Battle of Limanowa begins

The British chronology of the war gives 1 December 1914 as the start of the Battle of Limanowa and Łapanów. On that day south of Kraków, in the Raba valley and at the foot of the Beskid Wyspowy, the concentration of an Austro-Hungarian strike group was being completed, and its first units were already advancing towards the Russian positions. Polish historians usually take 2 December as the start of the operation, when the attack got under way along the whole sector. For Austria-Hungary the stakes were enormous: the question was whether the Russians would outflank the fortress of Kraków from the south.

The Russians before Kraków

After the Battle of Kraków the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army had returned to the shelter of the forts, but the Russians had no intention of stopping. From the east, from the direction of Tarnów and Bochnia, General Radko Dimitriev’s Third Army was approaching. Around 30 November its units occupied Wieliczka and Dobczyce, and Cossack patrols appeared in the fortress’s foreground. Further south the Russian Eighth Army held Nowy Sącz and was pushing towards the Carpathian passes, through which its units had recently crossed into Hungary. Between the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army at Kraków and the Third Army in the Carpathians gaped a gap through which the Russians could pass further west.

The Chief of the General Staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, decided not to wait for the blow. He judged that the Russian armies, stretched in an arc from the Vistula to the Carpathians and exhausted by a long march, were weakest on their southern wing. He decided to strike precisely there, from the mountainous country south of the Kraków–Bochnia road, into the flank and rear of the Third Army.

Concentration in the mountains

On 28–30 November the railways carried units released from the fighting north of the city from Kraków to Chabówka, Jordanów and Mszana Dolna. The core of the group was the Tyrolean XIV Corps of Feldmarschall-Leutnant Josef Roth, who took command of the whole force. Behind it came the German 47th Reserve Infantry Division, the only sizeable German unit in this battle. The regiments, as soon as they had been unloaded from the wagons, set off eastwards along snow-covered mountain roads. In the Jurków area stood battalions of the Polish Legions, which had arrived there at the end of November under the command of Józef Piłsudski. Only its garrison remained in the fortress of Kraków.

According to some studies, as early as 1 December Austro-Hungarian infantry and cavalry were fighting their way out of the mountains in the area of Kasina Wielka and Dobra, pushing back the Russian cavalry units that covered the Third Army’s flank. The next day the attack spread across a broad belt from the Raba to the Łososina valley, and one of the most important battles Austria-Hungary fought on Polish soil in 1914 began.