Qualla: Battle of Komarow

Battle of Komarow: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lonio17, CC BY-SA 3.0. The horses were tired. Both sides had been moving for weeks across the worn fields and dirt roads of what is now eastern Poland and western Ukraine, and now, on the last day of August 1920, two of the largest cavalry forces ever assembled in Europe were about to crash into each other near a village named Wolica Sniatycka. Semyon Budyonny's Konarmiya - the First Cavalry Army of the Bolsheviks - had been ordered north to relieve pressure on the Soviet armies that had just lost Warsaw. Polish cavalry under Juliusz Rommel was waiting. What followed has been called the largest cavalry battle of the twentieth century, and it decided something larger than its participants probably understood at the time. If Budyonny's horsemen had broken through, the Soviet revolution might have ridden west across Galicia into the rubble of post-war central Europe. They did not break through.

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Image: Lonio17 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Battle of Komarow: After the miracle

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roch Mściwój, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Polish-Soviet War had reached its climax three weeks earlier outside Warsaw, where Pilsudski's counterattack had shattered Tukhachevsky's Western Army in what Polish memory still calls the Miracle on the Vistula. Tukhachevsky now needed Budyonny to draw Polish forces south, a...

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Image: Roch Mściwój | CC BY-SA 4.0

Battle of Komarow: Hill 255

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roch Mściwój, CC BY-SA 4.0. Just before dawn on 31 August, the 200-man Second Regiment of Grochow Uhlans took an unoccupied rise of ground called Hill 255, north of the main Polish line. Within minutes they had spotted a disorganized Bolshevik tabor - a wagon train tangled with cavalry on the road below - a...

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Image: Roch Mściwój | CC BY-SA 4.0

Battle of Komarow: Sabres in the long evening

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Loraine, CC BY-SA 4.0. The decisive clash came at the close of the day. Budyonny's 6th Cavalry Division - his strongest unit, six regiments of horsemen who had ridden across half of Russia and Ukraine - finally broke out of a Polish encirclement and reached the field. Rommel ordered everything he had i...

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Image: Loraine | CC BY-SA 4.0

Battle of Komarow: What the dead bought

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Polish losses came to about five hundred men killed and seven hundred horses; Soviet losses were never officially counted but were certainly higher. By the standards of the world war that had ended only two years before, Komarow was not a large battle. But it was decisive. Budyon...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0