The Battle of Zadwórze was fought on 17 August 1920, during the Polish-Soviet War1, near a railway station 33 km from Lwów2. A battalion of about 330 to 350 Polish volunteers under Captain Bolesław Zajączkowski, many of them students and young veterans of the 1918 defence of Lwów, held off attacks by Semyon Budyonny's 1st Cavalry Army for about eleven hours1. Almost all were killed, but the stand delayed Budyonny and helped save Lwów, while the decisive Battle of Warsaw was being fought. It is often called the Polish Thermopylae.
In August 1920, while the fate of Poland was being decided at Warsaw, Semyon Budyonny's feared cavalry army was driving on Lwów. In its path, at a small railway station called Zadwórze, stood a single battalion of volunteers, many of them barely more than boys.
Lwów in danger
To gather forces for the counterattack at Warsaw, the Polish command stripped the southern front3. Budyonny's 1st Cavalry Army broke through and advanced on Lwów4, defended by only weak forces and hastily organised volunteers.
The volunteers
Thousands of the city's inhabitants volunteered, among them students and young veterans of the 1918 fighting for Lwów, the famous Lwów Eaglets. One battalion of these volunteers, about 330 to 350 men under Captain Bolesław Zajączkowski, was sent along the railway line to delay the enemy.
Eleven hours
On 17 August the battalion ran into Soviet cavalry near Zadwórze. It seized the railway station and the nearby hills and formed an all-round defence. Over about eleven hours the volunteers beat off repeated cavalry attacks, taking ammunition from the dead and wounded and finally fighting with bayonets2.
To the last
At dusk, with ammunition gone, Zajączkowski ordered the few dozen survivors to try to break out to a nearby wood, but fresh Soviet forces closed in. Almost all the defenders were killed, and several officers took their own lives rather than be captured2. Days later, 318 Polish bodies were found on the battlefield.
The Polish Thermopylae
The stand cost Budyonny time and helped persuade him to turn away from Lwów. Zadwórze became one of the most moving symbols of the war of 1920, and it is often called the Polish Thermopylae1. Most of the fallen lie in the war cemetery beneath the memorial mound at Zadwórze; seven identified defenders, Captain Zajączkowski among them, were reburied in the Cemetery of the Defenders of Lwów.
