Battle of Gródek and Rawa Ruska begins

On 8 September 1914 the Austro-Hungarian armies went over to the attack eastwards, towards Lviv, lost five days earlier. The main fighting took place on the line of the river Wereszyca (PL) and the ponds near Gródek Jagielloński, while from the north, around Rawa Ruska, the Russian Fifth Army was pressing on the Austrians’ threatened flank. It was the last great attempt to reverse the outcome of the Battle of Galicia.

Names of the battle

The British chronology of the war calls this engagement the Second Battle of Lemberg. For it the first was the fighting on the Złota Lipa and Gniła Lipa at the end of August, which opened the way to the city for the Russians. Polish and Austrian literature usually speaks of the Battle of Gródek, and the fighting on the northern flank is described separately as the Battle of Rawa Ruska. In reality these were two parts of one operation. The fighting at Rawa Ruska had begun as early as about 3 September, and the main attack on Gródek lasted from 8 to 11 September.

Conrad’s plan

After the Russians took Lviv on 3 September, the Chief of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff, General Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, would not accept defeat. He judged that the Russians, occupied with the city, were advancing slowly, and decided to strike once more. He placed the Third Army, routed on the Gniła Lipa and now taken over by General Svetozar Boroević von Bojna, on the line of the Wereszyca, west of Lviv. On its right flank, to the south, stood the Second Army of General Eduard von Böhm-Ermolli, whose units were arriving by rail from the Serbian front.

The boldest part of the plan was the turn of the Fourth Army of General Moritz Auffenberg. Only a few days earlier it had been fighting in the north, in the Battle of Komarów. Now Conrad sent it south to strike from the north at the flank of the Russians advancing from Lviv. Auffenberg was to swing round in an arc and come out in the rear of the Russian Third Army. The plan was risky, because after the Fourth Army left only weak forces remained in the north, and it was not known whether the Russian Fifth Army from Komarów had really been beaten.

The opponents

Facing the Austrians stood two victorious armies of the Russian South-Western Front: the Third Army of General Nikolai Ruzsky, which had taken Lviv, and south of it the Eighth Army of General Aleksei Brusilov. The Russians did not wait passively. On 7 September, after heavy fighting, they took Gródek itself. From the north approached the Fifth Army of General Pavel Plehve, which after the Battle of Komarów had quickly recovered and set off after Auffenberg’s retreating troops.

The attack

In the very first days of September the Fourth Army ran into strong resistance from the Russian Third Army around Rawa Ruska and Magierów. Instead of coming out in the enemy’s rear, Auffenberg became bogged down in heavy frontal fighting. On 8 September Conrad threw the Third and Second Armies into the attack on a front about 100 kilometres long. Austro-Hungarian regiments attacked the Russian positions on the Wereszyca and around the Gródek ponds. On some sectors they managed temporarily to push the Russians back, but nowhere did they break through the front. The counter-attack on Gródek did not recover the town.

The most dangerous developments, however, were in the north. Between Auffenberg’s Fourth Army and the First Army of General Dankl, fighting near Lublin, a wide gap had opened. The Russian Fifth Army of Plehve was entering it, threatening to come out in the rear of the whole Austro-Hungarian front.

What came next

The fighting lasted until 11 September. That day Conrad, faced with the threat of encirclement, broke off the battle and ordered all his armies to retreat behind the San. For Austria-Hungary this meant the loss of almost all of Eastern Galicia and the encirclement of the fortress of Przemyśl. Hopes of retaking Lviv collapsed for many months.

Gródek and Rawa Ruska

Both small towns, today in Ukraine, belonged for centuries to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In Gródek, called Jagielloński, King Władysław Jagiełło, the victor of Grunwald, died in 1434. Rawa Ruska lay in the old Bełz Voivodeship, on an important route from Lviv to the north. In 1914 their surroundings became the field of one of the largest battles on the lands of the former Commonwealth. Poles fought on both sides: conscripts from the Galician regiments of the Austro-Hungarian army and recruits from the Kingdom of Poland in the Russian army.