Qualla: Battle of Lida (1919) https://qualla.com/battle-of-lida-1919 en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:35 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_res/siteimages/rsslogo.png Qualla: Battle of Lida (1919) https://qualla.com/battle-of-lida-1919 Battle of Lida (1919): Introduction https://qualla.com/battle-of-lida-1919/ Most of what mattered about the Battle of Lida happened somewhere else. Polish forces under General Jozef Lasocki crossed into the Belarusian-Lithuanian borderlands in April 1919 with orders to take the railway junction at Lida - but the real prize was Vilnius, sixty kilometers to the northwest, the city Jozef Pilsudski had been raised in and was determined to recover from Bolshevik occupation. Lida was the screen, the diversion, the necessary side action that would let the trains carry Polish troops east toward the city Pilsudski could not let go. It took two days of street fighting, an armored train, and one house at a time.

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]]> Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/9/9/f/battle-of-lida-1919-wp/u99f-battle-of-lida-1919-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Battle of Lida (1919): A war that nobody had quite declared https://qualla.com/battle-of-lida-1919/ By the spring of 1919 the situation in the borderlands was a tangle no map could quite represent. The German Empire had collapsed; the Russian Empire had collapsed; in their place a half-formed Polish republic, a half-formed Soviet republic, a contested Lithuanian state, a brief ...

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]]> Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/9/9/f/battle-of-lida-1919-wp/u99f-battle-of-lida-1919-a-war-that-nobody-had-quite-declared.mp3 0:06 2 full Battle of Lida (1919): Three sides of one town https://qualla.com/battle-of-lida-1919/ At five in the morning on 16 April 1919, Polish forces attacked Lida from the north, west, and south simultaneously. The plan was to overwhelm the small Bolshevik garrison quickly. The plan did not survive contact with the Bolshevik garrison. Defenders dug in around the railway s...

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]]> Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/9/9/f/battle-of-lida-1919-wp/u99f-battle-of-lida-1919-three-sides-of-one-town.mp3 0:06 3 full Battle of Lida (1919): An armored train in the dark https://qualla.com/battle-of-lida-1919/ The Bolshevik defenders summoned an armored train, which rolled out of the station and pinned the Polish advance for hours with its guns. Polish soldiers crossed the rail tracks anyway and pushed into the suburbs, fighting from one wooden house to the next through the night of 16...

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]]> Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/9/9/f/battle-of-lida-1919-wp/u99f-battle-of-lida-1919-an-armored-train-in-the-dark.mp3 0:06 4 full Battle of Lida (1919): The cost and the screen https://qualla.com/battle-of-lida-1919/ Casualty figures for Lida are vague - several killed and wounded on each side, in the dry phrasing of the staff reports - but for an action of its size the proportion of dead was significant, and for the families involved the numbers did not need to be large. The day after Lida f...

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]]> Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/9/9/f/battle-of-lida-1919-wp/u99f-battle-of-lida-1919-the-cost-and-the-screen.mp3 0:06 5 full