Legions capture Kamieniucha

On the night of 27 October 1915 the 3rd Battalion of the 6th Infantry Regiment (PL) of the Polish Legions crept up to the Russian trenches in front of the village of Kamieniucha (PL) in Volhynia and, together with German grenadiers, charged with the bayonet. The enemy lines were broken, and after fierce hand-to-hand fighting the village was in the hands of the legionaries, who took more than 400 prisoners. For the young regiment, formed that summer, it was one of the bloodiest battles of its whole combat record.

After the capture of Kukle

Kamieniucha lay a little to the north-east of the village of Kukle, which the group of Lieutenant Colonel Edward Rydz-Śmigły had taken on 22 October. The fighting took place around the breach that a few days earlier General Aleksei Brusilov’s Russian Eighth Army had torn in the Austro-Hungarian and German front on the Styr. Driven out of Kukle, the Russians did not fall back far. For several days they heavily shelled the legionaries’ positions at Kukle, while digging in at Kamieniucha. The Poles answered with night raids. In a bayonet fight for the Kopne manor farm the captured Russian trenches changed hands until the legionaries retook them the next day.

The 6th Regiment, the 1st Regiment (PL) of the First Brigade and the German 1st Grenadier Regiment were detailed for the assault on the village. The Legions were then part of General Alexander von Linsingen’s Austro-German army group and were to cover Kovel, the most important railway junction on this sector of the front, from the east. The 7th Regiment (PL) also took part in the fighting.

The assault

The first attack, on 25 October, was stopped by heavy fire from Russian guns and howitzers. Two days later the commanders relied on surprise. Under cover of night the 3rd Battalion of the 6th Regiment crept close to the enemy line and only then went in to the attack together with the German grenadiers. The Russians replied with a counter-attack on the southern flank, near the village of Rudka, but there they were stopped by the 6th Regiment’s reserve. The regiment’s losses reached about 10 per cent of its strength. After the fighting the regiment went into reserve.

The date of the assault itself is given differently. Accounts of the 6th Regiment’s combat record give 27 October. The historian Michał Klimecki writes of the battle at Kamieniucha on 28 October, and according to Felicjan Sławoj Składkowski, then the doctor of the 7th Regiment, fighting was still going on here on 29 October. Marek Dutkiewicz, who studied the Legions’ medical service, describes the fighting in this area as a series of bloody clashes from 21 to 30 October.

The death of Żuliński

In the fighting at Kamieniucha Lieutenant Tadeusz Żuliński, a company commander in the 7th Regiment, was badly wounded in the stomach by shrapnel balls. He had been the first commandant-in-chief of the Polish Military Organisation, and in August 1915 he had brought a battalion of volunteers from Warsaw to the First Brigade. Taken to the First Brigade’s medical unit at Sewerynówka, he died there on 5 November of peritonitis. Józef Piłsudski honoured his memory in a special order.

The autumn battles in Volhynia drew the attention of the allies to the legionaries. German and Austro-Hungarian commands more and more often wrote of “Polish troops” in their orders and praised the legionaries’ courage. In the 6th Regiment the memory of those days lived on in its Commemorative Cross, instituted in 1916: its arms bore the names Kukle, Kopne, Kamieniucha, Kostiuchnówka and Góra Polaków.