In 1909 he graduated from a local gymnasium in Suwałki and then left for Galicia, the only part of partitioned Poland where teaching in Polish was permitted.

Simultaneously he also studied at the machine engineering faculty of the Lviv University of Technology, where he became a member of the Związek Strzelecki paramilitary organization.

He fought in the Carpathians, Bukovina and Volhynia, serving as a commander of a single piece of artillery, of an infantry platoon and as an adjutant of a battalion of heavy howitzers.

Released from the prisoner camp on 1 November 1918, he moved to Warsaw, where he joined the newly born Polish Army immediately after its creation.

Initially a clerk in the Inspectorate of Artillery, on November 29 he became an adjutant to the Polish commander-in-chief, General (later Marshal of Poland) Józef Piłsudski.

During the early stage of the Polish-Bolshevik War, in November 1919 he was dispatched to Lwów, where he served as the commander of the local cell of the II Detachment of the Headquarters, that is the intelligence and counter-intelligence service.

Władysław Filipkowski then was resettled to the town of Pieńsk (former German: Penzig) near Zgorzelec in the Recovered Territories of the newly restored Republic of Poland, where he found a job of an administrative director of a local state-owned glass works.