When was the Battle of Iłża?

It was fought on 17 January 1864, during the January Uprising, near and in the town of Iłża between Radom and Kielce.

Who won the Battle of Iłża?

The Polish insurgents of Lieutenant Colonel Karol Kalita, known as Rębajło, who ambushed and routed a Russian column before withdrawing from the town at night.

Karol Kalita, a lieutenant colonel of the January Uprising who commanded the 3rd Stopnica Infantry Regiment; Grzegorz Cwyl counts him among the best insurgent commanders.

What were the losses at Iłża?

Grzegorz Cwyl puts Russian losses at 150 to 170 killed and wounded. WielkaHistoria gives the insurgents 9 killed, 17 wounded and 8 missing.

Battle of Iłża, 1864: Rębajło's ambush in the January Uprising

Q: Where is the Battle of Iłża commemorated?

Its name is on one of the tablets of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw, added after 1990.

Quick answer

What happened at the Battle of Iłża?

On 17 January 1864, a year into the January Uprising against Russian rule, about 600 insurgents of the 3rd Stopnica Infantry Regiment under Lieutenant Colonel Karol Kalita, known as Rębajło, ambushed a Russian column of about 450 men in bitter frost near Iłża. The Russians broke and were chased back to the town, where the fighting went on house by house until late at night. Russian losses were many times heavier than Polish ones, and their commander, Colonel Sukhonin, died of his wounds. Bellona's summary of Grzegorz Cwyl's study calls it one of the largest Polish victories of the uprising.¹

By the beginning of 1864 the January Uprising was dying. The Russians, as the history portal WielkaHistoria puts it, were defeating the dwindling insurgent units again and again and believed they had the situation under control. In the hills between Radom and Kielce, one of the last regular insurgent formations was still in the field: the 3rd Stopnica Infantry Regiment of Lieutenant Colonel Karol Kalita, who fought under the name Rębajło.²

Grzegorz Cwyl, the author of a study of the battle published by Bellona, calls Kalita one of the best commanders of the uprising, and the Museum of Polish History's portal for the uprising's 160th anniversary draws on his own memoir of the day. The Russian force was led by Colonel Mikhail Sukhonin, the military chief of Opatów county.³

An ambush in the frost

The day began quietly. Kalita recalled that his men stood in ranks at reveille to say their prayers and then went off to breakfast. Then a local man brought word that a Russian column had left Iłża, about ten kilometers away. Kalita decided to fight.⁴

He hid his men in the cottages. The frost, he wrote, was so hard that it was difficult to hold a rifle, but the strictest order was given not to move, so as not to betray the ambush; the first shots were to come from the cottages on a signal from the regimental trumpeter. The Russians sensed a trap but were caught all the same. As they attacked the cottages, they were struck in the rear. Kalita brought up his reserve and ordered volley fire, and the Russians, in his words, fell like flies, turned and ran for the woods, where Captain Bezdzieda's skirmishers met them.⁵

The memoir does not spare the ugly side of the fighting: Kalita writes that Russians found hiding in the bushes were hanged from the trees by the scythemen, under the watchword of no quarter for the enemy.⁶

Into the town

The pursuit went on for two hours, until the insurgents reached Iłża. They entered the town around four in the afternoon, as darkness fell, and the fighting from house to house was very hard. At about ten at night they reached the market square, but the Russians still held houses on the north side, and in the dark no one could tell which buildings were held by which side.⁷

Kalita feared that Russian help might soon arrive from Radom and did not want to stay in the town until dawn without knowing where the enemy was. He had the bugles sound the retreat. The fighting had lasted from early morning until late evening, first outside Iłża and then in the town itself.⁸

A rare victory

For once in the uprising, the Poles had the larger force: about 600 men against about 450, according to WielkaHistoria. Citing Cwyl, it puts Russian losses at 150 to 170 killed and wounded, among them at least two officers who died of their wounds days later, and Polish losses at 9 killed, 17 wounded and 8 missing. Kalita himself counted 9 dead and could not estimate the Russian losses. Sukhonin was wounded twice in the leg and, Bellona's summary of Cwyl's book notes, later died of his wounds.⁹

The victory surprised the Russian command, which had thought the revolt all but crushed. In Cwyl's assessment it opened a short period of offensive activity by the insurgent II Corps of General Józef Hauke-Bosak and showed that insurgents could be trained to the standard of regular soldiers. WielkaHistoria adds that it forced the Russians to act more energetically in the region and raised insurgent activity in the Sandomierz and Kraków provinces.¹⁰

Too late to change the outcome

Cwyl argues that the fear of a long struggle helped push the tsar toward the land reform decrees signed on 2 March 1864, which gave the peasants of the Kingdom of Poland the land they worked on better terms than elsewhere in the empire. Many peasants then turned away from the insurgents, who could offer them nothing more, and the uprising had no chance of victory.¹¹

Iłża is remembered all the same. After 1990 its name was added to one of the tablets of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw, the Museum of Polish History notes, among the battles in which Polish soldiers fell for their country.¹²