The Eastern Front 1914-1917

by Norman Stone

  This decision belongs, as the Austro-Hungarian official historians said, ‘to the most finely-balanced of the world war’. In real terms, it was almost lunatic. IV Army had been exhausted by a fortnight’s marching and heavy fighting. III Army had been badly beaten already. But Conrad was not a man to take such things into account. He had learned that VIII Army in East Prussia had won a great victory; he must emulate the feat, perhaps exploit it for his own ends. III and II Armies would retire west of Lwów to a good line on the river Wereszyca, and when the Russians had followed, IV Army would intervene on their flank, by marching south-east across Rawa Ruska. Orders for this went out on 1st September. Meanwhile, Ruzski advanced towards Lwów, spent two days reconnoitring its empty and ancient forts, and finally made a ceremonial entry on 3rd September. Now, belatedly, he responded to suggestions that he might help V Army; the incessant proddings of Ivanov were reinforced by religious literature from Stavka, which made Ruzski transport one of his corps to his northern flank, and orientate the march of III Army towards the north-west. In this way, he met head-on the Austrian IV Army, marching south-east. These troops were exhausted, and had suffered heavy loss; they could no longer be moved around in Conrad’s fashion like so many coloured pins on a staff-map. After a few tactical successes of no great importance, they became locked west of Lwów in a frontal battle of no issue. By a curious twist, the out-flanking effect sought by Conrad was to some extent achieved further south, by III, and particularly by II Army—now reinforced by 4. Corps from the Balkans. Between 7th and 9th September the Austrians here won some considerable tactical successes, which encouraged Conrad to go on trying up to the last moment.

  .In the event, he had to retreat. Now, on the eastern side, he had built up at least equality of forces with the Russian III and VIII Armies. But he had done so, inevitably, at the expense of his northern side. His I Army had arrived before Lublin by 1st September, but it had to face a constant inflow of Russian reserves, as IX Army arrived to buttress this front. IV Army alone rose from six and a half to fourteen divisions, facing the Austrians’ thirteen; and the only fresh force on which the Austrians could count was a weak German Landwehr Corps which had just marched 200 miles from Silesia, had only eight machine-guns, one aeroplane, no field-kitchens. The Austrians had now 558 guns, the Russians 900. As new Russian troops arrived, they pressed the Austrians back towards Krasnik, with a series of embarrassments on the flanks. Worse still, the Russian V Army—reported to have been destroyed—recovered quickly enough, and sent two further corps against the Austrian northern side. Against them, the Austrian IV Army had left a single corps, such that, on this northern side, there were twenty-six and a half Russian divisions to fifteen and a half Austrian ones; and the other two corps of the reviving V Army moved into the rear of Auffenberg’s forces attacking III Army at Rawa Ruska. The northern side began to crumble. To defend Auffenberg’s rear, there was only one corps—again, Archduke Joseph Ferdinand’s. It had lost all but 10,000 of its 50,000 men, and was rudely pushed aside by the reviving Russian divisions—one regiment, with Franz Ferdinand’s military secretary at its head, being cut to pieces in a marsh. Further west, I Army’s front also collapsed. At Sukhodoly, an Austrian corps lost two-thirds of its guns and men as it stood up to the attack of three Russian corps. On the left, the Russians attacked along the Vistula, and broke up the Germans’ Landwehrkorps on 8th September, which lost 8,000 men and fell back over the Vistula. By 9th September, the Russians were threatening Conrad’s western communications his line of retreat towards the Germans

  Conrad appealed to the Germans for help. He was told that, for the moment, nothing could be done—the Kaiser remarking, ‘You surely can’t ask any more of VIII Army than it has already achieved’. Stubbornly, he urged the troops of III and II Armies into a further attack over the Wereszyca—even, uniquely, turning up himself, with the nominal commander-in-chief, Archduke Friedrich, to watch the armies’ doings. By 11th September, with Russian cavalry raiding even the headquarters of his divisions, Conrad elected to retreat. The retreat itself was extremely disorderly. Nothing had been prepared in anticipation of it—it was thought that preparations for retreat would demoralise the troops still attacking on the eastern side. Consequently, the few roads were taken up with two-way traffic—men and guns moving west, hospital-carts and munitions-carts moving up to the front. A steady downpour went on, turning the roads into marshes. Inside the San fortress of Przemyśl, narrow streets were blocked by military carts, standing axle-to-axle. The only thing that saved Conrad from even greater collapse was the sluggardly Russian advance. Ivanov took the view that ‘the Austrians’ retreat will secure for our army the chance of an essential break in operations’. Rest-days were lavishly distributed. Ruzski ordered fortification of Lwów. Cavalry, unfamiliar with the terrain, caused some panic in the Austro-Hungarian baggage-trains, but was less effective in this than men had hoped. With some speed, Conrad withdrew his stricken armies to the San, then to the rivers east of Cracow—the Dunajec and Biala, which were reached in mid-September. Both armies were exhausted. The Austro-Hungarians had suffered casualties of nearly fifty per cent—400,000, of which the Russians took 100,000, with 300 guns; the Russians had lost 250,000 men, 40,000 as prisoners, with 100 guns. Conrad could now only wait for German help; and the two operations of August-September 1914 now came together in their consequences, if not their course, as Ludendorff himself arrived to discuss matters.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The First War-Winter, 1914–1915

  By mid-September, the pattern of the war had been set up. The Germans had fought their way into France, but stand-still had followed; the Russians had been defeated by the Germans; the Austro-Hungarians by the Russians. Thereafter, the western Powers and the Germans sought to break the dead-lock in the west; the Germans had continually to help their ally; and the Russians sought to reverse the verdict of Tannenberg. In the latter part of September, too, the tactical pattern of the war was laid down. In the west, troops began to dig trenches, at first, sketchy and primitive ditches, and later on interlocking systems of some complexity. They did this because of a sudden discovery that soil proved to be the best defence against enemy artillery. Concrete fortresses offered it a target that was too obvious, whereas trenches in the earth were not vulnerable except to very well-aimed shells; even then, if the trenches were well-constructed, they could hold out against even heavy shell. Dug-outs with a ceiling ten metres thick were invulnerable to heavy shell, and if the ceiling were reinforced with concrete, it need even be only three metres thick. Of course, trench-warfare was a static form of defence, which had made it impossible in previous ages. But now, the attack itself was semi-static, since cavalry had become ineffective, and the internal combustion-engine was barely developed. To the generals’ bewilderment, a line of trenches began to snake across France and Flanders, and both sides found their attacks slackening and failing against this seemingly ‘unsoldierly’ defence.

  The war in eastern Europe continued, however, to be one of manoeuvre. One essential reason for this was, paradoxically, that communications were more primitive than in the west, so that reserves could not be rushed in to fill a gap as quickly as in France. When Ludendorff broke through the British army in March 1918, fourteen French infantry divisions were moved to fill the gap by 1st April, within ten days of the break-through—indeed, within three days of it there had arrived five by rail, three by bus and one by lorry.1 By contrast, it took the Russians in October 1914 a month to transport eighteen divisions from east of

  Cracow to south of Warsaw. Moreover, the eastern front was much less thickly-filled with infantry divisions than the western one, despite the obviously greater resources of man-power of Russia and even of the Habsburg Monarchy. Conscription, for reasons to be explained in Chapter 10, was a more haphazard business than in France. There were severe limits to the supply-capacity of the Russian army. Consequently, the Russian field army was not more than a fraction of the available man-power, and
was indeed, for most of the time in the first year-and-a-half of war, only marginally superior to the field armies of the Central Powers. By October 1914, there were ninety-eight Russian infantry divisions serving against the Central Powers, but sixteen of them were in VI and VII Armies, guarding the Baltic and Black Sea coasts. In the same period, the Central Powers had between seventy and eighty divisions of infantry. By January 1915, for the start of the Central Powers’ offensive, there were seventy-nine Austro-German infantry divisions, and fifteen and a half cavalry ones, to eighty-three Russian infantry and twenty-five cavalry divisions. By May 1915, the Central Powers were actually superior in number—109½ infantry divisions to just over 100, the Russian forces having in the mean time devoted thirteen and a half infantry and nine cavalry divisions to their Caucasus front against Turkey. It was only in mid-1916 that the Russians built up a comfortable superiority in man-power, with 150 infantry divisions to the Central Powers’ 100. On the western front, there were always at least as many divisions as on the eastern front, and usually more. In 1914–15, the Germans deployed 100 infantry divisions in the west, the Entente 110; and thereafter the Entente’s strength rose as new British divisions were gradually fielded. By February 1916, at the start of the Verdun offensive, there were 120 German divisions in the west, forty-seven and a half in the east; they faced 105 French, forty British, five Belgian divisions. By mid-1917, the forces west and east were roughly similar. In the west, 2,219 Entente battalions faced 1,314 German ones; in the east, 2,403 Russo-Romanian battalions faced 1,528 of the Central Powers. In terms of artillery, there were always of course many more guns in the west than in the east, a superiority still more important if shell-weight is counted. By the end of 1916, each side in the east had some 8,000 guns, but in the west, there were 18,000 allied guns to 11,000 German.2 Yet the western front was not much over half the length of the eastern one which, imposed on a map of western Europe, would have stretched roughly from Rotterdam to Valencia, and, after Romanian intervention, to Algeria. It was calculated that one and a half German divisions occupied in the east space that would have absorbed five divisions in the west; the Austrians similarly calculated that they had one rifle for every two metres of front in the east, whereas they had three

  rifles for every metre on their Italian front. Of course, differences in tactics and handling of troops overall also counted. But the essential reasons for the eastern front’s remaining for so long a place of manoeuvre, not of Stellungskrieg, were the lower defensive fire-power and the lesser mobility of reserves than in the west. Finally, the Germans’ more rapid overcoming of problems of rifle and shell-supply put the Russians at a disadvantage in defensive warfare that was to be particularly important in the early summer of 1915. This point is more fully discussed in Chapter 7.

  Moreover, the Russian army was at a great disadvantage in a war of manoeuvre because of the structure of command in the army, its division into often hostile ‘fronts’ or army groups. Hence, manoeuvring on the Russian side consisted, of a series of blundering and ill-co-ordinated responses to misunderstood crises. There had always been difficulty in combining the requirements of the two separate ‘fronts’, against Germany and Austria-Hungary. The staff of the Warsaw Military District had naturally wished to devote as much as possible against Germany, that of the Kiev Military District against Austria-Hungary. Because the General Staff’s own position had been so vulnerable before 1914, there was—except briefly, in 1910—no way by which it could impose its view on these separate planning agencies. In recognition of this, the two agencies were allowed to plan virtually independently, and two separate commands were set up in wartime. They fought, virtually, separate wars. The high command, Stavka, was botched together at the last moment, and was regarded with suspicion in so far as it was regarded at all. In reality Stavka existed mainly to co-ordinate the army’s movements with the French; and for the first weeks of war it lacked even proper communications with the separate fronts.

  In theory, of course, Stavka could control things because it controlled reserves: it could determine where newly-arrived units should go. But by early October, virtually all of the divisions had arrived at the front, and what remained did not give the high command very much influence. The two ‘fronts’ were independent in all but name, and controlled huge areas of Russia, in their rear-areas, as well as large quantities of rolling-stock and railway-line. Naturally, Stavka might determine strategic priorities, and decide that this action of this front was to be preferred to that action, proposed by the other front. In this case, resources would have to be transferred to the main front. But, for a variety of reasons, transfer of these resources was difficult, even impossible. Since the fronts controlled their own transport and reserves, their commands could obstruct Stavka easily enough. If Ruzski’s front against Germany won priority, when Ivanov and Alexeyev felt that they should have it, they would find endless ways of preventing any re-settlement of resources. The movement of reserves was slow; and there was certainly no transfer of troops from East Prussia to Galicia or vice-versa to match the shuttling of German troops between west and east. This was subsequently blamed on railways; but strategic disagreements had at least as much to do with it. In reality, the only way by which a front could be made to co-operate was to give it responsibility for the operation, even where that front’s command had opposed the operation in the first instance. In other words, the only way to get anything done was for Stavka to cease functioning. Inflexibility of reserves and confusions of command therefore marked the first few months of the war on the Russian side; nor was this problem ever successfully overcome. Ancient truths of Russian administration were thereby illustrated: centralisation brought inefficiency, de-centralisation brought anarchy.

  In mid-September, there was already a crisis between the two fronts.3 Ivanov and Alexeyev were determined to push on against the retreating Austro-Hungarian army. They would invest the great fortress of Przemysl, on the San, would capture Cracow and maybe Budapest as well. On the other side, the armies of the north-western front, against Germany, were retreating. Ruzski, who—after a typical episode*—had replaced Zhilinski in mid-September, suffered from visions of a German advance against Warsaw, and sometimes even talked as if the Germans, after their great successes in East Prussia, could go on to Moscow or Saint Petersburg. The only way to stop this was to withdraw the stricken I, II and X Armies a long way back, he thought—at least to the Niemen, where the fortress of Kovno would protect them. Warsaw might have to be abandoned; and the forts and bridges there were blown up (the first of three separate occasions). At best, Novogeorgievsk, an ostensibly impregnable fortress down-river from Warsaw, should be retained. This set of circumstances brought the two fronts into unwilling contact. Ivanov and Alexeyev would not go forward to Cracow if their northern flank, in the Vistula plains, had been bared by retreats of the type adumbrated by Ruzski. If the north-western front pulled right back, there was nothing to stop the Germans from advancing into these plains and cutting the communications of the south-western front; already there were signs of German activity here. If Ruzski retired, then Ivanov and Alexeyev would also have to go back—they threatened to give up even Lwów, a proposal that put Grand Duke Nicholas ‘into indescribable frigh’. Conferences between Stavka, Ruzski and Ivanov produced no decision. Ruzski would agree, under pressure, to postpone his retreat; would return to his headquarters and decide that it should be carried out after all.

  Events produced the decision that the commanders were unable to produce. In the first place, the expected German stroke against Warsaw or Kovno did not take place, or rather, was frustrated at the outset. The Germans crossed the East Prussian border, in the hope of great victories, and were simply stopped before they got very far—supply-problems, exhaustion, inferior numbers, unfamiliar terrain all counting. By 25th September, the Russian X Army was able to stage a counter-offensive that pushed the Germans back to their borders. In Galicia, it was the other way about. The Austro-Hungarian retreat
went on over the San. Russian forces followed. There too supply-problems became insuperable; the fortress of Przemyśl4 at least in theory was an obstacle, and no advance to Cracow could be made until it had fallen. Russian forces inched forward through the Galician mud. Finally, there came news that the Germans were arriving in force north of Cracow. On 18th September, Ludendorff saw Conrad. Ludendorff had been told that ‘direct assistance to the Austrians is now politically essential’. It also made military sense. If the Russians came forward to Cracow, then their northern flank, in the Vistula plains, would be open. Consequently, Ludendorff prepared to assemble a new German force, IX Army, to be commanded by Hindenburg and himself. By 22nd September its vanguards had arrived north of Cracow. Ivanov could not go on against Cracow: he would have to meet this new threat, four corps and a cavalry division.

  This gave Stavka a chance to smuggle in its old scheme, invasion of Germany from the central part of the front, the plains west of the Vistula. Ivanov would have to send troops to this theatre in any event, to match the arrival of Germans. One of Ruzski’s armies would have to remain west of Warsaw, such that a considerable force would be assembled in the middle. Towards the end of September, Ivanov agreed to send substantial forces to this theatre—‘not less than ten army corps, and better still, three armies’. Ruzski would contribute another army (II) and in this way, at least sixteen army corps would take on the Austro-Hungarians’ and Germans’ seven. Joffre took the chance to air his favourite idea, an offensive into Silesia or Poznania. Yanushkevitch therefore ordered ‘preparation of an offensive, of the greatest possible weight, with a view to deep invasion of Germany, proceeding from the middle Vistula to the upper Oder’. To make sure that Ivanov behaved properly, he was given charge of this operation, II Army being put under his command. Ruzski was of course annoyed. He felt that such operations could only succeed if their northern flank—East Prussia—were securely held. He preferred to develop plans for a new offensive against East Prussia, and refused to part with troops or supplies if this offensive were thereby endangered. In this way, two operations were once more conducted, with little contact between the two, and as well there were engagements of lesser importance in Galicia. Twenty-five divisions, generally, were pinned down in a set of operations in East Prussia, which eventually succeeded in pushing the Germans back to the Angerapp lines. Another thirty were pinned down in Galicia, along the Carpathians and on the San. The supposedly decisive central offensive received barely more than thirty divisions, and supply problems meant that these were less effective than they could have been. The only way to make either front collaborate properly in the offensive was to give it responsibility. Thus Ivanov was, first given control of all four armies. Then Ruzski failed to make II Army as strong as he could have done, and also failed to supply it as he was supposed to. Ruzski was then given control of it, and the operation thus acquired two commanders. The invasion of Germany, not surprisingly, failed to get off the ground.