Battle of Ławica, 1919: how Polish insurgents captured an air force

The capture of Ławica was one of the shortest actions of the Greater Poland Uprising and one of the most valuable: the aircraft and stores the insurgents took became the foundation of the reborn Polish state's military aviation.²

Who won the Battle of Ławica and why?

The Polish insurgents won. They attacked the station with infantry, cavalry and two field guns, and fired their guns sparingly so as not to wreck the aircraft they had come for. The German garrison surrendered within about twenty minutes.³

Background: an uprising in Poznań

At the end of 1918 Germany had lost the war, but the province of Posen, the historic heart of Greater Poland, was still German territory. On 26 December Ignacy Jan Paderewski arrived in Poznań. During his visit, on the afternoon of 27 December, German soldiers of the 6th Grenadier Regiment marched through the city tearing down Polish and Allied flags, and shooting broke out. The Greater Poland Uprising had begun.⁴

The fighting spread quickly. Within days most of Poznań and its surroundings were in Polish hands. Only one German force near the city could still threaten it: the air station at Ławica, on the western outskirts.⁵

The air station at Ławica

The military airfield at Ławica had opened in 1913, and Emperor Wilhelm II attended its official inauguration. At the end of 1918 it was the home of the German 4th Reserve Aviation Detachment, by Głuszek's count about 200 men; during the war, he writes, it was not an operational base but a school and workshop: pilots, observers and mechanics were trained there, and aircraft were repaired.⁶

Its real value lay in its stores. In the great airship hall at Winiary, in Poznań, the Germans kept some two hundred more aircraft in parts, and the aerial bombs for Ławica were stored in nearby Fort VII. The Poles feared that the Germans would use the aircraft to bomb the city.⁷

Polish soldiers served among the German staff of the station. One of them, the pilot Sergeant Wiktor Pniewski, built a conspiracy inside the unit on the orders of the Polish Military Organization, and the Poles knew what the station held and where. This knowledge would shape the attack.⁸

The decision and the ultimatum

On 5 January 1919, Głuszek writes, the Poles demanded the station's surrender. The German commandant, Lieutenant Fischer, refused and threatened to blow up the nearby fort full of aerial bombs if the airfield was attacked. The insurgent command then decided to take the station by force.⁹

The assault group was put under Second Lieutenant Andrzej Kopa. It was built around three companies of the 1st Poznań battalion of the Guard and Security Service, with a platoon of mounted riflemen under Second Lieutenant Kazimierz Ciążyński, a detachment of the Polish Military Organization, a medical team and a battery of two field guns. The figures differ: Paweł Głuszek of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) counts 300 infantry and 50 horsemen, and the ZPE education platform of the Ministry of Education puts the whole force at no more than 400 men. Głuszek gives the guns as 77 mm pieces, ZPE as 80 mm.¹⁰

The plan relied on surprise, speed and restraint. The insurgents did not want a long fight in which the aircraft and hangars would be destroyed: they wanted the station whole. So the attack was to come at dawn, and the guns were to fire only as much as was needed.¹¹

Twenty minutes at dawn

The Polish units marched out in the night of 5 to 6 January and took up positions around the station. Before the attack, Głuszek and Nawrot write, the station's electricity and telephone lines were cut. Shortly after 6 a.m. the Poles sent the Germans a last demand for unconditional surrender, with ten minutes to answer, in Nawrot's account; Głuszek writes that the four mounted envoys who carried it were fired on and one of them was taken prisoner. No answer came.¹²

In Głuszek's account the Polish infantry advanced at about 6:30. The German machine guns opened fire, but too high, and the attackers came on. The battery fired four rounds in all, and one shell destroyed the machine gun post on the airfield's tower; the Poles held back from heavier fire so as not to damage the aircraft in the hangars.¹³

The defenders soon surrendered. The fighting had lasted about twenty minutes, and Ławica was in Polish hands.¹⁴

Counting the losses

The losses were small on both sides. One insurgent was killed and several were wounded. The Germans lost two men killed, and Głuszek counts a dozen or more wounded.¹⁵

The booty was enormous, though the figures differ with what each account counts. At the station itself the insurgents took 26 serviceable aircraft, according to Głuszek and the Polish Press Agency, among them Fokker fighters. In the airship hall at Winiary there were about 215 more airframes in parts, with observation balloons, by Głuszek's and the Press Agency's count; Głuszek notes that other sources give up to 300. The Polish Aviation Museum gives 141 aircraft captured in all.¹⁶

The value of the haul is also given in round and differing figures: about 160 million German marks according to Głuszek and Nawrot, and 200 million according to the Polish Aviation Museum and the Polish Press Agency. Głuszek and the Polish Aviation Museum call it the largest war booty in the history of Polish arms.¹⁷

Raid and counter-raid

The Germans struck back from the air. On 7 and 8 January German aircraft from the airfield at Frankfurt an der Oder bombed Ławica and the Poznań area, and people were killed.¹⁸

The Poles worked fast. German markings on the aircraft were painted over with the white and red Polish checkerboard. Machines fit to fly were soon sent on to Warsaw.¹⁹

What happened next is told in two ways. The ZPE platform, Nawrot and the replica builders Ryszard Kędzia and Tomasz Łodygowski describe a Polish retaliatory raid on the Frankfurt airfield on 9 January, led by Wiktor Pniewski. By the account of ZPE and Nawrot six pilots flew it without permission; ZPE, Kędzia and Łodygowski put the bombs dropped at 900 kilograms, and Nawrot at six 25-kilogram bombs from each aircraft. ZPE and Nawrot also write that Pniewski was reprimanded for it, and Nawrot adds that he escaped punishment. Głuszek, by contrast, writes that the Poles only threatened a raid on Frankfurt, and that it never took place.²⁰

Aftermath: the first Polish air squadrons

The captured equipment was put to use at once. Four aviation squadrons were formed from it in Greater Poland, and part of the aircraft went to Warsaw. Pilots from Poznań later flew in the Polish-Soviet war of 1920 and, the ZPE platform adds, in the fighting for Lwów.²¹

With Ławica taken, no German force was left that could threaten Poznań, and the uprising spread across the province. It went on until February. Under the armistice of Compiègne of November 1918 the Prussian partition was to remain part of Germany until the peace conference decided its fate, so that, as the IPN historian Piotr Grzelczak points out, the uprising could be treated in international law as a rebellion inside Germany.²²

That changed at Trier. On 16 February 1919, when the armistice was renewed, Marshal Ferdinand Foch made the Germans agree to stop all offensive action against the Poles and to stay behind a demarcation line, which recognized the Greater Poland front and left the insurgents in control of the territory they held. In Weimar that day the German cabinet first resolved that Germany could not give up all action against the Poles in Prussia without an Allied guarantee that the Poles would also hold their fire; pressed by the party leaders, it gave way, and the terms were signed with a note of protest, according to the record of the meeting kept by the Foreign Office official Walter Simons. The Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, returned almost all of Greater Poland to Poland.²³

Poznań became one of the centers of Polish aviation, and, by Kędzia and Łodygowski's account, the Polish Aero Club was founded there in October 1919.²⁴

Ławica itself remained an airfield. The old German station is today Poznań's civil airport, Poznań-Ławica, and every January, the Polish Press Agency reports, veterans' and aviation associations, soldiers and local officials lay flowers at the memorial to the airfield's captors beside the old terminal.²⁵

Legacy and memory

For the centenary in 2019 the Polish Motor Glider Association and Poznań University of Technology set out to build flying replicas of the Fokker fighters taken at Ławica, and Poznań marked the anniversary with an aviation picnic of historic and modern military aircraft and a reenactment of the battle.²⁶

For Poles the capture of Ławica is remembered as the birth of the Greater Poland air force, in an uprising that, unlike most Polish risings, ended in success. The Polish Aviation Museum calls the Greater Poland Uprising the only successful insurrection of its scale in Polish history.²⁷