The Lithuanian Wars of Independence. The Polish Front

This is an abridged English translation of volumes II and III of Antanas Rukša’s Kovos dėl Lietuvos nepriklausomybės (The Lithuanian Wars of Independence), originally published in Cleveland in 1981–1982 and covering the Lithuanian–Polish conflict of 1919–1923. The volume reconstructs the military history of the Lithuanian–Polish confrontation on the so-called Polish front, the initial armed clashes of 1919–1920, Lithuanian military operations in Suvalkija in September 1920, and culmination of events in the battles for Sejny. The author, First Lieutenant Dr. Antanas Rukša, a classical philologist, veteran of the Wars of Independence, and émigré scholar, drew on the methodological principles of Ranke and Thucydides to produce, under the difficult conditions of emigration and without access to Lithuanian or Polish state archives, a near-thousand-page account that remained for decades the most comprehensive military history of this conflict available outside Soviet-occupied Lithuania. The present abridged edition, prepared by the Baltic Defence College and edited by Dr. Asta Maskaliūnaitė, concentrates on the military-historical substance of Rukša’s work, supplementing it with contextual chapters by contemporary historians, so as to make this foundational source accessible to an English-speaking readership.

All maps in the text were adapted from the original.

Edited by Dr. Asta Maskaliūnaitė, translated by Prof. Dr. Nijolė Maskaliūnienė.