What were the Polish Legions?
The Polish Legions were Polish volunteer units that fought against Russia inside the Austro-Hungarian army from August 1914. Grown from Józef Piłsudski's riflemen into three brigades, they fought their bloodiest battle at Kostiuchnówka in July 1916 and broke apart when most refused a new oath in July 1917. Their veterans helped build the Polish Army of 1918.1
In the early hours of 6 August 1914 a column of riflemen marched out of the Oleandry fields in Kraków toward the border of the Russian Empire. There were only about 150 of them, and Poland had not existed as a state for more than a century. Four years later Poland was independent again, and the men who had followed that march were among those who built its army.2
The riflemen
The Legions grew out of a plan Piłsudski had been preparing since 1908. In Austrian Galicia, under the eye and with the support of the Austrian authorities, he built up a rifle movement to train cadres for a future Polish army. The Riflemen's Association and the Riflemen, open organizations founded around 1910, were the public face of the secret Union of Active Struggle. In a war against Russia he meant to raise a rising behind the Russian lines under the cover of the Central Powers; the Austrians saw in it a chance for sabotage that would speed up their own campaign.3
The First Cadre Company, 6 August 1914
On 3 August 1914, at the Oleandry, Piłsudski formed a company from the Riflemen's Association and the Polish Rifle Squads under Tadeusz Kasprzycki. Counts of its strength range from 144 to 172 men. In the night of 5 to 6 August the First Cadre Company set out from Kraków for the Russian partition, and at 9:45 in the morning, at Michałowice north of the city, the riflemen pulled down the posts on the border between the Austrian and Russian partitions.4
The company marched on through Słomniki, Miechów and Jędrzejów and on 12 August entered Kielce. The rising Piłsudski had hoped to spark did not break out, and the people of the Kingdom of Poland received the riflemen coolly; the IPN historian Maciej Zakrzewski explains it by fear that the Russians would soon return and by a view of the riflemen as a pro-German force.5
The Austrian command now demanded that the riflemen be disbanded or merged into the Austrian territorial reserve. Galician politicians saved the venture. On 16 August 1914 they set up the Supreme National Committee (Naczelny Komitet Narodowy), which took the Polish Legions under its patronage, and Piłsudski brought his riflemen into them. He lost his independence, the Józef Piłsudski Museum writes, but gained a way to carry on his work for independence.6
Three brigades
An Austrian order of 27 August 1914 created two legions, a Western and an Eastern one. The Eastern Legion, organized in Lwów, broke apart within weeks: after the Russian victories in Galicia most of its men would not swear loyalty to the Austrian emperor, and it was dissolved on 21 September 1914. The Legions served within the Austro-Hungarian army.7
Out of them came three brigades. The First was Piłsudski's own, formed from his 1st Regiment in December 1914; it fought at Łowczówek at Christmas 1914 and at Konary in May 1915, and Piłsudski was made a brigadier in November 1914. The Second took shape in the Eastern Carpathians; its first commander was the Austrian colonel Ferdynand Küttner, and from July 1916 Józef Haller. The Third was created in May 1915 under another Austrian officer, Colonel Wiktor Grzesicki. Over all three stood the Legions Command, led by the generals Karol Trzaska-Durski and, from February 1916, Stanisław Puchalski.8
At their height, in 1915 and 1916, the Legions had more than 25,000 men, counting their rear services. Many were students and young members of the educated classes, as the historians Andrzej Nowak and Łukasz Przybyło both note.9
Haller's Carpathian Brigade
Józef Haller, a former Austrian artillery captain who had left the army before the war to work in the Sokół gymnastic movement and the scouts, joined the Eastern Legion in Lwów in August 1914. When it fell apart, he led the volunteers who wanted to fight on into a new 3rd Infantry Regiment and took it into the Eastern Carpathians to defend the passes against the Russians.10
In the mountains the regiment fought at Rafajłowa and at Mołotków, where on 29 October 1914 five battalions of the future Second Brigade met a Russian force twice their size and were driven back with heavy losses. The Carpathian fighting won the brigade its names, the "Carpathian" and the "Iron" Brigade. On 13 June 1915 its uhlans charged the Russian trenches at Rokitna; of some 65 to 70 riders, 14 or 15 were killed, depending on the source, among them their commander, Captain Zbigniew Dunin-Wąsowicz.11
The Battle of Kostiuchnówka, 4 to 6 July 1916
From the autumn of 1915 the Legions held a stretch of the front in the forests and marshes of Volhynia, on the Styr River. In November 1915 the Second Brigade took a hill near the village of Kostiuchnówka that was renamed Polish Hill (Polska Góra). Over the following months the Legions built three lines of trenches in the forest, with roads and wooden settlements behind them and the outpost called Piłsudski's Redoubt pushed out in front of the main line.12
On 4 June 1916 the Russian Southwestern Front of General Aleksei Brusilov opened its great offensive and broke the Austro-Hungarian line near Lutsk. A month later the Russians struck toward Kovel, and the road to Kovel ran through the Legions' positions at Kostiuchnówka. For the first time all three brigades fought side by side, under the overall command of General Puchalski. On their right, Hungarian Honvéd troops of the 128th Brigade held Polish Hill; on their left stood the Austro-Hungarian 11th Cavalry Division.13› The Brusilov Offensive, 1916
| Side | Strength | Guns | Losses |
|---|---|---|---|
| Polish Legions | About 5,500 riflemen and 800 uhlans (dzieje.pl); about 7,000 (Cieślik, IPN); 8,669 rifles and sabers in all three brigades on 30 June 1916 (Przybyło) | 26 guns | About 2,000 killed, wounded and missing |
| Russian Empire | 13,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry of the 46th Army Corps (dzieje.pl); about 30,000 (Cieślik, IPN); the 100th Rifle Division and part of the 77th, about 13,000 bayonets each (Przybyło) | About 120 | Unknown |
Strength figures differ by source and by what they count: the dzieje.pl portal of the Polish History Museum and Artur Cieślik (IPN) give men in the line, Łukasz Przybyło the Legions' total of rifles and sabers. All three give about 2,000 Polish killed, wounded and missing; Przybyło writes that no reliable figure for Russian losses exists.14
The odds were heavily against the Poles, though the sources count them differently. The Polish History Museum's portal gives the Legions about 5,500 riflemen and 800 uhlans against 13,000 Russian infantry and 3,000 cavalry of the 46th Army Corps; the IPN historian Artur Cieślik gives about 7,000 legionnaires against 30,000 Russians. Both put the Polish artillery at 26 guns against about 120 Russian ones.15
The Russian bombardment began on the morning of 4 July, its aim corrected from tethered observation balloons. It smashed dugouts and buried long stretches of trench. In the evening waves of Russian infantry attacked. The 5th Infantry Regiment of the First Brigade threw them back, but the Hungarians on Polish Hill gave way, and the Russians began to roll up the Polish line from the flank. The legionnaires fought their way back with the bayonet to the second line. The 5th Regiment lost more than half its strength that day.16
On 5 July legionnaires of the Second Brigade won back positions on Polish Hill, but in the evening the Russians attacked again, and the Legions were pushed back to their third, unfinished line of trenches. On 6 July Russian cavalry charged near the village of Wołczeck and was stopped by Polish fire. With the Austro-Hungarian line broken on both flanks, the Legions Command ordered a retreat on 6 July, and the brigades withdrew behind the Stokhid River.17
About 2,000 legionnaires were killed, wounded or missing in three days: Kostiuchnówka was the bloodiest battle the Legions fought. No reliable figure for Russian losses exists, Przybyło writes. The Legions had not held their positions, and Przybyło calls it plainly a lost battle, but the Russians did not achieve the encirclement they were aiming for. German commanders took note. "The Pole is a good soldier," General Erich Ludendorff wrote on 17 July 1916 to Arthur Zimmermann, the state secretary for foreign affairs in Berlin,, and proposed a Polish state and a Polish army under German command.18
The Act of 5 November 1916
Piłsudski meanwhile pressed the Austrians for a united Polish force under Polish command and a clear promise of a Polish state. When none came, he asked to be released, on 29 July 1916, and was dismissed in September. On 20 September 1916 the Austro-Hungarian high command announced that the Legions would become the Polish Auxiliary Corps.19
On 5 November 1916, in Warsaw and Lublin, the German and Austro-Hungarian occupation authorities proclaimed in the name of their emperors that the Polish lands taken from Russia would become "an independent state with a hereditary monarchy and a constitutional system." The borders were left open, no Polish government was set up, and the act promised a Polish army whose organization would be settled "by common agreement" with the two powers.20
The German Historical Museum is blunt about the motive: Berlin and Vienna hoped in this way to recruit Polish soldiers for their exhausted armies. On 9 November the governors general Hans von Beseler and Karl Kuk called for volunteers, but the call found little response. Even so, the act made the Polish question an international one. In December 1916 Tsar Nicholas II named a free Poland made of all three partitions among Russia's war aims, and in January 1917 the Provisional Council of State, set up after the act, met in Warsaw, with Piłsudski heading its military commission.21
The oath crisis of July 1917
In April 1917 the Legions were handed over to Beseler, to form the core of a new Polish Armed Force (Polnische Wehrmacht) under German command. Its soldiers from the Kingdom of Poland were to swear loyalty to a future Polish king and "faithful brotherhood in arms" with the armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Piłsudski had come to see Germany, not Russia, as the greater danger, and he resigned from the Provisional Council of State on 2 July. "The sooner the Germans lose the war, the better," he told Legion commanders that day.22
The oath was set for 9 July in Warsaw and the following days in the other garrisons. Most soldiers of the First and Third Brigades refused it. The dzieje.pl portal gives 166 officers and about 5,000 men; the Polish Auxiliary Corps' own figures, cited by the IPN historian Michał Wenklar, give 199 officers and more than 4,500 men, with others joining later. Most of the Second Brigade, under Haller, took the oath.23
Piłsudski's arrest, Magdeburg, Szczypiorno and Beniaminów
The Germans treated the refusal as mutiny. They arrested Piłsudski on 22 July 1917 and imprisoned him in the fortress of Magdeburg, where his chief of staff, Kazimierz Sosnkowski, was also held. The legionnaires from the Kingdom were interned, the officers at Beniaminów near Zegrze, the rank and file at Szczypiorno near Kalisz: about 3,300 men, or 3,250 by the German records the historian Jan Snopko studied. About 3,500 Galicians, Austrian subjects, were moved into the Austro-Hungarian army, most of them to the Italian front. The crisis in effect broke up the Legions.24
As Wenklar puts it, to his legend as a fighter against the tsar Piłsudski now added that of a prisoner of Germany. Released as the German Empire collapsed, he came back to Warsaw on 10 November 1918, and on 11 November the Regency Council handed him command of the Polish troops.25› Józef Piłsudski
Rarańcza and Kaniów
The Second Brigade served on in Bukovina as part of the Polish Auxiliary Corps. On 9 February 1918 the Central Powers signed a peace at Brest-Litovsk with the Ukrainian People's Republic and, as the Encyclopedia of Ukraine notes, conceded that the Kholm (Chełm) region and Podlachia should belong to the Ukrainian state. Poles took it as a betrayal. In the night of 15 to 16 February Haller led his brigade across the Austro-Russian front at Rarańcza. About 1,600 men got through and 16 were killed; those who did not get through were interned by the Austrians.26
Beyond the front the brigade joined the Polish II Corps in Russia. On 11 May 1918 German troops attacked the corps near Kaniów on the Dnieper, and after a hard fight it surrendered. Haller escaped through Moscow and Murmansk to France, where in October 1918 he took command of the Polish Army formed there, the Blue Army.27› Józef Haller
From the Legions to the Polish Army
In November 1918 the new Polish Army was formed from several streams: the soldiers of the Polish Armed Force of the Regency Kingdom, members of the Polish Military Organization whom Piłsudski mobilized, veterans of the Legions, the Polish corps from Russia and other volunteers. Former Legion officers were among its leaders from the start.28
Their names fill the history of the wars for the borders that followed, from the defense of Lwów to the war with Soviet Russia. Piłsudski, whose only other military rank had been brigadier of the Legions, became Chief of State, commander-in-chief and, in 1920, Marshal of Poland. Haller, once of the Second Brigade, was given command of the Northern Front on 10 August 1920, during the Battle of Warsaw.29› The Polish-Soviet War, 1919 to 1921
"My, Pierwsza Brygada"
The Legions also left Poland a song. "My, Pierwsza Brygada" ("We, the First Brigade"), with words by Andrzej Hałaciński and Tadeusz Biernacki, took shape at the end of World War I. Where its tune came from is less certain; the education ministry's portal says it was probably arranged by Andrzej Brzuchal-Sikorski, bandmaster of the First Brigade. In August 2007 the minister of national defense made it the official representative song of the Polish Army, sung on Armed Forces Day and at military ceremonies.30
The Legions never numbered more than a few tens of thousands, and they fought their war in the uniform of another empire. Yet from the First Cadre Company to the camps of Szczypiorno and Beniaminów they kept alive the idea of a Polish army fighting for a Polish state, and in 1918 the men who had carried it were ready. They stand at the start of the battles that won Polish independence.31
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