Battle of Rarańcza begins

On 12 June 1915 the infantry of the Second Brigade of the Polish Legions took the village of Rarańcza without a fight, north-east of Czernowitz, right on the border of Bukovina with Russian Bessarabia. The legionaries got no further. Beyond the Rokitna stream, on the hills above the Bessarabian village of Rokitna (PL), four lines of Russian trenches awaited them. So began the fighting that Legion memoirs called “the June fighting” at Rarańcza.

On the Bessarabian border

The brigade, known as the Carpathian or Iron Brigade, had come here in April, after the winter fighting in the Eastern Carpathians and a rest at Kolomyia. According to the book Szlakiem bojowym Legionów (“On the Legions’ battle trail”), published by its officers in Lviv in 1915 itself, about 6,000 men of the 2nd and 3rd Infantry Regiments, with two squadrons of uhlans and artillery, set off for the new front. They were commanded by the Austrian Colonel Ferdinand Küttner (PL), who knew no Polish. The brigade came under General Ignaz Korda’s XI Corps, part of General Karl von Pflanzer-Baltin’s forces. In May the Russian Ninth Army broke the front here and pushed the corps back behind the Prut, and for several weeks the legionaries guarded its bank near Czernowitz.

At the beginning of June the situation was reversed. After the breakthrough at Gorlice the Russians were retreating across Galicia, and on 8 June the Austrians recaptured Stanisławów. The same day XI Corps went over to the attack. The main blow was struck by the Austro-Hungarian 42nd Infantry Division, while the Second Brigade covered its right wing and advanced along the Prut through Łużany, Mamajowce and Sadagóra (PL) towards Rarańcza and Rokitna.

The march from the Prut

In the first echelon went two battle groups, under Colonel Zygmunt Zieliński and Major Mieczysław Norwid-Neugebauer (PL). The 3rd Regiment took Łużany, and Zieliński’s group took Mamajowce. On 11 June the uhlans took Sadagóra on the march, and the infantry reached the road from Sadagóra to Zadobrówka and forced the Russians to retreat. On patrol, according to Bertold Merwin, who described the brigade’s fighting in 1915 itself, the uhlan Emil Garbaczewski fell upon a Russian platoon covering a retreating gun and brought in 24 prisoners. Most probably during the night of 11–12 June the cavalry division of Rittmeister Zbigniew Dunin-Wąsowicz (PL) surprised the Russians on a fortified pass near the hamlet of Szańce and drove them out without loss.

In front of Rokitna

On 12 June uhlan patrols went out towards Rarańcza and the Dołżok wood between Rarańcza and Bojan. The infantry took Rarańcza without a fight, but its advance halted at the foot of the hills on the left bank of the Rokitna, a left-bank tributary of the Prut. The Russians held a position there from Kalinkowce through Rokitna to Renkowce. According to Juliusz S. Tym’s account in a booklet of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), the hardest obstacle was four lines of trenches on the slope above the village, by three windmills, covered by the fire of machine guns and field artillery. The hills beyond the village were held by infantry more numerous than the Polish battle groups.

Zieliński’s group, made up of the 3rd Regiment and the III Battalion of the 2nd Regiment, reached the western edge of Rokitna only in the evening. The fire of the Russian artillery and machine guns made it impossible to attack in daylight. The cavalry division was quartered in a cherry orchard near the ruined Bucz farmstead, about 3 kilometres east of Rarańcza. The next day the command, pressed by the corps staff, was to throw precisely this division against the Russian trenches.