Battle of Komarów (1920)

On 31 August 1920, near Komarów in the Zamość region, the Polish 1st Cavalry Division of Colonel Juliusz Rómmel (PL) fought a day-long battle against Semyon Budyonny’s (PL) First Cavalry Army (PL). On the hills around the village of Wolica Śniatycka some twenty cavalry regiments fought in all, six of them Polish, and the outcome was decided by sabre charges. In the evening the Soviet cavalry left the battlefield and began a retreat that ended behind the front line. The Battle of Komarów is regarded as one of the last great cavalry battles in Europe. In the same area six years earlier the Austrians had fought the Russians in one of the first battles of the Great War.

The Konarmia in a trap

All summer the First Cavalry Army had been the most dangerous formation of the Red Army. According to Polish figures it numbered about 18,000 sabres, several hundred machine guns and its own armoured trains. In August it fought on the approaches to Lviv, among other places at Zadwórze. The orders to send it to the aid of Tukhachevsky’s armies were carried out late. When, after the defeat at Warsaw, Budyonny finally moved north, at the end of August his divisions got stuck at Zamość. The fortress was defended by Polish units and the Ukrainian 6th Rifle Division of Colonel Marko Bezruchko, of the allied army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Meanwhile Polish divisions were closing in from the west, the north and the south, to trap the Konarmia in a pocket.

From the south came the group of General Stanisław Haller (PL): the 13th Infantry Division and Rómmel’s 1st Cavalry Division. Rómmel had two cavalry brigades: Colonel Konstanty Plisowski’s 6th Brigade and Colonel Henryk Brzezowski’s 7th Brigade, six regiments of uhlans and light horse in all, with horse artillery. Budyonny wanted to withdraw east, behind the river Huczwa, which he had crossed earlier. He left two cavalry divisions in reserve near Zamość and sent one each towards Komarów and Grabowiec.

Charges at Wolica Śniatycka

The fighting began at about seven in the morning at Wolica Śniatycka. The main battle was fought on a wooded upland north of the Komarów marshes. The key to it was Hill 255, from which, as Brzezowski later wrote, the surrounding villages and the road to Werbkowice could be seen “as on the palm of your hand”. The 7th Brigade attacked it first on foot, then mounted, and took it. The Soviet cavalry took up positions between Cześniki and Niewirków and began to outflank the Poles. In the afternoon Rómmel sent the 6th Brigade towards Niewirków to cut off the Konarmia’s route east. The Polish horse artillery and machine guns broke up attack after attack. At one point the batteries, which had gone too far forward, began to pull back, and confusion broke out among the Polish horsemen.

In the evening Budyonny threw the 6th Cavalry Division into the attack. Then the 8th Uhlan Regiment of Rittmeister Kornel Krzeczunowicz came forward at a trot between the retreating Polish squadrons and struck at the gallop from a few dozen paces. The Soviet division could not withstand the charge and turned back, and the whole Soviet line followed it. By dusk the Konarmia had left the battlefield. In the air the 7th Fighter Squadron, in which American volunteers served, took part in the fighting.

The outcome

The losses are uncertain. According to an article by the Museum of Polish History the Bolsheviks lost about 1,500 killed and the Poles five times fewer. Other accounts give about 300 killed and wounded and about 500 horses on the Polish side. The Poles captured supply trains and an operational order of the Cavalry Army found on a dead officer.

The Konarmia could not be encircled. The Polish infantry failed to cut its lines of retreat in time, and Krzeczunowicz later wrote bitterly about General Haller’s absence from the battlefield. Budyonny had nevertheless lost the initiative. Komarów was his army’s last attack of the war. The writer Isaac Babel, who rode with the Konarmia as a correspondent, noted in his diary after the battle: “Talk that the army is not what it was”. He had no doubt that this was “the beginning of the end” of the First Cavalry.