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The Polish-Ukrainian offensive, in April, 1920, gained much of Ukraine but failed to destroy the bulk of the Bolshevik forces, who counterattacked in the north in July and followed with an offensive in the south, which resulted in a rapid Polish retreat along the entire front. As Russian forces approached, Józef Piłsudski, Polish chief of state, devised a bold counterthrust centered on Warsaw.

At the end of World War I (1914–1918), two new powers contested in eastern Europe: Poland, having reappeared on the map after being occupied for more than a century, and a new communist regime that had risen to power in Russia. The Poles had large plans, associated with Józef Piłsudski, to regain much of their former eastern territory—now Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania—and create a Polish-led federation in the east. Vladimir Ilich Lenin’s government in Russia wished to take advantage of the postwar destabilization of Europe to spread the communist revolution westward. Emergent Poland stood athwart these plans. The inevitable clash centered on the so-called borderlands, a broad stretch of territory (encompassing modern-day Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine) between the Polish ethnic heartland in the west and Russian territories in the east. Control of this territory had been the key to strategic superiority in the millennial struggle between Poles and Russians for predominance in Eastern Europe.

In 1386, Poland and Lithuania united under the Jagiełłonian Dynasty, but the two states retained considerable independence. Over the next century, the threat from the Teutonic Knights along the Baltic was beaten back, but Poland was increasingly diverted to the Balkans and the Turkish threat while Lithuania was distracted eastward by the Tatars and, increasingly, by border clashes with Muscovy. By the end of the fifteenth century, Ivan the Great had thrown off Russian dependency on the Tatars and begun a series of border wars with the Lithuanians. In 1494, Ivan was able to win minor territorial gains from Lithuania, a historic first. Both militarily and psychologically, the Poles did not yet appreciate that the danger threatening Lithuania was also a menace to them.

The Allies landed in southern Italy in early September, 1943, but made slow progress due to a skillful defense by German Albert Kesselring. By year’s end, a powerful German position, the Gustav Line, barred further progress to the Fifteenth Army Group under Harold Alexander, which was composed of British Eighth (under Oliver Leese) and American Fifth Armies (under Mark Clark). Frustrated, the Allies launched Operation Shingle on January 22, 1944, an amphibious landing at Anzio, behind the German front, to combine with an assault on the Gustav Line. The key to the German position (under Heinrich von Vietinghoff) was Monte Cassino, topped by a venerable Benedictine monastery.