What happened at Radzymin and Ossów?
From 13 to 16 August 1920 two Soviet rifle divisions broke into the Warsaw bridgehead at Radzymin, 23 km from the capital, and the town changed hands several times. At nearby Ossów on 14 August volunteers threw back a Soviet brigade and their chaplain, Father Ignacy Skorupka, was killed. Polish troops retook Radzymin on the evening of 15 August.2
Toward evening on 13 August 1920 the defenders of Radzymin broke. Soviet infantry marched into the little town and pushed on toward the last line before Praga. For the next three days the fate of the capital hung on a few villages northeast of Praga: Radzymin, Wólka Radzymińska, Nieporęt and, a little to the south, Ossów.3
Radzymin and Ossów in the Battle of Warsaw
The fighting at Radzymin and Ossów was the defense of the northeastern sector of the Warsaw bridgehead, the ring of trenches that covered the capital east of the Vistula, during the Battle of Warsaw. It was one of three parts of the Polish plan. The 1st Army was to hold the bridgehead and wear the enemy down, General Władysław Sikorski's 5th Army was to strike from the Wkra in the north, and Józef Piłsudski's strike group was to attack from the Wieprz into the Soviet flank.4
The bridgehead had to hold until that strike was ready. The historian Mirosław Szumiło calls holding it the condition for the whole Polish plan, and he places the heaviest fighting at Radzymin, 25 kilometers from the city center. Sikorski put the town at 23 kilometers from Warsaw. It was the turning point of the Polish-Soviet War, and with it of the struggle to keep the independence regained in 1918.5
Tukhachevsky's plan
For the Soviet leadership Poland was a corridor, not the goal. The Polish History Museum writes that the Bolsheviks meant to carry the revolution to Germany, and Mikhail Tukhachevsky's order of 2 July 1920 told his soldiers that the road to a world conflagration led over the corpse of White Poland. Tukhachevsky himself later insisted that the hope of a revolution in Poland had been well founded and that a victory on the Vistula would have set the continent alight.6
His directive of 10 August, printed in full in the Red Army staff's official history of 1925, ordered the 16th Army to cross the Vistula north of Warsaw on 14 August and the 3rd Army to strike toward Praga, while the 4th Army was to cross far downstream, near Włocławek. "The political situation demands the immediate and complete destruction of the enemy's manpower," it ended. Szumiło describes the same design: the main forces against Warsaw from the east, one army around it from the north.7
On the Radzymin road that meant two divisions. The 21st Rifle Division belonged to Vladimir Lazarevich's 3rd Army, and the 27th, under Vitovt Putna, to Nikolai Sollohub's 16th Army. Both were worn out. General Aleksandr Verkhovsky later wrote that Soviet regiments before Warsaw had shrunk to 150 to 200 fighters, and the Russian historian Aleksandr Puchenkov concludes that an operation "built entirely on unbroken pressure" failed partly through the exhaustion of the troops. Putna himself later admitted a "political miscalculation" about Poland's readiness for revolution.8
The Polish 1st Army on the bridgehead
The bridgehead belonged to General Franciszek Latinik's 1st Army, part of the Northern Front of General Józef Haller. Its northeastern sector around Radzymin was held by the 11th Infantry Division. The division had been pulled out of the line in late July as worn out, the historian Mariusz Mróz writes, and was refilled with untrained volunteers and with stragglers and deserters from broken units. Its commander reported in August that the 46th and 47th Regiments had taken in 760 deserters and "a medley of recruits".9
The defenses were weak too. Trenches dug mostly by civilians were often too shallow and the wire was badly placed, Mróz writes. Sikorski, in his own account of 1928, stressed that Radzymin fell despite Polish superiority in numbers and equipment on the bridgehead, and described the 11th Division as stretched in a thin chain over almost 25 kilometers.10
Behind the line stood the front's reserves: the 1st Lithuanian-Belarusian Division, also called the 19th Infantry Division, at Marki and Struga, and General Lucjan Żeligowski's 10th Infantry Division at Jabłonna. The chief of the General Staff, General Tadeusz Rozwadowski, and Haller expected the decisive blow on the Wkra, and until the evening of 13 August no one, the historian Jan Engelgard writes, expected the battle to be decided at Radzymin.11
The Battle of Radzymin: the town falls on 13 August
On 13 August the 21st and 27th Soviet Divisions attacked Radzymin, which lay in the marshy valley of the Rządza. The 46th Infantry Regiment, strung out along the line, was "swept away", to use the Soviet phrase that Sikorski quotes. Toward evening Soviet troops held the town, and the Polish units fell back to the second and last line of the bridgehead, which ran from Nieporęt to Rembertów.12
The news shook Warsaw and the high command. Piłsudski, then preparing his strike on the Wieprz, wrote that "alarmed telegrams" reached him on 14 August: "our resistance was broken and Radzymin with its surroundings was taken by storm", and Warsaw pressed him to attack at once. Haller, Engelgard writes, issued an order at one in the morning that called the conduct of the 46th Regiment "shameful", removed its commander and sent the 19th Division to retake the town at dawn.13
14 August: counterattacks and the crisis
The 19th Division went in on 14 August and took Radzymin back around noon. The 85th Wilno Rifle Regiment led the attack. But the town could not be held for more than a few hours, and it fell again to the 27th Soviet Division. The Soviet records give the other side: the 21st Division, having taken over 300 prisoners at Radzymin and pushed ten kilometers west of it, was thrown back the same day to the eastern edge of the town.14
At three in the afternoon Haller and Latinik met Żeligowski at Jabłonna and put him in charge of a strike group of three divisions. Haller ordered an immediate attack on Radzymin. Żeligowski agreed with the commander of the 1st Lithuanian-Belarusian Division to attack only on the morning of 15 August, and, Pakuła shows, he did not tell his superiors of the change until afterward. That night, near Nieporęt, a battalion of the 29th Kaniów Rifle Regiment arrived by bus just as a Soviet attack hit the artillery massed there, and the line held.15
Żeligowski later defended the delay: his men were exhausted, his division was the last reserve before Warsaw, and, as Engelgard quotes him, Radzymin was to him a point of no importance between the two lines. The historian Mirosław Pakuła doubts the first argument, since the division had rested two days at Legionowo, and both he and Engelgard see a commander saving his division for a larger role. On the Wkra, meanwhile, Sikorski's 5th Army had gone over to the attack on 14 August, a day earlier than its commander wanted, to relieve the pressure on Warsaw. Prime Minister Wincenty Witos, Engelgard notes, also came to the front near Radzymin.16
The Battle of Ossów, 14 August
A few kilometers south of Radzymin, the Soviet 79th Rifle Brigade of the 27th Division attacked on 13 and 14 August toward Wołomin and toward Leśniakowizna and Ossów. Facing it near Ossów stood the 36th Infantry Regiment of the Academic Legion, the 33rd Regiment and, from the night of 13 August, the I Battalion of the volunteer 236th Infantry Regiment, mostly schoolboys and students from Warsaw.17
Before dawn on 14 August firing from Leśniakowizna woke the volunteers. The first Polish companies were driven back, Soviet riflemen broke into the eastern end of Ossów, and the volunteer battalion was sent in. Its young soldiers suffered very heavy losses, the regiment's history of 1931 records, and its commander, Stanisław Matarewicz, was killed. Around eleven Colonel Burhardt threw a reserve battalion of the 13th Regiment against the flank of the Soviet attack between Ossów and Leśniakowizna, and after hand-to-hand fighting the Soviets were driven out by the afternoon.18
In tactical terms, Margerita Szulińska writes, the fight at Wołomin mattered more, but tradition made Ossów the turning point. The historian Bartłomiej Kluska calls it a small, chaotic action fought without reconnaissance, yet the first defeat of the Red Army on the bridgehead, and the Polish Army Museum describes it the same way. Its weight was moral: volunteers who had never been under fire held.19
Father Ignacy Skorupka: what the sources say, and the legend
The volunteers' chaplain was Father Ignacy Skorupka, a Warsaw priest born in 1893 who had taught many of them. In July 1920 he asked to serve at the front, first refused by Cardinal Aleksander Kakowski, then posted to the Praga garrison, and on 7 August he became chaplain of the battalion. He marched out with it on 13 August on foot, in his cassock, with a stole and a cross.20
On 14 August he was shot in the head early in the counterattack. That much the sources share. The legend began at once. The General Staff's communiqué of 16 August praised his "heroic death" leading the attacking units "in his stole and with a cross in his hand", the war correspondent Adam Grzymała-Siedlecki pictured him striding ahead with the crucifix raised, and the regiment's history of 1931 still has him urging the battalion on "cross in hand".21
His company commander, Second Lieutenant Mieczysław Słowikowski, remembered something quieter. Skorupka walked beside him at the head of the skirmish line, and as they broke into a run "it seemed to me that Father Skorupka had stumbled on a furrow and fallen". Słowikowski found the body only after the fight. The historian Władysław Pobóg-Malinowski wrote that a stray bullet hit the priest as he bent over a badly wounded soldier, and the Radzymin museum's curator Grzegorz Kuba gives the same version.22
Kluska shows how the story served a purpose. Journalists and the first biography had him lead the charge, and in 1930 Jerzy Kossak painted him praying at the center of his Miracle on the Vistula, with the Virgin Mary sending winged hussars into the fight: the "miracle" reading favored by National Democratic writers hostile to Piłsudski. The version of a priest killed while giving the last rites, Kluska notes, fitted that reading too. Paweł Zaborowski adds that the body brought back to Warsaw also bore bayonet wounds. Skorupka was buried at Powązki on 17 August, and Haller read Piłsudski's order awarding him the Silver Cross of the Virtuti Militari.23
15 August: Radzymin retaken
Żeligowski's attack began before dawn on 15 August. The I Battalion of the 28th Kaniów Rifle Regiment, marching on Wólka Radzymińska, ran into Soviet troops at Zamostki Wólczyńskie, and its commander, Lieutenant Stefan Pogonowski, was mortally wounded in the firing. The battalion still took Wólka Radzymińska that morning. In Pakuła's reconstruction from the participants' accounts, Pogonowski's deputy, Lieutenant Jerzy Boski, led the attack and took the village at about 6:30, and the press of 1920 wrongly credited the victory to Pogonowski. That legend has hidden both Boski and the earlier capture of nearby Dąbkowizna.24
On the main road the 1st Lithuanian-Belarusian Division attacked Radzymin again that morning. Its 85th Wilno Rifles, with three Polish tanks in Jan Wnuk's account, broke into the town before noon, but the attacks on either side stalled and the regiment was forced out again around one in the afternoon.25
By three in the afternoon the 28th and 29th Regiments held Mokre, north of Radzymin, and Latinik, Engelgard writes, demanded that all three divisions of the 1st Army attack the town at once. In the end the 30th Kaniów Rifle Regiment of Lieutenant Colonel Kazimierz Jacynik settled it: its mounted scouts rode into the center unopposed, Jacynik guessed that the enemy was leaving, and before seven in the evening he sent in two companies. By ten the whole town was in Polish hands, at a cost to the regiment of two wounded, in Janusz Odziemkowski's account.26
Pakuła and the Masovian Voivode's office both place the final recapture in the evening, and the Polish Army Museum dates it to 15 August. Fighting around Mokre went on through Soviet counterattacks on 16 August, and the sector fell quiet only on 17 August. That afternoon, Piłsudski later read in Putna's own memoir, the 27th Division was ordered back to the Liwiec, and it left Radzymin at midnight without being pursued.27
The town paid for its three days in Soviet hands. Retreating troops looted shops and houses, and on 15 August, as the 85th Wilno Rifles fell back, Soviet soldiers seized the curate Father Andrzej Rudzki and the head of the local school, Dominik Rusiniak, on the market square. They were taken away and never seen again.28
Who won the battles of Radzymin and Ossów, and why it mattered
Radzymin and Ossów were a Polish victory. The 1st Army lost the town on 13 August but held its second line, threw back the Soviet brigade at Ossów on 14 August and retook Radzymin on the evening of 15 August. The bridgehead held, and on 16 August Piłsudski's strike group attacked from the Wieprz into the flank and rear of Tukhachevsky's armies.29
Historians still argue how much the fight mattered. Engelgard, who credits Rozwadowski and Haller with the victory, calls Radzymin the decisive place of the battle, psychologically and militarily: its recapture told the army and the capital that Warsaw would not fall. He also reports the dissent of Lech Wyszczelski, who sees no rational ground for calling 15 August a great turning point. Piłsudski himself had told his generals on 12 August that Warsaw, with ten and a half divisions and its artillery and aircraft, could stop the enemy fairly easily.30
Losses at Radzymin and Ossów
Radzymin cost the Polish army more than any other sector of the bridgehead. Władysław Kolatorski, citing the official Polish study of 1934, counts over 300 killed and about 2,700 wounded or missing there, more than 60 percent of all the 1st Army's losses. The Masovian Voivode's office gives 316 killed, 1,177 wounded and 1,329 missing for the 10th, 11th and 1st Lithuanian-Belarusian Divisions.31
There is no reliable count for Ossów. The regiment's history of 1931 speaks of enormous losses among the volunteers, and Kluska estimates that about 600 Polish soldiers were killed, wounded or missing there. Soviet losses at Radzymin and Ossów are not known either.32
Cemeteries, museums and memory
Radzymin's Cemetery of the Fallen in the Battle of Warsaw was laid out in 1920, two kilometers from the town center, with two large mass graves of unknown soldiers along the main avenue and fraternal graves of the Kaniów Rifles. Its chapel of 1927 holds plaques with the names of the fallen, Pogonowski among them. The cemetery's records were destroyed in 1944, and no full list of the dead was ever published. Pope John Paul II prayed there on 13 June 1999.33
Radzymin also has the Museum of the Battle of Warsaw 1920, a branch of the Museum of Independence in Warsaw, set up for the centenary near the cemetery. At Ossów the fallen lie in a war cemetery in the woods, where a monument was unveiled in 1924 and a chapel of Our Lady of Victory stands. Szulińska counts nine mass graves there, and the IPN, which restored them for the centenary, eight mass graves and one single grave. A large wooden cross marks the place where Skorupka fell, and a Polish Army Museum branch, also called the Museum of the Battle of Warsaw 1920, now stands on the battlefield.34
Between the wars the anniversary became Soldier's Day, set by an order of 4 August 1923, as Jolanta Załęczny shows, and the recapture of Radzymin became one of its symbols. The act of 30 July 1992 made 15 August Polish Armed Forces Day. Every 15 August a procession at Ossów goes from Skorupka's cross to the cemetery of the fallen.35
Radzymin and Ossów belong with the battles that won Polish independence. In the same days the city of Płock held off Soviet cavalry in the defense of Płock, and a month later Tukhachevsky's rebuilt armies were beaten again in the Battle of the Niemen.
