Who won the Battle of Kostiuchnówka?
The Russians took the ground. From 4 to 6 July 1916 their attack drove the Polish Legions, fighting in the Austro-Hungarian army, out of three lines of trenches at Kostiuchnówka in Volhynia and back toward the Stokhid River. But the Legions held long enough to stop an encirclement, at a cost of about 2,000 killed, wounded and missing.1
In the summer of 1916 all three brigades of the Polish Legions stood in one line in the forests and marshes of Volhynia, on the road to the railway junction of Kovel. When General Aleksei Brusilov's armies struck there, the Legions fought the costliest battle of their history. It is part of the story told in our guide to how Poland regained its independence.2
This page tells Kostiuchnówka from every side: the Russian commanders who wanted Kovel, the Hungarian troops who held the key hill, the German generals who watched the Poles and drew political conclusions, and the legionnaires themselves, whose sacrifice helped bring about the Act of 5 November 1916.
Where is Kostiuchnówka, and why did the Legions fight there?
Kostiuchnówka is a village on the border of Volhynia and Polesia, today Kostiukhnivka in the Volyn region of Ukraine. The Polish Legions that defended it were Polish volunteer units serving in the Austro-Hungarian army against Russia.3
The Legions first fought here in the autumn of 1915. The hill south of the village, then called Brickworks Hill, was stormed after a failed first attack and taken on 10 November 1915, and the legionnaires renamed it Polish Hill (Polska Góra, in German Polenberg).4
For the first time all three brigades now stood on one stretch of front. In 1916 the Legions Command was headed by General Stanisław Puchalski, a general of the Austro-Hungarian army, while Józef Piłsudski led the First Brigade. Relations were tense: a Colonels' Council of senior Legion officers pressed for Polish command and a Polish political future.5
Over the winter the legionnaires dug in deep in the forest. The Legions Command sat in a wooden settlement called Legionowo, the rear services and reserves in the Polish Grove (Polski Lasek), and the most exposed post was Piłsudski's Redoubt, pushed out right in front of the Russian trenches.6
The flank was not Polish. Polish Hill, the height on the right of the Legions that was the key to the whole position, was held by Hungarian Honvéd troops of the neighboring Austro-Hungarian 53rd Infantry Division.7
How did the Brusilov Offensive reach Kostiuchnówka?
On 4 June 1916 Brusilov's Southwestern Front opened the Brusilov Offensive, and within days it broke the Austro-Hungarian line at Lutsk. The Russian military historian Andrei Zayonchkovsky describes how the success pulled Brusilov in two directions at once, toward Lviv and toward Kovel.8
Kovel mattered to the Russians for reasons of their own. Brusilov wanted to help the Western Front, which was to make the main Russian effort of 1916, and he planned to catch the enemy in pincers: one force moving along the railway from Manevychi to Kovel, another striking from Lutsk. If Kovel fell, he wrote, the enemy around Pinsk would have to give up its positions without a fight.9
For that task Brusilov received the Third Army of General Lesh, transferred from the Western Front, and ordered it and Aleksei Kaledin's Eighth Army to take the area around Horodok and Manevychi. One of the corps of Lesh's army, the 46th Army Corps, was sent against the Legions' sector.10
Brusilov, who dated events by the Russian Old Style calendar, writes that the armies of Lesh and Kaledin went over to the decisive offensive on 21 June, which is 4 July in the Western calendar, and stood on the Stokhid by 1 July, that is 14 July. The attack on the Legions on 4 July was part of that advance.11
How big were the armies at Kostiuchnówka?
Every source agrees the odds were heavily against the Poles, but they count differently. The Polish History Museum's portal gives the Legions about 5,500 riflemen and 800 uhlans against 13,000 Russian infantry and 3,000 cavalry of the 46th Army Corps. The historian Przemysław Waingertner and the IPN historian Artur Cieślik both give about 7,000 legionnaires against nearly 30,000 Russians. Paweł Brudek speaks of a main Russian push of 13,000 men.12
Michał Klimecki, drawing on the 1931 study of the battle by its veteran Jan Sadowski, puts the front-line strength of the First and Third Brigades at no more than about 6,500 bayonets and 800 sabers, against a corps of up to 23,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry. The veteran historian Wacław Lipiński gave the same 6,500 bayonets and 800 sabers in 1935, out of 700 officers and 15,000 men, against two infantry divisions and four cavalry divisions.13
Łukasz Przybyło counts the whole Legions on 30 June 1916, rear services included: 15,599 men on the ration strength and 8,669 rifles and sabers. Facing them stood the whole Russian 100th Division and part of the 77th, each about 13,000 bayonets strong, and the Austro-Hungarian official history also places the 100th Division opposite the Legions.14
In firepower the gap was wider. The Legions had 26 guns and 49 heavy machine guns. The Russians brought about 120 guns.15
What happened at Kostiuchnówka on 4 July 1916?
The Russian bombardment began at about six in the morning of 4 July and went on, with a short pause at midday, for about twelve hours, until the evening.16
Dugouts collapsed, trenches were buried and telephone lines cut. "There are no trenches to be seen, no wire, no people, nothing," wrote the legionnaire Wacław Lipiński, who was in the line that day.17
Among the men directing the Polish guns was Second Lieutenant Józef Beck, later Poland's foreign minister. From a forward observation post he directed his battery by telephone, and when the lines were cut he signalled the direction of the Russian attack with red flares.18
At about six in the evening the Russian infantry came on in masses. In front of the 5th Regiment, facing the village of Kostiuchnówka, the attacks were thrown back with heavy Russian losses, three times by one account.19
Then the Hungarians on Polish Hill gave way. The Russians took the hill, moved into the rear of the 5th Regiment and seized the footbridges that led back to the Polish Grove. Cut off, the 1st Battalion had to fight its way out in hand-to-hand combat. It lost half its strength and its commander, Captain Zwierzyński, known as Sław, who was killed leading a counterattack.20
A night counterattack to retake the lost positions failed with heavy losses, and the legionnaires also had to leave Piłsudski's Redoubt, now open to fire from the south. By the morning the Legions were holding their second line.21
5 July: the fight for Polish Hill
On 5 July battalions of the 3rd Infantry Regiment of the Second Brigade, brought up from reserve, retook Polish Hill. A wider counterattack under Colonel Ferdinand Küttner, the Austrian commander of the Second Brigade, was planned to win back the first line, but it was soon given up.22
Reinforcements were coming up. The sector belonged to the army group of the German general Alexander von Linsingen, and Bavarian and Austrian troops were sent in to help.23
The Russians struck first. After a day of artillery fire they attacked the First Brigade again with great force and threw it back with heavy losses. During the night the Hungarian line to the south gave way as well, and on 6 July the Legions were fighting on their third and last line.24
6 July: the cavalry charge and the retreat to the Stokhid
Through the morning of 6 July the legionnaires held off Russian attacks along the Garbach stream. But the Russians broke through the Austro-Hungarian troops next to the Legions, and in the early afternoon the Legions Command ordered the brigades to withdraw toward the Stokhid.25
As the legionnaires began to pull back, Russian cavalry charged near Wołczeck. Eleven squadrons rode at the Polish line and broke down under machine-gun and artillery fire.26
The Legions were the last to leave, covering the withdrawal of the Austro-Hungarian and German troops, and they retreated in order. On the march Major Tadeusz Furgalski, known as Wyrwa, one of the most respected officers of the First Brigade, was killed. The exhausted Russians did not pursue hard, and the Central Powers made a new line behind the Stokhid.27
How many legionnaires died at Kostiuchnówka?
In three days the Legions lost about 2,000 men killed, wounded and missing, the heaviest losses the formation had suffered in so short a time since it was raised. Cieślik puts the dead alone at about 2,000. The worst hit was the 5th Infantry Regiment of the First Brigade, which lost about 500 men, 30 of them officers, more than half its strength.28
No reliable total exists for the Russian side. Przybyło notes that the legionnaires took several hundred prisoners and that their statements spoke of very heavy Russian losses on the first day. Waingertner thinks the Russian toll was probably several times the Polish one.29
Who won the Battle of Kostiuchnówka?
On the map, the Russians did. They took all three Polish lines and pushed the front back to the Stokhid, and Przybyło calls it a Russian victory. Brudek writes that the defeat left the legionnaires bitter, and that it took them months to see its political results.30
But the Russians did not reach their aim. The Polish and Austro-Hungarian troops were not encircled, and the attackers were too worn out to pursue. Waingertner calls the outcome a tactical success for the Legions, bought at a great price.31
The Russian view is sober in its own way. Zayonchkovsky writes that German commanders saw the July attacks north of Lutsk as the most critical moment of the whole operation for them, but that the Russian Eighth Army had no reserves left to exploit it, which gave the Germans two or three weeks to dig in on the Stokhid.32
What happened after Kostiuchnówka?
After the retreat the Legions rested around Czeremoszno, then fought on along the Stokhid until they left Volhynia in early October 1916.33
German commanders had watched the Poles fight while Austro-Hungarian units around them gave way. On 17 July 1916 General Erich Ludendorff wrote to Arthur Zimmermann of the German Foreign Office that the Pole was a good soldier, and that where Austria failed Germany must find new forces: a Polish state round Warsaw and Lublin, and then a Polish army under German command.34
That was Berlin's logic. The German Historical Museum is blunt that Germany and Austria-Hungary hoped a Polish kingdom would make it easier to recruit Polish soldiers for their exhausted armies. Zbigniew Gnat-Wieteska writes that the need for Polish recruits weighed decisively on the decision.35
Piłsudski drew his own conclusions. On 29 July 1916 he asked to be released from the Legions, in protest that their sacrifice had brought no political result, and he demanded firm commitments on a Polish state and a Polish army.36
On 5 November 1916 the emperors of Germany and Austria-Hungary proclaimed that the Polish lands taken from Russia would become a separate kingdom with a hereditary monarchy and a constitution. Sadowski, the veteran historian of the battle, called Kostiuchnówka one of the causes of that act, and Brudek writes that the battle led to it. It was a long road from there to the 11 November 1918.37
How is Kostiuchnówka remembered today?
In independent Poland the battlefield became a place of pilgrimage. In 1928, the tenth anniversary of independence, about 3,000 people came to Kostiuchnówka, and work began on the Mound of Glory of the Legions on Polish Hill. Basalt pillars marked places linked to Piłsudski: eight by Waingertner's count, nine by the autumn of 1938 by Kaczyński's.38
For the twentieth anniversary in July 1936 a school built by the Legions' veterans, which also served as a tourist hostel, was opened in the village, and more than 15,000 people came to the celebrations.39
Today Kostiukhnivka lies in Ukraine. Polish scouts from the Łódź region have come every summer for years to tend the Legion cemetery in the Polish Grove, the mound on Polish Hill and other war graves in Volhynia. They work from the Kostiuchnówka Dialogue Centre, housed in the rebuilt interwar school.40
Kostiuchnówka is one of the battles in our ranking of the battles that won Polish independence. Its wider setting is told in our guide to the Eastern Front of World War I and in the life of Józef Piłsudski.
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