Little is known about the field airstrip located in Biadoliny during the Great War. What is known is that it housed a staging point for Austro-Hungarian troops — due, among other things, to the railway line running through the area.
In aviation terms, however, Biadoliny earned its place in the pages of history as the site of a pioneering action in which heavy artillery and aviation cooperated with each other for the first time. It was from there that, during the period from December to May 1915, aircraft of the Austro-Hungarian army operated from a tiny landing strip, while in a nearby forest complex, four of the heaviest mortars — of 305 and 420 mm caliber — were hidden, from which Tarnów was shelled. A separate matter is the presence of German aviation in the same period — because during the battles with the Russian army in the early period of the Great War in the Tarnów area, Austro-Hungarian aviation dominated both numerically and operationally. However, in early 1915, the German supreme command — the Oberste Heeresleitung — wished to change this arrangement somewhat. Hptm. Anton Sieber, Fliegerreferent at Festungskommando Kraków, recalled: “The beginning of 1915. One night I received an encrypted dispatch from the army command (Cieszyn): within 48 hours, 3 railway tracks were to be laid at the Rakowice airfield. It was early April when three days later I went there on horseback in the morning; the airfield was bustling with activity. German aircraft were circling over Rakowice. During the night, a German aviation unit, BA. 0 (Brieftaubenabteilung 0; commander Hptm. V. Dewall) had arrived from the West. On the tracks stood a wagon serving as an office, a sleeping wagon and a dining wagon, wagons for the unit’s members, and wagons transporting materials (equipment).
Rakowice were under my special care.” And through the winter of 1914/1915, this German Feldfliegerabteilung 57 of Hptm. Heyder — as the only German aviation unit on this part of the front (along with the Austrian Flik 15) — operated from the area of the field airstrips at Jasień and Biadoliny. It is also worth noting that this area changed hands repeatedly, and the battles between March 13 and May 6, 1915 were very bloody — a trace of them is War Cemetery No. 271 in Biadoliny Szlacheckie, located on the right side of the Wokowice–Biadoliny road, running just south of the Kraków–Przemyśl railway line. It is situated in a forest, right by this road, opposite the railway signal box.
