On 17 August 1920, while the Battle of Warsaw was being decided far to the north, a battalion of about 330 Polish volunteers under Captain Bolesław Zajączkowski, most of them young people from Lwów, ran into the 6th Cavalry Division of Semyon Budyonny's 1st Cavalry Army near the railway station at Zadwórze, east of the city. They fought until dusk, beat off repeated cavalry charges and, when the ammunition was gone, fought on with bayonets and rifle butts. The Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) records 318 of them killed. The battle is remembered in Poland as the Polish Thermopylae.
Lwów under threat
In August 1920 the Red Army was advancing on two fronts: on Warsaw, and in the south on Lwów, the capital of eastern Galicia. Budyonny's cavalry army was driving on the city, and Lwów raised volunteer units to defend it. One of them was a battalion of the volunteer group of Captain Roman Abraham, commanded by Captain Zajączkowski. The IPN describes it as made up mainly of Lwów's youth. Their story is told at length in our full article on Zadwórze.1
On 17 August the battalion was falling back toward Lwów along the railway line. Around noon, according to the Museum of Polish History's portal dzieje.pl, the column was caught near the station at Zadwórze by machine-gun fire and grenades from the Soviet 6th Cavalry Division.2
Eleven hours
The volunteers attacked instead of falling back. They took a hill near the station, and a bayonet charge drove off a Soviet artillery battery, which pulled back behind the village. Through the afternoon they beat off six cavalry charges, taking ammunition from the dead and wounded as their own ran low. The IPN puts the fight at eleven hours.3
How badly they were outnumbered is given differently even by the IPN: its Polish page says twenty times, its English page more than ten times. What the sources agree on is that fresh Soviet cavalry arrived from the direction of Złoczów and the battalion was surrounded. Called on to surrender, Zajączkowski is reported by dzieje.pl to have answered: “Boys! To the last cartridge!”4
To the last man
Toward evening the Polish machine guns fell silent for lack of ammunition, and the survivors fought on with bayonets and rifle butts. Zajączkowski shot himself so as not to be taken prisoner, and several of his officers did the same. According to both the IPN and dzieje.pl, the last group of about 30 volunteers, sheltering by the railway huts, was killed on the spot. The IPN records 318 Polish soldiers dead, almost the whole battalion. Only a few were taken prisoner.5
The fight held up Budyonny's advance. Dzieje.pl writes that it let the Polish 13th Division and other units fall back to Lwów and take up defensive positions, and the IPN credits it with keeping the Bolsheviks from taking the city. In 1927 General Władysław Sikorski said that Lwów had tied down Budyonny's formidable army while the war was being decided on the Vistula, and called Zadwórze the symbol of that role.6
The graves and the Unknown Soldier
Most of the dead lie in a soldiers' cemetery at the foot of a mound raised in their honor at Zadwórze, under a plaque to the young defenders who fell on 17 August 1920 “in the fight for the integrity of the borderlands”. A few identified officers, Zajączkowski among them, were buried in the Cemetery of the Defenders of Lwów; the IPN counts five, while dzieje.pl lists seven men taken there for a funeral on 18 September 1920.7
Zadwórze also reached Warsaw. In 1925, when the remains for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier were chosen in Lwów, the choice among three coffins was made by Jadwiga Zarugiewiczowa, whose son Konstanty had fallen at Zadwórze and was never identified. The unknown soldier was laid in the tomb in Warsaw on 2 November 1925. The wider war is told in our article on the Battle of Warsaw.8
Also on this day
- 1424: Battle of Verneuil. Near Verneuil-sur-Avre in Normandy, an English army met a combined French and Scottish force backed by Milanese heavy cavalry in the Hundred Years' War.
