Stanislaw Maczek - Part 1 - The Early Years and World War 1 (1892-1918)

For me, one of the pleasures of historical research is the opportunity to experience things vicariously through those who were more talented, better equipped or just happened to be in the right place at the right time (depending on your point of view this can obviously also be read as witless, poorly equipped or just in the wrong place at the wrong time) and to be able to put myself into their shoes and question whether I would have made the same choices.  It’s a fascinating roleplay scenario.

History is replete with examples of individuals who go above and beyond the call of duty and sacrifice everything for the greater good and of course war also brings out diametrically opposed human traits as well. Doing research around a particular subject always opens the possibility of finding one of these individuals that history has largely forgotten.

We all know the names of people like Wellington, Nelson, Manstein, Napoleon and Alexander the Great but how much do we know of the second tier personalities such as Picton, Hardy, Guderian, Davout and Parmenio? 

We know them by the reflected glory of their superiors.  What then of the individuals on the ground such as Martin Poppel, Guy Sajer, Dick Winter, Primo Levi and Hubal?

Where Poland is concerned who are her heroes? General Juliusz Rommel? Nope, he abandoned his army in 1939 and bailed back to Warsaw. Sosabowski? You may know a little about him. He was a Regimental commander in 1939 and ended up commanding the Polish Parachute Brigade in Market Garden '44.  Hubal (Major Henryk Dabrowski)? Grot (Stefan Rowecki)?  These two are names that really will echo through the ages for those initiated into Polish history but perhaps the most well-known name of any Polish general of the Second World War, with the possible exceptions of Sikorski and Anders, absolutely must be that of General Stanislaw Maczek!

The four faces of Stanislaw Maczek

I came across this guy when I very first started to blow air onto the embers of my Polish fire about 15 years ago. I spent some time in the Sikorski Institute in London researching photographic evidence of the Polish 10th Motorised Cavalry Brigade (10BK aka ‘The Black Brigade’). I had seen a couple of very limited photographs of this guy and was able to pick him out in what few Black Brigade photographs the Sikorski Institute held, much to the surprise of a Polish family who were also in the archives sorting through photographs) and with the exception of his experiences of commanding the Black Brigade in September '39, there my interest in Maczek may have lain dormant.

Colonel Maczek with troops of the Reconnaissance Battalion in 1939

Over the years however, I found out that he died in Edinburgh at the ripe old age of 102, spending all his years after the war working in a series of low paid, dead end jobs denied a pension by the British government and robbed of any recognition that he so richly deserved (which I have to say I felt absolutely ashamed by), whilst other far less deserving Polish trouble makers (Anders being the main one, and you will understand why I reference him in this way in part VII of this biography) received very respectable dividends from the UK tax coffers.

As my signal project this year will be the Black Brigade, I thought that this would be a good time to produce a biographical blog post on the remarkable life of one of Poland’s leading military minds.

Following the end of the First World War, and the advent of armoured warfare each country had their experts in motorised combined arms operations, most of whom are much better known than Maczek. We (The British) had Captain Liddel-Hart, Germany had Heinz Guderian, the Soviet Union had Mikhail Tukhachevsky (who Stalin was retarded enough to kill off in the purges), France had Charles De Gaulle and The United States had Patton. Poland had Stanislaw Maczek and unlike all of the others he had actually learnt his skills in combined arms actually on the field of combat under the command of others who, in an era of rigid formulaic tactical doctrine, allowed him to prove his concepts on the coal face.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you  General Stanislaw Maczek, or Baca to his friends!

Stanislaw Maczek - The Early Years (1892 - 1914)

Anna Muller; Stanislaw's Mother

Maczek was born on 31st March 1892 in the Galician town of Szczerzec (thats pronounced Shhh-che-jjets), a parcel of land that hadn’t been a part of a Polish whole for almost 150 years. In 1795 Poland was dismembered and dished up between the three Central European Empires. Prussia (now called Germany since Bismarck’s ego trip), Austria (no longer called the Holy Roman Empire since Napoleon’s ego trip) and Russia (at the time in question being called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics due to Lenin's ego trip).

To understand the strength of Polish national identity (or a serious lack thereof), it is necessary to understand how these powers dealt with anybody who thought a Polish flag was anything other than a nice option for an added extra to be waved anywhere but a properties outhouse toilet. The Russians were the worst. They controlled the largest percentage of ethnic Poles that were alive, although if anybody so much as mentioned the word Poland, savage reprisals were served up with the morning porridge (Savage is an understatement by the way).  Prussia was next. As with Russia, ethnic Poles were  suppressed. The language, religion (the Poles being staunch Catholics) and literature were also suppressed and again, any occurrence of even a whiff of secession and savage reprisals were soon to follow. Throughout the nineteenth century the ethnic Polish population had three revolutions, all of which were savagely crushed with vast swathes of participants put to death. The last of these revolutions in Europe was in 1863 against Russia. The ethnic Pole was largely a cowed race after this time.

The Austrians were the most tolerant of the Empires within which the Poles lived and dealt with this ethnic group in a somewhat different way. Because they were more tolerant of the Poles ethnicity, when the ugly spectre of revolution raised its head the Austrian thinkers were able to incite the peasantry to revolt against the Polish middle classes (who were the prime movers of these mini revolutions), by prodding the Polish peasants’ desire for the end of serfdom as opposed to fighting for an independent Poland. It turns out that the Polish ethnic peasant wasn't actually terribly interested in independence anywhere near so much as in personal freedom which the Polish middle classes wanted to restrict on gaining independence. In 1848 hundreds of Polish landowners and their families were murdered. The Austrians abolished serfdom soon after.  Smart cookies the Austrians! 

Kasimir Badeni

The Austrian Emperor, Karl Franz, even appointed a Pole, Count Kasimir Badeni, to the governorship of Galicia, an action that would have horrified the Germans and Russians, although looking back in history would have been totally in keeping with how the Romans managed to manage such a large empire so effectively and for so long. Whilst having a liberal attitude towards politics and his own ethnic group, Badeni was also considered to be very much an Austrian monarchist.

The Austrians however, had troubles of their own. Put quite simply the Empire was struggling financially and had acquired so much land that they didn't know what to do with it. At the start of the 20th Century, Europe was largely at peace (for once!) and Galicia was very much a backwater, although it did have one very significant asset; the Polish cultural hub;  Lwow.

Witold Maczek; Stanislaw's Father

 Maczek’s parents were lower gentry and small landowners of Croatian descent and he was a first cousin of Croat politician, Vladko Macek, although despite this, Maczek, being from a well to do family, would have been brought up in a fervently Polish environment, steeped in the culture, patriotism and arts that underlined the Polish psyche, all elements which the poorer serfs would have been excluded from.

Maczek did not initially anticipate a military career. He intended to study either philosophy or the newly growing science of psychology, but the First World War changed these plans significantly!

This is perhaps a good place to now introduce Josef Pilsudski into this narrative. Whilst he exists in the Polish psyche as a Titan in their history, he should be seen as a controversial figure at best who it can be argued left Poland in an extremely vulnerable state in the years following his death... but all of that is yet to come.

In the years leading up to the First World War Josef Pilsudski correctly saw the internecine conflicts of the globally peripheral countries, such as the wars in the Balkans against the Ottomans’ and the humbling of Russia by Japan, amongst others as a precursor to a larger conflict, the results of which he predicted would be the end of the Imperial hegemonies of the central powers. This, he believed, would lead to the resurrection of the Polish state.

Marshal Jozef Pilsudski

Whilst Pilsudski should not be considered the hero or democrat that many Poles believe him to be, it can be justifiably claimed without any doubt, that he was the only Pole with the charisma and drive to lead a new nation to independence and maintain it during his lifetime. He had a varied life and career. Born a Lithuanian nobleman, various twists of fate saw him enjoying life as a terrorist, a train robber, a Socialist and finally, a self-appointed military commander, or as John Coutouvidis stated in 1993; 'Jozef Pilsudski had personified independent Poland. Successively convicted terrorist, Socialist agitator, cavalry officer, Commander-In-Chief and vanquisher of Trotsky's Red Army, democratic president and dictator, he became the embodiment of Polish statehood'.

Without going too much into a potted history of Pilsudski around this time, let us just say that his criminal activities allowed the financing of the Polish Legions that helped various powers in the First World War, after his pleading the case for raising Polish armies was rebuffed by all of the Allied powers. Pilsudski, because of the difficulty he had gaining traction for his ideas in the more authoritarian areas ruling Polish lands, travelled to Galicia. He believed this was the only place that the flames of Polish independence could be stoked. This was the legacy left to Galicia owing to the Austrian liberalism with which the Empire governed it. Pilsudski was able to build an armed force that would eventually, in 1918, become the Polish army which would then become, in very real terms, the only unifying state apparatus of the newly reborn Polish state. It started as subversive 'Rifle Clubs' (Strzelcy) and it was these that were used to train the nascent Polish military. What is perhaps most interesting are the types of individuals that it was attracting such as Wladyslaw Sikorski and Kazimierz Sosnkowski (we will hear much more of these two later).

A typical Polish Strzelcy around 1916

Coming back to Maczek however, he first met Pilsudski in 1913 when he was an anonymous young student who volunteered for the Strzelcy in Lwow (Lviv or Lemburg as it has also been variously called under different owners). This was not the only time these two would meet and it is only Maczek’s call up to the Austrian army that prevented him becoming a full member of the Polish Legion, the military forces which grew out of the Strzelcy.

On 6th August 1914 Austria and Russia went to war! Pilsudski, with only three companies of riflemen, took the unilateral decision to invade Russia which he did by marching out of Krakow and straight over the border!

A futile gesture though it turned out to be, it spoke volumes about the character of the man. He wanted the Polish peasant to again fall in love with its military and the best way to achieve that was to actually show them their military. It was a gamble, but much more than that, it was the start of the future.

Maczek and the First World War (1914 - 1918)

Whilst the shadow of the First World War looms large in the collective psyche of Europe as a whole, Poland stands as the exception. Poland only became an entity on the very last day of the war, 11th November 1918.

Before this the Poles were engaged in fighting for whichever empire their lot of land was found in. Poles ended up fighting each other, in their hundreds of thousands, just as Pilsudski predicted.

Stanislaw Maczek was a reserve officer in the Austrian Army who, following his training once conscripted, was destined to fight on the Italian front from 1915 to the end of the war in 1918. It should be highlighted at this point that the Austrian army was in fact termed The Imperial Austrian and Royal Hungarian Army and comprised a polyglot of nationalities. For every 100 soldiers in 1914 there were 25 Germans (Austrians), 23 Hungarians, 13 Czechs, 9 Serbs, 8 Poles, 8 Ukrainians, 7 Romanians, 4 Slovaks, 2 Slovenes and a single Italian. Overall 10 'regimental languages' were recognised reflecting the ethnic groups whilst the regiments reflected the overall ethnicity.

Austro Hungarians in the Carpathians 1914

Unfortunately for the Austrians however, 72% of their officer corps was Austrian-German and German was the language of command although only 90 military phrases needed to be learnt. Two languages were frequently used in each regiment and it was incumbent on an incoming officer that he became fluent in the secondary language within three years of joining. Obviously under wartime stresses, casualties and such like, this system broke down quite dramatically. This became an especially pronounced problem, when after 1917 the war turned against Austria and previously subsumed national psyches started to reassert themselves.

Maczek was a cadet officer (holding an NCO's rank) and received his officer training at III Corp centre at Graz, Austria. Following this he received command of a Motorised platoon of the 3rd Regiment of Landwehr during the second half of 1915. It is assumed that about this time Maczek’s aspirations changed from a desire for academia to a life of soldiering. Clever he undoubtedly was, but most agree he was no intellectual.

The winter of 1914 - 1915 saw Maczek attending specialists courses which included 'Storm Tactics' covering the use of automatic weapons as well as skiing and mountaineering in the Alps. These courses provided the bedrock of his subsequent career and on 14th June 1915 he joined the elite 2nd Tyrol Kaiser-Jaeger Regiment, whose speciality was high altitude mountain warfare, although as a Pole, Maczek was an unlikely recruit as it generally took men from Austrian, Croatian and Slovenian stock used to mountain living.

A Postcard displaying a trooper of a Tyroler Kaiser Jager Regiment

The regiment’s function in the Austrian VIII Corp was to fight in the mountains in the south eastern theatre of the war, or as it was otherwise known, The Italian Front.

The war between Italy and Austria was essentially a question of who should rule Italy. Italy declared war on 23rd May 1915 and the fighting until the end of the war took place over a front that extended more than 500 miles. The front was 80% mountainous with several of these mountains exceeding 3000mts and in winter, heavily covered in snow and ice.

Avalanches caused by explosions were commonplace. On one day alone, on 13th December 1916, thereafter termed White Friday, 10,000 men died in avalanches. A truly terrible Friday 13th! The irony being of course, that neither Austria nor Italy were equipped to fight a war of these extremes.

On 22nd July 1915 the 2nd Kaiser-Jaeger Regiment was sent to defend the Isonzo River valley on the Italian front. Between June 1915 and September 1917 there were 11 battles here with this portion of the front descending into a stalemate and constant war of attrition. It was to see 29 months fighting, claiming the lives of 1.1 million Italians, dead and wounded and 650,000 Austrian whilst each fought ferociously for every inch of ground.

The final Italian victory in 1918 was pyrrhic at best, and was achieved only because of the political collapse of the Austrian Empire. By 1917 the military and political conditions within Austria itself had almost destroyed Austria's ability to wage war.

Just before an attack in the Isonzo campaign

It was on this static front that Maczek witnessed first-hand the misery and military impoverishment of prolonged static warfare. The battles along the Isonzo revealed the necessity of a more mobile form of warfare, highlighting in stark contrast the flaws of such plans carried out badly, as successful prosecution of this manner of warfare depended on the close cooperation between Infantry and Artillery as well as close coordination between air and ground units. The main flaw could be found in the communications networks as field telephones were still in their infancy in the First World War.

Map of the Isonzo River Valley and positions between 1915 and 1917

Austrian troops had to become inventive in the way they fended off attacks by Italian armoured cars as they had no equivalent vehicles with which to reply and as such, they became quite proficient in anti-materiel tactics. To this end the Austrians employed mines, vehicle traps, anti-materiel rifles and field guns over open sites to destroy the Italian armoured vehicles.

Destroyed Austrian Equipment

There is no doubt that this is where Maczek learnt his trade. His consequent history continually demonstrates a sharp ability to understand the tenets of mobile warfare and the necessity of combined arms with close cooperation utilising a reliable comms network. In his autobiography, Maczek  makes a salient point that his grounding in map reading which he learnt in the Austrian army, stood him in good stead for the rest of his career. In fact, he had quite a developed ability to interpret topographical relief maps which aided him in his future battles, most especially in the Carpathian Campaign of 1918-1919, Poland '39 and the Falaise Campaign of '44 where his ability to read the landscape in these maps directly led to his prescient decision to occupy Hill 262, essentially trapping the German armies inside the Falaise pocket.

Maczek was on the Italian Front on 18th June 1915 (100 years to the day after Waterloo for anybody who is interested) where he remained until 17th December 1915 until he was taken ill and subsequently sent to Military Hospital No.2 in Vienna.

The New Year of 1916 started well for Maczek as he was finally commissioned into the Austrian army as a 2nd Lieutenant following his duties as a Cadet Officer.

Austrian Ski Troops attacking in the Carpathians

On returning from hospital Maczek was sent as an instructor to the XIV Corps Officers School in Styr, Upper Austria. With his experience in mountain warfare Maczek had a lot to offer these young officers. Once he returned to his regiment on the Italian Front he was given 8th Company to command from 2nd October 1916. It was a company that specialised in ski and mountain warfare and acted as a 'storm' battalion for raiding and such like. Maczek was the only Polish officer in his battalion and from the autumn of 1916 until the start of 1918 he and 8th Company were involved in many bloody battles on the Italian Front. Finally on 31st January 1918 Maczek was wounded in the leg and was swiftly sent to recover in a Viennese hospital where he spent a number of weeks before being given three months convalescence which he took in his native Lwow.

Austrian wounded on their way to Vienna from the Ilonso valley

It was whilst convalescing in Lwow that he not only completed his studies but also took note of the numbers of Polish Legionnaires and (Polish) Austrian Army officers that were packing out the cafes contemplating the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Unfortunately, Maczek’s leave finished before the final collapse and he returned to the front where German reinforcements had been shipped in to bolster the Austrian army which was by now, creaking at the seams and to hopefully snatch a quick victory against the Italians.

Austrian troops ascending a cliff face

Maczek himself states that he did not have the time or even the opportunity to get drawn into conspiracies as by the summer of 1918 he was back in the Austrian Alps, 3000 metres above sea level as a part of a regiment that seemed hell bent on winning the war for Austria on its own.

However, other agents were at work and the situation changed overnight and dramatically. By November 1918, owing to a complete lack of faith in victory and an inability to command the mountainous battlefront in a single day the line was broken at Trento and evacuation trains to Vienna were immediately ordered. At the same time, news started to filter through the lines to Maczek about unrest in Lwow with the first armed conflicts between the Poles and Ukrainians taking place.

Hearing that securing leave from Vienna to head east was becoming increasingly difficult, he took advice and ditched the Austrian Uniform. Donning mufti he started making his way back to his home; Lwow. The sad irony here is that he had just received his promotion to 1st Lieutenant and had been awarded various campaign and gallantry medals, but for Austria, the war was over!

Lwow in 1918

Once Maczek returned to his native Poland he was quick to apply the lessons that he had learnt in order to defend Poland against Ukrainian insurgents. This would not be the last time that Maczek was forced to take such drastic action to flee hostile environments.  He would be doomed to do so twice more in his career as a professional soldier...

In part two Maczek secures the Polish borders and then beats up on the Soviets before chilling for 20 years!

So until next time.... Fix Bayonets!