The defence of Lwów was the fighting for the city of Lwów from 1 to 22 November 19181. When Austria-Hungary collapsed, Ukrainian troops seized most of the city overnight and proclaimed it part of the West Ukrainian People's Republic. The Polish majority of the city resisted: small groups of soldiers, students and schoolchildren, led by Captain Czesław Mączyński, held the western districts for three weeks until a relief column from Przemyśl arrived. On 22 November the Ukrainian forces withdrew, but they besieged the city until May 1919. The young defenders are remembered in Poland as the Lwów Eaglets.
In the first days of November 1918 the old empire of the Habsburgs was falling apart, and two nations claimed the same city. In Lwów, the fight for it was taken up not only by soldiers, but by schoolboys, students and girls carrying ammunition: the Lwów Eaglets.
A city claimed by two nations
Lwów was the capital of Austrian Galicia. Most of its inhabitants were Polish or Jewish, while the countryside around it was largely Ukrainian. As Austria-Hungary collapsed in the autumn of 1918, both the reborn Polish state and the Ukrainian national movement regarded the city as their own.
The night of 1 November
Before dawn on 1 November 1918, Ukrainian soldiers of the former Austro-Hungarian army2, organised by a Ukrainian military committee under Dmytro Vitovsky, took over most of the public buildings in Lwów, and the West Ukrainian People's Republic was proclaimed. That same day Polish resistance sprang up in the western part of the city, at first around a handful of points such as the Sienkiewicz school and a student hostel, held by a few dozen poorly armed men.
Three weeks of street fighting
Volunteers streamed to the Polish posts, and command passed to Captain3 Czesław Mączyński. For three weeks the two sides fought for streets, barracks, the railway station and the cemeteries, with truces called to collect the wounded and feed civilians. By Polish counts about 6,000 people took part on the Polish side3 by 22 November, around 1,400 of them schoolchildren and students; some of the fighters were barely teenagers.
Relief and its shadow
On 20 November a Polish relief column under Lieutenant Colonel3 Michał Tokarzewski-Karaszewicz reached the city from Przemyśl, and on 22 November the Ukrainian forces withdrew. The Polish victory was followed by a pogrom: from 22 to 24 November Polish soldiers, militiamen and civilians attacked the Jewish quarter4, killing between about 50 and 150 Jewish residents by different estimates, wounding hundreds and looting and burning homes and shops. The Polish-Ukrainian war over Eastern Galicia went on, and Ukrainian troops besieged Lwów until May 19191, when Polish forces, including General Józef Haller's army from France, pushed them back.
The Eaglets in memory
About 440 Polish defenders died3, nearly 200 of them pupils and students (about 120 school pupils and 76 university students). The youngest became legends: Jerzy Bitschan, killed at 13 just days before his 14th birthday, and Antoni Petrykiewicz, 13, who was posthumously awarded the Virtuti Militari. The name Eaglets came from a popular poem, and in 1920 Lwów itself was awarded the Virtuti Militari5. The Cemetery of the Defenders of Lwów, where many of them lie, remains a place of memory for Poles, while for Ukrainians November 1918 is remembered as a founding moment6 of their own statehood.
