The Battle of Mokra, 1939: Polish cavalry against German tanks

Shortly before eight on the first morning of World War II, the tanks of a German panzer division came up against a Polish cavalry brigade dug in around a village north of Częstochowa. The cavalrymen did not charge them. They had left their horses in the woods, and they waited behind anti-tank guns. Four times between morning and late afternoon the Germans attacked, and four times the line held.⁴

Background: the gap between two armies

The German plan for the invasion of Poland sent the XVI Corps of General Erich Hoepner, with the 1st and 4th Panzer Divisions, into the junction between two Polish armies, the Łódź Army and the Kraków Army. Once through, the armor was to swing onto the roads to Warsaw. The 4th Panzer Division advanced on the left of this thrust, north of Kłobuck.⁵

Guarding exactly that junction was the Volhynian Cavalry Brigade. It covered the southern wing of the Łódź Army and kept contact with the Kraków Army in the area of Miedźno and Mokra, a large village in flat country about 23 kilometers northwest of Częstochowa and 5 kilometers from Kłobuck. John Dunn, writing for HistoryNet, calls it a key position.⁶

The Germans crossed the border river, the Liswarta, before five in the morning. The Polish 7th Infantry Division had blown the bridges at Krzepice, which held up the tanks for a while, but the motorized columns found other crossings and pushed on east toward the brigade.⁷

Armies and commanders

Colonel Julian Filipowicz was a cavalryman of the Polish Legions of World War I who had fought through the war of 1920 and taken command of the Volhynian Cavalry Brigade only in June 1939.⁸

He set his brigade facing west among the woods around a wide forest clearing. The 21st Vistula Uhlans held the open gap that led onto the clearing, the most obvious road for tanks; the 19th Volhynian Uhlans held the right, and an infantry battalion the left. The 12th Podolian Uhlans and the 2nd Mounted Rifles stood in reserve, with the horse artillery and a small armored battalion of tankettes and armored cars. Behind the whole position ran the railway line, partly on a high embankment.⁹

The guns were hidden and ranged on their targets in advance. The anti-tank weapons were modern: the 37 mm wz. 36 gun, built under a Bofors license, and the wz. 35 anti-tank rifle. Both would prove themselves in the coming fight. Counts of the brigade differ. Stanisław Piwowarski puts it at about 6,000 men, nearly 4,000 of them in the firing line, while the monthly Historia Do Rzeczy gives over 7,000 on paper but only some 2,000 available for the fight, 500 of whom had to hold the horses.¹⁰

Against them came the 4th Panzer Division of Generalmajor Georg-Hans Reinhardt, a formation of more than 13,000 men. Polska Zbrojna, the magazine of the Polish armed forces, credits it with 341 tanks and about 90 armored cars; Piwowarski gives 324 tanks. Many of them were light Panzer I and II models.¹¹

The defenders also had a card the Germans did not expect. Armored train No. 53, named Śmiały, “Bold”, moved along the railway behind the brigade, ready to bring its guns to bear wherever the line was threatened.¹²

The battle in phases

The first attacks. Around eight the German advance guard ran into the Polish line and tried to break it on the move. The attack was beaten off, and both Robert Forczyk, a former US Army officer who wrote a history of the invasion, and Historia Do Rzeczy count four German tanks lost in this first clash.¹³

The outflanking move. At about ten the Germans attacked again, now after an artillery barrage and dive bomber strikes, and with part of the division they tried to work around the brigade from the north. Filipowicz fed his reserves into the fight.¹⁴

The train. Then the armored train came into action. Firing from the high railway embankment, Śmiały struck the German tanks and helped drive them back. Andrzej Wesołowski of the Central Military Archives singles it out for supporting the uhlans and mounted riflemen at the culminating moment of the fight.¹⁵

The noon assault. Around midday came the heaviest blow. A mass of tanks drove through the gap between the forests onto the positions of the 21st Uhlans' 4th Squadron and broke through onto the clearing where the Polish artillery stood. The sources disagree on the numbers: Historia Do Rzeczy writes of 80 to 100 tanks, Polska Zbrojna of almost 200 German tanks crowded into a clearing two kilometers across. The duel between the tanks and the Polish guns cost both sides dearly, and in the end the cavalrymen and gunners stabilized their line on the railway, where the attack ran out of strength.¹⁶

Turning point: the line of the railway

The last great attack came in the afternoon, again after a bombardment from the air and from the guns. Again the railway saved the brigade: a second armored train had joined Śmiały, and the two of them struck the Germans. In the center Filipowicz threw in his last reserve, the tankettes and armored cars, which with the anti-tank guns of the 2nd Mounted Rifles forced the Germans back.¹⁷

How the day ended depends on whose account you read. Polish accounts say the line on the railway held and the brigade withdrew in good order at dusk, on orders, leaving about a hundred knocked out or immobilized German tanks and vehicles on the fields. Forczyk writes that the 4th Panzer Division took Mokra and forced the brigade back by five o'clock but could not pursue it. In his view the day was a German tactical success, but a costly one, because Reinhardt tried to force a fortified position by brute strength with thinly armored tanks instead of maneuvering around it.¹⁸

Aftermath

The brigade paid heavily. The usual Polish figure is about 500 killed, wounded and missing, with five guns and several hundred horses lost; Polska Zbrojna gives 530 men, among them 27 officers, five guns, four anti-tank guns and about 300 horses.¹⁹

German losses are far less certain. Counts of tanks knocked out run from 40 to 50 (Historia Do Rzeczy, which adds that many were later repaired) and at least 50 (Polska Zbrojna) to 62, of which 24 were total losses, by Forczyk's count, and about 70 in the PAP report on the battle. Estimates of German dead and wounded range from several hundred to over a thousand. Piwowarski cites a German estimate that over the two days of fighting at Mokra and Ostrowy the division lost about 170 vehicles, 75 of them tanks.²⁰

The fight was not over. During the night the brigade fell back to a delaying position at Ostrowy, where on 2 September it beat off further attacks, and that evening it was ordered into the reserve of Operational Group Piotrków. In the night of 2 to 3 September the 2nd Mounted Rifles raided the Germans near Kamieńsk.²¹

Filipowicz led the brigade through the rest of the September Campaign, all the way to the battle of Tomaszów Lubelski. He then joined the underground, was promoted to brigadier general in 1942, and, worn down by tuberculosis, died in Otwock on 14 August 1945.²² › Battle of Kock, 1939

Legacy and memory

For Andrzej Wesołowski, co-author of the study Mokra Działoszyn 1939, the two days at Mokra and Ostrowy are a golden page in the history of Polish cavalry, not because of any spectacular charge but because the regiments knew how to block and delay a far stronger enemy.²³

The world remembers a different picture: Polish uhlans galloping at tanks with lances. That story most likely grew out of another fight on the same day, at Krojanty in Pomerania. Late on 1 September the 18th Pomeranian Uhlans under Colonel Kazimierz Mastalerz charged a German infantry battalion that was not ready for battle and scattered it, until hidden German armored cars opened fire with machine guns. Mastalerz was killed. There were no tanks on that field, and the regiment had done its job by holding up the German advance.²⁴

By the time German and Italian war correspondents reached Krojanty, German tanks had arrived, and the dead men and horses lying near them were turned into a tale of lances against armor. Heinz Guderian repeated it in his memoirs, and the historian Juliusz Tym notes that Soviet and communist Polish propaganda later took it up too.²⁵

Mokra is the answer to that legend: disciplined cavalrymen, fighting as infantry with modern weapons, showed on the first day of the war that German armor could be stopped. It is one of the best known battles of the September Campaign, and in Poland it is remembered with the defense of Westerplatte, the bunkers of Mława and Wizna and the great battle on the Bzura.²⁶ › Battle of Kałuszyn, 1939

Mokra today

Mokra lies in the commune of Miedźno, near Kłobuck in the Silesian Voivodeship, and in the village stands the Monument to the Heroes of the Battle of Mokra. Every year around 1 September the anniversary of the battle is commemorated at the monument.²⁷