Chwalkowski, Lucjan

Additional Chwalkowski family information...
Chwalkowski, Lucjan
(December 5, 1892 - April 21, 1918)
Unlike many of the nation's war heroes, Lucjan Chwalkowski, the first one of the Polish Army in France killed in action, is barely known. One of the last persons to write a history of the independent Polish army, Dr. Paul S. Valasek, who was familiar with all the records at hand, was unable to find a biography of the fallen hero. The veterans' posts named after him did not have one, either. Regretfully that is about as far as it goes.
If it had not been for a ship's manifest, a census return, and a draft card that Lucjan Chwalkowski filled out, I would never have known of his earlier life. As it is now understood, he was born December 6, 1892, one of ten children of religious Catholic parents, Thomas and Cecilia Chwalkowski. The family lived in Praszka, on the road between Kluczbork and Wielun in what is now Krakowska-Czestochowska province, where Lucjan's father was a tailor. His work was not steady, and the family struggled to make ends meet.
On May 15, 1906, the entire family arrived in New York and settled in a tenement house at 526 East 16th Street, in New York's 18th Ward. It included Thomas (Tomasz in Polish), his wife Cecilia, and children Vincent, Joanna, Lucian, Frances, Maria, and Wladyslawa. The fate of four children is unknown. The records of Ellis Island, however, list only the father and two sons. The letters "i" and "j" are interchangeable, but Lucian is spelled "Luccia" in Ellis Island records. Ironically, the SS Princess Alice, the German passenger liner that brought the family from Bremen, Germany, was left in, or taken to, Cebu, one of the American-owned islands in the Philippines, when the First World War began in August 1914. It remained there in neutral territory until the United States entered the war in 1917. Then the U. S. government seized the 20,500-ton vessel, renamed her the Princess Matoika, and turned her over to the U. S. Navy for transporting troops to and from France.
Upon arriving in New York, Lucjan Chwalkowski saw that boys of his age played in the streets. At the same time, he heard that a young Polish engineer, Emil Elektorowicz, came to New York a few months before him to expand the railroad tunnels under the Hudson River and immediately joined the Falcons, a society similar to one in Lwow, Galicia, where he came from, and the Turnvereins that Germans brought to America in the 1850s. The nest, in the fourteen years of its existence, owed its success to Polish immigrants who wanted to achieve Polish independence. Whether it had a Falcon center, or whatever it was called, in New York's Lower East Side or Brooklyn is not certain. Judging from all accounts, Thomas and Lucjan Chwalkowski were ladies tailors, and Vincent Chwalkowski, eight years older than Lucjan, was a pattern maker in 1910, when they marched in New York to mark the Polish Lithuanian victory over the Knights of the Teutonic Order on July 15, 1410. Each one owned his own uniform.
Little is known of Nest No. 8 aside of what is known of Elektorowicz, who served on three separate occasions as the president of a dissident organization in the East, known as Free Falcons, to which the nest belonged, and by 1913 it merged with the Polish Falcons of America. Although he moved to Plainfield, New Jersey, where he registered for the draft on May 29, 1917, Lucjan Chwalkowski shot out of the New York nest like a rocket. After graduating from the Officers Training School at University of Toronto, Canada, he was assigned to train recruits at two camps in Pennsylvania and Canada and then sailed from New York with a boatload of Poles to France. Altogether more than 20,000 skis, iczs, eks, ulas, and others with Polish suffixes were shipped overseas. They were broken up into companies and sent to different camps for further training.
On January 19, 1918, Lt. Col. Leon Jasinski, a descendant of a Polish military officer in the 1831 uprising, was transferred from the French Army to organize the First Regiment of Polish Rifleman and train them almost equal to French soldiers. 2nd Lt. Chwalkowski was assigned to him. Three days later Raymond Poincare, President of France since 1913, arrived in the camp, 100 miles from Paris, in the Champagne wine country, with an entourage of French and Polish VIPs, to present battle flags to the Polish regiment from the United States. Each flag was embroidered with a Polish eagle in the center. For the first time in his life, Chwalkowski met veterans of the Polish insurrection of 1863 and the son of Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish poet who was often translated in the United States. It took Jasinski three months to teach the riflemen how to fight on French soil.
On April 21, 1918, the Polish regiment was transferred to the Fourth French Army in Sept-Saults, where General Gourand lost a number of soldiers because of inadequate fortifications and German snipers in trenches. The Polish riflemen from New York, Chicago and other places in the United States relieved a French unit and began to repair the fortications around vineyards, where monks made wine for the Eucharist in peacetime, and build new ones. Some French soldiers paid the price for sleeping in the wineries and trenches. Under the cover of darkness the Germans killed them. Remaining in one place was difficult and dangerous. One night Chwalkowski lost a hand in an accident on one of his reconnaissance patrols to capture German prisoners. Exactly what happened was widely discussed at the time in the French and Polish press on both sides of the Atlantic.
So far all I know is that Private Michael Mroczko carried Lt. Chwalkowski back to his post to await an ambulance. General Gourand sent a telegraph to President Poincare for permission and pinned the French Legion of Honor on Chwalkowski. "This is for Poland," were Chwalkowski's last words. Posthumously he was awarded the Virtuti Militari, the Polish eqivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor.
From: Edward Pinkowski [email protected] (2008)