Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  The planning of the Trentino campaign also owed much to fantasy. Conrad never visited the front; he issued his orders from his headquarters in Teschen more than 1,200 kilometres away on the Empire’s northern border. His imagination, although vivid, did not extend to predictable problems of terrain and weather. The offensive had to be postponed three times because the mountains over which the troops were expected to advance had been covered in a four-metre thick blanket of snow. Nor did he think much of the Eastern Front, and the possible consequences of withdrawing troops. Falkenhayn had already taken eight divisions for Verdun. Conrad transferred away another four, along with fifteen batteries with nearly all the Habsburg army’s heavy guns. Overcoming all logistical obstacles, a force of 157,000 soldiers well supported with artillery was concentrated in the Trentino. On 15 May, after a two-hour bombardment, the troops charged forward. The success of the assault surprised allies and enemies alike; Habsburg troops took the Italian First Army’s front lines along a 20-kilometre front. In the next weeks they pressed forward, but already by the end of May the conditions of static warfare favouring the defender had asserted themselves. Habsburg supply lines became dangerously overstretched. The Italians poured in reserves at an unmatchable rate and when they counter-attacked on 6 June, Austro-Hungarian forces had to relinquish most of their hard-won territory.69

  The Italians were not only energetic in defending themselves but added their voices to those of the French screaming to the Eastern Front for relief. The Russians had already tried an offensive, at Lake Narotch against the Germans in March 1916. They had fielded more than four times the men and three times the guns of their enemy, but the operation had still been a bloody and embarrassing failure, with 100,000 casualties against the 20,000 of the defenders.70 In mid-April, when Stavka convened the army staffs to discuss another attack, few were therefore enthused. Only General Aleksei A. Brusilov, the commander of the South-West Front, offered to attack in the summer, striking the first blow for the Entente’s combined counter-offensive. He was warned by the Russian Chief of the General Staff, Mikhail Alekseev, and accepted, that he must use what men and guns he had; large reinforcements would not be granted. To most of his colleagues, he appeared to be setting himself up for failure. Where they had failed to penetrate the Central Powers’ lines with concentrated artillery fire and massed infantry even on narrow fronts, Brusilov was proposing to attack a well-fortified line over 300 kilometres long at the south end of the Eastern Front with scarcely any material advantage. Brusilov had just 132,000 more men than the 500,000 predominantly Habsburg soldiers opposing him. With 1,770 light and 168 heavy guns against the Central Powers’ 1,301 light and 545 medium and heavy pieces, he had no artillery superiority.71 Brusilov could not even count on surprise to carry his men through. The five Austro-Hungarian armies targeted knew months in advance that an attack was planned. Aerial reconnaissance had detected the Russians’ construction of new trenches and large dugouts to hold their reserves. Front-line units had observed enemy guns registering and infantry digging saps to within seventy-five paces of their front line, both obvious preludes to assault. By mid-May, their commands could accurately predict where the focus of the attack would be. When, in early June, Russian deserters spoke of having been issued with wire cutters and fresh underwear, it was understood that an assault was imminent.72

  On 4 June 1916 at the ungodly hour of four o’clock in the morning, the Russians’ bombardment began. Their first major attack was launched in the northernmost sector, against the 117,800-strong Habsburg Fourth Army. The defence here, as elsewhere along this front, was designed to thwart familiar ponderous Russian tactics that eschewed surprise in favour of a very heavy artillery bombardment followed by unskilled mass infantry assault. Habsburg ‘best practice’ was to dig a front line with a second line ten metres behind well connected to the first with defensible communication trenches. A third reserve line was then sometimes set out 100 metres to the rear. Great effort had been made to make the front line impregnable. Barbed-wire obstructions had been erected in front of it, and in the line concrete machine-gun emplacements, mortar and flame-thrower positions had been built. In some places, field artillery had been dug in for direct fire support. A key feature were shelters, known in the Habsburg army as ‘fox holes’ (Fuchslöcher), three or four metres underground and capable of withstanding a direct hit from a 15cm shell.73 The Prussian General Alexander von Linsingen, who was responsible for the Habsburg Fourth Army and the Army of the Bug to the north, had a fortnight before the attack personally inspected the positions of 2 Infantry Division (ITD), a unit filled with Poles and Ruthenes that was to be at the centre of the Russian bombardment and initial breakthrough. To the divisional commander’s obvious relief (all Habsburg officers were scared of Linsingen), even the pernickety Prussian pronounced himself ‘convinced that [they] would defy any attack’.74

  On the first day of Brusilov’s offensive, albeit only on that day, this confidence was fully vindicated. While the Russian bombardment did cause damage, the 2 ITD and its neighbouring formations fought off enemy patrols and probing attacks. The division’s regiments reported proudly in the late afternoon that not only had all attacks been repelled but even Russian attempts to confuse the defence by sending forward German speakers in their assault waves had failed. Habsburg troops remained in good spirits and while most reserves were already in place directly behind the first position, they had not been needed.75 Night attacks were easily thrown back. Only the next morning did the Austro-Hungarian defence lose control over the battle. At dawn on 5 June the Russian artillery opened up again and at around 9 a.m. built up to drumfire. The men of 2 ITD took cover in their fox holes, as they had been taught. They remained there too long. The Russians suddenly shifted their fire onto the line immediately behind the front and unleashed their storm troops, who, thanks to saps dug across no-man’s-land, did not have far to run. The defenders lost the race to the parapet. As two 2 ITD officers explained:

  In the shelters of the first trench, in Infantry Regiment 82, the men still had the roar of the barrage ringing in their ears, even though for five seconds it had no longer been directed against the trench. In the sixth second some quick-witted person perhaps cried: ‘Out into the trenches!’ In the seventh second, he collided with someone in the stairwell, who between mangled and splintered low-hanging beams flung a hand grenade after him. And in the eighth second, a voice from above called to the people in the shelter that they could give themselves up. All resistance would be useless.76

  The reserves, in accordance with the Habsburg army’s defensive doctrine, were positioned just behind the front, with the unintended result that they were embroiled in the battle too soon to be organized for a counter-attack. The 13 Landwehr Division (LITD), the Fourth Army’s reserve held further back, should have intervened, but the order was not delivered because its commander and his staff had been displaced by Russian artillery fire and could not be found. What remained of 2 ITD, fewer than 100 of its 3,500 men, was told to withdraw to the rudimentary third position, along with 13 LITD. Further down the line, the 70 Honvéd Division (HITD) had also lost the centre of its first position, and with little chance of restoring the situation due to the loss of 40–50 per cent of its men, it too retreated.77

  These retreats started a spectacular collapse that overtook the whole Fourth Army on the next day. The infantry at the front were under constant Russian pressure and their artillery spent more time galloping rearwards than giving fire support. The gunners claimed that they lacked shells. In fact, there were plenty of shells but all too often panicking batteries abandoned their stocks and the munitions columns ordered to replenish them found their positions deserted. Worse still, after all but two of the eight divisions in the army reserve had been committed, there were insufficient spare troops to stem the attack and an utter failure of coordination at all levels of command. X Corps, the formation to which the 2 ITD belonged, made an independent decision to pull its troops back shortly before
midday on 6 June. Fourth Army command failed promptly to countermand the order and as a result was left with no choice by the early afternoon but to sound a retreat along its whole 81-kilometre front. By mid-afternoon, what was left of the 70 HITD had broken and was streaming back to the Styr River. Units became mixed up, panic spread and exhausted troops ceased to obey orders to form defensive lines and instead flooded rearwards. The army’s main supply base, the town of Lutsk, was abandoned on 7 June. Such was the state of dissolution that it was not possible even to re-form the line along the defensible Styr River. Already that night, the Russians began to cross to the west bank, in many places without opposition, and kept going until they had advanced 75 kilometres from their jumping-off points. The Habsburg Fourth Army was broken. In just four days its strength plummeted from 117,800 to only 35,000 men, a fall of almost 70 per cent.78

  As the Fourth Army collapsed, the Habsburg Seventh Army at the southern end of the line also crumbled. This force, composed of reliable Hungarian and Croatian troops under a proven commander, General Karl von Pflanzer-Baltin, was bombarded south of the Dniester River by 200 guns firing 100,000 shells. ‘Our brave Honvéd troops were literally buried,’ recalled its Chief of Staff, Colonel Theodor von Zeynek. The Russians, as a result of their diligent sapping, had no more than forty and in some places just twenty paces to run in order to reach Habsburg trenches. In consequence, as against the Fourth Army, they were able to move into their enemy’s positions with startling speed and, ‘as the drumfire ceased and the curtain fire [aimed behind the lines to stop Habsburg reserves coming up] began, one saw whole columns marching into Russian captivity’.79 To stem the main Russian success near the village of Okna, Pflanzer-Baltin then made the error of committing all his reserves, with the result that when, on 7 June, the Tsarist Ninth Army launched a sudden assault to the north of the Dniester River and broke through the line, he was rendered helpless. He ordered a retreat south-west into Bukovina two days later, but German protests that this would expose the flank of the Südarmee on the Seventh Army’s left forced him to switch to a westerly withdrawal. The change in the direction, combined with continued Russian pressure, broke the army. By 8 June it had lost 76,200 of its 194,200 soldiers. Four days later, after just a week of action, Brusilov’s forces had captured one-third of the Habsburg army’s personnel on the Eastern Front, namely 2,992 officers and 190,000 soldiers, along with 216 artillery pieces. Taking account of the killed and wounded, the total Habsburg loss came to around half the army’s complement.80

  Why had the opening stages of the battle gone so disastrously wrong for the Austro-Hungarian army? Brusilov, the man who conceived and led the offensive, deserves much of the credit for bringing a unique system and effectiveness to Russian offensive planning.81 He had studied recent Tsarist assaults to understand why they had failed. He ordered his four armies to attack on a front of at least 30 kilometres each, recognizing that any less would leave advancing troops vulnerable to flanking fire. His offensive preparations were characterized by a thoroughness unprecedented on the Eastern Front. At his order, aircraft photographed Habsburg positions, artillery firing programmes were painstakingly drawn up, munitions stockpiled, and dugouts for holding the storm infantry and saps for taking them safely across no-man’s-land were constructed. Most importantly, Brusilov did not, in part because he could not, rely on the weight of materiel or men to advance. Instead, he exploited his troops’ intelligence and inculcated in them his own clarity of thought to enable speed of action. The general allocated his artillery clearly defined tasks suited to its capabilities: while the heavy guns were ordered to bombard rear lines and lay a curtain of fire after the first break-in, the light guns were set to counter-battery work. The infantry too had its mission carefully explained. Behind the lines, copies of the Habsburg trench systems were laid out on which troops could train for the attack. Brusilov was determined that in the confusion of combat, his soldiers would know their objectives and know how to achieve them.82

  In contrast, the Habsburg army’s preparations for the coming attack were misguided. To a great degree this was a product of the force’s perennial problem of incompetent senior leadership. Fourth Army, which alone was to face nearly half of Brusilov’s amply supplied light artillery, was particularly unfortunate in its command. Archduke Joseph Ferdinand, its commander, ran a thoroughly dysfunctional staff operation. He had no time for his Chief of Staff, General Otto Berndt, who had been imposed on him after an earlier defeat, was generally intolerant of criticism, and hated the fact that a Prussian officer had been appointed over him to command the Army Group. The Seventh Army had a little more luck with Pflanzer-Baltin and his Chief of Staff Zeynek, who had won laurels repelling a Russian offensive at the start of the year. However, the victory had hardened their tactical and operational convictions, leading to disastrous dispositions in June 1916 when two-thirds of their troops were deployed in or just behind a supposedly impregnable front line, and as a result were immediately lost when the Russians attacked. It also did not help that when the offensive began, Pflanzer-Baltin was bedridden with influenza.83

  The Habsburg leadership’s problems went deeper, however. As one German general observed after extensive service alongside Habsburg staff officers, their key deficiency was their distance, psychological as well as physical, from the men. Conrad and his staff officers, safely ensconced with their wives at the AOK in Teschen, nearly 500 kilometres from the Eastern Front, is the exemplar, but the same mentality was also seen among other General Staff officers. Zeynek, for example, revealingly complained that commanders at the front had built up their positions incompetently; the thought that someone from Seventh Army headquarters should have inspected the works before they were completed evidently never crossed his mind.84 This detachment, along with the ample evidence of incompetence provided by two years of fighting, had cost commanders the respect of their subordinates. Troops’ disgust with their leaders was reflected in slang used at the front, which dubbed General Staff officers’ distinctive caps ‘prosthetic brains’. So far had the collapse of authority progressed that neither the Fourth nor Seventh Army command proved able to get troops to act against the Russians’ sapping. Both recognized the obvious danger posed by the enemy tentacles unfurling towards their lines, yet their orders to stop it prompted little response. Some half-hearted raids over no-man’s-land were launched; most ended badly. A few units suggested that it might be preferable to move their lines back, rather than provoke an ugly confrontation with the Russians about their saps. The 2 ITD met an attempt to get it to attack first with procrastination and then, among its junior officers, resistance. The division’s parent X Corps, unimpressed when an assault on a dangerous sap was aborted on the lame excuse that dawn had been approaching, ordered another attempt to be made, and added a warning that company commanders who had shirked the operation claiming ill health, and platoon commanders who had thought they could escape through suicide attempts, would all face courts martial.85

  The scramble by junior officers to avoid the 2 ITD’s raid was symptomatic of a wider lack of fighting spirit among the Habsburg army’s lower ranks by mid-1916. Even as the debacle unfolded in June, rumours blaming Slavic disloyalty circulated. Already by the middle of the month, Vienna’s chattering classes were spreading the story, probably inspired by the 2 ITD’s disintegration, that Ruthenian and Polish troops had surrendered unnecessarily to the Russians.86 Others begged to differ, claiming that it was mass desertion by the Czechs of Moravian Infantry Regiment 8 which had triggered Fourth Army’s collapse.87 In July, when the crisis worsened, Jewish men also came under scrutiny. The General Staff’s Intelligence Bureau warned of ‘mass desertion’ by German, Polish and Hungarian Jews. This was blamed not solely on what it called Jews’ ‘inherent fear of the strain of war’ but also on systematic agitation by mysterious Zionist forces in England.88 In reality, nationality was a poor predictor of the resistance put up by Habsburg units in the summer of 1916. Seventh Army, for example, had f
ive Slavic divisions, one Polish-Ruthenian, one Ruthenian, one Croatian and two Czech, in late June. The worst relative losses, including in prisoners, had been inflicted on the Croatian and part-Polish divisions, whose peoples were generally regarded as loyal, while the Czech units, the usual scapegoats in any defeat, had shed the fewest soldiers. Ethnically German units also lost large numbers of prisoners. Most of 13 LITD’s 13,000 Viennese officers and men surrendered when their positions were overrun by the Russians in the first week of June. Only 1,714 soldiers escaped to fight on.89

  The Habsburg army’s hypersensitivity to disloyalty from the Empire’s subordinate peoples, a trait that had cost many civilians their lives in Galicia and Serbia and inflicted much damage on the regime’s reputation in 1914 and 1915, undermined its fighting performance in 1916. First, it distracted from the real causes of poor performance. By scapegoating their men, Habsburg commanders right up to Conrad successfully avoided the self-criticism that might have fostered a learning process and improvement. Second, it encouraged the adoption of poor tactics. An investigation after the debacle of summer 1916 was correct to conclude that troops ‘had dug too much and exercised too little’, yet missed the key point: an army that distrusted half of its soldiers naturally had little interest in training them in initiative or independence. Far better, it seemed, to seek security in reassuringly solid earthworks where troops might easily be supervised.90 In actuality, these only exacerbated the force’s weakness. Officers and soldiers, whose self-confidence could scarcely be high given their hasty training and the suspicion of their commanders, drew a similar comforting but highly dangerous illusion of security from their ‘impregnable’ fortifications. They consequently preferred not to leave the apparent safety of their earthworks to contest no-man’s-land and suppress Russian sapping. Worse still, when that strong front line failed in June 1916, these troops lacked the skills, cohesion and independence to react effectively. Chaos and collapse thus inevitably engulfed the army.91