Who won the Battle of Komarów?
Poland won the Battle of Komarów on 31 August 1920. Semyon Budyonny's Soviet 1st Cavalry Army, beaten off at Zamość by a Polish and Ukrainian garrison, was caught near Komarów by the Polish 1st Cavalry Division under Colonel Juliusz Rómmel. After a day of charges and counter-charges around Hill 255 at Wolica Śniatycka, the Soviet divisions broke and fled east. Budyonny escaped encirclement, but his army never recovered. It was the largest battle of Polish cavalry since 1813, and publications of Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) call it the last great cavalry battle.1
Late in the afternoon of 31 August 1920, on the hills east of Zamość, the 8th Uhlan Regiment came forward at a trot through the dust, with the sun setting red ahead of it. Retreating Polish riders streamed back through its squadrons. Then came the command: deploy, gallop, hurrah. The regiment hit the Soviet 6th Cavalry Division head on, and in a moment the whole enemy line turned and fled. The most feared cavalry army of the war had been broken by sabers and lances.2
After Warsaw
The Polish victory at Warsaw in mid-August 1920 sent Mikhail Tukhachevsky's Western Front reeling back to the east, but the war was not over. In the south, Budyonny's 1st Cavalry Army had failed to take Lwów and was ordered north to help Tukhachevsky; the Russian defense ministry's Military History Journal notes that the order reached Budyonny's front only on 13 August and that the handover dragged on until 20 August. The IPN historian Marek Kozubel writes that the army's plan was to break the Polish front where the 3rd and 6th Armies met, reach Krasnystaw in four days and then Lublin, falling on the rear of the Polish armies pursuing the beaten Soviet north.3
On 25 August the Cavalry Army set out from the Sokal area across the Bug toward Zamość. It was tired and worn: its own returns that day counted 1,352 commanders, 11,581 sabers, 1,554 bayonets and 51 guns, according to figures from Aleksander Smoliński cited by Kozubel. It had four cavalry divisions, the 4th, 6th, 11th and 14th, and a special-purpose cavalry brigade.4
Budyonny had already paid for Lwów. At Zadwórze on 17 August a battalion of some 330 young Lwów volunteers held his 6th Cavalry Division for eleven hours and was almost wiped out.5› Battle of Zadwórze, 1920
The defense of Zamość
Zamość stood in the way. Founded as a Renaissance fortress city by Jan Zamoyski, it had survived sieges by Cossacks and Swedes. In August 1920 its defense was entrusted to a Ukrainian, Colonel Marko Bezruchko, commander of the 6th Sich Rifle Division of the Ukrainian People's Republic, Poland's ally. Ukrainian sappers dug trenches and strung two lines of barbed wire between the marshy valleys of the Łabuńka and Topornica. The garrison counted about 3,000 Polish and Ukrainian soldiers by the IPN's count (about 3,500 according to the historian Waldemar Maziarczyk): the Polish 31st Kaniów Rifle Regiment, Ukrainian units, artillery and three armored trains. Who really led the defense is disputed: Captain Mikołaj Bołtuć of the 31st Regiment later claimed the leading role, and Maziarczyk writes that Bezruchko left the decisions to him; Kozubel and Waldemar Rezmer judge that Bołtuć overstated his part, and Kozubel cites 3rd Army orders that placed every unit in the town under Bezruchko.6
From 29 to 31 August the Soviets attacked the city again and again. Rain softened the ground and delayed the main assault until the evening of 30 August. The first charges, made on horseback, collapsed under machine-gun fire on the wire. Near midnight, Kozubel writes, the 6th Cavalry Division broke through at Janowice and seized the bridge over the Łabuńka, causing panic in the town, but reserves drove the raiders out within hours; Maziarczyk writes that the cavalry never broke the lines. Zamość held. About 250 defenders were killed or wounded. Jan Kołaczkowski, the owner of nearby Łabuńki, wrote from Zamość on 2 September that the Bolsheviks had been driven out of his estate two days before and that he had found the manor wrecked.7
The three days at Zamość gave the Poles time to close a ring. General Władysław Sikorski, now commanding the 3rd Army, ordered infantry to push in from the west and north while General Stanisław Haller's Pursuit Group, the 1st Cavalry Division and the 13th Infantry Division, came up from the south to cut off Budyonny's retreat across the Huczwa.8
Armies and commanders
The 1st Cavalry Division was led by Colonel Juliusz Rómmel. Its 6th Brigade under Colonel Konstanty Plisowski had the 1st Krechowce, 12th Podolian and 14th Jazłowiec Uhlans; its 7th Brigade under Colonel Henryk Brzezowski had the 2nd Rokitna Light Horse and the 8th and 9th Uhlans, each brigade with its horse artillery. The 12th Uhlans were commanded by Captain Tadeusz Komorowski, the future commander of the Home Army.9
Attached to the division was a volunteer assault battalion that Lieutenant Stanisław Maczek had formed that August; the IPN historian Jerzy Kirszak puts it at about 400 men, riding into battle on horse-drawn farm wagons with six to eight riflemen in each. Maczek would later command the 1st Armored Division in Normandy.10
How many men fought is disputed. The IPN infographic counts about 5,600 Polish cavalrymen; a PAP summary of the battle gives about 7,500 men for the whole Polish group, and another PAP report only about 1,500 Polish soldiers against more than 6,000 Soviets. In all, some 21 cavalry regiments took part, six of them Polish.11
Morning: Hill 255
By the morning of 31 August Budyonny knew he was trapped. He left two divisions to hold the Poles at Zamość and sent the 11th Division and the special brigade toward Komarów to open a road east. Fighting began early in the morning at Wolica Śniatycka, on the western edge of the Komarów marshes. The Museum of Polish History's account has it open around seven with a Soviet blow at the Polish right, held by the 7th Brigade; Kozubel and the historian Daniel Koreś write that the 7th Brigade attacked first, without waiting for the rest of the division: on Haller's order according to Koreś, on Rómmel's according to Kozubel.12
The key was Hill 255, the best observation point for miles around. From it, Brzezowski later wrote, Niewirków, Miączyn, Koniuchy and the road to Werbkowice lay spread out like a map. The 7th Brigade took the hill and broke the Soviet line, and the Soviets fell back to a line from Cześniki to Niewirków. Budyonny threw in Iosif Apanasenko's 6th Cavalry Division. For hours the Soviet squadrons charged the isolated brigade again and again, and the Poles answered with countercharges, horse artillery and machine guns. In the confusion Polish fire also hit the 9th Uhlans.13
Midday: Niewirków
Around ten Rómmel reached the field, saw that the 7th Brigade was bleeding white and sent part of the 6th Brigade to help; Plisowski's regiments threw the Soviets back. At noon it looked as if the Cavalry Army had been beaten and bottled up. Then Rómmel learned that the rest of the Soviet force was slipping away toward Hrubieszów through Niewirków. Ignoring Haller's order to keep attacking toward Cześniki, he sent the 6th Brigade to Niewirków. The blow came so suddenly that Budyonny and his staff, who were nearby, had to flee, first to Miączyn and then, when Polish infantry attacked that village too, into a forest.14
Evening: the charge of the 8th Uhlans
In the afternoon the Soviet 4th and 6th Divisions arrived from Zamość. Rómmel ordered the exhausted 7th Brigade back into the fight, but a dispute in his staff delayed the order and it reached Brzezowski only around five. On its way the brigade was struck by the 6th Division. Brzezowski later wrote that the odds were one to ten: if the Poles failed, they would lose all their artillery and end in the marshes around them.15
The 2nd Light Horse and the 8th and 9th Uhlans refused to give ground and countercharged again and again. Then Captain Kornel Krzeczunowicz led the 8th Uhlans into the charge that decided the battle. The Soviet riders answered with a ragged pistol volley, turned and fled, and the whole 6th Division galloped off the field toward Cześniki. Behind it the 1st Krechowce Uhlans arrived at a steady gallop, followed by the 14th and the 12th, and Hill 255 and the ground before it passed into Polish hands.16
Krzeczunowicz later reckoned that about 80 squadrons had fought there, hand to hand, for almost three hours. He knew of only one fight to compare it with since Napoleon: Murat's cavalry battle at Liebertwolkwitz in October 1813.17
The escape
The Polish cavalry, worn out and with dusk falling, could not pursue. In the following days Budyonny turned his beaten army toward Grabowiec, Werbkowice and Hrubieszów. On 1 and 2 September his divisions hit the Polish 4th and 24th Infantry Regiments, surrounded them and took heavy toll, and broke through at the Werbkowice crossing. Kozubel blames above all the commander of the 2nd Legions Infantry Division, Colonel Michał Żymierski, who was away from his headquarters when the Soviets broke out. Once again, the IPN notes, the Cavalry Army had avoided destruction. Budyonny's own memoirs, quoted in the Russian Military History Journal, tell these days as a breakout from encirclement in which his divisions took up to 1,000 prisoners and the Poles lost some 700 killed and wounded and over 2,000 prisoners on 1 September alone.18
Aftermath
Komarów did not destroy the Cavalry Army, but it finished it as a fighting force. Between 25 August and 20 September it lost at least 1,268 men by Smoliński's count; working from the army's own records, Smoliński also rejects the figure of 1,500 Soviet dead at Komarów found in some Polish accounts. The army was later withdrawn from the front, and the IPN judges that it no longer posed any serious threat to Poland. Russian scholarship, too, treats the defeat at Zamość, as it calls the fighting of 31 August to 2 September, as the turning point after which the army was sent into reserve.19
Three weeks later Piłsudski's armies beat Tukhachevsky again on the Niemen, in a battle that began on 20 September. An armistice was signed at Riga on 12 October 1920, with fighting to stop by 18 October, and the Treaty of Riga of 18 March 1921 fixed the border that lasted until 1939.20› Battle of the Niemen, 1920
Memory
Komarów was the largest battle of Polish cavalry since Leipzig in 1813, and historians and soldiers of the interwar years counted it among the great victories of horsed cavalry. Its veterans planned a monument as early as 1936. After 1939 the German occupiers banned commemorations of the Polish army, and communist Poland passed over the whole war of 1920 in silence. The memory revived in the 21st century: an association named for the battle was founded in 2006 to stage reenactments and raise money, and 31 August is now marked as Polish Cavalry Day.21
On 28 August 2022 the Monument to the Glory of the Cavalry and Horse Artillery was unveiled at Wolica Śniatycka, on the ridge of Hill 255, about 15 km east of Zamość: hussar wings 19.5 meters tall form an arch through which three bronze riders charge east. A monument in Komarów and a mound with a cross at Wolica Śniatycka also mark the battle, which Jerzy Kossak painted between the wars. Marko Bezruchko, the defender of Zamość, died in Warsaw in 1944 and is buried in the Orthodox cemetery in Wola.22
For the wider war, see the Battle of Warsaw; for the place of Komarów among the great mounted battles, see the largest cavalry battles in history.
