Battle of Łowczówek

On 22 December 1914 the First Brigade of the Polish Legions went into action at Łowczówek, on the hills above the valley of the Biała, a dozen or so kilometres south of Tarnów. That day saw the start of the Battle of Łowczówek, the legionaries’ hardest fight of 1914, which lasted until Christmas. The brigade, formed only three days earlier, came straight off the march and before nightfall retook from the Russians a hill that the Austrians had lost that morning.

A telegram from army headquarters

After the Battle of Limanowa the legionaries of Józef Piłsudski were resting in Nowy Sącz. There, on 19 December, their units were reorganised into a brigade which, according to the historian Michał Klimecki, numbered about 2,600 soldiers. They hoped to spend Christmas in the town. At noon on 20 December, however, a telegram arrived from the headquarters of the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army: the brigade was to set off for Tarnów at once. Piłsudski was away, having gone to Vienna for political talks. Command therefore fell to the chief of staff, Lieutenant-Colonel Kazimierz Sosnkowski. After nights in Zbyszyce and Zakliczyn, where the gunfire could already be heard, the legionaries marched on 22 December along sodden roads towards Rychwałd and Lichwin.

At the same time the Russian Third Army of General Radko Dimitriev went over to the counter-attack along the whole front from the Dunajec to the Carpathians. The area around Łowczówek lay at the junction of two Austro-Hungarian armies and was weakly held. On the morning of 22 December units of the Russian XXI Corps drove a few companies of the 18th Landwehr Infantry Regiment of Colonel Pattay’s group off the hills above the village. This threatened to break the front and outflank the troops defending the Biała.

An attack at dusk

At the headquarters of Pattay’s group, in the Brzezie inn at Lichwin, Sosnkowski was given the task of retaking Hills 360 and 343. It was a short December day, sleet was falling and dusk was approaching. Sosnkowski decided to attack at once, before the Russians could dig in on the positions they had taken. The 1st Regiment of Major Edward Rydz-Śmigły approached Hill 360 through ravines and ran into barbed wire and machine-gun fire. The matter was decided by a flank attack by the left-wing battalion of Captain Stanisław Burhardt-Bukacki. The legionaries got through the wire and, fighting with bayonets, rifle butts and spades, drove soldiers of the Russian 132nd Bender Infantry Regiment off the hill. According to the historian Tomasz Woźny, only a few hundred legionaries went in with the first wave, but the enemy was scattered over difficult ground and tired after a whole day’s fighting with the Landwehr.

By the evening the legionaries were masters of the position. Patrols of the 1st Regiment went further, deep into the ground held by the Russians. An eight-man patrol under NCO Świderski captured almost the entire staff of the Bender regiment, with its lieutenant-colonel at its head. Things went worse for the 5th Regiment, which was to take the neighbouring Hill 343. Advancing from the direction of Meszna, it came under heavy Russian artillery fire. In the dark, on unknown ground and with no contact with the Austrian batteries, its commanders did not want to risk an attack and postponed it until dawn.

Four days

The legionaries took Hill 343 before dawn on 23 December. Over the following days, pushed out ahead of the line of their neighbours, without food and short of ammunition, they beat off Russian counter-attacks, including on Christmas Eve, when the trenches of the two sides were in places only 30–50 metres apart. On 25 December, when the Russians broke through the front next to them, they had to withdraw. According to the most commonly cited figures, the brigade lost 128 killed and 342 wounded. The fallen lie in war cemetery no. 171 on Kopaliny hill above Łowczówek.