World War II › Special Units › Invasion of Poland
Special Units · Invasion of Poland, 1939
The Volhynian Cavalry Brigade
Fighting on foot, with antitank guns and an armored train beside them, a cavalry brigade from eastern Poland held the 4th Panzer Division at Mokra through the first day of the war.
- Polish Army · Army Łódź
- Mokra, north of Kłobuck
- 1–23 September 1939
A brigade from Volhynia
The Volhynian Cavalry Brigade (Wołyńska Brygada Kawalerii) came from Volhynia, in the east of interwar Poland. It went to war with three uhlan regiments, the 12th Podolian, the 19th and the 21st, the 2nd Mounted Rifles, the 2nd Horse Artillery Battalion and the 21st Armored Battalion of TKS tankettes (Chapter 3).
A Polish cavalry brigade of 1939 was mobile infantry that rode to battle and fought on foot. Its weapons were the 37 mm Bofors antitank gun, 75 mm horse artillery, machine guns, tankettes and the wz. 35 antitank rifle, a weapon so secret that it was issued in sealed crates. The men carried sabers and still trained for the mounted charge, but they used it only against infantry or cavalry caught in the open.
Its commander from June 1939 was Col. Julian Filipowicz, born in Lwów in 1895, a veteran of the Polish Legions and of the wars of 1918–1920 who held the Gold and Silver Crosses of the Virtuti Militari. In the Polish deployment under Plan West the brigade held the right wing of Army Łódź under Gen. Juliusz Rómmel, north of Kłobuck and northwest of Częstochowa, about 40 km southeast of Wieluń. Its sector lay squarely across the path of the German Tenth Army’s main thrust.
The ground at Mokra
Facing the brigade was the 4th Panzer Division under Gen. Georg-Hans Reinhardt, part of Gen. Erich Hoepner’s XVI Corps, with the 1st Panzer Division on its right. The brigade dug in around the villages of Mokra, Wilkowiecko and Izbiska, with its regiments in line along a railway embankment and in woods and farmsteads, and its antitank guns placed to fire into the flanks of anything crossing the open fields.
The ground suited the weapons. The German army of 1939 was not the all-mechanized force of legend, and its panzer divisions were built around light tanks: more than three-quarters of the German tanks in Poland were Panzer Is and IIs, the first armed only with machine guns. At the range of a farm field, the 37 mm Bofors and the wz. 35 rifle could go through their thin armor (Chapter 3).
1 September
German motorcycle reconnaissance troops made contact at about 06:30. From 08:00 the Germans attacked the 19th Uhlans, and around 10:00 the brigade’s northern flank. The Poles fought dismounted. The antitank guns and rifles did most of the work, and the 75 mm horse artillery fired over open sights.
The railway gave the brigade an unusual ally. Polish armored train no. 53, Śmiały (“Bold”), ran up and down the line through the battlefield and at one point stopped in the middle of a German column, firing its two 75 mm guns and its machine guns at point-blank range. Later it engaged German tanks from about 2.5 km, beyond the effective range of their guns. A second train attacked German tanks from behind near Izbiska as they crossed the line. A train could go only where the track went, and one demolition or one bomb on the embankment could trap it; at Mokra, for one day, the geometry favored the train (Chapter 3).
Poland entered the war with ten armored trains, a weapon born in the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1920 and kept because the country had a dense railway network and too little artillery. A typical train had an armored locomotive in the middle, two or more artillery wagons with 75 mm guns and sometimes a 100 mm howitzer in turrets, an assault wagon with machine guns and a platoon of infantry, and flat cars at each end carrying rails and sleepers for repairs and to absorb mines. At Mokra the line ran through the middle of the fight, and the train could move faster along it than the German tanks could cross the fields.
In the afternoon the Germans made a frontal assault from the direction of Wilkowiecko with what Polish accounts describe as nearly 180 tanks, and broke into Mokra itself. By about 17:00 the attack had been beaten off. Some uhlans did mount and ride across the fields during the day, to change position rather than to attack tanks. Polish cavalry and German tanks met at Mokra as they met everywhere in September 1939: men on foot with guns against armor, not horsemen against steel. Far to the north, on the same evening, the 18th Pomeranian Uhlans made the mounted charge against infantry that propaganda turned into the opposite story.
Counting the cost
Losses at Mokra are uncertain. Figures compiled by the Sikorski Institute’s official history and by Joachim Neumann’s history of the 4th Panzer Division put the division’s losses at about 800 men and between 100 and 160 armored vehicles, including at least 50 tanks, many of them later recovered. Those vehicle figures come largely from Polish accounts and divisional histories and count tanks that were knocked out and repaired; across the whole campaign about 236 German tanks were total write-offs. The Volhynian Brigade lost about 500 men killed and wounded and some 300 horses (Chapter 3; FAQ).
Overnight Filipowicz learned that the 1st Panzer Division had taken Kłobuck on his flank, and he pulled the brigade back about 12 km. Mokra did not change the course of the campaign. Its importance lay in what it showed: well-handled Polish troops with modern antitank weapons could stop German armor, and the panzer divisions of 1939 were vulnerable. The difficulty was that the Polish army had too few such weapons, too little artillery and almost no reserves to exploit a success. North of the brigade the Germans found the seams between Polish formations. The Kraków Cavalry Brigade fell back by 2 September, the 7th Infantry Division was surrounded and destroyed near Częstochowa on 3 September, and through that gap the Tenth Army’s armor drove toward Radomsko and Piotrków.
Piotrków, Tomaszów and the underground
Elements of the brigade fought again at Piotrków Trybunalski, where units of Army Łódź under Gen. Wiktor Thommée, with the 7TP tanks of the 2nd Light Tank Battalion, joined the northern group of Army Prusy. On 5 September the 1st Panzer Division broke the Polish line and was in the city by evening, and the road to Warsaw lay open (Chapter 3). The 4th Panzer Division, the brigade’s opponent at Mokra, reached the southwestern edge of Warsaw on 8 September (Chapter 6).
The brigade went on to the battles around Tomaszów Lubelski in the second half of September, where the last Polish armies south of Warsaw tried and failed to break through the German ring (Chapter 8). On 23 September Filipowicz disbanded its remnants. He made his way to Warsaw and joined the underground. Twice arrested by the Gestapo, he escaped from Pawiak prison in 1940, became a brigadier general of the Home Army in 1942, and died of illness in Otwock on 14 August 1945.
The battlefield north of Kłobuck has memorials to the Volhynian Cavalry Brigade and is the site of anniversary reenactments (Chapter 3).
The insignia, rendered
Illustration Original insignia-style artwork made for the Lake Norman Brief. It is not the unit’s official emblem.
Timeline
- Col. Julian Filipowicz takes command of the brigade.
- German motorcycle reconnaissance troops make contact near Mokra.
- The 4th Panzer Division attacks the 19th Uhlans, then the brigade’s northern flank.
- Armored train no. 53 Śmiały fires into a German column at point-blank range.
- A frontal assault from Wilkowiecko, by Polish accounts with nearly 180 tanks, breaks into Mokra.
- The German attack is beaten off.
- With Kłobuck lost on his flank, Filipowicz pulls the brigade back about 12 km.
- Elements fight at Piotrków Trybunalski; the 1st Panzer Division takes the city that evening.
- The brigade fights in the battles around Tomaszów Lubelski.
- Filipowicz disbands the remnants and goes to Warsaw and the underground.
People of the unit
Read the full story
- Chapter 3: The Frontier Battles: Wieluń, Mokra, Mława, Krojanty and the Corridor
- Chapter 6: The Bzura and the Siege of Warsaw
- 17 September: The Soviet Invasion and the Last Battles (Chapter 8)
- Invasion of Poland: questions readers ask
- The Invasion of Poland collection and atlas
By the numbers
The Volhynian Cavalry Brigade by the numbers
Mokra, 1 September 1939: the human cost
Approximate losses on both sides in one day of fighting. All figures are estimates.
Source: Polskie Siły Zbrojne w drugiej wojnie światowej, vol. 1 (Sikorski Institute) and Joachim Neumann’s history of the 4th Panzer Division, as summarized in Wikipedia, “Battle of Mokra”; Chapter 3 of this collection.
German armor knocked out at Mokra
Vehicles knocked out at Mokra, many of them later recovered and repaired, against German tanks totally written off in the whole Polish campaign. The Mokra figures come largely from Polish accounts and divisional histories.
Source: Polskie Siły Zbrojne w drugiej wojnie światowej, vol. 1 (Sikorski Institute) and Joachim Neumann’s history of the 4th Panzer Division, as summarized in Wikipedia, “Battle of Mokra”; Chapter 3 of this collection.
In pictures
More photographs
In the art of World War II
Insignia, posters and art
.jpg){kind=link}
Sources
- Polskie Siły Zbrojne w drugiej wojnie światowej, vol. 1, Kampania wrześniowa 1939 (Sikorski Institute, London), and Joachim Neumann’s history of the 4th Panzer Division, as summarized in Wikipedia, “Battle of Mokra.”
- Steven J. Zaloga, Poland 1939: The Birth of Blitzkrieg (Osprey, 2002); Robert Forczyk, Case White: The Invasion of Poland 1939 (Osprey, 2019).
- Roger Moorhouse, First to Fight: The Polish War 1939 (2019); Halik Kochanski, The Eagle Unbowed (2012).
- Panzerworld, “Poland 1939: Tank Strength” (after Thomas L. Jentz, Panzertruppen, vol. 1, 1996).
- Wikipedia: “Battle of Mokra,” “Volhynian Cavalry Brigade,” “Julian Filipowicz,” “Battle of Piotrków Trybunalski,” “Battle of Tomaszów Lubelski,” “Kraków Army.”