Select Pages

• As the plans to capture Bydgoszcz were abandoned (...)
• Group II. Commander (...)
• To make matters worse (...)

To make matters worse, the arms and supplies began to fail. The weapons with which the Polish soldiers had attacked a well prepared enemy had not been uniform and additionally, they had hardly had 20 bullets per gun at their disposal. As a result of this, as the fighting for the railway station went on, at some point in time, the insurgents ran out of ammunition.

The final success of the battles for Inowrocław was determined, above all, by the determination and courage of the insurgents, as well as the unambiguously patriotic and at the same time valorous attitude of the Polish community of the city and the nearby vicinity. This also contributed to the accelerated decision of the Germans to march out of the city (initially, the date set for them was 7 January, at midnight). During the fighting, cases of arbitrary behaviour and insubordination took place though, after all, they were quite typical for insurgent units consisting, for the most part, of volunteers. The numerical strength of the units was not proportionate to the military skills. As a result of this, the railway station seized with so much hardship was easily lost, and attempts to recapture it and to seize the barracks also failed – apparently similar phenomena to those which took place in Poznań and Zdziechowa were also present here. As a consequence of this, the losses were disproportionately high in comparison to the accomplished results.

Also, the issue of the involvement of the battalion of the 31st Infantry Regiment is deeply questionable. Observation of the course of events allows for the drawing of the conclusion that P. Cyms could not use this unit properly, and the results achieved would have been the same if the soldiers of Captain Zabdyr had not been present in Inowrocław. On the other hand, the involvement of soldiers from the Congress Kingdom in battles on the other side of the still existing border, could have had exceptionally dramatic effects for the status of the Greater Poland uprising. There is no wonder then that both Poznań and Warsaw were appalled by the participation of the soldiers of the 31st Infantry Regiment in the battles for Inowrocław.

From the patriotic point of view, the raid of Paweł Cyms and the fighting for the capital city of Kuyavia must be assessed positively, however, the strictly professional conclusions will remain strict even if we take the level of the art of war during those times into consideration. The propaganda, the spectacular nature of the events in this area during the first week of January 1919 made P. Cyms and his soldiers a subject of historical novels (W. Rogowski: Owoc w dłonie, Poznań 1973, G. Górnicki: Bitwa szalała do wieczora, Poznań 1984) and a play by Gerard Górnicki: Poszli ci, którzy powinni (Poznań 1978).However, here, non-scientific reasons, quite different from the strictly military ones, were the decisive factors.