Battle of Kraków begins

A British chronology of the war gives 15 November 1914 as the day the Battle of Kraków began. The Russian armies were by then already on the approaches to the fortress of Kraków, and the Austro-Hungarian command was completing preparations for a counter-attack. The attack itself began at dawn the next day, which is why most accounts, including the Polish Wikipedia, date the beginning of the battle to 16 November.

The Russians before Kraków

After the failed offensive on the Vistula, the Austro-Hungarian armies fell back at the beginning of November as far as Kraków. They were followed by the Russian Fourth and Ninth Armies, advancing north of the Vistula towards Silesia, and by the Third Army of General Radko Dimitriev, which was moving west from Tarnów on the southern side of the river. On 9 November the first Cossack patrol appeared before the forts. Around 14 November General Platon Lechitsky’s Ninth Army reached the line Wolbrom – Skała – Słomniki – Proszowice, between a dozen and several dozen kilometres from the city.

Kraków prepared for a siege. At the beginning of November the fortress commandant, General Karl Kuk, ordered the compulsory evacuation of inhabitants who did not have food supplies for three months. Roughly a third of the population left the city. On 17 November the city gates were closed, and no one was allowed to enter Kraków even for a short stay.

The blow from the fortress

The Chief of the General Staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, decided not to wait for a siege. The plan was for the Fourth Army of Archduke Joseph Ferdinand, reinforced by battalions from the fortress garrison and supported by the fire of the fortress guns, to march out of Kraków to the north-east and strike the left wing of the Ninth Army. In the north the First Army of General Viktor Dankl was to attack at the same time. The Austrians counted on help from the German offensive in the north, where the Battle of Łódź had been going on for several days.

At dawn on 16 November the troops of the Fourth Army marched out of the fortress along the Warsaw and Proszowice highways. The inhabitants of Kraków heard the roar of guns for the first time. In the following days fighting flared up across the whole approach to the city, from the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland to the Vistula. On 17–18 November at Krzywopłoty near Bydlin two battalions of the Polish Legions held off Russian attacks for two days, losing 46 killed and 131 wounded and captured.

The battle lasted until the end of November. The Austrians threw the Russians back beyond the Dłubnia river, towards the Szreniawa valley, but failed to destroy their wing. When the Russians brought reinforcements from the Third Army across the Vistula, the attack collapsed and the Fourth Army returned to the cover of the forts.