What happened at Płock in August 1920?
On 18 August 1920, during the Battle of Warsaw, two divisions of Gai's Soviet 3rd Cavalry Corps broke into Płock. Soldiers, gendarmes and townspeople, scouts among them, held barricades near the cathedral through the night until reinforcements crossed the bridge, and the Soviets left the next morning. In 1921 Piłsudski awarded the city the Cross of Valor.5
At about four in the afternoon of 18 August 1920, Soviet horsemen rode into the old town of Płock and reached the Canons' Square beside the cathedral, only a short walk from the bridge over the Vistula. Soldiers and civilians were running for the bridge. Within hours a few gendarmes, scattered soldiers and townspeople had thrown up barricades across the streets, and they held them until morning.6
Płock on the edge of the Battle of Warsaw
In August 1920 the Red Army's Western Front was closing on Warsaw. Its 4th Army had swung far to the west, north of the capital, as far as the Sierpc area, and the 3rd Cavalry Corps of Gai, born Hayk Bzhishkyan, reached the Vistula near Włocławek and fought for the crossing there. Płock, an old cathedral city on a high bank of the Vistula, had a bridge of its own, and through it poured refugees fleeing west ahead of the fighting.7
From 15 and 16 August the Polish counteroffensive was turning the battle. General Władysław Sikorski's 5th Army fought on the Wkra north of Warsaw, and Piłsudski's strike group attacked from the Wieprz in the south. The Soviet armies in the north were soon in danger of being cut off, and Gai's corps was ordered to destroy the Polish forces on the right bank at Płock.8 › The Battle of Warsaw, 1920
A town prepares
In July 1920 Płock answered the call to join the new Volunteer Army, and on 15 July a state of emergency was declared in the town and county. A Civic Guard was formed under Ksawery Cygański, with many boys in its ranks.9
The defense of the bridgehead was put under Major Janusz Mościcki, within General Mikołaj Osikowski's Lower Vistula Group, which answered to Sikorski's 5th Army. Its works were designed by Captain Albert de Buré, a French engineer officer who had come with General Józef Haller's army. They amounted to a single line of trenches with barbed wire, a kilometer or so beyond the edge of town; Papierowski and Stefański judge the line far too long for so small a garrison. On 15 August the military ordered men aged 17 to 40 to leave for the left bank.10
The garrison was a patchwork. Trubas describes about 2,500 men from more than a dozen subunits, most of them fresh conscripts or convalescents; Papierowski and Stefański stress how many were barely trained volunteers. Among them were the reserve battalion of the 6th Legions Infantry Regiment and a squadron of Tatar cavalry, and armed river vessels of the Vistula Flotilla supported the defense.11
The raid that went wrong
Sikorski ordered the bridgehead troops to strike north toward Bielsk and Sierpc to tie down enemy forces. On 17 August Polish infantry advanced a few kilometers, ran into fire and returned to its trenches. The attack was renewed early on 18 August around Trzepowo, just north of the town. Trubas calls the raid extremely badly planned, because it drew troops off the defense lines around the town.12
In the early afternoon Gai's cavalry appeared on the flank and in the rear of the Polish infantry. The 10th Cavalry Division cut the reserve battalion of the 6th Legions Infantry Regiment to pieces near Trzepowo, along with a dismounted squadron of the Tatar cavalry. Gai's riders pushed on toward the town, panic swept it, and soldiers and civilians fled for the bridge. Between three and four o'clock the Soviets entered Płock.13
Barricades by the cathedral
The cavalry reached the Canons' Square by the cathedral, about 100 meters from the way down to the bridge by Gołębiewski's reckoning (250 meters by that of an interwar history of the scouts). Then the attack slowed: many of the Soviet soldiers turned to looting houses and shops. Gendarmes, Tatar uhlans and soldiers rallied at the bridge drove the riders off the square. Trubas finds it a plain exaggeration that 80 gendarmes beat off two cavalry divisions, but holds that they checked the enemy's momentum.14
Lieutenant Edward Czuruk's gendarmes held the Canons' Square, and Lieutenant Iskander Achmatowicz's Tatar uhlans held the crossing of Warszawska Street and Kilińskiego Avenue. A young woman, Janina Landsberg-Śmieciuszewska, turned back fleeing soldiers at the bridge and led them against the riders on the square. Gołębiewski names her, with Mościcki, de Buré, Achmatowicz, Czuruk and the headmistress Marcelina Rościszewska, among those who organized the improvised defense.15
Townspeople built and manned the barricades. In the accounts Maria Macieszyna wrote down after the battle, women and girls fill sacks with earth and drag benches out of the square, carry cartridges and water under fire, and wash the feet and dress the wounds of exhausted soldiers; a printer unpacks ammunition and passes it to both sides of the square. Papierowski and Stefański write that the barricades around the cathedral were raised mainly by the hands of Płock girls.16
From five in the afternoon companies of the 1st Battalion of the Kowno Infantry Regiment crossed the bridge, and in the night battalions of Podhale and Słuck riflemen followed. River gunboats of the Vistula Flotilla and artillery on the far bank shelled the Soviet troops. At dawn on 19 August the Poles counterattacked, and by about eleven in the morning the Soviets had left the town.17
Their withdrawal was not only the defenders' doing. Gai had been ordered to march on Płońsk, to help the Soviet armies fighting on the Wkra, and Gołębiewski writes that he had to pull out of Płock whatever the Poles did. Papierowski and Stefański date the order to break off to midnight on 18 August, repeated at four in the morning.18
The young defenders
Many of Płock's scouts had gone to the Volunteer Army, and those left in the town were children; an interwar history of the scouts, reprinted by the IPN, says they still ran to the barricades. Stefan Zawidzki, a teenage scout in the Civic Guard, fought with a rifle and was killed on 18 August; he was awarded the Cross of Valor after his death.19
Another scout, Antoni (Antolek) Gradowski, carried ammunition and helped the wounded until Cossacks caught him and cut him down. Papierowski and Stefański call him a heroic boy.20
The same war that was fought at Płock appears in the lives of better-known Poles. Witold Pilecki, the future volunteer of Auschwitz, joined the 211th Uhlan Regiment in August 1920 and fought with it at Płock.21 › Witold Pilecki
A night of looting
In the part of the town they held, Soviet soldiers spent the night of 18 to 19 August robbing homes, shops and institutions, wrecking flats and raping women, and they killed captured Polish soldiers. Gołębiewski and the State Archives in Płock both record 52 women raped. Polish and Jewish families suffered alike: Maria Macieszyna spoke only to Polish residents, Gołębiewski notes, but the Jewish population was robbed and abused no less.22
The residents' material losses were estimated at about 16 to 17 million Polish marks, in a count that covered some 800 families. The city's own losses came to over 1.5 million marks by the figures Papierowski and Stefański cite, and over 1.7 million by Gołębiewski's.23
The dead and the missing
The cost in lives is still uncertain. Gołębiewski and the State Archives give about 150 to 170 soldiers killed in action or murdered, with about 100 civilians dead by the archive's account, and 300 to 400 wounded by the archive's count (twice as many as the dead, by Gołębiewski's). Older estimates collected by Papierowski and Stefański run from 200 to about 300 dead. More than 300 prisoners by the archive's count, 400 to 450 by contemporary estimates, were taken away by the Soviets, and Papierowski and Stefański found no record that any of them came home.24
Papierowski and Stefański are sharply critical of the Polish command. In their reading General Osikowski bears the responsibility, because the raid toward Bielsk was launched without reconnaissance of Gai's corps, and the scale of the losses was kept from the public by censorship after the battle.25
The rabbi and the field court
The search for culprits turned against Płock's Jews. Rumors spread that Jews had fired on Polish soldiers, and soldiers looted Jewish shops. A Hasidic rabbi of the town, Chaim Szapiro (Shapira), was accused of signaling to the enemy from his balcony during the attack, sentenced to death by a military field court and shot.26
Historians of Płock do not accept the charge. Trubas calls the execution a judicial crime based on a false denunciation, and Papierowski and Stefański describe the anti-Jewish campaign as a search for a scapegoat for the command's mistakes. The Pinkas Hakehillot encyclopedia of Jewish communities records that the rabbi had gone out onto his balcony in his prayer shawl and phylacteries to pray, and that his death was followed by attempts to incite attacks on the Jews.27
Did Płock matter?
Historians disagree about what the defense achieved. The IPN's educational calendar says the defense of Płock kept the Bolsheviks from outflanking Warsaw. Gołębiewski stresses that Gai left on orders, to march toward the Wkra. Trubas sees no particularly important operational significance in it, but an expression of the unity of almost the whole of Polish society. Papierowski and Stefański call the battle a minor episode that did not affect the military situation of either side, yet perhaps the most important event in the whole history of Płock.28
The larger claim goes back to 1920. The writer Adam Grzymała-Siedlecki, who came to Płock just after the battle, argued that taking the bridge would have let the enemy strike Warsaw from the west, and Papierowski and Stefański write that interwar authors repeated this uncritically. An interwar history of the scouts, reprinted by the IPN, tells the story the same way: Gai meant to force the Vistula at Płock and undo the Polish victory at Warsaw. Papierowski and Stefański reply that the Soviet troops never even tried to take the bridge.29 › The battles that won Polish independence
The Cross of Valor
On 10 April 1921 Józef Piłsudski, the Chief of State, came to Płock and decorated the city with the Cross of Valor, in recognition of the heroism shown by its civilian population on 18 and 19 August 1920. He decorated dozens of defenders too: the State Archives count 64 people given the Cross of Valor that day, and Trubas names gendarmes who received the Virtuti Militari. Płock was the second Polish city, after Lwów, to be honored with a military decoration.30
Płock's defenders also received a badge of their own, the Cross for Bravery and Courage of the 206th Volunteer Infantry Regiment. The minutes of the city council of 20 March 1921, shown by the State Archives, record that the city itself was decorated with this badge.31
A century later the Sejm, in its resolution of 22 July 2020 on the centenary of the Battle of Warsaw, called the war of 1919 to 1920 a collective effort of the whole Polish nation, of all its social classes and of its national minorities, and paid tribute to all the defenders of Poland's independence. At Płock that effort could be seen on the barricades, where soldiers fought beside girls with sandbags and boys with rifles.32 › The Polish-Soviet War, 1919 to 1921
For the wider story of how Poland regained and defended its independence, read our guide to Polish independence in 1918.
