Battle of Zborov

On 2 July 1917, the second day of the Kerensky Offensive, the Czechoslovak Rifle Brigade went into the attack at Zborov in eastern Galicia. About three and a half thousand Czechs and Slovaks, former subjects of Emperor Franz Joseph, were fighting in the ranks of the Russian army. Within a few hours they broke through successive lines of Austro-Hungarian trenches and took thousands of soldiers prisoner. The regiments made up mostly of Czechs suffered worst. Militarily the battle was only an episode of the offensive, but it became a legend and later a symbol of the struggle for an independent Czechoslovakia.

Czechs in the Russian army

The first unit of Czech volunteers, the Czech Druzhina, was formed in Kiev as early as August 1914 from Czechs settled in Russia. Over time prisoners and deserters from the Austro-Hungarian army joined it. The Tsarist authorities, however, distrusted men who had broken their oath to their own monarch. They used the Czech volunteers mainly as scouts and interpreters, scattered across many divisions, and were reluctant to allow recruitment in the prisoner-of-war camps. In time the Druzhina grew into a regiment and then into a rifle brigade, which in the summer of 1917 had three regiments.

The February Revolution changed the situation. The Provisional Government was better disposed towards the nations fighting Austria-Hungary, and as early as January the Allies had included the liberation of the Czechoslovaks among their war aims. In May 1917 the leader of the Czech émigrés, Professor Tomáš Masaryk, arrived in Petrograd. He sought the expansion of the Czechoslovak forces and their recognition as the army of an allied nation. The émigré leaders were anxious for the brigade to go into battle as a whole. Taking part in the attack was for them a political matter, not just a military one.

The brigade was commanded by a Russian, Colonel Vyacheslav Troyanov, but the plan of attack was prepared by Czech and Slovak officers. It was poorly equipped and had few machine guns, but its soldiers were eager to fight. The Russian command placed it in XLIX Corps of the 11th Army, between the 4th and 6th Finnish Rifle Divisions, on the heights south-west of Zborov. Facing it was the Austro-Hungarian 19th Division, largely Czech, with Infantry Regiments No. 35 from Plzeň and No. 75 from Jindřichův Hradec, and next to it the Hungarian 32nd Division from Budapest. The Austrian official history called this deployment a “clever move” by the Russian command. During the artillery bombardment before the battle, among those seriously wounded was the future Czechoslovak general Jan Syrový, who lost an eye.

The breakthrough

The day before, the Russians had broken through the front a few kilometres to the south, at Koniuchy. On 2 July the commander of the 11th Army, General Ivan Erdeli, wanted to exploit this success. In the morning, after a heavy artillery bombardment, the 4th Finnish Rifle Division attacked the Mogiła hill near Zborov, and the Czechoslovaks advanced behind it. Assault groups with grenades cut through the wire, followed by further waves. The Hungarians of the 32nd Division repulsed the first attack on Mogiła, but the Czechoslovaks broke in deep at the junction of the 32nd and 19th Divisions and pushed uphill towards the village of Jezierzanka.

The battalions of the Plzeň 35th Regiment fell back far to the west. Some groups still resisted, others scattered or surrendered. Before noon the northern wing and centre of the 19th Division were retreating in disorder, and its commander tried in vain to rally the broken units on the second position. Soon, under threat of encirclement, the 75th Regiment also had to withdraw. At about two in the afternoon the surrounded Mogiła fell, defended to the last by the remnants of the 86th Regiment. The Russians and Czechoslovaks reached the heights beyond Zborov. Only a German reserve regiment, arriving after a night march, and the Saxon 96th Division halted their advance.

By the evening the front ran about five kilometres west of the old line. On 30 June the Austro-Hungarian IX Corps had had more than 16,000 soldiers in the trenches. Now it had 6,700 left. During the night its shattered divisions were replaced by German ones.

Prisoners and losses

According to Czech sources, the brigade took about 3,300 prisoners, including 62 officers, and captured about 20 guns. According to the Austrian official history, the 35th Regiment lost about 1,700 men on 1 and 2 July, and the 75th Regiment almost 2,900, of whom about 2,300 were taken prisoner. The whole Russian 11th Army recorded more than 14,000 prisoners in those two days. The brigade lost, according to Czech sources, about 170–185 killed and died of wounds and about 700 wounded. The Austrians gave 159 killed and a thousand wounded.

Vienna looked for culprits in the Czech regiments. The Austrian official history places the blame on Regiments 35 and 75. The 75th Regiment was 82 per cent Czech, peasants’ sons from the area around Jindřichův Hradec, and had fought well until then. In the 35th Regiment, from industrial Plzeň and the Šumava, Czechs made up 61 per cent. The investigation, however, found no collusion with the enemy. Austrian historians also admitted that many sub-units at first put up resistance, which weakened only when the soldiers heard their mother tongue from the other side and realised they were fighting their own countrymen.

The legend of Zborov

“For the first time in this war citizens of the Danubian monarchy came out against its army in larger units as allies of the enemy,” wrote the Austrian official history. The news went round the world. The Entente gained an argument for its slogan of liberating the nations “oppressed by the Habsburgs”, and in Germany distrust of its ally’s armed forces and cohesion grew. In Austria the news arrived just as Emperor Charles I announced, on that same 2 July, an amnesty for those convicted of political offences. Among those who benefited was the Czech leader Karel Kramář. There were stormy disputes in the Vienna parliament.

In Russia the victory persuaded the government and the high command to lift the restrictions on forming Czechoslovak units. The brigade quickly grew into two divisions, and in the autumn into the Czechoslovak Corps, tens of thousands strong. Veterans of Zborov included the later general Radola Gajda and the future president of Czechoslovakia Ludvík Svoboda. In interwar Czechoslovakia the anniversary of the battle, 2 July, was celebrated as Army Day. Monuments were erected to the “heroes of Zborov”, and in 1938 a film was made about the battle. Under the German occupation, and then in the Communist era, the legend was passed over in silence.

For Poles at the time Zborów was associated above all with other events. In 1649 King John II Casimir fought a battle here against Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s Cossacks and the Tatars, after which the Treaty of Zboriv was concluded. Now, less than three centuries later, at the same town an army of another nation was being born, a nation which, like the Poles, was counting on the fall of the Habsburg monarchy.