Before dawn on 1 November 1918, as Austria-Hungary fell apart, Ukrainian soldiers took over the key buildings of Lwów (Lviv), the capital of Galicia, almost without a shot, and a yellow and blue flag went up over the town hall. The same day the city's Poles took up arms. For three weeks soldiers, students, schoolchildren and women couriers fought for the city street by street, until a Polish relief column helped drive the Ukrainian forces out on 21 and 22 November. Poland remembers the young defenders as the Lwów Eaglets, and Ukrainians remember the day as the November Action (or November Uprising) that founded their western state. The same date also saw two British cruisers lost with all hands off Coronel in 1914 and the first attacks of the Algerian War in 1954.
Two claims on one city
On 19 October 1918 the Ukrainian National Council, meeting in Lwów, adopted a manifesto proclaiming a Ukrainian state on the Ukrainian ethnic territory of Austria-Hungary. The reborn Polish state wanted Galicia too, and the clash over it became the Polish-Ukrainian War. On 13 November the council adopted a provisional fundamental law that fixed the new state's name, the West Ukrainian People's Republic, and its territory: the Ukrainian parts of Galicia, Bukovyna and Transcarpathia.1
The city itself was mostly not Ukrainian. The Museum of Polish History's portal dzieje.pl gives the population of Lwów in 1910 as 51 percent Polish, 28 percent Jewish and 19 percent Ukrainian, and the Encyclopedia of Ukraine puts the Polish share at about 60 percent.2
The wolf's hour: the night of 1 November
The Ukrainians moved early because a Polish Liquidation Commission was about to move to Lwów. The rising was run by the Ukrainian Military Committee, which in October 1918 elected Captain Dmytro Vitovsky as its chairman. ArmiaInform, the news agency of Ukraine's Ministry of Defense, quotes his words at the decisive meeting on the evening of 31 October: "If we don't take Lviv today, the Poles will take it tomorrow!" By its count he had only about 1,400 riflemen and 60 officers, while the Encyclopedia of Ukraine gives 1,200 soldiers and 60 officers.3
Before dawn on 1 November his men took the town hall, the governor's office, the main post office, the railway stations and the military command, almost without bloodshed. That day a yellow and blue flag flew over the town hall. The IPN historian Marek Kozubel describes soldiers in Austro-Hungarian uniforms, with Ukrainian badges in place of the imperial ones, patrolling the streets.4
For the city's Poles it was a humiliation. Kozubel quotes the memoirist Stanisław Łapiński-Nilski, who wrote that the Ukrainian coup struck Lwów's Poles like a slap in the face: "The Lwów townsman had been insulted. His dignity demanded satisfaction".5
Three weeks of street fighting
According to dzieje.pl, command of the Polish units, made up of members of the clandestine Polish Military Organization, former legionaries and local volunteers, passed on 1 November to Captain Czesław Mączyński. The Poles quickly took the western part of the city, and on 2 November the main railway station with its stores of weapons and ammunition. The Center for Urban History in Lviv says the station fell late that evening to men under Lieutenant Jan Schramm. By 5 November the Poles held the western districts.6
The Ukrainians kept the citadel, the Diet building, the town hall, the Podzamcze station and the Ferdinand barracks. According to the Center for Urban History, the citadel was occupied on 1 November by Lieutenant Tymotey Humovskyi with 3 officers and 55 soldiers, was reinforced by Sich Riflemen under Captain Osyp Bukshovanyi, and beat off Polish attacks led among others by Lieutenant Bernard Mond. On the Ukrainian side Vitovsky was replaced after a failed attempt to bring in reinforcements: command passed to Colonel Mykola Marynovych, on 5 November to Hryhorii Kossak and on 9 November to Colonel Hnat Stefaniv.7
Even in the middle of the battle the two sides talked. The Center for Urban History records that from 2 November joint commissions arranged pauses to bury the dead, deliver food and medicine and keep water, gas and electricity running, and that on 19 November the sides signed an agreement on hospitals and sanitary services. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine notes an armistice signed on 18 November.8
Eaglets, couriers and a schoolboy's death
Polish counts put the defenders at about 6,000. Dzieje.pl gives 6,022, including 427 women; 1,422 of the defenders were under 17. Kozubel gives 6,021 for 1 to 21 November, including 1,374 school and university students and 427 women.9
Kozubel warns against the legend that the city was saved mainly by "women and children". By his count only 10, or by other estimates up to 17, women fought in the street battles, some of them disguised as men, while the rest served as couriers and nurses. In the first days of November Aleksandra Zagórska, a veteran of the PPS Combat Organization, recruited 17 women as couriers who carried messages and newspapers across the front line and brought volunteers out of the Ukrainian-held districts. The Institute of National Remembrance notes that women later served in whole units of their own. According to Kozubel, the Women's Volunteer Legion seen in the photograph above grew out of a women's militia that Zagórska set up on 28 November.10
Zagórska's own son, the schoolboy Jurek Bitschan, was killed on 21 November at the Łyczakowski cemetery. One dzieje.pl article says he was 13, a few days short of his 14th birthday; another, and Kozubel, call him 14. With Antoś Petrykiewicz he became one of the two central figures of the Eaglets legend.11
Relief, and a pogrom
Volunteers raised in Kraków recaptured Przemyśl on 11 November and pressed on toward Lwów, ignoring an ultimatum from Stefaniv on the night of 12 to 13 November that threatened reprisals against Poles. A relief column under Lieutenant Colonel Michał Tokarzewski-Karaszewicz reached the city on 20 November, and a combined attack the next day forced the Ukrainian troops to leave. The Center for Urban History says the citadel garrison, by then 213 men fit for combat, withdrew on Stefaniv's orders after setting fire to its ammunition depot. On the morning of 22 November the city was in Polish hands.12
Dzieje.pl gives 439 Polish defenders killed in the November fighting, 109 of them secondary school pupils. The Polonika Institute counts more than 400 Poles killed in the fighting for Lwów in 1918 and 1919, among them 120 school pupils and 76 university students. We have not found a reliable figure for Ukrainian losses in the city.13
The victory was followed by an anti-Jewish pogrom. Andriy Lyubka, writing for the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter about the lawyer and writer Grzegorz Gauden's book on the events, and the Center for Urban History describe violence in the Jewish quarter by Polish soldiers, escaped prisoners and local townspeople. According to Lyubka, it began before dawn after Polish troops entered and was most intense for about 72 hours. The Center for Urban History, which notes that the Jewish community had kept its own militia and stayed neutral during the fighting, gives about 78 killed and 453 seriously injured, while the Jewish Rescue Committee documented more than 150 murders and more than 50 buildings burned, synagogues among them. Our full article on the defense of Lwów sets out the range of estimates.14
A siege and a symbol
The war was far from over. The Poles held only a narrow corridor along the railway to Przemyśl, and Ukrainian artillery could still reach the city center. Ukrainian forces came close to taking the city in December 1918 and March 1919 and attacked again in February; on 8 March they cut the railway link, which was restored in mid-March. A Polish offensive from 14 May 1919 drove the Ukrainian Galician Army back to the east of Galicia, and by July Poland held most of the West Ukrainian republic's territory.15
On 22 November 1920, the second anniversary of the end of the November fighting, Józef Piłsudski decorated the arms of Lwów with the Virtuti Militari, Poland's highest military order. Lwów was the first city to receive the order, and between the wars the only Polish one; Warsaw was decorated in 1939. Many of the young defenders lie in the Cemetery of the Defenders of Lwów, of which the writer Kornel Makuszyński wrote that because pupils in uniform lie there, it is like a school. According to the Polonika Institute, the Soviet authorities wrecked the cemetery in 1971, and the rebuilt cemetery was opened in 2005. For Ukrainians, 1 November 1918 is the November Uprising, a founding moment of their statehood, and the Center for Urban History traces how their accounts moved from calling it a "coup" and an "outbreak" to "the November Action". The wider story of these border wars is in our guide to the battles that won Polish independence.16
Also on 1 November
In 1914 Admiral Maximilian von Spee's German cruiser squadron met Rear Admiral Christopher Cradock's ships off Coronel, on the coast of Chile. Cradock's flagship Good Hope and the cruiser Monmouth were sunk with all hands, about 1,600 men, or 1,578 by the count of Royal Marines History. John Rickard calls it the worst British naval defeat of the First World War. A British squadron with two battlecruisers destroyed most of Spee's ships off the Falkland Islands on 8 December.17
In 1954, in the night of 31 October to 1 November, Algerian nationalists carried out about thirty attacks on barracks, gendarmerie posts, public buildings and other targets. Le Courrier de l'Atlas describes them as launched simultaneously across Algeria. They marked the appearance of a new movement, the National Liberation Front (FLN). INA's commentary, drawing on Benjamin Stora, presents the date mainly as the appearance of the FLN and not as a mass uprising. The Algerian War that followed lasted nearly eight years; according to Hérodote.net, it ended with the ceasefire of 19 March 1962 and independence on 5 July 1962.18
Also on this day
- 1914: Battle of Coronel. Off central Chile near Coronel, Admiral von Spee's German East Asia Squadron met Rear Admiral Christopher Cradock's British squadron in the First World War.
