Who won the Battle of Kaniów?
The Germans won. On 11 May 1918 German troops attacked the Polish II Corps of General Józef Haller near Kaniów on the Dnieper, and after a day of fighting the corps, short of ammunition, capitulated. Three months earlier, at Rarańcza, Haller's Second Brigade had broken through the Austrian front to join it.1
In May 1918 a few thousand Polish soldiers fought the German army near Kaniów on the Dnieper, far from any Polish land. Their road began on a winter night in Bukovina, when the Second Brigade of the Polish Legions turned its rifles against the Austro-Hungarian army it had served since 1914. It is one of the stories told in our guide to how Poland regained its independence.2
This page follows that road from Rarańcza to Kaniów. It gives the logic of every side: the Ukrainian People's Republic that won the Chełm region at Brest-Litovsk, the Austrian and German governments that needed Ukrainian grain, the Polish officers who felt betrayed, and the German command in Ukraine that would not tolerate an armed corps it did not control.
What happened at Rarańcza on 15 to 16 February 1918?
On 9 February 1918 the Central Powers signed a peace treaty at Brest-Litovsk with the Ukrainian People's Republic. It gave the new state the Chełm region and part of Podlachia, land that Poles regarded as their own.3
The treaty drew the Ukrainian frontier from Tarnogród through Biłgoraj, Szczebrzeszyn and Krasnystaw to the north, and left the details to a mixed commission that was to follow "the ethnographical conditions" and the wishes of the inhabitants. Kyiv claimed the region on just those grounds: its Ukrainian Orthodox population, and a resolution of the Central Rada of November 1917 that called it an integral part of Ukraine.4
For the Ukrainian side, the treaty was the first peace of the war and its first recognition abroad, and it bought German and Austrian help against Soviet Russia in return for food.5
For Vienna, in the grip of a food crisis and strikes, promised deliveries of Ukrainian grain mattered more than Polish feelings. In Germany and Austria the treaty soon had a name of its own: the "bread peace", the Brotfrieden.6
Poles in Galicia and the Kingdom took it as a betrayal, and a wave of protest followed. Jan Snopko notes that it also suited Berlin, which let Austria take the blame and buried the plan to tie a future Poland to the Habsburg monarchy.7
The Second Brigade, now part of the Polish Auxiliary Corps in the Austro-Hungarian army, was quartered west of Czernowitz in Bukovina, around Mamajowce. On 14 February Colonel Józef Haller called his officers together, and they decided to cross the front and join the Polish corps forming in Russia. The chaplain, Father Józef Panaś, argued that the soldiers' oath no longer bound them because the Central Powers had broken faith first. According to Buława, Haller sent his decorations from the Central Powers back, and a proclamation of the brigade command, "To the Polish Nation", said that a soldier's duty told them to go where a Polish armed force was being built, since that was no longer possible at home.8
On the evening of 15 February the brigade marched out under the cover of night exercises. The Austrian high command had told the army to watch the Poles closely, but the warning did not stop them. On the way the legionnaires arrested the commander of their own corps, General Zygmunt Zieliński, with his staff, and at a level crossing at Stara Żuczka they stopped the car of the Austrian General Schilling, who had overseen the corps for the high command, and arrested him too.9
Near Rarańcza, in Buława's account, the head of the column ran into two battalions of the Austro-Hungarian 53rd Infantry Regiment, recruited mostly from Croats, and scattered them in a short fight. Most of the men who got through belonged to the 2nd and 3rd Infantry Regiments.10
The rear of the column was less lucky. An armoured train cut off the baggage train and the artillery, and most of the men with them were taken. Haller himself wrote that the trains, the field bakery and the artillery had been cut off.11
By the morning of 16 February about 100 officers and 1,500 men stood in the abandoned Russian trenches. The brigade lost 16 killed and a dozen or more wounded. Snopko counts 11 Austro-Hungarian dead and 42 wounded, and the historian Adam Buława gives the same two figures the other way round.12
What happened to the legionnaires who did not get through?
Vienna answered hard. On 19 February 1918 Emperor Charles dissolved the Polish Auxiliary Corps, and the units left behind, in Bukovina and in the rear, were disarmed and interned in camps in Hungary, in the county of Máramaros. Snopko puts the number of interned former legionnaires at about 5,500, nearly 230 of them officers. The Austrian official history, published in 1938, says that only about three companies under Haller got through, and that the bulk of the corps was surrounded and disarmed after a short fight and taken to Huszt in Hungary as mutineers.13
Conditions in the camps were harsh at first, with cold barracks, hunger and disease, and the guards treated the Poles as traitors. Many of the men were later put back into the Austro-Hungarian army and sent to the Italian front.14
The officers held most responsible went on trial before an Austro-Hungarian military court at Máramarossziget (today Sighetu Marmației in Romania). The indictment named 115 legionnaires, and the trial opened on 8 June 1918. The prosecutor asked for the death penalty for 102 of them.15
Polish deputies in Vienna, the Regency Council in Warsaw and the Galician press pressed for the accused. At the end of September 1918, with the monarchy close to collapse, Emperor Charles granted an abolition, and the proceedings were dropped.16
How did the Second Brigade join the II Polish Corps?
The II Polish Corps had grown out of the movement of Polish soldiers in the Russian armies of the Romanian Front in the winter of 1917. General Stankiewicz, a Russified Pole whose first name the sources give differently, commanded it, and General Eugeniusz de Henning-Michaelis, a Pole in Russian service, was among the senior officers who backed the formation of Polish units there.17
The brigade joined the corps at Soroki on the Dniester on 6 March 1918.18
The two groups did not fit easily. The corps' own Chief Military Council clashed with Stankiewicz, and on 28 March it removed him and gave command to Haller.19
Haller reorganised the corps into two rifle divisions, the 4th and the 5th, with two uhlan regiments and strong artillery. Its ration strength was about 7,000 men, but far fewer were fit to fight. Buława gives 238 officers and 2,035 men in combat strength on 1 May 1918.20
In late March the corps left Bessarabia, where the Romanian peace made its stay impossible, and marched east into Ukraine, aiming to get beyond the reach of the Central Powers. It was making for the Dnieper crossing at Kaniów, today Kaniv in central Ukraine. In April General Aleksander Osiński, named commander of the Polish troops in Ukraine on behalf of the Regency Council, ordered it to halt there, in a ring of villages west of the river.21
The Ukrainian authorities had their own reasons. Kozłowski writes that they pressed to keep the corps away from the Dnieper bridges and made food supplies through Kyiv depend on the halt, and Lipiński adds that the quarters were assigned by the authorities in Kyiv.22
Why did the Germans want to disarm the II Corps?
After Brest-Litovsk, German and Austro-Hungarian armies occupied Ukraine to secure the grain the treaty promised. When the Central Rada failed to deliver, the German command backed a change of government, and at the end of April 1918 Pavlo Skoropadskyi was proclaimed hetman of a new Ukrainian State.23
In that country the Polish corps was a foreign army that answered to no one. The Central Powers had no intention of tolerating large armed forces outside their control in Ukraine, and after their peace treaties they began disarming Polish units there. The I Polish Corps in Belarus was disbanded under German pressure in May as well. Nor had the Germans forgotten Rarańcza: Adam Miodowski notes that in March a German negotiator, Major von Wulffen, had demanded that the former Second Brigade be separated from the corps and held responsible for treason.24
The Germans cut off the corps' supplies and disarmed small detached groups, while the local population, in Lipiński's account, was stirred up against it. Then they issued an ultimatum: it was presented to Osiński on 2 May and to the corps four days later, on 6 May. The corps rejected it.25
The readiness to fight that the corps showed that day made the Germans postpone the action until they had more troops, and Lipiński writes that they brought them in from Kyiv, Fastiv, Bila Tserkva and Cherkasy.26
How large were the armies at Kaniów?
The Polish Army Museum gives the corps about 7,000 men. Lipiński gives the same 7,000, but only about 3,000 bayonets and sabres in the line. The German force is put at 9,000 to 12,000 men by Lipiński and at about 12,000 by most others: 14 battalions of infantry and a regiment of hussars, with three batteries of 77 mm guns.27
In one arm the Poles were stronger. The artillery historian Włodzimierz Kozłowski counts 59 guns in the corps in March 1918, and Lipiński seven Polish batteries of 3-inch guns and two of 6-inch guns, against three German batteries of four 77 mm guns each. The German commander was General von Zierhold of the 28th Landwehr Brigade, whose name Polish accounts also spell Lierhold. His headquarters was at Myronivka, west of the Polish quarters.28
What happened at Kaniów on 11 May 1918?
Before dawn on 11 May, in a heavy downpour, German troops slipped past the Polish pickets through the marshes and struck the sleeping corps at about half past three or four in the morning. A squadron of the 6th Uhlans on outpost duty was taken almost whole. The attack on Potok, from several sides at once, surprised the 5th Rifle Division: the Germans took a battery and captured the division's staff, until a counterattack by the corps' officers' legion won it back.29
The 4th Rifle Division had time to take up its positions. Its 14th Rifle Regiment held the causeway at Kozin over the marshy valley of the Rossava, and the remnants of the 5th Division held the second causeway at Masłówka. The engineers held Stepańce, and the corps formed a defensive ring around Jemczycha and Masłówka.30
The German attacks on the causeways were beaten back, and the Germans went on more cautiously while they brought up more troops. But the corps was surrounded, and by the afternoon its ammunition and food were running out. At about four in the afternoon the firing stopped and talks began. The corps capitulated on honourable terms, and the next day, 12 May, the soldiers laid down their arms.31
How many soldiers died at Kaniów?
The figures differ. Kozłowski found a named list of 56 Polish dead, 18 of them officers, and at least 74 wounded, probably twice as many. Buława gives 46 killed and about 200 wounded, and the Polish Army Museum 200 to 250 killed and wounded together. About 1,500 Poles were taken prisoner in the fighting and about 3,000 more after the capitulation, but 1,500 to 2,000 of them escaped.32
German losses were heavier. Lipiński puts them at more than 1,000 killed and wounded, and an exhibition of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) at about 1,500.33
Who won the Battle of Kaniów, and was Haller right to give up?
The Germans won. They had disarmed the corps, which was what they wanted. Brudek calls it a German victory after a short fight, and for Adam Miodowski the defeat at Kaniów, together with the disbanding of the I Corps, meant the end of the Polish corps raised in Russia.34
Polish historians have long argued about Haller's command. Lipiński, a veteran of the Legions, asked in 1935 why Haller had not regrouped his troops after the ultimatum, why he put only 3,000 of his 7,000 men in the line, and why he did not try to cross the Dnieper while there was still time. Kozłowski notes that the corps was quartered for a further march, not for all-round defence.35
Buława answers that a battle order would have been an open provocation, that a breakout across the Dnieper was doubtful, and that the fight could only end the corps honourably, not win. He cites Kozłowski's verdict: the fighting was broken off at the right moment, because going on without ammunition could have ended in a massacre.36
Politically the battle counted for more than militarily. For Buława, Kaniów was the most important Polish battle of World War I: for the first time a Polish formation fought Germany on its own, and the men of the Second Brigade had now fought all three partitioning powers, the Russians on the Eastern Front, the Austrians at Rarańcza and the Germans at Kaniów.37
What happened after Kaniów?
The corps ceased to exist. Many of its soldiers escaped captivity. Some went south to the Kuban, where Polish units were forming again, and the largest group, Brudek writes, went to Siberia.38
Haller escaped. He made his way to Moscow and then to Murmansk, and sailed for France. On 4 October 1918 he took command of the Polish army in France, the Blue Army, which he brought home in 1919. His life is told in our biography of Józef Haller.39
The name lived on. Men of the II Corps who gathered in the Kuban became part of the 4th Polish Rifle Division, and on 26 August 1919, to keep that tradition, the four infantry regiments of the 10th Infantry Division were renamed the Kaniów Rifle Regiments.40
Rarańcza and Kaniów belong to a wider story: the Legions' road from Kostiuchnówka in 1916 to the Polish state of 11 November 1918. Rarańcza is one of the close calls in our ranking of the battles that won Polish independence, and the setting of both is told in our guide to the Eastern Front of World War I.
