If necessary, we will fight: Battle of Radviliškis with the Bermontites in 1919.
On November 21-22, 1919, fateful battles took place in the city of Radviliškis between the Lithuanian army and the Bermontinians - a joint force of Russian prisoners of war and German volunteers, which ended in a significant Lithuanian victory.
As Povilas Barštaitis, a museum curator at the Vytautas the Great War Museum, writes, at the end of the summer of 1919, as soon as the Bolsheviks were driven out of Zarasai, clouds of a new threat began to gather in the western part of Lithuania. The Bermontists, led by Pavel Bermont-Avalov, although they claimed to be fighting against the Bolsheviks, in reality sought to restore the Russian Empire, in which Lithuania would be just one of the provinces.
Having captured the Radviliškis railway station, the Bermontites cut off the vital communication link between the capital Kaunas and the Lithuanian army operating on the Bolshevik front. A garrison of 600-800 enemy troops entrenched themselves in the city's brick buildings, cemeteries, and a windmill.
A participant in the fighting, the chief Antanas Šukys, described the enemy as follows: "In the end, it doesn't matter to us who they are. We knew very well that they were the enemies of Lithuania, and that if necessary, we would have to fight them."
Although the Lithuanians failed on the first day of the attack, on the second day, having gathered a larger and more experienced force, they captured Radviliškis. The Bermontites fled, leaving behind a large amount of war booty. Only the intervention of Henri Albert Nisel, the head of the Entente Military Control Commission, stopped the further Lithuanian attack.
