A Mad Catastrophe
Page 24
The Austrian army was just not big enough to fight the Russians; the Habsburg divisions were becoming lost in the vast spaces and losing their connection to units around them. This allowed the Russians to infiltrate those spaces and fire into the Austrian flanks and rear. Ordered to press on, Wodniansky couldn’t, for he had Russians in front of him and all along his right flank. To reach them and their spitting guns, he would have to cross the swamps of the Huczwa.24 Back in Belzec—the market town that would become a notorious Nazi death camp in 1942—General Boroevic tried to maneuver his VI Corps forward by telephone, telegraph, and couriers. Reports of Russian troops arriving from the southeast and hurrying toward Komarów suggested that Auffenberg’s success would be fleeting.25
Later claims of a great Austrian victory at Komarów hardly seem justified by records of the action. Only a day into the battle, Auffenberg’s overstretched units were, as one general put it, “falling apart, on the brink of chaos.” The men had not slept or been properly fed in days. They were literally falling asleep while marching and even while fighting. The 15th Division had marched twenty miles on the twenty-fifth, twelve miles on the twenty-sixth, and fifteen miles on the twenty-seventh—all without a hot meal. They had slept no more than six hours over the course of those three days. Boroevic kept promising to “compensate” them for these exertions with extra rest days, but the rest day was always übermorgen, “the day after tomorrow.” When these weary, furious men took Tomaszow, which before the war had been a Russian garrison town, they plundered the Russian barracks and officers’ apartments, stealing what they could carry away and destroying everything else.26 They were going mad with fatigue.
While Archduke Friedrich scolded Auffenberg from Przemysl—“You must stop these outrages, which ruin the army’s image abroad and make the men believe that plundering is acceptable”—Conrad was launching another of his operational outrages. With Plehve apparently pinned in a pocket at Komarów but Boroevic unable to close the pocket on the right, Conrad—who had just cabled Auffenberg that the situation of the Third Army at Lemberg was “unfavorable”—nevertheless now ordered Archduke Joseph Ferdinand to turn around (again) with his long-suffering XIV Corps and rejoin Auffenberg.27 The men, having already marched south on the twenty-sixth through sand and swamp, now turned around and crossed the same ground in the opposite direction, losing an entire day. These forced marches—thirty miles a day, for no apparent purpose—were killing the corps, which was losing nearly 10 percent of its strength every day to “straggling.”28
General Josef Paic, the archduke’s staff chief, kept a diary that recorded the backing and filling ordered by Conrad from his office far behind the lines. On the twenty-sixth: “hard marches by the men to intervene in the battle of Fourth Army; just as we were distributing orders for an attack, the phone rang and we received new orders to march back in the direction of Lemberg to support Third Army in its battles east of the city.” Paic’s staff worked for four hours to redirect the corps, knowing that “the change of direction and the new marches would have an extremely demoralizing impact on the troops.” Four hours after that, at 1:15 a.m. on the twenty-seventh—as his supply trains and field artillery were already rolling south, trailed by the sleepless infantry—Paic received yet another set of orders from Conrad: “Suspend the march to Lemberg and carry out the original plans.”29
With XIV Corps turning in ineffectual circles, Auffenberg grasped General Karl Huyn’s XVII Corps, a new unit formed just days earlier, and commanded its 19th Division to advance from Belzec toward Plehve’s forces, which seemed torn between regarding themselves as prey or predator. For now, Auffenberg still felt like a predator; Archduke Peter Ferdinand’s 25th Division had taken Zamosc on the twenty-seventh and had been greeted by the city fathers with bread and salt on a silver salver, the traditional tokens of submission to a conquering army. Peter Ferdinand’s staff chief recalled that “morale was high and our casualties were slight.” Still, he noted that here too, on the left-center, the Austro-Hungarian troops were on the edge of collapse. They had been marching and fighting without a rest since the twenty-first. “We should have pursued the Russians, but we couldn’t. We needed a rest day.” They rested on the twenty-eighth, Archduke Peter Ferdinand settling into the luxury rooms of the Hotel Zentral.30
Auffenberg reverted to the original plan, which was to swing Boroevic’s corps forward to pin the Russian XVII and V Corps on the bend of the Huczwa, then bite into their flank with Archduke Joseph Ferdinand’s corps, returning from the south. But Boroevic’s corps was dead tired, scarcely able to march, let alone fight. When Conrad grandly ordered Auffenberg late on the twenty-seventh to press the attack all the way to Chelm, Auffenberg was stunned. “To Chelm?” Auffenberg sputtered. “And for this they took away a third of my army and gave it to Brudermann?” The eventual return of those units—for the second time—could no longer affect the outcome of the Battle of Komarów; the reinforcements would arrive too late and too weary. “What must these troops think of us?” Auffenberg scribbled in his diary. “We’ve sent them zigzagging around under steaming heat on roads of sand.”31 To solidify his right wing for Archduke Joseph Ferdinand’s arrival, Auffenberg woke his 15th Division just after midnight on the twenty-eighth and sent them forward to wrest Tyszowce from the Russians and shore up the Fourth Army’s right. After slopping through the swamps of the Huczwa, they were set upon in the darkness by the Russian V Corps. Already roughed up, the Austrian division now shattered completely, losing four thousand men and twenty guns in a pell-mell retreat.32
Desperate to seal a victory, Auffenberg was trying to find the flank of the swelling Russian army. He planned to keep moving northeast, toward Chelm, but was alerted by aerial reconnaissance that “strong enemy forces on the line Chelm-Tyszowce are closing on the army’s right wing.” This was Ruzski’s Third Army, sliding northwest to rescue Plehve and flank Auffenberg before the Austrian could flank him. Alarmed, Auffenberg ordered Archduke Joseph Ferdinand to close up beside Huyn’s XVII Corps, reconnoiter aggressively with a cavalry division, and fend off every attempt by Ruzski or Plehve to strike Auffenberg’s right wing in the flank.
Colonel Brosch’s 2nd Tyrolean Kaiserjäger, one of Archduke Joseph Ferdinand’s regiments, marched day and night to make their rendezvous with Auffenberg, one veteran recalling the long slog from the Komarów force down to the Lemberg one and then back again: “There was Auffenberg; here was Brudermann, and we marched here and there under a hot shimmering sun—over rolling green hills and ancient forests—toward an infinite blue horizon.” The troops who had skirmished near Rawa-Ruska three days earlier marched away and were now marching back, marveling at the space and the stillness of Russia, which swallowed them up like flyspecks. On the twenty-eighth Brosch’s light infantry slouched wearily into Belzec, “this poor, plundered, extremely filthy Jewish village,” and were poised at long last to swing their southern pincer into Plehve’s left flank.33
Conrad in Przemysl continued to believe that he was dealing a war-winning blow, wiring Auffenberg on August 27 that “the outcome of this campaign now hinges on the successful completion of these promising attacks on the left wing.” Auffenberg was surprised. “Nothing could be expected from XIV Corps, it had been left too far behind by AOK’s ever-changing orders,” exposing his army and Dankl’s—the “left wing” mentioned by Conrad—to Plehve and Ruzski.34 Conrad was deaf to all of these caveats. “He was,” Churchill later wrote, “one of those apostles of the Offensive for whom machine guns and barbed wire had prepared so many disillusions.”35 The apostle now ordered Auffenberg to press on dauntlessly with all available forces; local reverses anywhere on the field must not turn into retreats.36 On the actual battlefield, Austrian officers already sensed that the battle and probably the war were lost, joking darkly, “Zum Schluss hat doch jeder noch ein Kugel” (Well, at least we’ve all saved a bullet for the end). General Wodniansky wasn’t joking: he pressed his pistol to his head and shot himself that night.37
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Resting on August 28—the lull before the storm—Auffenberg’s divisions awaited instructions for the twenty-ninth. Conrad wasn’t much help, for his mood careened wildly from punchy optimism to brooding melancholy; having earlier boasted of a war-winning blow, he was now disputing history with the Hofburg, already pronouncing the war unwinnable and insisting that if only the emperor had heeded his calls for preventive war in 1909 or 1912, all would be well. “It’s a malicious freak of fate that it’s I who must now bear the burden of that neglect,” he griped in a spectacularly ill-timed letter to Bolfras.38
Conrad’s officers were also contemplating fate; they knew that the Russians before them had to be bludgeoned to death before they could regroup and reinforce. Marching and fighting faster than was prudent, in order to mollify the French, who were fending off the Germans on the Marne, the Russians had been badly disorganized in these first battles, a fact confirmed by their slow reaction to the blows of Dankl and Auffenberg. It seemed to justify Conrad’s fitful optimism, as the Austrian XIV Corps—now the right wing of Auffenberg’s Fourth Army—advanced to within two days’ march of the army’s left at Zamosc. But the Stavka eventually reacted, diverting the Russian Ninth Army to the Southwest Front to prevent Dankl from joining his army with Auffenberg’s, and to stem the Austrian advance. The Russian Fourth Army’s command had imploded under the strain, the army commander, Salza, firing Voyshin for the debacle on the twenty-third, only to be fired himself by Ivanov, who then reinstated the demonstrably inept Voyshin. Incompetence seemed to reign as freely here as across the way in Przemysl. But two Russian armies—the Fourth and the threat of the Ninth—sufficed to stop Dankl, and the diversion of Ruzski to rescue Plehve would stop Auffenberg as well.39
To polish off Plehve before Ruzski could rescue him from the south, Auffenberg had spent a long night in Oleszyce drafting plans, which he distributed at six-thirty in the morning on August 29: “General offensive of the Fourth Army with every rifle available, for the imminent decisive blow.”40 Huyn’s XVII Corps—now under General Karl Kritek, Huyn having been cashiered for “nervousness”—was the clasp joining the Fourth Army to Archduke Joseph Ferdinand’s XIV Corps. It too was supposed to sweep Plehve up from the right, crushing him in a pocket at Komarów.41 Having supposed that the mutiny against Huyn—“we’ll shoot him ourselves if you don’t do something about him,” Huyn’s staff chief had phoned the AOK—had stiffened his right, Auffenberg now found that it hadn’t. Kritek’s divisions made no more progress than Huyn’s, their brigades shot down by Russian artillery and machine gun fire as they tried to get across the Huczwa and press into the heart of Plehve’s position. Each time the Austrians took a ridge, they would find the Russians had merely decamped to the one behind it and dug in there with their machine guns. The little woods that dotted the field filled with Russian infantry, who fired into the flanks of every Austrian attack. If an Austrian machine gun opened fire, three or four Russian guns would answer. All the while, Russian shells were falling, gradually killing most of the officers in the 34th Regiment and the division’s two Jäger battalions. The 19th threw in its last reserves, but they too retreated under Russian fire.42
Things were no better on the left, where General Blasius Schemua—given command of II Corps after his removal from Conrad’s position in 1912—groped ahead. Archduke Peter Ferdinand commanded Schemua’s 25th Division, and, having rested on the twenty-eighth, the archduke left the comforts of the Hotel Zentral in Zamosc on the twenty-ninth and resumed his march east. But Peter Ferdinand’s 50th Brigade came immediately under Russian heavy artillery fire from Komarów. For troops supposedly trapped in a pocket, the Russians were behaving with admirable aggressiveness.
Archduke Peter Ferdinand ordered his division to attack toward the village of Dub and seal the pocket, an objective that was starting to seem outlandish in view of the accelerating Russian counterattacks. Expecting to find a Landwehr division on his left, the archduke spotted Cossacks instead. His artillery was its usual ineffective self, spraying shrapnel harmlessly over the Russian trenches while the Russian heavy artillery lobbed in shells that triggered panic in the archduke’s 25th Division as well as in the divisions on either side of it. With two Russian armies, Plehve’s Fifth and Ruzski’s Third, closing around them, every Austrian unit along this quaking front assumed that the Russians had broken their line and were grasping at their flank. When night fell on the twenty-ninth the exhausted men slept where they stood, reserves a hundred paces behind the skirmish line, with no cook fires and no noise. Whispered orders were conveyed from Schemua to the archduke to the 10th Division to renew the attack at first light, but the archduke was told that the 10th Division would have to rest on August 30, as “the men are broken.”43
Conrad’s failed strokes around Komarów and the reserves he shifted there to support them had consequences at Lemberg. With Brudermann’s army weakened by the detachment of XIV Corps to Auffenberg, the Russian Third and Eighth Armies struck toward Lemberg on August 26. They threatened not only to smash in Brudermann’s center but to double-envelop him from the flanks as well. Whatever fleeting success the Austrians had achieved at Komarów was now being undone at Lemberg. With Russians everywhere, a sense of imminent doom affected everyone. The war minister, General Alexander Krobatin, sent a cable from Vienna to Przemysl urging Conrad to silence the “terrifying and depressing gossip” bubbling out of his headquarters and armies.44
But by now everyone was terrified and depressed. Having lost his XIV Corps to Auffenberg, Brudermann now had to hold Lemberg with just two and a half corps: his own XI Corps as well as Second Army’s III Corps and a division of the XII Corps. The Serbian detour was proving disastrous, as three additional divisions desperately needed at Lemberg were still chugging slowly through Hungary on their way from Sabac. At best, Brudermann might eke out nine divisions against at least sixteen Russian ones; he’d survived this long only because of bad roads and Ruzski’s inveterate caution.45 With four corps in hand, Ruzski continued to swallow the Redl-era assumption that the main Austro-Hungarian effort would be a Südstoss from Lemberg, not the Nordstoss to Komarów, which he still took for a feint. Certain that thirty Austrian divisions, not nine, lay in his path, Ruzski was crawling toward Austria’s eastern capital, averaging just five miles a day on his own territory, even less on Austrian ground.
Ruzski’s tardiness gave Conrad the false hope that he could still seal the victory at Komarów, even though doing so would mortally weaken Brudermann. By now even the Austro-Hungarian line troops were becoming aware of just how vastly outnumbered they were; rumors of Russian strength and Austrian inferiority were so entrenched that Brudermann ordered the death penalty for anyone caught spreading them. “Reinforce discipline,” he growled, “before it’s too late.”46
It was too late. Flogging Ruzski forward, Ivanov finally began attacking toward Lemberg in the last days of August. He was aided by appalling Austro-Hungarian indiscretion: generals around Lemberg were discussing their plans on unsecured telephone lines, which the Russians listened to raptly. Belatedly learning of this Russian espionage, Conrad reacted furiously, demanding that his officers adopt a Joycean code when speaking on the phone. Lemberg would henceforth be referred to as “Uzldampf,” a corps “Ulmklotz,” a division “Ulmtexas,” and so on.47 “Uzldampf,” of course, was the fourth city of Austria-Hungary and the junction of four vital railways. Conrad could not afford to lose it, on grounds of both prestige and military necessity, yet by August 30, Ivanov had massed three times as many troops for the assault on Lemberg as Brudermann had defending it. Ruzski would hit Lemberg from the east, Brusilov from the south.
All of this flailing around Lemberg alerted Auffenberg and Dankl to the fact that Krásnik and Komarów were not so much victories as preludes to their own envelopment and defeat by a much larger and apparently more competent Russian army. Both Austrian generals now slammed on the brakes, realizing that every step forward would pull them deeper into a Russian pocket, not t
he other way around. A twenty-mile gap promptly opened between the Austrian First and Fourth Armies near Zamosc, and Plehve galloped through it to safety. Having tasted victory in the north, Conrad watched in frustration as Plehve—dismissed before the war as a “kranker Greis,” a sickly geezer—got away.48 Auffenberg blamed Archduke Peter Ferdinand for drawing back with his 25th Division on August 31 and “giving back much of what had been taken.” Peter Ferdinand was supposed to have closed the ring at Komarów “with every available rifle and gun,” but he had pulled back upon hearing reports that there were Russians behind him. “Awful disappointment, he threw away the fruits of victory,” Auffenberg wrote, virtually guaranteeing—Archduke Peter Ferdinand was a Habsburg, after all—that Auffenberg’s insider-trading scandal, which had been quashed in 1912, would be rediscovered, dusted off, and pushed to an embarrassing and career-ending censure in 1915.49
Archduke Peter Ferdinand’s general staff chief wrote his own account of Komarów and blamed much of it on poor communication from Auffenberg. The army commanders had agreed early in the campaign that the efficient delivery of orders was more important in this theater than any other due to the sketchy infrastructure and vast spaces of Russia, which could take days to cross with dispatches, but Auffenberg’s orders and objectives invariably arrived late or not at all. This dawdling gave the Russians time to fill in gaps and march reserve troops and guns to the rescue. The Austrian divisions by now were running out of shells and bullets, and confronting reinforced Russian units that were better supplied. Efforts to join Habsburg units wing to wing invariably failed—the phrase “contact with neighboring units impossible because of swamps” recurring in almost every report.