Battle of Łowczówek

The Battle of Łowczówek was the hardest fight that the troops of Józef Piłsudski fought in 1914, and the first in which they fought as the First Brigade of the Polish Legions. It took place on 22–25 December 1914 on the wooded, ravine-cut hills of the Rożnów Foothills (PL), above the valley of the Biała, a dozen or so kilometres south of Tarnów. The brigade, summoned suddenly from its quarters in Nowy Sącz, attacked on the march the Russians who had broken through the Austro-Hungarian front here, retook the hills above Łowczówek and for three days, in sleet, without food and short of ammunition, beat off Russian counter-attacks. The fighting went on on Christmas Eve and on Christmas Day too. Piłsudski was not with the troops at the time. The brigade was commanded by its chief of staff, Lieutenant-Colonel Kazimierz Sosnkowski.

Name and dates

Polish tradition and the Polish Wikipedia date the battle to 22–25 December 1914, from the legionnaires’ first attack to their withdrawal from the front line on Christmas Day. The name comes from the village of Łowczówek in today’s Gmina Pleśna. Fighting also took place in the neighbouring villages: Łowczów, Buchcice, which until 1965 was called Meszna Szlachecka, and Lichwin. Sosnkowski’s order of 1 January 1915 speaks of the fight “on the hills of Łowczówek and Meszna Szlachecka”.

The name is strictly Polish. For the Austrians and the Russians the fighting at Łowczówek was one episode of a much larger clash. Between 21 December 1914 and the first days of January 1915 the Russian Third Army counter-attacked along the whole front from the Dunajec to the Carpathians. This clash has no settled name. The historian Tomasz Woźny proposes “the Battle of Jasło and Tarnów”, while Hungarian literature speaks of the “Christmas battle in the Carpathians”.

Background

In mid-December 1914, after the Battle of Limanowa, the Austro-Hungarian forces were pursuing the retreating Russians. The Fourth Army of Archduke Joseph Ferdinand came up to Tarnów and the line of the Dunajec, while the Third Army of General Svetozar Boroević was approaching from the Carpathians. The victorious divisions, however, were exhausted and thinned out. Many of them had the strength of a regiment, or even of a battalion. The Third Army of General Radko Dimitriev had not been destroyed. It halted on the hills between the Dunajec and the Biała and received new divisions from the Kingdom of Poland, often at full strength. On 18 December the Austro-Hungarian high command halted the Fourth Army’s advance, and a few days later the Russians went over to the counter-attack.

The area around Łowczówek lay at the junction of the two Austro-Hungarian armies. On the eastern bank of the Biała, near Tuchów, the left wing of the Third Army, General Sándor Szurmay’s corps, had been beating off Russian attacks since 20 December. On the western bank, on the hills above Łowczówek, there were only weak units: Colonel Pattay’s small group, left here by the 45th Landwehr Infantry Division, part of the 6th Cavalry Division and General Albert Schmidt von Georgenegg’s group. Facing them was the Russian XXI Corps with the 33rd and 44th Infantry Divisions. From Hills 360, 343 and 398 (Kopaliny) the whole Biała valley could be seen. Whoever held them controlled the roads leading to Tarnów from the south.

The brigade on the way

The legionnaires came from Limanowa. After the Battle of Marcinkowice (PL) on 12–13 December they entered Nowy Sącz and were sent there to rest. There the formation of the second infantry regiment, which received the number 5 in the Legions’ numbering, was completed, and on 19 December Piłsudski’s troops were reorganised as the First Brigade of the Polish Legions. According to the historian Michał Klimecki, the brigade then numbered about 2,600 men, including about 2,150 infantry. The brigade also had a cavalry squadron, artillery and sappers. Piłsudski himself, appointed brigadier in November, had according to some sources left for Vienna on 18 December for political talks.

The legionnaires were counting on spending Christmas in Nowy Sącz. At noon on 20 December, however, a telegram arrived from Fourth Army headquarters ordering them to march at once to Tarnów, where the Russians threatened to break the front. Sosnkowski led the brigade although its reorganisation was not finished. The legionnaires spent the night of 20–21 December in Zbyszyce and the next one in Zakliczyn, where the sounds of fighting could already be heard. On 22 December, along muddy roads through Wróblowice and Janowice, they reached the area of Rychwałd and Lichwin.

Course of the battle

22 December. That day a Russian attack drove the few companies of the 18th Landwehr Infantry Regiment from Pattay’s group off the hills above Łowczówek. In the Brzezie inn in Lichwin, where the group’s staff was quartered, Sosnkowski was given the task of retaking Hills 360 and 343. Despite the falling dusk and the sleet, he decided to attack at once, before the Russians could dig in. The 1st Regiment of Major Edward Rydz-Śmigły approached Hill 360 through the ravines and ran into wire entanglements and machine-gun fire. The attack was decided by a flank attack by the battalion of Captain Stanisław Burhardt-Bukacki. The legionnaires got through the wire and, fighting with bayonets, rifle butts and entrenching tools, drove units of the Russian 132nd Bender Infantry Regiment off the hill. An eight-man patrol under NCO Świderski captured almost the whole staff of that regiment. The 5th Regiment, advancing from the direction of Meszna, came under heavy artillery fire. It had no communication with the Austrian batteries and its commanders did not know the ground, so the attack on Hill 343 was put off until morning.

23 December. Before dawn the 5th Regiment, supported by the neighbouring infantry and the fire of three batteries, took Hill 343. The belt of hills was in the hands of the legionnaires, who drove the Russians back towards Łowczówek and Łowczów, on the Biała. The neighbouring units, however, did not move forward, and the brigade found itself far ahead of the front line. The Russians swept the hills with artillery and machine-gun fire, cutting the legionnaires off from the rear. Neither ammunition nor food got through. The legionnaires fired rifles captured from the Russians and buried their dead where they fell. According to Woźny, they were supported by machine-gun detachments of the 30th and 80th Infantry Regiments of the Austro-Hungarian 30th Infantry Division, to which the brigade was subordinated.

24 December. During the night the Russians came within 30–50 metres of the Polish trenches. Christmas Eve began with a murderous exchange of fire at close range. Successive Russian attacks were beaten off by counter-attacks, and in the centre of the position an assault was broken by a counter-attack of the battalion of Captain Kazimierz Bojarski “Kuba”, who was mortally wounded in this fighting. Towards evening an order to retreat arrived from divisional headquarters. The legionnaires left their trenches, which the Russians occupied at once, and then it turned out that the order had been a misunderstanding. They had to go back and retake the positions with the bayonet. In the evening the firing died down and the rain turned to snow and a light frost. The men had had no food for two days.

25 December. On Christmas Day, which for the Orthodox Russians was not yet a holiday, the attacks resumed with redoubled force. In the fog the fighting was mostly with the bayonet, at a range of a dozen or so metres. Meanwhile, on the brigade’s right wing, near Buchcice, the Russians broke through the defence of General Klemens Nottes’s weak group of Landsturm battalions and began to get into the legionnaires’ rear. Sosnkowski asked many times for the exhausted brigade to be relieved. Finally the commander of the 30th Infantry Division agreed to a withdrawal, and at about 1 p.m. the brigade was ordered to leave its positions. The Russians attacked the retreating battalions from three sides. Captains Leon Berbecki and Witold Ścibor-Rylski (PL), a veteran of the Boer War, distinguished themselves by leading their units out of encirclement. The brigade went through Lichwin to Wróblowice, and on 26 December it was sent into reserve in the area of Lipnica Murowana.

Christmas Eve in the trenches

The Christmas Eve fight quickly grew into a legend. According to the memoirs of the Legions doctor Felicjan Sławoj Składkowski, on Christmas Eve night the legionnaires began to sing the carol “God Is Born” in the trenches, and the carol was taken up by Poles serving in the Russian army on the other side. When the legionnaires called on them to surrender, they heard in Russian that Siberian riflemen do not surrender. The story of the shared carol was popularised in the interwar period by Zygmunt Nowakowski’s play “Gałązka rozmarynu” (A Sprig of Rosemary). Not all participants confirmed it. Gustaw Łowczowski (PL), then a seventeen-year-old legionnaire of the 5th Regiment, recalled that the nearness of the enemy made carol singing impossible, and that instead of the Christmas wafer he had half a loaf of bread and a tin of meat, divided with a bayonet among the comrades of his section.

The fratricidal character of the fighting, on the other hand, was real. Poles fought on both sides, and many conscripts from the Kingdom of Poland served in the Russian army. Among the dozen or so legionnaires taken prisoner was a second lieutenant of the 1st Regiment, Stanisław Kaszubski (PL) “Król”, born in Warsaw and therefore a Russian subject. The Russians regarded him as a traitor and hanged him on 7 February 1915 in Pilzno.

Losses

The figure most often given is that the First Brigade lost 128 killed and 342 wounded. According to some sources, 10 officers were among the killed and 38 among the wounded. Other studies apply the figure of 38 officers to the dead, and in his order of 1 January 1915 Sosnkowski wrote of a hundred dead. Among those killed were Captain Bojarski, Lieutenants Eugeniusz Użupis-Zagórski and Władysław Blejarski and Corporal Józef Lesiecki (PL), a well-known Tatra mountaineer. The legionnaires took about 600 prisoners, including 18 officers. Sosnkowski estimated Russian losses at no fewer than 4,000 killed and wounded, but this is an estimate by the Polish side that cannot be verified.

Significance

The brigade more than fulfilled its task. It retook the assigned hills, drove the Russians back to the Biała and in four days and three nights carried out five major attacks and beat off sixteen counter-attacks. Fourth Army headquarters, usually sparing with decorations for Poles, awarded for Łowczówek 6 large gold medals, 18 large silver ones, 48 small medals and 72 diplomas of commendation. The fight showed that Piłsudski’s volunteer units had become a fully fledged army. In the interwar period and after 1990 the inscription “Łowczówek 24 XII 1914” was placed on one of the tablets of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw.

Historians point out, however, that the significance of the fight for the course of the war is sometimes overrated. Polish tradition credits the legionnaires with stopping the Russians and saving the front, which held here until the Battle of Gorlice in May 1915. According to Tomasz Woźny, the fighting at Łowczówek was an important but not the only episode of the great Russian counter-attack. After the brigade left, the Austro-Hungarian divisions of XI Corps went on bleeding on the neighbouring hills for another week and held the front between the Biała and the Dunajec. Further east the counter-attack ended in a heavy defeat for Austria-Hungary. According to Russian figures, in five days, between 21 and 25 December, the Russians took about 25,000 Austro-Hungarian soldiers prisoner, and Boroević’s Third Army was pushed back into the Carpathians.

The cemetery on Kopaliny

The dead were gathered from individual graves into a common cemetery on the slope of Kopaliny hill, by the road from Łowczów to Rychwałd. The plot was donated by its owner, and the money for building it was collected by the Women’s League. War Cemetery No. 171, one of more than four hundred West Galician war cemeteries (PL), was designed by Siegfried Haller and Heinrich Scholz. It has a stone wall roofed with shingles and a chapel consecrated in 1922. In 20 mass graves and 275 individual ones lie 483 soldiers killed in December 1914 and in the first days of May 1915: 80 legionnaires of the 1st and 5th Regiments, 162 soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army and 241 Russian soldiers. The crosses on the legionnaires’ graves were painted silver. In 1985 the ashes of General Łowczowski were buried here; in accordance with his wishes, he was laid to rest among the comrades of his first battle. The Polish Legionnaires’ Cemetery in Łowczówek (PL) is today the site of annual commemorations.