communications and logistics prevented the Russians from taking full advantage of their situation. A total of 2 million Polish troops fought with the armies of the three occupying powers, and 450,000 died. Several hundred thousand Polish civilians were moved to labour camps in Germany. The scorched-earth retreat strategies of both sides left much of the war zone uninhabitable. Recovery of statehood In 1917 two separate events decisively changed the character of the war and set it on a course toward the rebirth of Poland. The United States entered the conflict on the Allied side, while a process of revolutionary upheaval in Russia weakened her and then removed the Russians from the Eastern Front, finally bringing the Bolsheviks to power in that country. The army of Tsarist Russia ceased to be a factor when the Bolsheviks pulled Russia out of the war. At Brest-Litovsk the Bolsheviks renounced Russian claims to Poland. Compelled by force of German arms to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk all formerly Polish lands were ceded to the Central Powers. After the German defeat in the Fall of 1918; the overthrow of the Prussian Monarchy and its replacement by the liberal Weimar Republic, the road to an independent Polish state was opened. The vacating of both Russia and Germany from Poland gave free rein to the calls of Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles Peace Conference, echoing those of the new Bolshevik regime, to liberate the Poles and other peoples from Greater Power suzerainty. The thirteenth of Wilson's Fourteen Points adopted the resurrection of Poland as one of the main aims of the First World War. Józef Piłsudski became a popular hero when Berlin jailed him for insubordination. The Allies broke the resistance of the Central Powers by autumn 1918, as the Habsburg monarchy disintegrated and the German imperial government collapsed. In October 1918, Polish authorities took over Galicia and Cieszyn Silesia. In November 1918, Piłsudski was released from internment in Germany by the revolutionaries and returned to Warsaw. Upon his arrival, on 11 November 1918 the Regency Council of the Kingdom of Poland ceded all responsibilities to him and Piłsudski took control over the newly created state as its provisional Chief of State. Soon all the local governments that had been created in the last months of the war pledged allegiance to the central government in Warsaw. Independent Poland, which had been absent from the map of Europe