White Eagle, Red Star

The Polish-Soviet War 1919-1920 and the Miracle on the Vistula

Many authors are specially fond of their first book, as parents are of their first child, and I am no exception. It came into being suddenly, following the advice of my former Oxford tutor, AJP Taylor "Ph. D’s are for second-raters; "Taylor said, "you, Norman, should write a book". He recommended me for a research fellowship at St. Antony's College. The condition of the fellowship was that a publishable typescript should be produced within twelve months.

"White Eagle, Red Star" (1972) tells the story of the war in 1919-20 between the newly independent Republic of Poland and the Bolshevik-led Soviet Republics.(The USSR was not yet born). It disproved the widely held belief that Poland started the war by attacking Soviet Russia; it revealed the Bolsheviks’ plans for spreading their Revolution to Germany and beyond; and by using both Russian and Polish sources it showed that this little known conflict was not just a regional skirmish, but a determined attempt to provoke a continental conflagration.

The book was well-received, notably by Sir Michael Howard, launching my academic career and convincing me that I could write.