Defence of Lviv

The Defence of Lviv was the first clash of the Polish–Ukrainian War and one of the most extraordinary episodes of the end of the Great War. As the Habsburg monarchy broke up into nation states, two nations laid claim to the capital of Galicia at once. On the night of 31 October to 1 November 1918 Ukrainian soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army seized Lviv and proclaimed it the capital of a new Ukrainian state. That same day the city’s Polish inhabitants, most of them volunteers with no military training, took up arms. For three weeks fighting raged in the streets, schools, barracks and cemeteries, and on the Polish side grammar-school pupils, university students and scouts took part. They went down in history as the Lwów Eaglets. On 20 November a relief force from Przemyśl fought its way into the city, and on the night of 21–22 November the Ukrainian troops withdrew from Lviv. The war for the city and for the whole of Eastern Galicia, however, was only beginning.

Name and dates

In Polish tradition these events are called the “Defence of Lwów” or the “November fighting”, although strictly speaking on the first day it was the Ukrainians who held the city and the Poles who took up the fight against them. In Ukrainian historiography the coup of 1 November is the November Uprising, and the fighting that followed is the Battle of Lviv. The Polish Wikipedia describes the whole as the Battle of Lwów 1918–1919, which also includes the six-month siege of the city. This page covers only its first stage, the street fighting of November 1918.

We adopt the dates 1–22 November 1918. The Ukrainian coup began at about four in the morning on 1 November, and the Poles started their resistance that same morning. The last Ukrainian order to retreat was carried out on the night of 21–22 November, and on the morning of 22 November Polish soldiers occupied the abandoned city centre. This is the date given by most Polish and Ukrainian studies. The British official chronology of the war records the Polish capture of Lviv under 23 November, and some studies place the Ukrainian withdrawal on the night of 22–23 November, but participants’ accounts and monographs of the fighting agree on the night of 21–22 November.

Background

From 1772 Lviv had been the capital of Austrian Galicia and, after the province gained autonomy in 1867, the centre of Polish administration, learning and culture. According to the 1910 census it had more than 200,000 inhabitants. About half were Roman Catholics, the great majority of them Poles, more than a quarter were Jews, and just under a fifth were Greek Catholics, that is, mostly Ukrainians. In the countryside around the city, however, Ukrainians predominated, and in the whole of Eastern Galicia they made up about three-fifths of the population. Lviv was also the main centre of the Ukrainian national movement, which for decades had demanded the division of Galicia and a province of its own. The Poles regarded the city as one of the most important cities of Poland; the Ukrainians saw it as their natural capital.

The war sharpened this dispute. During the war Lviv was in Russian hands for nine months, from 3 September 1914 to June 1915. In February 1918, in a secret protocol to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Austria-Hungary promised the Ukrainians that the Ukrainian part of Galicia and Bukovina would be separated into a crown land of its own. The Poles responded with a wave of protests, and part of the Polish Auxiliary Corps broke through the front at Rarańcza. After these events the Austrians stopped trusting units made up of Poles and sent them to other fronts, while units with a Ukrainian majority were posted to the Lviv garrison.

In the autumn of 1918 the monarchy was falling apart. Emperor Karl’s manifesto of 16 October, announcing the transformation of Austria into a federation, only hastened the process. On 18 October Ukrainian deputies and activists from Galicia, Bukovina and Carpathian Ruthenia met in Lviv. They formed the Ukrainian National Council headed by Yevhen Petrushevych, which the next day proclaimed a Ukrainian state on the Ukrainian lands of the monarchy, including Eastern Galicia as far as the San. On 20 October the Lviv city council, over the objections of its Ukrainian members, resolved that the city belonged to Poland. On 28 October the Polish Liquidation Commission was set up in Kraków, and on 31 October the Poles took power in Kraków. The Lviv newspapers announced that on 1 November a delegation of the Commission would arrive in Lviv to take power there too.

Both sides were preparing to seize the city by force. The Ukrainians had at their disposal in the garrison the soldiers of the replacement battalions of several regiments, between about 1,300 and 1,500 men in all according to various sources. The Polish underground organisations, namely the Lviv branch of the Polish Military Organisation, the Polish Military Cadres (PL) of Captain Czesław Mączyński, linked to the National Democrats, and the circle of former legionnaires, numbered together about 700 poorly armed men and had no common command. Polish politicians did not believe the Ukrainians would act. The Austrian governor of Galicia, General Karl Georg Huyn, assured them that it would not happen.

The Ukrainian coup

The Ukrainians had originally planned to take power on 3 November, but the announced arrival of the Liquidation Commission made them hurry. On the evening of 31 October Captain Dmytro Vitovsky of the Ukrainian military committee persuaded the members of the National Council to act at once. According to Ukrainian accounts he said: “If we do not take Lwów tonight, the Poles will take it tomorrow.”

At about four in the morning on 1 November Ukrainian soldiers occupied, without bloodshed, the governor’s offices, the town hall, the railway stations, the post office, the barracks and the military depots. Governor Huyn and the Austrian commandants were interned. Huyn handed over power to his deputy, the Ukrainian Volodymyr Detsykevych (PL), who submitted to the Ukrainian National Council. A blue-and-yellow flag was hoisted on the town hall, and a proclamation was posted on the walls announcing that a Ukrainian state with its capital in Lviv had come into being on the Ukrainian lands of the monarchy. That same night the Ukrainians took power in most of the towns of Eastern Galicia. On 9 November the new state formed a government, and on 13 November it took the name West Ukrainian People’s Republic.

Course of the fighting

On the morning of 1 November, All Saints’ Day, the people of Lviv were astonished to see Ukrainian patrols in the streets. The first centres of Polish resistance appeared in the western and southern parts of the city. In the Henryk Sienkiewicz School a handful of soldiers and volunteers under Captain Zdzisław Trześniowski (PL) seized weapons at a nearby police station and beat off the first Ukrainian attack. The second centre of resistance was the Technicians’ House, where students of the Lwów Polytechnic lived. That day Polish politicians formed a Polish National Committee, which entrusted the command to Mączyński. On the first day more than a thousand volunteers joined the Polish units.

The first days of fighting were chaotic. On 3 November companies (sotnias) of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, the best Ukrainian formation, broke into the city, but strong Polish resistance at Kleparów held up most of them. On the night of 1–2 November the Poles seized a large ammunition depot by the railway station, and on 4 and 5 November they retook the Main Station and captured the Cadet School, the barracks at Wulka and the police headquarters building. By 5 November a makeshift front line ran through the city from north to south. The Poles held roughly the western third of Lviv; the Ukrainians held the city centre, the hills with the Citadel and the High Castle, and the eastern and northern districts. The failure of the Ukrainian attack cost Vitovsky his command. After a few days he was replaced by Colonel Hryhoriy Kossak, and on 9 November by Colonel Hnat Stefaniv.

From then on the fighting became positional. Both sides put up barricades and dug trenches across the streets, and around schools, barracks, churches and the old Jewish cemetery there were fierce struggles for individual buildings. The Poles divided the front into sectors and organised artillery, cavalry, a medical service, workshops and a newspaper, Pobudka (“Reveille”). They also took over the airfield at Lewandówka. On 9 November an improvised armoured car known as the Piłsudski Tank took part in an attack through the Jesuit Garden, and the Poles captured the Main Post Office. From 13 November the Ukrainians, reinforced from the provinces, attacked again and again from the north, through Zamarstynów and Kleparów, and from the direction of the Cadet School, but they did not break the Polish defence.

The two sides repeatedly agreed short truces to collect the wounded, bury the dead and supply the population with food. Talks on a lasting settlement went on almost without a break, but they foundered on the demand that Ukrainian authority over the city be recognised. On 16 November the two metropolitans of Lviv, the Roman Catholic Józef Bilczewski and the Greek Catholic Andrey Sheptytsky, jointly called for an end to the fratricidal fighting. On 17 or 18 November, according to different sources, a truce was concluded and later extended to 21 November.

The relief

Help from outside came from the west. On 9 November a detachment under Major Julian Stachiewicz set off by train from Kraków, and on 11–12 November it drove the Ukrainians out of Przemyśl and secured the bridge over the San. General Bolesław Roja organised a relief group there, and Lieutenant-Colonel Michał Tokarzewski-Karaszewicz took command of it. According to Michał Klimecki it numbered 140 officers, 1,228 men and 8 guns. On 19 November it left Przemyśl in several trains, and the Ukrainian command did not destroy the track or the bridges on the line. On 20 November the relief force reached Lviv, and Tokarzewski took command of all Polish forces in the city. Including the relief force, the Poles then numbered about 6,600 men.

On the morning of 21 November, after the truce expired, the Poles attacked along the whole front. The plan was to make a feint attack in the city centre and to outflank the Ukrainians from the north and south so as to cut off their retreat. In the north the attack bogged down at Zamarstynów, and in the centre the units that were only supposed to feint suffered heavy losses below the Citadel. The southern wing, however, succeeded. Its units passed through Snopków and Pohulanka, took the Łyczakowski Cemetery and reached the Łyczaków station, on the Ukrainians’ main line of retreat to the east. In this fighting the 13-year-old scout Jerzy Bitschan was killed.

In the evening Colonel Stefaniv, fearing encirclement, ordered the city to be abandoned. On the night of 21–22 November the Ukrainian units withdrew eastwards, setting fire to the Galician Diet building and the depots. According to Klimecki about 120 officers and 3,185 Ukrainian front-line soldiers left the city. The Poles realised that the enemy had gone only towards morning. At about five Lieutenant Roman Abraham hung the Polish flag on the tower of the town hall, and during the day Polish units occupied the whole city.

The pogrom

On the day the city was taken and the two days that followed, 22–24 November, a pogrom took place in the Jewish districts of Lviv. The perpetrators were Polish soldiers, including men of the volunteer units, and civilians, among them criminals released from prison at the start of the fighting. They justified the violence as revenge for the Jews’ alleged support for the Ukrainians. A Jewish militia, formed on 1 November to keep order in the Jewish quarter, had declared its neutrality, but the Polish military press accused it of shooting at Poles. Shops and flats were looted, houses and synagogues set on fire and inhabitants killed. The number of victims remains disputed. A Jewish relief committee counted 73 dead and more than 400 wounded, the American Morgenthau commission in 1919 counted 64 dead, and a Polish government commission about 150. General Roja ordered a state of emergency and summary courts as early as 22 November, but the order was announced only on 24 November. The pogrom caused a wide outcry in the West and for years tarnished the image of reborn Poland.

Losses

According to Michał Klimecki’s tally, 6,022 people took part in the fighting on the Polish side up to 22 November, including 1,374 pupils and students. 439 Polish soldiers and members of the medical service were killed or died of wounds, among them 12 women, 120 schoolchildren and 76 students. Ukrainian studies give about 250 killed and 500 wounded on their side, but Ukrainian losses are known less precisely. According to a police tally, about 120 civilians died a violent death or died of wounds during the fighting, not counting the victims of the pogrom.

Significance

The November fighting decided that Lviv remained in Polish hands, but it did not end the war. Ukrainian forces surrounded the city on three sides and besieged it for half a year, shelling it with artillery and cutting it off from supplies. The only link with the rest of Poland was the railway line from Przemyśl, which was fought over constantly. The siege was broken only by a Polish offensive in May 1919, and that summer Polish forces occupied the whole of Eastern Galicia as far as the Zbruch.

For Poles the Defence of Lviv became one of the founding myths of the Second Polish Republic, the story of a city that defended itself on its own, with the strength of its children and young people. The fallen were buried in the Cemetery of the Defenders of Lviv, known as the Cemetery of the Eaglets, and in 1920 Lviv became the first Polish city to receive the Cross of the Virtuti Militari. For Ukrainians the November Uprising was the birth of a state which lost the war with Poland but left a lasting mark on Ukrainian memory. In both nations the fighting for Lviv poisoned mutual relations for a long time.