Legions capture Kukle

On 22 October 1915, at about 5 p.m., legionaries from the group of Lieutenant Colonel Edward Rydz-Śmigły took the village of Kukle (PL) in the forests of Volhynia, west of the river Styr, after fierce fighting. A few days earlier the Russians had broken through the Austro-Hungarian and German front in the area. Taking the village helped to close the gap and was one of the first successes of the Polish Legions in the autumn campaign in Volhynia.

The Legions on the Stokhid and the Styr

At the end of August 1915 the First Brigade and the 4th Infantry Regiment were sent from Podlachia to Volhynia. On 6 September the legionaries entered Kovel, and within a week they had cleared the country of Russian cavalry as far as the river Stokhid. At the end of September the 6th Regiment of the Third Brigade joined them, and in the second half of October the Second Brigade arrived from Bessarabia. For the first time since the start of the war all three brigades fought on one sector of the front and under one command. In Volhynia they came under the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army, and from the autumn under the army group of General Alexander von Linsingen.

The common command soon turned into a quarrel. On the night of 14–15 September Józef Piłsudski ignored an order from the commandant of the Legions, General Karol Trzaska-Durski (PL), splitting his brigade into two groups. Trzaska-Durski demanded that the Fourth Army command remove the brigadier. The Austrians chose another solution. On 17 September Piłsudski handed command of part of the brigade to Rydz-Śmigły, while he himself, with the 4th and 5th Regiments and the uhlans, took over a sector on the Styr near Kołki (PL). Rydz’s group, that is the 1st and 7th Regiments, and the 6th Regiment (PL) were from then on directly subordinate to the Legions Command.

At the beginning of October this group suffered a defeat. At the end of September the legionaries had entered Kostiuchnówka and briefly taken the nearby village of Kołodia, but the Russians, defending the crossing over the Styr, counter-attacked. After several hours of fighting on 1 October the 1st, 6th and 7th Regiments had to fall back westwards, and some companies fought their way through enemy infantry and cavalry in squares.

The breakthrough at Czartorysk

In the second half of October General Aleksei Brusilov struck with the right wing of the Russian Eighth Army to regain the line of the Styr along its whole length. According to Russian accounts, based on the commander’s memoirs, General Anton Denikin’s 4th Rifle Division crossed the river, took Czartorysk and by 20 October had driven a wedge into the front 18 kilometres wide and more than 20 kilometres deep. The neighbouring corps did not follow, however, and the Germans and Austrians brought up reserves from every side. For two days Denikin’s division fought facing all four directions, and on the morning of 22 October it was withdrawn.

The Legions were among the reserves thrown at the breach. On 20 October the 6th Regiment, which had been resting in the rear after the earlier fighting, took the field again and, together with the Austro-Hungarian 10th Cavalry Division, attacked the Russians from the south.

Jabłonka and Kukle

Before dawn on 21 October the 3rd Battalion of the 6th Regiment attacked the village of Jabłonka. The attack went in too early, without agreement with the neighbouring units, and broke down. Only a blow by the 1st Battalion of the 1st Regiment from the north caught the defenders in a pincer. The legionaries took about 200 prisoners and several machine guns, and the Russians began to fall back. Rydz’s group set off in pursuit, with the task of taking Kukle on the march. Late in the afternoon of the next day, after fierce fighting, the village was in Polish hands.

For the next few days the Russians shelled the positions at Kukle, and the legionaries answered with raids. In a night bayonet fight for the nearby Kopne manor farm, the fourteen-year-old corporal of the 6th Regiment Wincenty Żarski (PL) was wounded twice; he died of his wounds a few days later. The historian Marek Dutkiewicz judges that the fighting around the breach at Kukle lasted from 21 to 30 October and was very bloody. The enemy did not go far: he dug in at the village of Kamieniucha, a little further to the north-east.