When was the World Wide Web invented?

Web navigation came about with the introduction of the World Wide Web, in 1989 when Timothy Berners-Lee invented it. Once the world wide web was available, web navigation increasingly became a major aspect and role in jobs and everyday lives. With one-third of the world’s population now using the internet, web navigation maintains a global use in today's ever evolving international society. Web navigation is not restricted to just computers, either, as mobile phones and tablets have added avenues for access to the ever-growing information on the web today. The most recent wave of technology which has affected web navigation is the introduction and growth of the smartphone. As of January 2014, 58% of American adults owned a smart phone, and that number is on the rise from previous years. Web navigation has evolved from a restricted action, to something that many people across the world now do on a daily basis.

Web navigation

Web navigation refers to the process of navigating a network of information resources in the World Wide Web, which is organized as hypertext or hypermedia. The user interface that is used to do so is called a web browser.
A central theme in web design is the development of a web navigation interface that maximizes usability.
A website's overall navigational scheme includes several navigational pieces such as global, local, supplemental, and contextual navigation; all of these are vital aspects of the broad topic of web navigation. Hierarchical navigation systems are vital as well since it is the primary navigation system. It allows for the user to navigate within the site using levels alone, which is often seen as restricting and requires additional navigation systems to better structure the website. The global navigation of a website, as another segment of web navigation, serves as the outline and template in order to achieve an easy maneuver for the users accessing the site, while local navigation is often used to help the users within a specific section of the site. All these navigational pieces fall under the categories of various types of web navigation, allowing for further development and for more efficient experiences upon visiting a webpage.

The use of website navigation tools allow for a website's visitors to experience the site with the most efficiency and the least incompetence. A website navigation system is analogous to a road map which enables webpage visitors to explore and discover different areas and information contained within the website.

There are many different types of website navigation:The structure of the website navigation is built from general to specific. This provides a clear, simple path to all the web pages from anywhere on the website.Global website navigation shows the top level sections/pages of the website. It is available on each page and lists the main content sections/pages of the website.Local navigation is the links within the text of a given web page, linking to other pages within the website.

Web navigations vary in styles between different website as well as within a certain site. The availability of different navigational styles allows for the information in the website to be delivered easily and directly. This also differentiates between categories and the sites themselves to indicate what the vital information is and to enable the users access to more information and facts discussed within the website. Across the globe, different cultures prefer certain styles for web navigations, allowing for a more enjoyable and functional experience as navigational styles expand and differentiateWhat makes Web design navigation difficult to work with is that it can be so versatile. Navigation varies in design through the presence of a few main pages in comparison to multi-level architecture. Content can also vary between logged-in users and logged-out users and more. Because navigation has so many differences between websites, there are no set guidelines or to-do lists for organizing navigation. Designing navigation is all about using good information architecture, and expressing the model or concept of information used in activities requiring explicit details of complex systems.

Adaptive web navigation describes the process of real-time changes in a website's navigation links and layout according to individual user preferences as they browse the site. Innovative websites are increasingly attempting to automatically personalize web sites based on a user’s browsing pattern in order to find relevant information more quickly and efficiently. The usage of data analysis allows website creators to track behavior patterns of a user as they navigate a site. Adding shortcut links between two pages, rearranging list items on a page, and omitting irrelevant navigation links are all examples of adaptive changes that can be implemented in real-time. The advantage of utilizing adaptive technologies in web navigation is it reduces the time and navigational effort required for users to find information. A possible disadvantage of this is that users may get disoriented from global and local navigational changes from page to page.

The World Wide Web, also known as the WWW and the Web, is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), interlinked by hypertext links, and accessible via the Internet. English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He wrote the first web browser in 1990 while employed at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The browser was released outside CERN in 1991, first to other research institutions starting in January 1991 and to the general public on the Internet in August 1991.

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web has been central to the development of the Information Age and is the primary tool billions of people use to interact on the Internet. Web pages are primarily text documents formatted and annotated with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). In addition to formatted text, web pages may contain images, video, audio, and software components that are rendered in the user's web browser as coherent pages of multimedia content.

Embedded hyperlinks permit users to navigate between web pages. Multiple web pages with a common theme, a common domain name, or both, make up a website. Website content can largely be provided by the publisher, or interactively where users contribute content or the content depends upon the users or their actions. Websites may be mostly informative, primarily for entertainment, or largely for commercial, governmental, or non-governmental organisational purpose.

Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a global hyperlinked information system became a possibility by the second half of the 1980s. By 1985, the global Internet began to proliferate in Europe and the Domain Name System (upon which the Uniform Resource Locator is built) came into being. In 1988 the first direct IP connection between Europe and North America was made and Berners-Lee began to openly discuss the possibility of a web-like system at CERN. In March 1989 Berners-Lee issued a proposal to the management at CERN for a system called "Mesh" that referenced ENQUIRE, a database and software project he had built in 1980, which used the term "web" and described a more elaborate information management system based on links embedded in readable text: "Imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document you could skip to them with a click of the mouse." Such a system, he explained, could be referred to using one of the existing meanings of the word "hypertext", a term that he says was coined in the 1950s. There is no reason, the proposal continues, why such hypertext links could not encompass multimedia documents including graphics, speech and video, so that Berners-Lee goes on to use the term "hypermedia".

With help from his colleague and fellow hypertext enthusiast Robert Cailliau he published a more formal proposal on 12 November 1990 to build a "Hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" (one word) as a "web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "browsers" using a client–server architecture. At this point HTML and HTTP had already been in development for about two months and the first Web server was about a month from completing its first successful test. This proposal estimated that a read-only web would be developed within three months and that it would take six months to achieve "the creation of new links and new material by readers, [so that] authorship becomes universal" as well as "the automatic notification of a reader when new material of interest to him/her has become available." While the read-only goal was met, accessible authorship of web content took longer to mature, with the wiki concept, WebDAV, blogs, Web 2.0 and RSS/Atom.

The proposal was modelled after the SGML reader Dynatext by Electronic Book Technology, a spin-off from the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship at Brown University. The Dynatext system, licensed by CERN, was a key player in the extension of SGML ISO 8879:1986 to Hypermedia within HyTime, but it was considered too expensive and had an inappropriate licensing policy for use in the general high energy physics community, namely a fee for each document and each document alteration. A NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the world's first web server and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, in 1990. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the first web browser (which was a web editor as well) and the first web server. The first web site, which described the project itself, was published on 20 December 1990.

The first web page may be lost, but Paul Jones of UNC-Chapel Hill in North Carolina announced in May 2013 that Berners-Lee gave him what he says is the oldest known web page during a 1991 visit to UNC. Jones stored it on a magneto-optical drive and on his NeXT computer. On 6 August 1991, Berners-Lee published a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the newsgroup "alt.hypertext". This date is sometimes confused with the public availability of the first web servers, which had occurred months earlier. As another example of such confusion, several news media reported that the first photo on the Web was published by Berners-Lee in 1992, an image of the CERN house band Les Horribles Cernettes taken by Silvano de Gennaro; Gennaro has disclaimed this story, writing that media were "totally distorting our words for the sake of cheap sensationalism."

The first server outside Europe was installed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Palo Alto, California, to host the SPIRES-HEP database. Accounts differ substantially as to the date of this event. The World Wide Web Consortium's timeline says December 1992, whereas SLAC itself claims December 1991, as does a W3C document titled "A Little History of the World Wide Web". The underlying concept of hypertext originated in previous projects from the 1960s, such as the Hypertext Editing System (HES) at Brown University, Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu, and Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS). Both Nelson and Engelbart were in turn inspired by Vannevar Bush's microfilm-based "memex", which was described in the 1945 essay "As We May Think".

Berners-Lee's breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet. In his book "", he explains that he had repeatedly suggested that a marriage between the two technologies was possible to members of "both" technical communities, but when no one took up his invitation, he finally assumed the project himself. In the process, he developed three essential technologies:

The World Wide Web had a number of differences from other hypertext systems available at the time. The Web required only unidirectional links rather than bidirectional ones, making it possible for someone to link to another resource without action by the owner of that resource. It also significantly reduced the difficulty of implementing web servers and browsers (in comparison to earlier systems), but in turn presented the chronic problem of "link rot". Unlike predecessors such as HyperCard, the World Wide Web was non-proprietary, making it possible to develop servers and clients independently and to add extensions without licensing restrictions. On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone, with no fees due. Coming two months after the announcement that the server implementation of the Gopher protocol was no longer free to use, this produced a rapid shift away from Gopher and towards the Web. An early popular web browser was ViolaWWW for Unix and the X Windowing System.

Scholars generally agree that a turning point for the World Wide Web began with the introduction of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen. Funding for Mosaic came from the US High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative and the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, one of several computing developments initiated by US Senator Al Gore. Prior to the release of Mosaic, graphics were not commonly mixed with text in web pages and the web's popularity was less than that of older protocols in use over the Internet, such as Gopher and Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS). Mosaic's graphical user interface allowed the Web to become, by far, the most popular Internet protocol. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded by Tim Berners-Lee after he left the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in October 1994. It was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT/LCS) with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which had pioneered the Internet; a year later, a second site was founded at INRIA (a French national computer research lab) with support from the European Commission DG InfSo; and in 1996, a third continental site was created in Japan at Keio University. By the end of 1994, the total number of websites was still relatively small, but many notable websites were already active that foreshadowed or inspired today's most popular services.

Connected by the Internet, other websites were created around the world. This motivated international standards development for protocols and formatting. Berners-Lee continued to stay involved in guiding the development of web standards, such as the markup languages to compose web pages and he advocated his vision of a Semantic Web. The World Wide Web enabled the spread of information over the Internet through an easy-to-use and flexible format. It thus played an important role in popularising use of the Internet. Although the two terms are sometimes conflated in popular use, "World Wide Web" is not synonymous with "Internet". The Web is an information space containing hyperlinked documents and other resources, identified by their URIs. It is implemented as both client and server software using Internet protocols such as TCP/IP and HTTP. Berners-Lee was knighted in 2004 by Queen Elizabeth II for "services to the global development of the Internet".

The terms "Internet" and "World Wide Web" are often used without much distinction. However, the two terms do not mean the same thing. The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. In contrast, the World Wide Web is a global collection of documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URIs. Web resources are accessed using HTTP or HTTPS, which are application-level Internet protocols that use the Internet's transport protocols.

Viewing a web page on the World Wide Web normally begins either by typing the URL of the page into a web browser, or by following a hyperlink to that page or resource. The web browser then initiates a series of background communication messages to fetch and display the requested page. In the 1990s, using a browser to view web pages—and to move from one web page to another through hyperlinks—came to be known as 'browsing,' 'web surfing' (after channel surfing), or 'navigating the Web'. Early studies of this new behaviour investigated user patterns in using web browsers. One study, for example, found five user patterns: exploratory surfing, window surfing, evolved surfing, bounded navigation and targeted navigation.

The following example demonstrates the functioning of a web browser when accessing a page at the URL codice_1. The browser resolves the server name of the URL (codice_2) into an Internet Protocol address using the globally distributed Domain Name System (DNS). This lookup returns an IP address such as "203.0.113.4" or "2001:db8:2e::7334". The browser then requests the resource by sending an HTTP request across the Internet to the computer at that address. It requests service from a specific TCP port number that is well known for the HTTP service, so that the receiving host can distinguish an HTTP request from other network protocols it may be servicing. The HTTP protocol normally uses port number 80 and for HTTPS protocol it normally is port number 443. The content of the HTTP request can be as simple as two lines of text:
The computer receiving the HTTP request delivers it to web server software listening for requests on port 80. If the web server can fulfil the request it sends an HTTP response back to the browser indicating success:
followed by the content of the requested page. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) for a basic web page might look like this:
The web browser parses the HTML and interprets the markup (, for paragraph, and such) that surrounds the words to format the text on the screen. Many web pages use HTML to reference the URLs of other resources such as images, other embedded media, scripts that affect page behaviour, and Cascading Style Sheets that affect page layout. The browser makes additional HTTP requests to the web server for these other Internet media types. As it receives their content from the web server, the browser progressively renders the page onto the screen as specified by its HTML and these additional resources.

Most web pages contain hyperlinks to other related pages and perhaps to downloadable files, source documents, definitions and other web resources. In the underlying HTML, a hyperlink looks like this:
Such a collection of useful, related resources, interconnected via hypertext links is dubbed a "web" of information. Publication on the Internet created what Tim Berners-Lee first called the "WorldWideWeb" (in its original CamelCase, which was subsequently discarded) in November 1990.

The hyperlink structure of the WWW is described by the webgraph: the nodes of the web graph correspond to the web pages (or URLs) the directed edges between them to the hyperlinks. Over time, many web resources pointed to by hyperlinks disappear, relocate, or are replaced with different content. This makes hyperlinks obsolete, a phenomenon referred to in some circles as link rot, and the hyperlinks affected by it are often called dead links. The ephemeral nature of the Web has prompted many efforts to archive web sites. The Internet Archive, active since 1996, is the best known of such efforts.

JavaScript is a scripting language that was initially developed in 1995 by Brendan Eich, then of Netscape, for use within web pages. The standardised version is ECMAScript. To make web pages more interactive, some web applications also use JavaScript techniques such as Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML). Client-side script is delivered with the page that can make additional HTTP requests to the server, either in response to user actions such as mouse movements or clicks, or based on elapsed time. The server's responses are used to modify the current page rather than creating a new page with each response, so the server needs only to provide limited, incremental information. Multiple Ajax requests can be handled at the same time, and users can interact with the page while data is retrieved. Web pages may also regularly poll the server to check whether new information is available.

Many hostnames used for the World Wide Web begin with "www" because of the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts according to the services they provide. The hostname of a web server is often "www", in the same way that it may be "ftp" for an FTP server, and "news" or "nntp" for a Usenet news server. These host names appear as Domain Name System (DNS) or subdomain names, as in "www.example.com". The use of "www" is not required by any technical or policy standard and many web sites do not use it; the first web server was "nxoc01.cern.ch". According to Paolo Palazzi, who worked at CERN along with Tim Berners-Lee, the popular use of "www" as subdomain was accidental; the World Wide Web project page was intended to be published at www.cern.ch while info.cern.ch was intended to be the CERN home page, however the DNS records were never switched, and the practice of prepending "www" to an institution's website domain name was subsequently copied. Many established websites still use the prefix, or they employ other subdomain names such as "www2", "secure" or "en" for special purposes. Many such web servers are set up so that both the main domain name (e.g., example.com) and the "www" subdomain (e.g., www.example.com) refer to the same site; others require one form or the other, or they may map to different web sites. The use of a subdomain name is useful for load balancing incoming web traffic by creating a CNAME record that points to a cluster of web servers. Since, currently, only a subdomain can be used in a CNAME, the same result cannot be achieved by using the bare domain root.

When a user submits an incomplete domain name to a web browser in its address bar input field, some web browsers automatically try adding the prefix "www" to the beginning of it and possibly ".com", ".org" and ".net" at the end, depending on what might be missing. For example, entering " may be transformed to "http://www.microsoft.com/" and 'openoffice' to "http://www.openoffice.org". This feature started appearing in early versions of Firefox, when it still had the working title 'Firebird' in early 2003, from an earlier practice in browsers such as Lynx. It is reported that Microsoft was granted a US patent for the same idea in 2008, but only for mobile devices.

In English, "www" is usually read as "double-u double-u double-u". Some users pronounce it "dub-dub-dub", particularly in New Zealand. Stephen Fry, in his "Podgrams" series of podcasts, pronounces it "wuh wuh wuh". The English writer Douglas Adams once quipped in "The Independent on Sunday" (1999): "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for". In Mandarin Chinese, "World Wide Web" is commonly translated via a phono-semantic matching to "wàn wéi wǎng" (), which satisfies "www" and literally means "myriad dimensional net", a translation that reflects the design concept and proliferation of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee's web-space states that "World Wide Web" is officially spelled as three separate words, each capitalised, with no intervening hyphens. Use of the www prefix has been declining, especially when Web 2.0 web applications sought to brand their domain names and make them easily pronounceable.
As the mobile Web grew in popularity, services like Gmail.com, Outlook.com, Myspace.com, Facebook.com and Twitter.com are most often mentioned without adding "www." (or, indeed, ".com") to the domain.

The scheme specifiers "codice_3" and "codice_4" at the start of a web URI refer to Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP Secure, respectively. They specify the communication protocol to use for the request and response. The HTTP protocol is fundamental to the operation of the World Wide Web, and the added encryption layer in HTTPS is essential when browsers send or retrieve confidential data, such as passwords or banking information. Web browsers usually automatically prepend http:// to user-entered URIs, if omitted.

For criminals, the Web has become a venue to spread malware and engage in a range of cybercrimes, including identity theft, fraud, espionage and intelligence gathering. Web-based vulnerabilities now outnumber traditional computer security concerns, and as measured by Google, about one in ten web pages may contain malicious code. Most web-based attacks take place on legitimate websites, and most, as measured by Sophos, are hosted in the United States, China and Russia. The most common of all malware threats is SQL injection attacks against websites. Through HTML and URIs, the Web was vulnerable to attacks like cross-site scripting (XSS) that came with the introduction of JavaScript and were exacerbated to some degree by Web 2.0 and Ajax web design that favours the use of scripts. Today by one estimate, 70% of all websites are open to XSS attacks on their users. Phishing is another common threat to the Web. In February 2013, RSA (the security division of EMC) estimated the global losses from phishing at $1.5 billion in 2012. Two of the well-known phishing methods are Covert Redirect and Open Redirect.

Proposed solutions vary. Large security companies like McAfee already design governance and compliance suites to meet post-9/11 regulations, and some, like Finjan have recommended active real-time inspection of programming code and all content regardless of its source. Some have argued that for enterprises to see Web security as a business opportunity rather than a cost centre, while others call for "ubiquitous, always-on digital rights management" enforced in the infrastructure to replace the hundreds of companies that secure data and networks. Jonathan Zittrain has said users sharing responsibility for computing safety is far preferable to locking down the Internet.

Every time a client requests a web page, the server can identify the request's IP address and usually logs it. Also, unless set not to do so, most web browsers record requested web pages in a viewable "history" feature, and usually cache much of the content locally. Unless the server-browser communication uses HTTPS encryption, web requests and responses travel in plain text across the Internet and can be viewed, recorded, and cached by intermediate systems. When a web page asks for, and the user supplies, personally identifiable information—such as their real name, address, e-mail address, etc.—web-based entities can associate current web traffic with that individual. If the website uses HTTP cookies, username and password authentication, or other tracking techniques, it can relate other web visits, before and after, to the identifiable information provided. In this way it is possible for a web-based organisation to develop and build a profile of the individual people who use its site or sites. It may be able to build a record for an individual that includes information about their leisure activities, their shopping interests, their profession, and other aspects of their demographic profile. These profiles are obviously of potential interest to marketeers, advertisers and others. Depending on the website's terms and conditions and the local laws that apply information from these profiles may be sold, shared, or passed to other organisations without the user being informed. For many ordinary people, this means little more than some unexpected e-mails in their in-box or some uncannily relevant advertising on a future web page. For others, it can mean that time spent indulging an unusual interest can result in a deluge of further targeted marketing that may be unwelcome. Law enforcement, counter terrorism, and espionage agencies can also identify, target and track individuals based on their interests or proclivities on the Web.

Social networking sites try to get users to use their real names, interests, and locations, rather than pseudonyms, as their executives believe that this makes the social networking experience more engaging for users. On the other hand, uploaded photographs or unguarded statements can be identified to an individual, who may regret this exposure. Employers, schools, parents, and other relatives may be influenced by aspects of social networking profiles, such as text posts or digital photos, that the posting individual did not intend for these audiences. On-line bullies may make use of personal information to harass or stalk users. Modern social networking websites allow fine grained control of the privacy settings for each individual posting, but these can be complex and not easy to find or use, especially for beginners. Photographs and videos posted onto websites have caused particular problems, as they can add a person's face to an on-line profile. With modern and potential facial recognition technology, it may then be possible to relate that face with other, previously anonymous, images, events and scenarios that have been imaged elsewhere. Because of image caching, mirroring and copying, it is difficult to remove an image from the World Wide Web.

Many formal standards and other technical specifications and software define the operation of different aspects of the World Wide Web, the Internet, and computer information exchange. Many of the documents are the work of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), headed by Berners-Lee, but some are produced by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and other organisations.

Usually, when web standards are discussed, the following publications are seen as foundational:

Additional publications provide definitions of other essential technologies for the World Wide Web, including, but not limited to, the following:

There are methods for accessing the Web in alternative mediums and formats to facilitate use by individuals with disabilities. These disabilities may be visual, auditory, physical, speech-related, cognitive, neurological, or some combination. Accessibility features also help people with temporary disabilities, like a broken arm, or ageing users as their abilities change. The Web receives information as well as providing information and interacting with society. The World Wide Web Consortium claims that it is essential that the Web be accessible, so it can provide equal access and equal opportunity to people with disabilities. Tim Berners-Lee once noted, "The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." Many countries regulate web accessibility as a requirement for websites. International co-operation in the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative led to simple guidelines that web content authors as well as software developers can use to make the Web accessible to persons who may or may not be using assistive technology.

The W3C Internationalisation Activity assures that web technology works in all languages, scripts, and cultures. Beginning in 2004 or 2005, Unicode gained ground and eventually in December 2007 surpassed both ASCII and Western European as the Web's most frequently used character encoding. Originally allowed resources to be identified by URI in a subset of US-ASCII. allows more characters—any character in the Universal Character Set—and now a resource can be identified by IRI in any language.

Between 2005 and 2010, the number of Web users doubled, and was expected to surpass two billion in 2010. Early studies in 1998 and 1999 estimating the size of the Web using capture/recapture methods showed that much of the Web was not indexed by search engines and the Web was much larger than expected. According to a 2001 study, there was a massive number, over 550 billion, of documents on the Web, mostly in the invisible Web, or Deep Web. A 2002 survey of 2,024 million web pages determined that by far the most web content was in the English language: 56.4%; next were pages in German (7.7%), French (5.6%), and Japanese (4.9%). A more recent study, which used web searches in 75 different languages to sample the Web, determined that there were over 11.5 billion web pages in the publicly indexable web as of the end of January 2005., the indexable web contains at least 25.21 billion pages. On 25 July 2008, Google software engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj announced that Google Search had discovered one trillion unique URLs., over 109.5 million domains operated. Of these, 74% were commercial or other domains operating in the generic top-level domain "com". Statistics measuring a website's popularity, such as the Alexa Internet rankings, are usually based either on the number of page views or on associated server "hits" (file requests) that it receives.

A web cache is a server computer located either on the public Internet, or within an enterprise that stores recently accessed web pages to improve response time for users when the same content is requested within a certain time after the original request. Most web browsers also implement a browser cache by writing recently obtained data to a local data storage device. HTTP requests by a browser may ask only for data that has changed since the last access. Web pages and resources may contain expiration information to control caching to secure sensitive data, such as in online banking, or to facilitate frequently updated sites, such as news media. Even sites with highly dynamic content may permit basic resources to be refreshed only occasionally. Web site designers find it worthwhile to collate resources such as CSS data and JavaScript into a few site-wide files so that they can be cached efficiently. Enterprise firewalls often cache Web resources requested by one user for the benefit of many users. Some search engines store cached content of frequently accessed websites.


Who lost the Polish–Ukrainian War?

Although the 70 to 75 thousand men who fought in the Ukrainian Galician Army lost their war, and the Polish territory was brought back to Poland, the experience of proclaiming a Ukrainian state and fighting for it significantly intensified and deepened the nationalistic Ukrainian orientation within Galicia. Since the interwar era, Galicia has been the center of Ukrainian nationalism.

Polish–Ukrainian War

The Polish–Ukrainian War of November 1918 and 1919 was a conflict between the Second Polish Republic and Ukrainian forces (both the West Ukrainian People's Republic and Ukrainian People's Republic). The conflict had its roots in ethnic, cultural and political differences between the Polish and Ukrainian populations living in the region. The war started in Eastern Galicia after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and spilled over into Chełm Land and Volhynia (Wołyń) regions formerly belonging to the Russian Empire, which were both claimed by the Ukrainian State (a client state of the German Empire) and the Ukrainian People's Republic.

The origins of the conflict lie in the complex nationality situation in Galicia at the turn of the 20th century. As a result of the House of Habsburg's relative leniency toward national minorities, Austria-Hungary was the perfect ground for the development of both Polish and Ukrainian national movements. During the 1848 revolution, the Austrians, concerned by Polish demands for greater autonomy within the province, gave support to a small group of Ruthenians (the name of the East Slavic people who would later adopt the self-identification of "Ukrainians" or "Rusyns") whose goal was to be recognized as a distinct nationality. After that, Ruthenian language schools were established, Ruthenian political parties formed, and the Ruthenians began attempts to develop their national culture. This came as a surprise to some Poles, who until the revolution believed, along with most of the politically aware Ruthenians, that Ruthenians were part of the Polish nation (which, at that time, was defined in political rather than ethnographic terms). In the late 1890s and the first decades of the next century, the populist Ruthenian intelligentsia adopted the term Ukrainians to describe their nationality. Beginning with the 20th century, national consciousness reached a large number of Ruthenian peasants.

Multiple incidents between the two nations occurred throughout the latter 19th century and early 20th century. For example, in 1897 the Polish administration opposed the Ukrainians in parliamentary elections. Another conflict developed in the years 1901–1908 around Lviv University, where Ukrainian students demanded a separate Ukrainian university, while Polish students and faculty attempted to suppress the movement. In 1903 both Poles and Ukrainians held separate conferences in Lviv (the Poles in May and Ukrainians in August). Afterwards, the two national movements developed with contradictory goals, leading towards the later clash.

The ethnic composition of Galicia underlay the conflict between the Poles and Ukrainians there. The Austrian province of Galicia consisted of territory seized from Poland in 1772, during the first partition. This land, which included territory of historical importance to Poland, including the ancient capital of Kraków, had a majority Polish population, although the eastern part of Galicia included the heartland of the historic territory of Galicia-Volhynia and had a Ukrainian majority. In eastern Galicia, Ukrainians made up approximately 65% of the population while Poles made up only 22% of the population. Of the 44 administrative divisions of Austrian eastern Galicia, Lviv (, ), the biggest and capital city of the province, was the only one in which Poles made up a majority of the population. In Lviv, the population in 1910 was approximately 60% Polish and 17% Ukrainian. This city with its Polish inhabitants was considered by many Poles to have been one of Poland's cultural capitals. For many Poles, including Lviv's Polish population, it was unthinkable that their city should not be under Polish control.

The religious and ethnic divisions corresponded to social stratification. Galicia's leading social class were Polish nobles or descendants of Rus' gentry who had become polonized in the past, whereas, in the eastern part of the province Ruthenians (Ukrainians) constituted the majority of the peasant population. Poles and Jews were responsible for most of the commercial and industrial development in Galicia in the late 19th century.

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries the local Ukrainians attempted to persuade the Austrians to divide Galicia into Western (Polish) and Eastern (Ukrainian) provinces. These efforts were resisted and thwarted by those local Poles who feared losing control of Lviv and East Galicia. The Austrians eventually agreed in principle to divide the province of Galicia; in October 1916 the Austrian Emperor Karl I promised to do so once the war had ended.

Due to the intervention of Archduke Wilhelm of Austria, who adopted a Ukrainian identity and considered himself a Ukrainian patriot, in October 1918 two regiments of mostly Ukrainian troops were garrisoned in Lemberg (modern Lviv). As the Austro-Hungarian government collapsed, on October 18, 1918, the Ukrainian National Council ("Rada"), consisting of Ukrainian members of the Austrian parliament and regional Galician and Bukovynan diets as well as leaders of Ukrainian political parties, was formed. The Council announced the intention to unite the West Ukrainian lands into a single state. As the Poles were taking their own steps to take over Lviv and Eastern Galicia, Captain Dmytro Vitovsky of the Sich Riflemen led the group of young Ukrainian officers in a decisive action and during the night of October 31 – November 1, the Ukrainian military units took control over Lviv. The West Ukrainian People's Republic was proclaimed on November 1, 1918 with Lviv as its capital.

The timing of proclamation of the Republic caught the Polish ethnic population and administration by surprise. The new Ukrainian Republic claimed sovereignty over Eastern Galicia, including the Carpathians up to the city of Nowy Sącz in the West, as well as Volhynia, Carpathian Ruthenia and Bukovina (the last two territories were claimed also by Hungary and Romania respectively. Although the majority of the population of the Western-Ukrainian People's Republic were Ukrainians, many urban settlements had Polish majorities. In Lviv the Ukrainian residents enthusiastically supported the proclamation, the city's significant Jewish minority accepted or remained neutral towards the Ukrainian proclamation, while the city's Polish majority was shocked to find themselves in a proclaimed Ukrainian state. Because the West Ukrainian People's Republic was not internationally recognized and Poland's boundaries had not yet been defined, the issue of ownership of the disputed territory was reduced to a question of military control.

Fighting between Ukrainian and Polish forces was concentrated around the declared Ukrainian capital of Lviv and the approaches to that city. In Lviv, the Ukrainian forces were opposed by local self-defence units formed mostly of World War I veterans, students and children. However, skillful command, good tactics and high morale allowed Poles to resist the badly planned Ukrainian attacks. In addition, the Poles were able to skillfully buy time and wait for reinforcements through the arrangement of cease-fires with the Ukrainians. While Poles could count on widespread support from the civilian population, the Ukrainian side was largely dependent on help from outside the city. Other uprisings against Ukrainian rule erupted in Drohobych, Przemyśl, Sambir and Jarosław. In Przemyśl, local Ukrainian soldiers quickly dispersed to their homes and Poles seized the bridges over the River San and the railroad to Lviv, enabling the Polish forces in that city to obtain significant reinforcements.

After two weeks of heavy fighting within Lviv, an armed unit under the command of Lt. Colonel Michał Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski of the renascent Polish Army broke through the Ukrainian siege on November 21 and arrived in the city. The Ukrainians were repelled. Immediately after capturing the city, some in the local Jewish militia attacked Polish troops, while at the same time elements of the Polish forces as well as common criminals looted the Jewish and Ukrainian quarters of the city, killing approximately 340 civilians. The Poles also interned a number of Ukrainian activists in detention camps. The Ukrainian government provided financial assistance to the Jewish victims of the violence and were able to recruit a Jewish battalion into their army. Some factions blame these atrocities on the Blue Army of General Haller. This is unlikely as this French trained and supported fighting force did not leave France and the Western Front until April 1919, well after the rioting.

On November 9 Polish forces attempted to seize the Drohobych oil fields by surprise, but outnumbered by the Ukrainians, they were driven back. The Ukrainians would retain control over the oil fields until May 1919.

On 6 November, a new Ukrainian polity was proclaimed in the Northern half of the region of Bukovina: Ukrainian Bukovina under President Omelian Popovych. The new state had its capital at Chernivtsi. It was dissolved on 11 November, when the Romanian Army occupied Chernivtsi. The Ukrainian administration and its military support retreated from the city the day before.

By the end of November 1918, Polish forces controlled Lviv and the railroad linking Lviv to central Poland through Przemyśl, while Ukrainians controlled the rest of Eastern Galicia east of the river San, including the areas south and north of the railroad into Lviv. Thus, the Polish controlled city of Lviv (Lwów) faced Ukrainian forces on three sides.

Immediately after the collapse of Austria-Hungary, Polish forces had captured Kholm (Chełm) area; shortly thereafter the Austrian commandants in southwestern Volhynia (Volodymyr-Volynskyi and Kovel) handed over the government to the local Polish national committees. In November–December 1918, the Poles also advanced into Podlachia and Western Polesia, but were stopped in western Volhynia by the troops of gen. M. Osetsky.

As Polish units tried to seize control of the region, the forces of the Ukrainian People's Republic under Symon Petlura tried to recover the territory of Kholm Governorate already controlled by the Polish troops.

According to Richard Pipes, the first major pogrom in this region took place in January 1919 in the town of Ovruch, where Jews were robbed and killed by regiments affiliated with Symon Petlura's Cossack ataman, Kozyr-Zyrka. Nicolas Werth claims that armed units of the Ukrainian People's Republic were also responsible for rapes, looting, and massacres in Zhytomir, in which 500–700 Jews lost their lives.

After two months of heavy fighting the conflict was resolved in March 1919 by fresh and well-equipped Polish units under General Edward Rydz-Śmigły.

Thanks to fast and effective mobilization in December 1918, the Ukrainians possessed a large numerical advantage until February 1919, and pushed the Poles into defensive positions. According to an American report from the period of January 13 – February 1, 1919, Ukrainians eventually managed to surround Lviv on three sides. The city's inhabitants were deprived of water supply and electricity. Ukrainian army also held villages on both sidelines of the railway leading to Przemyśl.

Ukrainian forces continued to control most of eastern Galicia and were a threat to Lviv itself until May 1919. During this time, according to Italian and Polish reports, Ukrainian forces enjoyed high morale (an Italian observer behind Galician lines stated that the Ukrainians were fighting with the "courage of the doomed") while many of the Polish soldiers, particularly from what had been Congress Poland, wanted to return home because they saw no reason to fight against Ruthenians over Ruthenian lands; the Polish forces were outnumbered by two to one and lacked ammunition. Despite being initially outnumbered, the Poles had certain advantages. Their forces had many more and better trained officers resulting in a better disciplined and more mobile force; the Poles also enjoyed excellent intelligence and, due to their control of railroads behind their lines, were able to move their soldiers quite quickly. As a result, although the Poles had fewer total troops than did the Ukrainians, in particularly important battles they were able to bring in as many soldiers as did the Ukrainians.

On December 9, 1918 Ukrainian forces broke through the outer defences of Przemyśl in the hope of capturing the city and thus cutting off Polish-controlled Lviv from central Poland. However, the Poles were able to quickly send relief troops and by December 17 the Ukrainians were forced back. On December 27, bolstered by peasant troops sent to Galicia from Eastern Ukraine in the hopes that the Western Ukrainians would be able to form a disciplined force out of them, a general Ukrainian offensive against Lviv began. Lviv's defences held, and the eastern Ukrainian troops mutinied.

From January 6-January 11, 1919 a Polish attack by 5,000 newly recruited forces from formerly Russian Poland commanded by Jan Romer was repulsed by Western Ukrainian forces near Rava-Ruska, north of Lviv. Only a small number of troops together with Romer were able to break through to Lviv after suffering heavy losses. Between January 11 and January 13, Polish forces attempted to dislodge Ukrainian troops besieging Lviv from the south while at the same time Ukrainian troops attempted another general assault on Lviv. Both efforts failed. In February 1919, Polish troops attempting to capture Sambir were defeated by the Ukrainian defenders with heavy losses, although the poor mobility of the Ukrainian troops prevented them from taking advantage of this victory.

On February 14, Ukrainian forces began another assault on Lviv. By February 20, they were able to successfully cut off the rail links between Lviv and Przemysl, leaving Lviv surrounded and the Ukrainian forces in a good position to take the city. However, a French-led mission from the Entente arrived at the Ukrainian headquarters in February 22 and demanded that the Ukrainian cease hostilities under threat of breaking all diplomatic ties between the Entente and the Ukrainian government. On February 25 the Ukrainian military suspended its offensive. The Barthélemy mission proposed a demarcation line (February 28) leaving almost 70% of the East Galician territory to Ukrainians, and Lviv with oil fields to Poland. The Ukrainians would be supplied with half of the oil production. The proposal was accepted by the Poles. The Allied demands, which included the loss of significant amount of Ukrainian-held and inhabited territory, were however deemed to excessively favor the Poles by the Ukrainians, who resumed their offensive on March 4. On March 5 Ukrainian artillery blew up the Polish forces' ammunition dump in Lviv; the resultant explosion caused a panic among Polish forces. The Ukrainians, however, failed to take advantage of this. During the time of the cease fire, the Poles had been able to organize a relief force of 8,000–10,000 troops which by March 12 reached Przemyśl and by March 18 had driven the Ukrainian forces from the Lviv-Przemysl railroad, permanently securing Lviv.

On January 6–11 of 1919 a small part of the Ukrainian Galician Army invaded Transcarpathia to spread pro-Ukrainian sentiments among residents (the region was occupied by Hungarians and Czechoslovaks). Ukrainian troops fought with Czechoslovak and Hungarian local police. They succeeded in capturing some Hungarian-controlled Ukrainian settlements. After some clashes with Czechoslovaks, the Ukrainians retreated because Czechoslovakia (instead of Ukrainian People's Republic) was the only country that traded with the Western Ukrainian People's Republic and that supported it politically. Further conflict with the Czechoslovak authorities would have led to the complete economical and political isolation of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic.

On May 14, 1919, a Polish general offensive began throughout Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. It was carried out by units of the Polish Army aided by the newly arrived Blue Army of General Józef Haller de Hallenburg. This army, composed of Polish forces which had fought for the Entente on the Western front, numbering 60,000 troops, was well equipped by the Western allies and partially staffed with experienced French officers specifically in order to fight the Bolsheviks and not the forces of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic. Despite this, the Poles dispatched Haller's army against the Ukrainians in order to break the stalemate in eastern Galicia. The allies sent several telegrams ordering the Poles to halt their offensive as using of the French-equipped army against the Ukrainian specifically contradicted the conditions of the French help, but these were ignored, with the Polish side arguing that Ukrainians were Bolshevik sympathizers. At the same time, on May 23 Romania opened a second front against Ukrainian forces, demanding their withdrawal from the southern sections of eastern Galicia including from the temporary capital of Stanislaviv. This resulted in a loss of territory, ammunition and further isolation from the outside world.

The Ukrainian lines were broken, mostly due to the withdrawal of the elite Sich Riflemen. On May 27 the Polish forces reached the Złota Lipa–Berezhany--Radziwiłłów line. The Polish advance was accompanied by a large wave of anti-Jewish violence and looting conducted not only by disorganized Polish mobs, as in Lviv in 1918, but by Polish military units operating against the orders of their officers, in particular those of the Poznań regiments and Haller's army. Following the demands of the Entente, the Polish offensive was halted and the troops of General Haller adopted defensive positions.

On June 8, 1919, the Ukrainian forces under the new command of Oleksander Hrekov, a former general in the Russian army, started a counter-offensive, and after three weeks advanced to Hnyla Lypa and the upper Stryi river, defeating five Polish divisions. Although the Polish forces had been forced to withdraw, they were able to prevent their forces from collapsing and avoided being encircled and captured. Thus, in spite of their victories, the Ukrainian forces were unable to obtain significant amounts of arms and ammunition. By June 27 the Ukrainian forces had advanced 120 km. along the Dnister river and on another they had advanced 150 km, past the town of Brody. They came to within two days' march of Lviv.

The successful Chortkiv offensive halted primarily because of a lack of arms – there were only 5–10 bullets for each Ukrainian soldier. The West Ukrainian government controlled the Drohobych oil fields with which it planned to purchase arms for the struggle, but for political and diplomatic reasons weapons and ammunition could only be sent to Ukraine through Czechoslovakia. Although the Ukrainian forces managed to push the Poles back approximately 120–150 km. they failed to secure a route to Czechoslovakia. This meant that they were unable to replenish their supply of arms and ammunition, and the resulting lack of supplies forced Hrekov to end his campaign.

Józef Piłsudski assumed the command of the Polish forces on June 27 and started yet another offensive, helped by two fresh Polish divisions. On June 28, the Polish offensive began. Short of ammunition and facing an enemy now twice its size, the Ukrainians were pushed back to the line of the river Zbruch by mid-July 1919. Although the Ukrainian infantry had run out of ammunition, its artillery had not. This provided the Ukrainian forces with cover for an orderly retreat. Approximately 100,000 civilian refugees and 60,000 troops, 20,000 of whom were combat ready, were able to escape across the Zbruch River into Eastern Ukraine.

The Polish and Ukrainian forces struggled on the diplomatic as well as military fronts both during and after the war. The Ukrainians hoped that the western allies of World War I would support their cause because the Treaty of Versailles that ended the first world war was based on the principle of national self-determination. Accordingly, the diplomats of the West Ukrainian People's Republic hoped that the West would compel Poland to withdraw from territories with a Ukrainian demographic majority.

Opinion among the allies was divided. Britain, under the leadership of prime minister David Lloyd George, and to a lesser extent Italy were opposed to Polish expansion. Their representatives maintained that granting the territory of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic to Poland would violate the principle of national self-determination and that hostile national minorities would undermine the Polish state. In reality, the British policy was dictated by unwillingness to harm Russian interests in the region and alienate the future Russian state through preventing possible union of Eastern Galicia with Russia. In addition, Britain was interested in Western Ukraine's oil fields. Czechoslovakia, itself involved in a conflict with Poland, was friendly towards the Ukrainian government and sold it weapons in exchange for oil. France, on the other hand, strongly supported Poland in the conflict. The French hoped that a large, powerful Polish state would serve as a counterbalance to Germany and would isolate Germany from Soviet Russia. French diplomats consistently supported Polish claims to territories also claimed by Germany, Lithuania and Ukraine. France also provided large numbers of arms and ammunition, and French officers, most notably General Haller's forces, to Polish forces that were used against the western Ukrainian military, much to the horror of Lloyd George and President Wilson.

During the winter of 1918-1919, a diplomatic offensive by the Polish government tried to tilt the opinions of the Allies in favor of fully backing the Polish cause, and to counter German disinformation campaign, which aimed to weaken French, British and American support of the new Polish state. Government officials in Poland and abroad repeatedly raised the issue of a possible link between Germany and the West Ukrainian People's Republic, insisting that the Germans were financially supporting the West Ukrainian government and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in order to sow a wave of political unrest and chaos in the region. However, the Ukrainians objected to such claims, arguing that the Poles only sought to portray the West Ukrainian People's Republic as pro-German and sympathetic to the Bolsheviks because of a successful defense put up by the Ukrainian Galician Army, which stalled the Polish military offensive.

In attempt to end the war, in January 1919 an Allied commission led by a French general was sent to negotiate a peace treaty between the two sides, prompting a ceasefire. In February it recommended that the West Ukrainian People's Republic surrender a third of its territory, including the city of Lviv and the Drohobych oil fields. The Ukrainians refused, the truce did not correspond to ethnology of the country or the military situation and broke diplomatic ties with Poland. In mid-March 1919, the French marshal Ferdinand Foch, who wanted to use Poland as an operational base for an offensive against the Red Army, brought the issue of Polish–Ukrainian war before the Supreme Council and appealed for large-scale Polish-Romanian military operation which would be conducted with Allied support, as well as sending Haller's divisions to Poland immediately to relieve Lviv from Ukrainian siege.

Another Allied commission, led by South African General Louis Botha, proposed an armistice in May that would involve the (West) Ukrainians keeping the Drohobych oil fields and the Poles keeping Lviv. The Ukrainian side agreed to this proposal but it was rejected by the Poles on the grounds that it didn't take into consideration the overall military situation of Poland and the circumstances on the eastern front. The Bolshevik army broke through the UNR forces and was advancing to Podolia and Volhynia. The Poles argued that they need military control over whole Eastern Galicia to secure the Russian front in its southern part and strengthen it by a junction with Romania. The Poles launched an attack soon afterward using a large force equipped by France (Haller's Army), which captured most of the territory of the West Ukrainian People's Republic. Urgent telegrams by the Western allies to halt this offensive were ignored. Czechoslovakia, which had inherited seven oil refineries from prewar Austrian times and which was dependent on its contracts for oil with the Ukrainian government, demanded that the Poles send the Czechoslovaks the oil that had been paid for to the Ukrainian government. The Poles refused, stating that the oil was paid for with ammunition that had been used against Polish soldiers. Although the Czechoslovaks did not retaliate, according to Polish reports the Czechoslovaks considered seizing the oil fields from the Poles and returning them to the Ukrainians who would honor their contracts.

On June 25, 1919, the Allied Council legitimized Polish control over Eastern Galicia through the resolution that approved military occupation by Polish forces, including Haller's Army, up to the river Zbruch and authorized the Polish government to establish an interim civil administration, which would preserve as far as possible the territorial autonomy and liberties of the inhabitants. On November 21, 1919, the Highest Council of the Paris Peace Conference granted Eastern Galicia to Poland for a period of 25 years, after which a plebiscite was to be held there, and obliged the Polish government to give territorial autonomy to the region. This decision was suspended on 22 December 1919 and never implemented. On April 21, 1920, Józef Piłsudski and Symon Petliura signed an alliance, in which Poland promised the Ukrainian People's Republic the military help in the Kiev Offensive against the Red Army in exchange for the acceptance of Polish–Ukrainian border on the river Zbruch.

Following this agreement, the government of the West Ukrainian People's Republic went into exile in Vienna, where it enjoyed the support of various West Ukrainian political emigrees as well as soldiers of the Galician army interned in Bohemia. Although not officially recognized by any state as the government of West Ukraine, it engaged in diplomatic activity with the French and British governments in the hopes of obtaining a favourable settlement at Versailles. As a result of its efforts, the council of the League of Nations declared on February 23, 1921 that Galicia lay outside the territory of Poland and that Poland did not have the mandate to establish administrative control in that country and that Poland was merely the occupying military power of Galicia, the sovereign of which were the Allied Powers (pursuant to the Treaty of Saint-Germain signed with Austria in September 1919) and whose fate would be determined by the Council of Ambassadors at the League of Nations. The Council of Ambassadors in Paris stated on July 8, 1921 that so called "West Ukrainian Government" of Yevhen Petrushevych did not constitute a government either de facto or de jure and did not have the right to represent any of the territories formerly belonging to the Austrian empire. After a long series of negotiations, on March 14, 1923, the Council of Ambassadors decided that Galicia would be incorporated into Poland "taking into consideration that Poland has recognized that in regard to the eastern part of Galicia ethnographic conditions fully deserve its autonomous status." After 1923, Galicia was internationally recognized as part of the Polish state. The government of the West Ukrainian People's Republic then disbanded, while Poland reneged on its promise of autonomy for Eastern Galicia.

Historian Christoph Mick states there was no systematic violence nor massacres of ethnic Poles during the course of this war but that both sides blamed each other for bloodshed. When Ukrainian forces first captured Lviv they refused to take hostages and were even prepared to enter negotiations with the Polish side, but were met with armed resistance. Polish historians, however, describe numerous examples during which Ukrainian troops used terror to subdue Poles into compliance. Ukrainian authorities tried to intimidate Polish population in Lviv by sending soldiers and armed trucks into the streets and dispersed crowds that could turn to Polish demonstrations. Ukrainian soldiers patrolled the streets with firearms and machine guns aimed at pedestrians; Polish sources claim that the Ukrainians shot bystanders who were looking at them from windows or building entrances. while Ukrainians claimed Poles were shooting at their soldiers from windows and behind gateways. Polish fighters also often dressed in civilian clothing when shooting at Ukrainian soldiers. According to historian Christoph Mick, both Poles and Ukrainians engaged in a propaganda war with each side accusing the other of war crimes and brutality.During fights over Lviv, Polish nurses who assisted wounded soldiers were said to have been captured by Ukrainian forces and tortured before being executed., while Ukrainians sources claimed that Polish soldiers shot Ukrainian medical patrols and accused Poles of rape and bloodlust.

When Poles captured Lviv, a mixed group of Polish criminals released form prisons, maundering militiamen and some regular soldiers pillaged the Jewish and Ukrainian parts of the city, and abusing local civilians. According to historian Norman Davis the Poles killed approximately 340 civilians, 2/3 of them Ukrainians and the rest Jews. According to Christoph Mick, only Jews were killed during these events and Ukrainians, while subject to hostile acts, were not murdered. As the Ukrainian military situation worsened, the Ukrainian side lashed out against Polish civilians in revenge, killing Polish teenagers, or even people who wore Polish national symbols on their clothes like a white eagle button. Especially the mass execution of a civilian family of Michonskich has shocked the public opinion in Lviv; among the murdered was a disabled war veteran and elderly father of 72 years..

According to Polish historians, during the course of the war, Ukrainian forces conducted massacres against the Polish population in Sokoloniki where 500 buildings were burned down and circa 50 Poles killedIn Zamarstynow. a Ukrainian commander accused the Polish population of supporting the Polish side and allowed for brutal house searchers by his troops in which civilians were beaten, robbed, murdered and raped. Ukrainian forces also murdered prisoners of war during these events. A day later, Polish troops executed a group of Ukrainian prisoners in retaliation..

On 24 November 1919 the village of Bilka Szlachecka was attacked by Ukrainian forces, burned down and its civilian population massacred, with 45 civilians murdered and 22 wounded. In Chodaczkow Wielki, 4 Polish girls were murdered by Ukrainian soldiers and their bodies mutilated. A special Polish commission for investigation of these atrocities established that even more drastic events occurred, but refused to blame Ukrainian nation for them, putting the blame for them on small percentage of Ukrainian society, mainly soldiers, peasants and so called "half-intelligentsia", that is village teachers, officers and members of gendarmerie. The commission, which included representatives from Italy and France, established that in just three districts 90 murders were committed on civilians besides robberies. Numerous churches desecrated by Ukrainian forces as well. Nuns from three cloisters were raped and later murdered by being blown up by explosive granades. They were cases of people being buried alive. The commission also noted however that several Ukrainian villagers have hidden Poles. The head of the commission, Zamorski recommended imprisonment of culprits of the atrocities, while establishing friendly relationship with Ukrainian population based on existing laws..

Approximately 10,000 Poles and 15,000 Ukrainians, mostly soldiers, died during this war. On July 17 a ceasefire was signed. Ukrainian POWs were kept in ex-Austrian POW camps in Dąbie (Kraków), Łańcut, Pikulice, Strzałków, and Wadowice.

Following the war, the French, who had supported Poland diplomatically and militarily, obtained control over the eastern Galician oil fields under conditions that were very unfavorable to Poland.

In the beginning of the Second World War, the area was annexed by the Soviet Union and attached to Ukraine, which at that time was a republic of the Soviet Union. According to the Yalta Conference decisions, while the Polish population of Eastern Galicia was resettled to Poland, the borders of which were shifted westwards, the region itself remained within the Soviet Ukraine after the war and currently forms the westernmost part of now independent Ukraine.

Although the 70 to 75 thousand men who fought in the Ukrainian Galician Army lost their war, and the Polish territory was brought back to Poland, the experience of proclaiming a Ukrainian state and fighting for it significantly intensified and deepened the nationalistic Ukrainian orientation within Galicia. Since the interwar era, Galicia has been the center of Ukrainian nationalism.

According to a noted interwar Polish publicist, the Polish–Ukrainian war was the principal cause for the failure to establish a Ukrainian state in Kiev in late 1918 and early 1919. During that critical time the Galician forces, large, well-disciplined and immune to Communist subversion, could have tilted the balance of power in favor of a Ukrainian state. Instead, it focused all of its resources on defending its Galician homeland. By the time the western Ukrainian forces did transfer East in the summer of 1919 after having been overwhelmed by the Poles, the Russian forces had grown significantly and the impact of the Galicians was not decisive.

After the war the Ukrainian soldiers who fought in this war became the subject of folk songs and their graves a site of annual pilgrimages in western Ukraine which persisted into Soviet times despite persecution by the Soviet authorities of those honoring the Ukrainian troops.

For Poles living in Eastern Galicia, the victory of the Polish forces over the Ukrainian Galician Army and the prospect of the region once again becoming part of the newly reconstructed Polish Republic, after 123 years of foreign domination caused a great wave of excitement. In the years following the war, battles such as the Defense of Lwów were remembered as outstanding examples of Polish heroism and resilience. Young defenders of the Łyczakowski Cemetery, who lost their lives defending the city, such as Jerzy Bitschan became household names in Poland during the interwar period.

Polish–Ukrainian War

The religious and ethnic divisions corresponded to social stratification. Galicia's leading social class were Polish nobles or descendants of Rus' gentry who had become polonized in the past, whereas, in the eastern part of the province Ruthenians (Ukrainians) constituted the majority of the peasant population. Poles and Jews were responsible for most of the commercial and industrial development in Galicia in the late 19th century.

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries the local Ukrainians attempted to persuade the Austrians to divide Galicia into Western (Polish) and Eastern (Ukrainian) provinces. These efforts were resisted and thwarted by those local Poles who feared losing control of Lviv and East Galicia. The Austrians eventually agreed in principle to divide the province of Galicia; in October 1916 the Austrian Emperor Karl I promised to do so once the war had ended.

On November 9 Polish forces attempted to seize the Drohobych oil fields by surprise, but outnumbered by the Ukrainians, they were driven back. The Ukrainians would retain control over the oil fields until May 1919.

On 6 November, a new Ukrainian polity was proclaimed in the Northern half of the region of Bukovina: Ukrainian Bukovina under President Omelian Popovych. The new state had its capital at Chernivtsi. It was dissolved on 11 November, when the Romanian Army occupied Chernivtsi. The Ukrainian administration and its military support retreated from the city the day before.

By the end of November 1918, Polish forces controlled Lviv and the railroad linking Lviv to central Poland through Przemyśl, while Ukrainians controlled the rest of Eastern Galicia east of the river San, including the areas south and north of the railroad into Lviv. Thus, the Polish controlled city of Lviv (Lwów) faced Ukrainian forces on three sides.

Immediately after the collapse of Austria-Hungary, Polish forces had captured Kholm (Chełm) area; shortly thereafter the Austrian commandants in southwestern Volhynia (Volodymyr-Volynskyi and Kovel) handed over the government to the local Polish national committees. In November–December 1918, the Poles also advanced into Podlachia and Western Polesia, but were stopped in western Volhynia by the troops of gen. M. Osetsky.

As Polish units tried to seize control of the region, the forces of the Ukrainian People's Republic under Symon Petlura tried to recover the territory of Kholm Governorate already controlled by the Polish troops.

According to Richard Pipes, the first major pogrom in this region took place in January 1919 in the town of Ovruch, where Jews were robbed and killed by regiments affiliated with Symon Petlura's Cossack ataman, Kozyr-Zyrka. Nicolas Werth claims that armed units of the Ukrainian People's Republic were also responsible for rapes, looting, and massacres in Zhytomir, in which 500–700 Jews lost their lives.

After two months of heavy fighting the conflict was resolved in March 1919 by fresh and well-equipped Polish units under General Edward Rydz-Śmigły.

Thanks to fast and effective mobilization in December 1918, the Ukrainians possessed a large numerical advantage until February 1919, and pushed the Poles into defensive positions. According to an American report from the period of January 13 – February 1, 1919, Ukrainians eventually managed to surround Lviv on three sides. The city's inhabitants were deprived of water supply and electricity. Ukrainian army also held villages on both sidelines of the railway leading to Przemyśl.

On December 9, 1918 Ukrainian forces broke through the outer defences of Przemyśl in the hope of capturing the city and thus cutting off Polish-controlled Lviv from central Poland. However, the Poles were able to quickly send relief troops and by December 17 the Ukrainians were forced back. On December 27, bolstered by peasant troops sent to Galicia from Eastern Ukraine in the hopes that the Western Ukrainians would be able to form a disciplined force out of them, a general Ukrainian offensive against Lviv began. Lviv's defences held, and the eastern Ukrainian troops mutinied.

The Ukrainian lines were broken, mostly due to the withdrawal of the elite Sich Riflemen. On May 27 the Polish forces reached the Złota Lipa–Berezhany--Radziwiłłów line. The Polish advance was accompanied by a large wave of anti-Jewish violence and looting conducted not only by disorganized Polish mobs, as in Lviv in 1918, but by Polish military units operating against the orders of their officers, in particular those of the Poznań regiments and Haller's army. Following the demands of the Entente, the Polish offensive was halted and the troops of General Haller adopted defensive positions.

The Polish and Ukrainian forces struggled on the diplomatic as well as military fronts both during and after the war. The Ukrainians hoped that the western allies of World War I would support their cause because the Treaty of Versailles that ended the first world war was based on the principle of national self-determination. Accordingly, the diplomats of the West Ukrainian People's Republic hoped that the West would compel Poland to withdraw from territories with a Ukrainian demographic majority.

According to Polish historians, during the course of the war, Ukrainian forces conducted massacres against the Polish population in Sokoloniki where 500 buildings were burned down and circa 50 Poles killedIn Zamarstynow. a Ukrainian commander accused the Polish population of supporting the Polish side and allowed for brutal house searchers by his troops in which civilians were beaten, robbed, murdered and raped. Ukrainian forces also murdered prisoners of war during these events. A day later, Polish troops executed a group of Ukrainian prisoners in retaliation..

Approximately 10,000 Poles and 15,000 Ukrainians, mostly soldiers, died during this war. On July 17 a ceasefire was signed. Ukrainian POWs were kept in ex-Austrian POW camps in Dąbie (Kraków), Łańcut, Pikulice, Strzałków, and Wadowice.

Following the war, the French, who had supported Poland diplomatically and militarily, obtained control over the eastern Galician oil fields under conditions that were very unfavorable to Poland.

In the beginning of the Second World War, the area was annexed by the Soviet Union and attached to Ukraine, which at that time was a republic of the Soviet Union. According to the Yalta Conference decisions, while the Polish population of Eastern Galicia was resettled to Poland, the borders of which were shifted westwards, the region itself remained within the Soviet Ukraine after the war and currently forms the westernmost part of now independent Ukraine.

Although the 70 to 75 thousand men who fought in the Ukrainian Galician Army lost their war, and the Polish territory was brought back to Poland, the experience of proclaiming a Ukrainian state and fighting for it significantly intensified and deepened the nationalistic Ukrainian orientation within Galicia. Since the interwar era, Galicia has been the center of Ukrainian nationalism.

After the war the Ukrainian soldiers who fought in this war became the subject of folk songs and their graves a site of annual pilgrimages in western Ukraine which persisted into Soviet times despite persecution by the Soviet authorities of those honoring the Ukrainian troops.

For Poles living in Eastern Galicia, the victory of the Polish forces over the Ukrainian Galician Army and the prospect of the region once again becoming part of the newly reconstructed Polish Republic, after 123 years of foreign domination caused a great wave of excitement. In the years following the war, battles such as the Defense of Lwów were remembered as outstanding examples of Polish heroism and resilience. Young defenders of the Łyczakowski Cemetery, who lost their lives defending the city, such as Jerzy Bitschan became household names in Poland during the interwar period.

The main Polish success was concluding signing a military alliance with the Ukrainian People's Republic of Symon Petliura. Ukrainians, who have faced a series of defeats on hands of both Poles and Soviets, decided that the only way to preserve some form of independence was to ally themselves with one faction and majority of Ukrainian leaders chose Poland as the less imperialistic of their enemies. Petliura had, after his government's defeat by the Bolsheviks, found asylum in Poland and now headed a new Ukrainian Army. The Polish–Ukrainian War ended around July 1919 and from September both Polish and Ukrainians fought together against the Soviets.

Polish–Soviet War in 1919

In 1918, the German Army in the east was the most powerful force in the region. Even more importantly, it was not only undefeated, it was victorious (in contrast to the German Army on the western front). However the commander of the German forces in the east, Max Hoffmann, a chief negotiator in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, was facing increasing difficulties. He believed, rightly, that his army was the only stabilising influence over the Eastern Europe. Yet with the disintegration of Austria-Hungary, rise of Bolsheviks in the east and various independent governments between the former frontline and Germany, the former "Oberkommando-Ostfront" (or "Ober-Ost") occupation zone became a thin line to nowhere, connected only to still-German Prussia. The deteriorating situation in Germany, facing the threat of civil war, eventually forced Hoffman to begin to retreat westwards, to Germany, in December 1918. Demoralized officers and mutinous soldiers abandoned their garrisons "en masse" and returned home. Only a limited number of units still retained any combat strength.
The areas abandoned by the Central Powers became a field of conflict among local governments created by Germany, other local governments that independently sprang up after the German withdrawal, and the Bolsheviks, who hoped to incorporate those areas into Bolshevik Russia. Internal power struggles prevented any of the governments in Belarus from gaining real power. The situation in Ukraine was even more complex, with sizable Ukrainian forces divided and ongoing conflicts among Nestor Makhno's anarchists, the communists, the White Russians, various governments of Ukraine, and the renascent Polish Army. The situation was further complicated when self-defence forces began to form in Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia as well. Many of those groups were fragmented, merged, divided, formed short alliances with others, and almost constantly fought. Almost the entire Eastern Europe was in chaos.

On November 16, Bolsheviks formed the "Western Army". On November 18, 1918, Vladimir Lenin issued orders to the Red Army to begin an operation, codenamed in some sources as "Target Vistula". The basic aim of the operation was to drive through eastern and central Europe, institute Soviet governments in the newly independent countries of that region and support communist revolutions in Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Bolshevik Russian forces did not anticipate serious opposition on the way but their advance was slow due to the continuing civil war. Faced with initial struggles with the uncoordinated local opposition and self-defense forces, the Red Army's slow offensive westwards continued through late December 1918. On January 12 Soviet High Command declared the goal of Target Vistula operation: deep scouting towards Neman River. On February 12 that goal was updated to Bug River.

At the start of 1919, fighting broke out almost by accident and without any orders from the respective governments, when self-organized Polish military units in Kresy ("Borderland") areas of Lithuania, Belarus and western Ukraine (the "Self-Defence of Lithuania and Belarus" numbering approximately ~2,000 soldiers under general Władysław Wejtko) clashed with local communist units and advance Bolshevik forces, each trying to secure the territories for its own incipient government. Eventually the more organised Soviet forces quelled most of the resistance and drove the remaining forces west.

On January 5, 1919, the Red Army entered Minsk almost unopposed, thus putting an end to the short-lived Belarusian People's Republic. At the same time, more and more Polish and Belarusian self-defense units sprang up across western Belarus and Lithuania. Ill-equipped and mostly comprising local recruits, they were determined to defend their homes from what the newspapers described as a "Red menace." Similar Bolshevik groups operated in the area, and a series of skirmishes ensued. The Polish Army began sending first of their newly organised units east to assist the self-defense forces, while the Russians sent their own units west. Open conflict seemed inevitable.

In the spring of 1919 Soviet conscription produced a Red Army of 2,300,000. However, few of these were sent west that year, as the majority of Red Army forces were engaging the White Russians. In September 1919, the Polish army had 540,000 men under arms, 230,000 of these on the Soviet front.

The Polish government, attempting to stop the westwards advance of Russian forces, negotiated on February 2 a treaty with Germany, which allowed Polish units safe passage through the territories still under German administration. Small Polish forces (12 artillery battalions, 12 cavalry regiments, 3 artillery batteries) had been securing the eastern border. The southern sector, from the Pripyat River to the town of Szczytno, was assigned to Grupa Podlaska (the Podlaska Group, later known as Grupa Poleska), commanded by General Antoni Listowski. These units had concentrated near Antopol and moved toward Brest, Pinsk and Bereza Kartuska. The Wolyn region was assigned to Grupa Wołyńska (the Wolyn Group) under General Edward Rydz-Śmigły.
The northern sector, from Szczytno to Skidel, was protected by Dywizja Litewsko-Białoruska (the Lithuanian–Belarusin Division) under General Wacław Iwaszkiewicz-Rudoszański, concentrated near Volkovysk. That division had also absorbed the former Samoobrona Litwy i Białorusi units which retreated from Vilnius.

By February 14 Polish forces had secured positions along the line of Kobryn, Pruzhany, rivers Zalewianka and Neman. Around February 14, the first organised Polish units made contact with the advance units of the Red Army and a border frontline slowly began to form from Lithuania, through Belarus to Ukraine.

The first serious armed conflict of the war took place on February 14. While Soviet units retreated without a fight from the town of Mosty, fighting erupted near the towns of Maniewicze and Bereza Kartuska in Belarus. By late February the Bolshevik offensive had come to a halt, and it had become apparent that the Red Army would not break through the Polish lines with half-hearted attacks. On 27 February 1919 the Soviets proclaimed the creation of the Lithuanian–Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Both Polish and Soviet forces had also been engaged with the Ukrainian forces (Polish–Ukrainian War). Active fighting was going on in the territories of Baltic countries (Lithuanian Wars of Independence, Latvian War of Independence and Estonian War of Independence). Further escalation of the conflict seemed inevitable.

At the same time, the Russian civil war raged on. In early summer 1919, the White Russians gained an upper hand and White forces under the command of Anton Ivanovich Denikin were marching on Moscow. Piłsudski in his remarks on the war of 1919-20 cited some communication effort between Denikin and the government of Poland, where Denikin stood on a position of allowing the Polish Army into his ranks, "as obedient servants of the Empire", which was understood by the Polish side as a sign that Denikin would not accept Polish independence and wanted to recreate Russia with the complete pre-First World War borders, encompassing Poland. Piłsudski thus decided to temporarily halt the Polish offensive so that the Bolsheviks could concentrate on stopping Denikin. Piłsudski is said to have considered Bolsheviks the less dangerous of the Russian civil war contenders and would offer Poland better terms, as the White Russians were not willing to accept Poland's independence, while the Bolsheviks did proclaim the Partitions of Poland null and void. In the coming months, Denikin would pay dearly for his refusal to compromise on this issue.

In early March 1919, Polish units opened an offensive and forces under general Stanisław Szeptycki captured the cities of Słonim (March 2) and crossed the Neman River. Forces under gen A.Listowski took Pinsk (March 5) and secured passages through Jasiolda river and Oginski Canal. Northern units reached the outskirts of Lida and stopped for several weeks. Polish decisions regarding further action in the east were taken at the beginning of April, when Józef Piłsudski determined that Polish forces must maintain the initiative on the eastern front but should avoid tipping the balance of Russian Civil war in any direction. Both the Russian and Polish advances began around the same time in April, resulting in increasing numbers of troops being brought into the area. In April the Bolsheviks captured Grodno and Vilnius, but in the very same month were pushed out by a Polish counteroffensive. The newly formed Polish Army had proved to be a far more difficult opponent than the Russians had assumed. Although the Soviet orders for Operation "Target Vistula" (advance west) were never rescinded, the early Russian plans would soon be made obsolete by growing Polish resistance and eventually, in April, a Polish counteroffensive. Unable to accomplish their objectives and facing strengthening offensives of White Russians, the Red Army withdrew from their positions and reorganized. Soon the Polish-Bolshevik War would begin in earnest.

Polish forces under general J.Lasocki recaptured Lida April 17). General A. Mokrzecki captured Nowogródek and Baranowicze on (April 18). On April 19 the major city of Vilnius was taken by Polish cavalry units under Władysław Belina-Prażmowski (~800 soldiers), soon reinforced with infantry under z-Śmigły (1 Dywizja Legionów, ~2,500 soldiers), who swiftly defeated the Red Army units remaining near Vilnius (near Pabradė, Ašmena and Širvintos). By May units of Rydz-Śmigły had advanced to the north and east and reached the line of Łyngmiany–Ignalino–Hoduciszki–Narocz lake, while gen. Mokrzecki engaged Russians east of Baranowicze and gen.Listowski moved west of Łunińc and near lower Styr on the Polesie Wołyńskie.

On 1 July Polish armies attacked Mołodeczno, captured on 4 July; Łuniec in the Polesie region was captured on 10 July, and in mid-July the Soviet counteroffensive near Naliboki was stopped. Polish forces continued their push and on 8 August captured Minsk. From 17 July Polish forces pushed towards Zbrucz and on 9 August captured Dubno and Krzemieniec in the Wołyń region. On 13 August the town and fortress of Równe had been captured, on 16 August Ostroróg near Horyń, on 18 August Zasław, and on 30 August Olewsko near Uborcia. In the Lithuanian–Belarusian theater of operations Ihueń was captured on 14 August, Borysów at Berezyna on 20 August and on 25 August an offensive towards Połock and Dyneburg was launched. On 28 August Polish forces for the first time used tanks and after heavy fighting captured fortress Bobrujsk near Berezyna (29 August), and from October landed on the other side of the river (Bobrujsk on 1 October, Borysów on 11 October). On 2 October Polish forces reached Daugava River and secured the region from Dzisna to Dyneburg.
Until early 1920, the Polish offensive was quite successful. Sporadic battles erupted between Polish forces and the Red Army, but the latter was preoccupied with the civil war and White Russian counterrevolutionary forces and were slowly but steadily retreating on the entire western frontline, from Latvia in the north to the Ukraine in the south.

In 1919, several attempts at peace negotiations had been made by various factions, but to no avail. First attempt at Polish-Soviet negotiations took place in Białowieża from June–August 1919. None of them were successful, and the war raged on. With White Russian general Denikin unwilling to guarantee Polish independence, Polish negotiators initiated another round of negotiations with the Bolsheviks, from October until December 1919 in Moscow and Mikaszewicze (on Polesie). While the negotiations slightly slowed down the pace of conflict between Poles and Bolsheviks, this mostly allowed Bolshevicks to concentrate bulk of their forces on destroying the Denikin's army advancing towards Moscow. The negotiations in early 1920 would be considered a token effort by both sides, which were preparing for a major offensive.

In the meantime, Polish–Lithuanian relations worsened as Polish politicians found it hard to accept Lithuanians demand for a complete independence and their territorial demands, especially on ceding the city of Vilnius, Lithuanian historical capital which had nonetheless a Polish ethnic majority. Thus Lithuanian nationalist leaned more and more towards the Soviet side. Polish negotiators made some more progress in negotiations with Latvian Provisional Government, and in early 1920 Polish and Latvian forces were conducting some joint operations against Soviets.

See Polish–Soviet War#References


Who is the oldest living person in the world?

As of, the oldest known living person is Kane Tanaka of Japan, aged. The oldest known living man is Gustav Gerneth of Germany, aged. Due to differences in life expectancy, the 100 oldest women have lived significantly longer than the 100 oldest men.

List of the verified oldest people

These are lists of the 100 known verified oldest men and women, arranged in descending order of each individual's age in years and days. A year typically refers to a calendar year, the time between two dates of the same name. However, years can be of different lengths due to the presence or absence of a leap day within the year, or to the conversion of dates from one calendar to another.

The oldest person ever whose age has been verified is the contested case of Jeanne Calment (1875–1997) of France, who died at the purported age of 122 years, 164 days. The oldest man ever whose age has been verified is Jiroemon Kimura (1897–2013) of Japan, who died at the age of 116 years, 54 days.

All the people on this list are supercentenarians, having reached an age of at least 110.

The list including known and validated supercentenarians who died before 2015 was compiled by the Gerontology Research Group (GRG). Later cases are included in more recent GRG data, with administrative reports or press coverage as supplementary sources, as indicated in the table.

The list including all known and validated supercentenarians who died before 2015 was compiled by the Gerontology Research Group (GRG). Later cases were sourced either from more recent GRG data, from administrative reports or from press coverage, as indicated in the table. Unranked entries have not been validated by the GRG, which only publishes recent cases above 112 years old.