End of the siege of Lviv

On 19 March 1919 Polish units broke through the Ukrainian positions near Gródek and recovered the railway line from Przemyśl to Lviv, the only route by which soldiers, ammunition and food could reach the city. That day the commander of the Polish forces in Eastern Galicia, General Wacław Iwaszkiewicz, announced the victory in an order of the day and singled out for praise the units that had come from Greater Poland. The Ukrainian ring round Lviv, closed at the beginning of March, had been broken. In Polish memory this fighting went down as the relief of Lviv, and for the first time in months the city was no longer cut off from the rest of the country.

Half a year surrounded

Lviv had been in Polish hands since 22 November 1918, but the troops of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic who had withdrawn from the city stopped just outside its gates and surrounded it on three sides. As Artur Brożyniak of the IPN writes, the Poles held only a narrow corridor along the railway to Przemyśl, and Ukrainian artillery could shell the city centre. At the end of December the Ukrainian Galician Army made its first attempt to take the city, and in January another. Both broke down against the Polish defence.

On 15 February the Ukrainians began an operation, named after the village of Wołczuchy (PL), that was meant to cut Lviv off from Przemyśl. According to the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, some 40,000 soldiers took part in it. The Ukrainians cut the line, and the Polish position was so difficult that the fighting was halted only by a short truce, imposed by an Allied mission in which the negotiations were conducted by the French general Joseph Barthélemy (PL). The demarcation line he proposed left Lviv and the oilfield at Borysław on the Polish side, and so the Ukrainian side in the end rejected it. At the beginning of March (accounts give dates from 2 to 8 March) the Ukrainian Galician Army struck again, destroyed railway bridges near Sądowa Wisznia (PL) and at Medyka, and closed the ring. Lviv was under siege once more.

The relief

Polish public opinion demanded immediate help for the city, and most of the forces the young Polish Army possessed were being sent to the Galician front. On 10 March the group of General Franciszek Aleksandrowicz (PL) arrived in Przemyśl; it attacked straight from the march and reached Sądowa Wisznia. The most important reinforcements, however, came from Poznań. After the Greater Poland Uprising the command there agreed to send part of its forces to Lviv. On 12 and 13 March the Greater Poland Group of Colonel Daniel Konarzewski (PL) set off: according to an IPN study, about 3,800 soldiers of the 1st Greater Poland Rifle Regiment, three batteries and seven aircraft.

At six in the morning on 17 March the men from Greater Poland went into the attack from Sądowa Wisznia. They took several villages, among them Wołczuchy, after which the Ukrainians had named their operation, and in two days of fighting broke through towards Lviv. On 19 March the railway was in Polish hands again. General Iwaszkiewicz wrote in his order that “the iron hosts of Greater Poland under the command of Col. Konarzewski, by their gallant attack […] contributed to the victory”. According to the IPN, the Greater Poland Group lost 17 killed, 178 wounded and 35 missing on 18 and 19 March, and captured two guns and five heavy machine guns. The dates in the sources differ slightly: Brożyniak writes that Lviv was relieved as early as 15 March, and the Polish Wikipedia has the men from Greater Poland arriving on 18 March, but Ukrainian and Polish studies agree in giving 19 March as the day the corridor was recovered.

On the same day Tadeusz Rozwadowski, who had commanded the defence of Eastern Galicia since November, was appointed head of the Polish military mission at the Allied supreme command in Paris, and Iwaszkiewicz took over command of the front.

A city on the front line

Breaking the ring did not yet push the war away from Lviv. The Ukrainians still stood a few kilometres from the city, and on 21 March the Polish High Command suspended major offensive operations until Józef Haller’s army arrived from France. Only in April did a Polish attack push the Ukrainians back from the southern suburbs, so that from then on the city could be shelled only from the north. The last Ukrainian units left the approaches to Lviv in May, during the Polish offensive, which is why some accounts, the Polish Wikipedia among them, end the siege of the city then.