Poland has rarely been thought of as a military power of any
degree of effectiveness. In fact, Dave Barry, in his travel
guide, refers to it as the screen door of Europe, his rationale
being that it was forever being slammed by invading armies going
one way or the other who forgot to wipe their feet. However, in
the Russo-Polish war, they managed to avoid being conquered, and
in fact won a fairly solid and very important victory against
what would become a major world superpower, if one that was kind
of busy with other things at the time.  Poland had declared its
independence from foreign domination in 1918 in accordance with
Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen point plan and had declared Jozef
Pilsudski, a leading figure in the fight for Polish
independence, its military and de facto head of state, at least
once he was let loose from a German prison. It had little time
to get its affairs in order before being involved in what at
least some historians consider to be six different wars,
concurrently, from 1918-1922. One