Fighting for Lviv begins

On 1 November 1918 the inhabitants of Lviv woke up in a different state. During the night Ukrainian soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army, acting on the orders of the Ukrainian National Council, had occupied the most important buildings of the capital of Galicia without firing a shot, interned the Austrian governor and hung a blue-and-yellow flag from the town hall. A proclamation posted on the walls announced that a Ukrainian state had come into being on the Ukrainian lands of the monarchy, with its capital in Lviv. The Poles, who made up the majority of the city’s inhabitants and regarded it as Polish, had no intention of accepting this. Before noon the first shots were fired in the western part of Lviv. Thus began the three-week struggle for the city and the Polish–Ukrainian War, which lasted until the summer of 1919.

The race for Lviv

As Austria-Hungary fell apart in the autumn of 1918, Poles and Ukrainians reached for the same lands. The Ukrainians, who made up the majority of the rural population of Eastern Galicia, counted on the promise Vienna had made them in February in the secret protocol to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and on the separation of the Ukrainian part of Galicia into a province of its own. After Emperor Karl’s manifesto their deputies and activists formed in Lviv the Ukrainian National Council headed by Yevhen Petrushevych, which on 19 October proclaimed a Ukrainian state on the lands from the San to the Zbruch, including Bukovina and Carpathian Ruthenia. The Poles regarded Lviv, where according to the 1910 census Roman Catholics predominated, as one of the most important Polish cities. On 28 October the Polish Liquidation Commission was set up in Kraków, and on 31 October the Poles took power in Kraków. That day the Lviv newspapers announced that on 1 November a delegation of the Commission would arrive in Lviv to take power there too.

The Ukrainians had been preparing the coup for weeks. They were helped by the fact that after the mutiny of part of the Polish Auxiliary Corps at Rarańcza the Austrians had been sending units made up of Poles to other fronts, while battalions with a Ukrainian majority were posted to the Lviv garrison. The coup had originally been planned for 3 November. The news of the Liquidation Commission’s arrival hastened the decision. The governor of Galicia, General Karl Georg Huyn, refused in talks with Kost Levytsky to hand power over to the Ukrainians, pleading a lack of instructions from Vienna. When on the evening of 31 October the Council discussed this answer, some of its members wanted to wait. Captain Dmytro Vitovsky, who had taken charge of the Ukrainian military committee, persuaded them to act. According to Ukrainian accounts he said: “If we do not take Lwów tonight, the Poles will take it tomorrow.”

The Polish military organisations, namely the Polish Military Organisation, the National Democrats’ Polish Military Cadres and the circle of former legionnaires, numbered together about 700 men, poorly armed and without a common command. They knew about the Ukrainian preparations. The commandant of the Lviv POW, Lieutenant Ludwik de Laveaux, intended on 31 October to forestall the Ukrainians and seize the station, the town hall and the post office, but the action was never started and some of the men were sent home. Polish politicians did not believe in the danger. The delegate of the Regency Council, Professor Stanisław Głąbiński, citing Governor Huyn, gave assurances that the Ukrainians would not take power. Colonel Władysław Sikorski, who on the orders of the Regency Council was organising units of the Polish army in Lviv, left for Przemyśl on 30 October.

The night of the coup

At about four in the morning of 1 November the Ukrainian units went into action. They belonged to the replacement battalions of the 15th Infantry Regiment and the 19th Landwehr Infantry Regiment, a battalion of the 41st Infantry Regiment and the 30th Field Jäger Battalion. According to various sources Vitovsky had between about 1,300 and 1,500 men under his command. Ukrainian assault groups occupied the governor’s building and the town hall, arrested the military commander of Lviv and the city commandant, disarmed the police, and took over the stations, the post office, the telephone exchange and the telegraph office, the barracks and the arms depots. Soldiers of other nationalities, Austrian Germans and Hungarians, offered no resistance, as they were thinking only of going home. By dawn all the key points of the city were in Ukrainian hands, except the airfield at Lewandówka. According to Ukrainian accounts the coup did not cost the life of a single Ukrainian soldier.

During the day the interned Governor Huyn handed power to his deputy, the Ukrainian Volodymyr Detsykevych (PL), who recognised the authority of the Ukrainian National Council. The Austrian commandant called on his subordinates to submit to the Council. In the evening Huyn and the Austrian officials were sent west by train. According to Ukrainian memoirs the general said on parting that things would not go so easily from now on, because the Ukrainians’ opponents were a persistent people.

The Council’s proclamation to the inhabitants announced that “by the will of the Ukrainian nation” a Ukrainian state had come into being on the Ukrainian lands of the monarchy, and that the Council had assumed power in Lviv and throughout its territory. It promised order, security of life and property, and food supplies to those who submitted to its decrees. That same night Ukrainian soldiers and activists took power in Stanisławów, Tarnopol, Złoczów, Kołomyja and most other towns of Eastern Galicia. The new state did not yet have a final name. Its government was formed on 9 November, and on 13 November it adopted the name West Ukrainian People’s Republic.

The first day of resistance

1 November was All Saints’ Day. The people of Lviv who left their homes in the morning to go to the cemeteries were astonished to see yellow-and-blue flags on the buildings and, in the streets, Ukrainian patrols with blue-and-yellow ribbons on their caps, dispersing passers-by who gathered. Polish resistance arose spontaneously in two places in the western and southern parts of the city, far from the centre.

The first was the Henryk Sienkiewicz School, where the Polish cadre battalion of Captain Zdzisław Trześniowski (PL) was quartered. Accounts differ on the number of defenders, from a few dozen to about two hundred men, but all agree that they had only a few pistols and a handful of old rifles. A sortie against a nearby police station brought in about twenty rifles and ammunition, another against the Czernowitz station crates of cartridges and grenades. At about ten the defenders beat off the first Ukrainian attack on the school, capturing a lorry with a machine gun in the process. The second centre of resistance was the Technicians’ House, where Polish students happened to have gathered for a convention. They armed themselves with weapons hidden in the cellars of the Lwów Polytechnic and occupied the nearby tram depot.

The news quickly spread around the city. Volunteers flocked to the Polish posts, mostly grammar-school pupils, university students and scouts, often in their teens. According to Polish studies more than a thousand people came forward on the first day. Polish politicians formed the Polish National Committee (PL), which took over the duties of the supreme Polish authority in the city, and in the afternoon command of the scattered groups was assumed by Captain Czesław Mączyński, until then commandant of the Polish Military Cadres. In the evening a Polish detachment of more than a hundred people took part of the Nowy Świat district. The Committee called on Poles to enlist and to submit to the Polish command.

A war without a declaration

The British official chronology of the war recorded under 1 November the beginning of a “state of war” between Ukraine and Poland. It was not a formal declaration of war. The reborn Polish state then had at least two centres of authority, the Regency Council in Warsaw and the Liquidation Commission in Kraków, and neither of them declared war on the Ukrainians. The Polish–Ukrainian War simply began with fighting in the streets of Lviv. On the morning of 1 November a delegation of the Liquidation Commission, the lawyer Zygmunt Lasocki (PL) and Aleksander Skarbek (PL), left Kraków for Lviv, but never reached the embattled city. Nor did things go so easily for the Ukrainians everywhere. Fighting soon broke out for Przemyśl on the San, through which ran the railway line from Kraków to Lviv. It was to prove the only route by which help could reach the Poles of Lviv.

For the time being the advantage lay with the Ukrainians. They controlled the city centre and most districts, and units of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, the best Ukrainian formation, were due to arrive from the east. The Poles held only a few buildings on the western edge of the city. Even so, over the following days it was they who seized the initiative, and the street fighting for Lviv lasted three weeks.