The war on Polish soil

From 1 August 1914 the war on the Eastern Front was fought on Polish soil. In 1914–1915 great battles swept across Galicia and the Kingdom of Poland several times, and Poles fought in them on both sides, in the armies of the three partitioning powers. After the breakthrough at Gorlice in May 1915 the Russians lost Galicia and the whole Kingdom, and as they withdrew they carried off factories, laid waste to the country and deported the population. Until the end of the war the Kingdom lived under German and Austro-Hungarian occupation, with requisitions and hunger, and in 1916–1917 the front returned to Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. According to the historian Andrzej Chwalba, fighting touched almost 90 per cent of the territory of reborn Poland.

The partition border becomes a front

In 1914 the Polish lands belonged to three powers. On 1 August, when Germany declared war on Russia, the German-Russian border became a front line. Russian war plans made no provision for defending the western part of the Kingdom of Poland, which jutted far out between Prussia and Austria-Hungary, so the Tsar’s troops pulled out of the border towns. On 2 August a battalion of a Prussian infantry regiment marched into Kalisz, abandoned by the Russians, and on 3 August the first German soldiers appeared in Częstochowa. On 6 August Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia, and for the first time since the partitions two partitioning powers went to war against each other.

For Kalisz the arrival of the Germans proved tragic. From 4 August the town was subjected to artillery fire, executions and arson, and by 22 August almost the entire historic centre had been destroyed and many of the inhabitants had fled. The destruction of Kalisz opened the list of violence against civilians in this war. The inhabitants of the three partitions served in the armies of Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary, and so on opposite sides of the front. Andrzej Chwalba recalls that at Christmas 1914 Poles in Russian and Austro-Hungarian uniforms celebrated Christmas Eve together, sharing the Christmas wafer, and that the commands of all three armies firmly banned such joint celebrations.

Galicia, 1914

The greatest battle of the first weeks was fought in the south. In the Battle of Galicia, from 23 August to 11 September 1914, the main forces of Austria-Hungary and Russia, almost two million soldiers, clashed on a front running from the Vistula to the Dniester. The Austrians began with victories at Kraśnik and Komarów, but the Russians smashed their right wing on the Zlota Lipa and the Gnila Lipa. After the defeat at Gródek and Rawa Ruska the Habsburg armies fell back behind the San, and at the end of September further still, behind the Dunajec. According to various authors Austria-Hungary lost between about 320,000 and 400,000 soldiers, and the Russians about 225,000–250,000. Almost the whole battle was fought on Polish soil, and Poles fought in it on both sides: in the Galician regiments and as conscripts from the Kingdom in the Russian army.

On 3 September the Russians entered Lviv without a fight, the capital of Galicia. The occupied lands of Galicia and Bukovina were placed under a governorate-general, whose head, Count Georgy Bobrinsky, declared Eastern Galicia to be “an original part of the one great Rus”. The Russians closed Ukrainian newspapers, societies, reading rooms and bookshops, persecuted the Greek Catholic Church and arrested its metropolitan, Andrey Sheptytsky. On 27 September Russian soldiers carried out a pogrom of the Jewish population in Lviv. The Polish city council under deputy mayor Tadeusz Rutowski ran municipal kitchens and aid for refugees and defended the city’s self-government. The Russian occupation lasted 293 days.

In the Russians’ path stood the fortress of Przemyśl, holding more than 120,000 soldiers and between about 18,000 and 30,000 civilians. During the first siege the Russian 3rd Army of General Radko Dimitriev stormed the forts on 5–8 October and suffered heavy losses, and on 9 October relief reached the fortress. In November the Russians surrounded Przemyśl again, and in the second siege they set out to starve the garrison into surrender. The soldiers slaughtered their horses, the town ran short of salt, soap and candles, cholera broke out, and the attempts at relief in the Carpathians cost the Austro-Hungarian army hundreds of thousands of men. On 22 March 1915 the commandant blew up the forts and surrendered the fortress, and about 117,000–120,000 soldiers went into Russian captivity.

Battles in the Kingdom and before Kraków

At the end of September 1914 the German 9th Army and the Austro-Hungarian 1st Army advanced from Silesia and western Galicia to draw the Russians away from the beaten Habsburg army. In the Battle of Warsaw and Dęblin the Germans got within a dozen or so kilometres of Warsaw, but the Russians massed far larger forces, crossed the Vistula and forced the enemy to retreat. For the people of the Kingdom this meant the front passing through their homes twice in a month. The troops of both sides requisitioned food, horses and carts, and the villages on the battle lines were reduced to rubble. Warsaw experienced air raids for the first time: in the most tragic of them, on 19 October, 18 people were killed. The retreating Germans destroyed railways and bridges.

In November the 9th Army, now under August von Mackensen, struck from the Toruń area into the flank of the Russian armies preparing to march on Silesia. The Battle of Łódź, from 11 November to 6 December, was one of the greatest battles of manoeuvre of the war: the Germans almost trapped the Russians in a pocket, and then broke out of an encirclement themselves at Brzeziny. From 18 November shells fell on Łódź. 135 civilians were killed, 155 according to other sources, about 300 buildings were destroyed or damaged, and every large building was taken over by the wounded. On 6 December the Germans entered Łódź, the second-largest city of the Kingdom, and ruled it until November 1918.

In the south the Russians approached Kraków. At the beginning of November the authorities ordered a compulsory evacuation and roughly a third of the inhabitants left the city, while villages in front of the fortress were burned. In the Battle of Kraków, from 16 November, neither side gained a decisive success. In December the Austrians struck from the Raba valley into the flank and rear of the Russian 3rd Army, and after ten days of fighting in snow and frost at Limanowa forced the Russians to retreat behind the Dunajec. The front came to rest on the line of the Dunajec and the Biała, and stayed there until May 1915. The people of the Limanowa and Nowy Sącz districts lived through the marches of both armies, requisitions, shelling and fires.

In the north the Russians fell back to the Bzura and the Rawka, a few dozen kilometres from Warsaw. For seven months, from December 1914 to July 1915, the front on the Rawka and the Bzura moved no more than a few kilometres. Here the Germans first used chemical weapons on a large scale. On 31 January 1915 at Bolimów they fired about 18,000 tear-gas shells, whose contents barely evaporated in the frosty air, and on 31 May they released more than 240 tonnes of chlorine from cylinders. After the May attack, according to Russian historians, about 9,000 Russian soldiers were poisoned. The inhabitants of villages on the trench line were evicted, and in Sochaczew, which lay on the front line the whole time, artillery completely destroyed 64 per cent of the buildings.

The turning point of 1915

On 2 May 1915, after several hours of fire from more than a thousand guns and mortars, Mackensen’s new German 11th Army, supported by Austro-Hungarian armies, attacked at Gorlice. Within four days the Russian defence collapsed in its full depth. It was one of the few breakthroughs of a trench front in this war after which the defender failed to build a new line. On the Austro-Hungarian side the attack included the 12th Infantry Division from Kraków, mostly Poles, while many conscripts from the Kingdom served in the Russian ranks. After the battle Gorlice lay largely in ruins, and the villages in the foothills were destroyed by shellfire and fires.

On 3 June German and Austro-Hungarian troops recaptured Przemyśl, where Russian rule had lasted 73 days. After the Russian lines on the Wereszyca were broken, on 22 June troops of the Austro-Hungarian 2nd Army entered Lviv under General Eduard von Böhm-Ermolli. As they left, the Russians took hostages with them, Rutowski among them, and the Galician Russophiles went with them. In the surrounding villages the retreating troops burned buildings. The return of Austrian rule, however, brought arrests of people suspected of sympathising with Russia, often on the strength of denunciations, and wartime requisitions.

Now it was the Kingdom’s turn. On 13 July the great offensive of the Central Powers began: the armies of General Max von Gallwitz struck from the East Prussian border towards the Narew, and Mackensen’s troops from the south towards Lublin and Chełm. On 30 July the Russians lost Lublin. The Russian armies in central Poland found themselves in a deep sack, and General Mikhail Alekseyev decided to withdraw them behind the Vistula. Early on 5 August the Russians blew up the bridges over the Vistula, and a few hours later German troops of Prince Leopold of Bavaria entered Warsaw. The day before, the Austro-Hungarians had occupied the fortress of Ivangorod. Russian rule, in place since 1815, was over.

In the following weeks more fortresses fell. On 20 August Novogeorgievsk, today’s Modlin and the largest fortress of the Russian Empire, surrendered, and its whole garrison went into captivity. On 22 August the Russians abandoned Osowiec, which the Germans had failed to take for half a year, and on 26 August the Central Powers entered Brest-Litovsk and Białystok. By the autumn the Russians had left the whole Kingdom of Poland.

Bezhenstvo and destruction

The Great Retreat of 1915 was also a catastrophe for the civilian population. The Russian army adopted scorched-earth tactics: it drove the population out of the areas it abandoned and seized or destroyed their property. Even before that it had expelled Jews, whom it accused of treason, from one place after another in the front zone, and according to some historians it deported about half a million Jews into the Russian interior during the Great Retreat. An Austro-Hungarian communiqué of 30 July accused the retreating Russians of destroying settlements and even burning the grain in the fields. A wave of refugees moved east, known as bezhenstvo, from the Russian word for flight. Those who fled were above all peasants from Podlachia and the Lublin region, mostly Orthodox, frightened by propaganda about German atrocities. According to Andrzej Chwalba, 3.5 million people from the Kingdom and the Russian partition had to leave for the Russian interior, about a third of them Poles, while according to Aneta Prymaka-Oniszk up to 2 million left the Polish lands.

Along with the people the Russians removed offices, archives and factories. They took the university from Warsaw, and dismantled factory machinery and sent it into Russia together with raw materials and some of the workers. Before leaving they set fire to Warsaw’s Petersburg and Terespol stations. In Białystok, one of the largest textile centres in the Russian Empire, they destroyed the water towers, part of the power station and the railway installations, and for many years the city ceased to be an industrial centre. Infectious diseases spread among the refugees on the road, and many of them did not survive exile. Those who returned home after the war found their villages burned.

The people of Galicia fled too. As early as the Battle of Galicia hundreds of thousands of refugees, Poles, Ukrainians and Jews, set off westwards, and the Austrian authorities forcibly evacuated Lviv, Przemyśl and Kraków. Further waves followed the Russian offensives of 1916 and 1917. According to Kamil Ruszała just under a million people fled in four waves, according to Chwalba about 900,000. They ended up in barrack camps in the interior of the monarchy, such as the camp at Gmünd, which housed more than 28,000 refugees against 4,500 local inhabitants. The retreating Austro-Hungarian troops arrested, and sometimes shot, Ruthenians suspected of pro-Russian sympathies.

Under occupation

On 24 August 1915 the Germans created the Government General of Warsaw, headed by General Hans Hartwig von Beseler. It covered about 62,000 square kilometres with 6 million inhabitants. In the south-eastern part of the Kingdom Austria-Hungary set up its own military government general, based in Lublin from 1 October 1915, covering 48,000 square kilometres and about 3.5 million inhabitants. Białystok and the area around Augustów came under the German military administration run by the Eastern Front command of Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff.

The occupiers treated the country above all as a source of food, raw materials and labour for a Germany cut off by the blockade. Requisitions began in the first days of the occupation. In Łódź, as early as the winter of 1914, the occupiers were carrying off raw materials, cloth, machinery, brass and copper parts, motors and drive belts from the factories. In the Warsaw government general trade in wheat, rye and barley was banned, and by November 1918 the Germans had requisitioned more than 400,000 head of cattle. In the second half of 1916 a single requisition unit in Kalisz sent almost 25 million eggs to Germany. Poles also had to go to work in Germany, voluntarily or under compulsion.

The result was hunger. Bread was rationed: from December 1915 the daily ration in the towns was 145 grams, with an ever larger admixture of barley flour and potato starch. By the end of 1916 the weekly meat ration in Warsaw had fallen to 50 grams, and in 1918 the daily bread ration fell to 80 grams. The Łódź textile industry, cut off from the Russian market and stripped of raw materials, came to a standstill, and by May 1915 about 250,000 people in the city were without work or means of subsistence. During the war the population of Łódź fell by more than a quarter of a million, almost by half. Polish committees brought relief: in 1916 about 100,000 people ate lunch every day in the cheap canteens of the government general.

No help came from outside. A plan for American food deliveries to the Kingdom, drawn up by Herbert Hoover on the model of the relief for Belgium, collapsed in July 1916 because Berlin and London blamed each other. Yet the occupiers also courted the Poles. The Germans allowed what the Tsarist authorities had refused for decades, and on 15 November 1915 the Polish-language University of Warsaw and Warsaw Polytechnic were opened. In July 1916 Warsaw held its first city council elections in decades, though the councillors were chosen in six curiae and the last word still lay with the occupiers. After the Act of 5 November 1916 the Poles took over the courts and the schools, and in 1917 also the supply of the population, but the Kingdom’s government had no army and no foreign policy, and power stayed with the occupiers.

1916–1918

After the Great Retreat the front moved east, but the war went on in the eastern lands of the old Commonwealth. Poles fought there on both sides: the Legions on the Austro-Hungarian side and the Polish Rifle Brigade in the Russian army. On 4 June 1916 the Brusilov offensive began: the armies of General Aleksei Brusilov broke through the front at Lutsk and on the Dniester and took Lutsk, then Czernowitz and almost all of Bukovina. In Volhynia, on the Styr, brigades of the Polish Legions held up the attack of the Russian XLVI Corps for three days. The Battle of Kostiuchnówka cost the legionaries about 2,000 killed and wounded, and the Central Powers’ troops had to fall back behind the Stokhid. In August the Russians took Stanislau again.

The front crossed Eastern Galicia for the last time in the summer of 1917. On 1 July the Kerensky Offensive began, with Lviv as its objective. At Zborów a Czechoslovak brigade in the Russian army broke through the Austro-Hungarian front, while a Polish rifle division, formed from Poles serving in the Russian army, stood in the reserve of the 7th Army. The attack soon petered out, as Russian units increasingly refused to go forward. On 19 July the Germans and Austrians went over to the counter-offensive, on 25 July they entered Tarnopol, and at the end of July the front came to rest on the Zbruch, the border river between Galicia and Russia.

At the end of 1917 Russia concluded an armistice with the Central Powers and in practice left the war, but the occupation of the Kingdom continued. In the autumn of 1918, as the Central Powers were losing the war, the Poles took power themselves. On 31 October Polish soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army disarmed the Kraków garrison without firing a shot, and in Warsaw, where about 30,000 German soldiers were stationed, they were disarmed on 11 November. In Cieszyn Silesia the Polish and Czech national councils divided the country provisionally on 5 November, and the larger part, with Cieszyn and Bielsko, came under Polish administration. On 11 November in Kielce a crowd attacked those attending a Jewish meeting, and in the riots, which went on into the next day, four people were killed. But the war did not end for everyone: from 1 November Poles fought for Lviv against the Ukrainians. After the Poles took the city, from 22 to 24 November soldiers and civilians looted and burned the Jewish quarter; according to the findings of commissions of 1918–1919, between about 50 and at least 150 Jews were killed.

Toll and memory

The losses are known only from estimates, as none of the armies counted soldiers by nationality. Between 385,000 and 530,000 Poles were killed, died or went missing in the armies of all sides: Tomasz Nałęcz gives 385,000, the Museum of Polish History about 450,000, and Mieczysław Wrzosek about 530,000. The wounded numbered between about 900,000 and a million. In 1915 between 2 and 3.5 million inhabitants of the Kingdom and the western provinces fled or were deported into Russia, about a million Poles among them, and between 900,000 and a million people left Galicia. Civilian deaths cannot be reliably counted.

According to Chwalba the worst destruction in Europe, alongside the Balkans, was suffered by the lands of the old Commonwealth, because there was no trench war here as in the West: armies moved several times east and west, destroying everything. In 1919, at the invitation of Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Hoover visited Poland and saw thousands of children without food or clothing and thousands of families without a roof over their heads. Hundreds of war cemeteries are the traces of the fighting. In Western Galicia the Austro-Hungarian war graves department built more than 400 of them, and in the Łódź region there are almost 180.

For decades this war was almost forgotten in Poland. The most important event of those years became the regaining of independence, and the memory of the bezhenstvo survived mainly in the families of Orthodox peasants, who left no memoirs or diaries. For many inhabitants of Mazovia the front on the Rawka was “the partitioners’ war”, a foreign war. Chwalba points out that world history is written mainly by Western historians, so the suffering and destruction of the Polish lands, like those of Serbia, rarely feature in it. This has begun to change only in recent years, thanks to the work of Polish and foreign historians, archaeologists studying surviving trenches, and the anniversaries of the bezhenstvo.