The Eastern Front 1914-1917

by Norman Stone

  Lechitski’s attack began with a tactical victory near the town of Okna. In a bend of the river Dniester—the ‘Samuszyn-Schlinge’—the Austrians had taken up a highly unfavourable line, over-looked by the Russians. It was held because retreat here would have meant retreat elsewhere; but the sector did not even have a separate divisional command. Lechitski’s troops sapped forward to within thirty paces of the Austrian lines, and nothing could be done to prevent this. On 4th June bombardment began—200 guns south of the Dniester firing 100,000 shells, in an ably-programmed style. The bombardment was much more effective than before, since light and heavy guns stuck to their tasks the heavy ones maintaining fire on the Austrian rear to prevent reserves from coming in, while the light ones were well-timed—stopping for fifteen minutes as supposed prelude to attack, firing again once the Austrians had come out of their dug-outs. After several such episodes, the defenders did not come out of their dug-outs, and many were captured in them. On 5th June a considerable tactical success was achieved near Okna, where the Austrian salient was taken, with 11,000 prisoners and fourteen guns.

  But the dimensions of Lechitski’s victory turned out to be much greater. Pflanzer-Baltin now committed all of his troops to the area south of the Dniester, where two heights buttressed his line. He was led to commit all of his forces by continuing Russian attacks on these heights. The attacks, generally, failed over the next few days. None the less, there was nothing to spare for his front north of the Dniester, and a well-staged attack by Russian forces there on 7th June brought collapse—the Austrian corps retiring in disorder over the Dniester itself. As they retired, they bared the left flank of the defenders to the south, and collapse set in—a collapse that found most of the troops already committed to their front line and almost unable to escape. The tactical victory on Lechitski’s front was therefore as great as on VIII Army’s. But, because Brusilov had seen the importance of disrupting enemy reserves, of confusing the Austrians as to the direction of attack, the victory turned out to be a still greater one. Pflanzer-Baltin ordered retreat on 9th June. But he ordered retreat to the south-west, into the Bukovina, which he imagined Lechitski wished to take. The Austro-Hungarian high command, however, was told by Falkenhayn that retreat must be towards the west, where Pflanzer-Baltin could keep his links with the German Südarmee. Retreat therefore had to go first south-west and then west—a confusion of transports that brought the entire movement to a stop. By mid-June VII Army had almost disintegrated, parts of it holding the river Prut to the south, parts of it fleeing west, on the side of Südarmee. Lechitski’s troops arrived on the Prut. On 17th June an Austrian bridgehead fell, with 1,500 prisoners, for Russian loss of one man, wounded. Demoralisation was such that the artillery now ran off: a Russian observer noted that ‘although the artillerists knew their business well, they did not now have the courage to do their duty by the infantry. Batteries made off to the rear much earlier and more rapidly than they should have done, and left the infantry to its fate’. There were even cases where Cossack troops seized whole batteries. Now, part of VII Army had gone off to the west, and another part retired to the southern reaches of the Bukovina. Pflanzer-Baltin himself reckoned that he had lost 100,000 men, talked of his ‘ruinierte Armee’. That morale alone had not been responsible for this was shown in that only forty per cent of the loss could be ascribed to capture—at that, mainly in the confused conditions of retreat. It was tactical and strategic mishandling that brought about this defeat.

  By 12th June two Austro-Hungarian armies had been broken up almost completely. Brusilov’s command reported its captures (and perhaps under-stated them) as:28

  Army

  officers

  men

  guns

  machine—guns

  Minenwerfer

  VII

  716

  34,000

  47

  106

  9

  VIII

  437

  76,000

  87

  276

  90

  IX

  1,245

  55,000

  66

  172

  32

  XI

  594

  25,000

  16

  91

  64

  2,992

  190,000

  216

  645

  196

  In other words, the Austro-Hungarian army had lost over a third of its men as prisoners in less than a week of action; with other casualties, the losses came to over half of the forces in the east. The blow to Austrian morale was irreparable: from now on, Austrian troops fought with an ineradicable sense of inferiority, and the loss of positions which had been universally thought impregnable led to a deep disbelief in commanders and in fortifications of all kinds. From now on, the Austrian army was useful only in so far as it could be joined with German troops—which happened, increasingly, even to the degree that companies of Austrian and German troops were joined to make mixed battalions. It is probably not an exaggeration to state that the Austrian army survived, now, by grace of the Prussian sergeant-major. Except on the Italian front, the heirs of Radetzky were not much more than stage-props pushed around, often contemptuously, by German managers. Pflanzer-Baltin had Seeckt foist on him as chief of staff;29 Südarmee, under its German commander, Bothmer, took over most of the east-Galician sector; the command-area of Linsingen’s Army Group—though theoretically under Conrad’s orders—came to include the Austrian I as well as IV Army; and IV Army itself had most of its units mixed with German ones, under German command—although the Austrian army command, again theoretically, remained in existence. In time, pressures for establishment of a German command of the entire eastern front came up—Falkenhayn proposing first Mackensen, then late in July having to preside over the extension of Hindenburg’s powers to include the bulk of the Austrian front as well as the whole of the, German one. Austrian independence, late in July, was shown only in the existence of ‘Army Group Archduke Karl’—south-eastern Galicia and the Bukovina—and even this had Seeckt as its chief of staff. Conrad sometimes grumbled that peace would have to be made, that the Germans should abandon their ‘limitless’ plans for conquest in Europe.30 But it would have been difficult, on the ground, to withdraw the Habsburg army from action, since it was already so much intermingled with German troops; and in any case the junior officers of the Austro-Hungarian army were probably more loyal to the German alliance than they were to the wreckage of the supra-national Habsburg Monarchy. Hitler’s satellites existed before Hitler.

  But, even though Austria-Hungary had almost collapsed, Brusilov could not follow up his victory at once. The losses of VIII Army had not been insignificant—35,000 by 8th June, of which two-thirds were wounded—and much of the shell-reserve had been fired off. The rapid advance to Lutsk, and later Dubno, brought the infantry beyond their supply-lines, and when the advance went over the Styr at Lutsk, the problem was still more complicated. It was true that the defence had been shattered; Russian cavalry even reached Vladimir Volynski, headquarters of IV Army. But there was not much cavalry, and as usual it could be held up even by platoons of infantry in passable condition. The infantry could not move fast enough, and so the Austrians were able to retire until no Russians were following them. In later years, Brusilov was much criticised for his failure to have reserves of infantry and cavalry to exploit his break-through—he had only one cavalry division in reserve, that of Mannerheim, later President of Finland. But he did not have reserves, partly because his was meant to be an ‘auxiliary’ attack for which no great reserves were made available, and partly because his very method ruled out assembly of reserves—most of the men took part in the immediate, long-front attacks, instead of waiting behind the lines for someone to break through on a tiny sector, as had happened at Lake Narotch. As far as cavalry was concerned, Brusilov had simply dismounted his divisions and used them as infantry: again from a reasonable judgment that cavalry divis
ions—for instance Smirnov’s preposterous 233 squadrons of cavalry in March 1916—merely complicated supply to an intolerable degree. In this case, failure to exploit the break-through was almost a direct consequence of breaking through in the first place, and it was unfair to ask more of Brusilov.

  Faced with the physical impossibility of going on against the remnant of IV Army, Brusilov turned his attention to the north. Here was the vast weight of Evert’s front, with its three-fold superiority in guns and men. Some way must be found of bringing that superiority into play. Brusilov allowed his forces to halt their advance to the south-west, against the Austrians, in order to turn to the north-west, in the direction of Kowel—his main aim being to dislodge the defenders of this area, and thus roll up the German line opposite Evert’s front. In later years, he was accused of missing a great opportunity, for going on south-west to destroy the Austrians. But supply-problems cut across this; in any case, Kaledin, commanding VIII Army, was nervous that the Germans would come to attack him as he moved on, baring his flank to the north. In September 1915, VIII Army had re-taken Lutsk, and had then been humiliatingly expelled from it when German forces moved south into VIII Army’s flank. Kaledin seems to have thought much the same would happen now—as a trickle of German troops was reported—and even ordered that positions should be dug just west of the Styr. Brusilov himself was in two minds. He knew that Evert, not he, had the main task in the summer offensive; he acquiesced in Kaledin’s halt, and even confirmed it—telling Kaledin, somewhat later, that he might move towards Kovel but ‘you are on no account to advance towards Vladimir Volynski’—i.e. against the Austrians. Typically enough, Brusilov himself had won a brilliant victory by methods that had been intended almost as a ballon d’essai; and now he too relapsed into orthodoxy, fear for his flank ruling out the energetic pursuit that might have been organised once VIII Army had got over its supply-problems.

  Brusilov turned to the forces of the western front, and decided that his main task must be to unlock the German defences on his own northern flank. But the difficulties of this were considerable. In the first place, Evert himself showed no stomach for action; and in any case Brusilov’s own northern group—a mixed force of cavalry and infantry divisions on the bend of the Styr north-east of Lutsk—was unable to get over the Austrian defences. This was mainly a matter of terrain—the marshes of the Styr, with only a few ways through them. Two cavalry corps and an infantry corps attempted without success to force the Styr salient, but succeeded, at best, in seizing villages on its perimeter.31 The one break-through that did occur brought eighty per cent loss against barbed-wire hidden in the marshes, and the attackers lost so heavily that their success could not be followed up. Brusilov blamed this on the cavalry commander, Gyllenschmidt, for his ‘feeble activity and bad management’. But in country of this type, there was not much that Gyllenschmidt could achieve. The Styr salient would require investment of greater force, and it was an error—a cruel one—of Brusilov’s to suppose otherwise.

  With this salient on his flank, Brusilov seems to have thought that German troops would use it to debouch far in his rear. He recognised that Gyllenschmidt could do little, and therefore summoned Evert to attack—Evert, with two-thirds of the army’s heavy artillery, and a huge force of nearly a million men groomed for offensive action, prepared—according to conference instructions—since mid-April 1916. Evert had no stomach at all for his attack. He demanded ‘quantities of heavy shell that go beyond our wildest dreams’. He switched the main area of attack between one place and another—on 1st June announcing that the Narotch area was unsuitable, that Baranovitchi, in the centre of his front, was to be preferred; and preparations were switched to this area. The transfer of reserves from Lake Narotch to Baranovitchi naturally was allowed to take weeks. He was asked to attack in June, but said that this attack must be postponed—‘it would be unseemly to attack on Trinity Sunday and All Souls’ Day’. On 4th June, attack was put off until the 17th and then the end of the month. It was switched away from Pinsk—because the marshes were not dry—and then switched back again a week later. As early as 5th June, men on Brusilov’s front regarded Evert—with his German name—as a traitor; Brusilov complained to Alexeyev that ‘he will turn a won battle into a lost one’. On 16th June Evert was telling Alexeyev that his attack would be ‘only frontal blows, promising only very slow progress with the greatest of difficulty’.32 Kuropatkin, still in charge of the northern front, was even more prudent—even announcing that the Germans had reinforced their front here by four divisions. No-one noted how Brusilov had won his victories—in some ways, not even Brusilov himself. Evert in particular could only imagine some great set-piece offensive. His gestures towards attack were feeble—a few sporadic corps-actions in the latter part of June, leading nowhere in particular. Insistence on great preparation meant that the Germans were not at all surprised, and the preparation was in any event perfunctory as Evert switched the stage of his pusillanimity from one place to another—his deliberations being followed by transport, hither and thither, of great quantities of matériel. It was the legacy of Lake Narotch in March, 1916.

  In the event, he agreed to attack near Baranovitchi, early in July. In the meantime, he and Kuropatkin—no doubt partly as excuse to relieve themselves of any need to attack—parted grudgingly enough with reserves for Brusilov’s front: 5. Siberian Corps, which arrived on 12th June, followed by two others on 18th June and 1. Turkestan Corps on 24th June. 5. Siberian Corps took only a week to arrive in full—much the same time as reserve-troops took on the German side, a sign that, when the transport-officers were made to do their work properly, reserves could be shifted at speed.33 These four corps were only the beginning of a considerable shift of reserves to the successful front. Even so, there were still 400,000 men on Kuropatkin’s front to 200,000 Germans, and Kuropatkin would not shift more than a division or two, in this decisive phase.

  By mid-June, the disorientation of Kaledin and the confusions of Evert’s front had stopped Brusilov’s advance in the northern sector. None the less, the great confusions brought to the Central Powers by Brusilov’s methods continued to work much harm to the decisions of Falkenhayn and Conrad. Their reserves had been altogether disrupted—some went to Volhynia, for counter-attack; others were sent to eastern Galicia, to stop the threatened collapse; others again went to the area south of the Dniester, in an attempt to shore up the collapsing Austro-Hungarian VII Army.34 It was this confusion of enemy reserves that allowed Brusilov more successes, in July, despite the confusion of his advance.

  Falkenhayn was still committed to his western campaign, and in any case an Anglo-French offensive on the Somme was about to come—the preliminary bombardment beginning on 24th June (lasting until 1st July). Conrad was likewise committed to his offensive against Italy. Neither man wished to break off in order to save the eastern front. There was an initial delay as Conrad tried to get Falkenhayn to send reserves—Verdun had failed, Asiago was working. Falkenhayn responded icily: he had nothing to spare from the west; moreover, there had been no Russian troop-movements to Brusilov’s front from Evert’s, such that the Germans north of the Pripyat still faced a great superiority of numbers. A series of small-scale grants was made—Linsingen’s front received five battalions from marshes to the north, a Landwehr brigade, an Austrian brigade, and the Austrian reserve division that had first, erroneously, been put in against XI Army. For four days, nothing more was decided. Conrad met Falkenhayn in Berlin on 8th June and was forced, almost like ‘an errant schoolboy’,35 to give up troops from his Italian front, where in any case the offensive was slackening. Four German divisions would be sent, four and a half Austro-Hungarian ones, including two and a half from the Italian front at once. A trickle of German troops began on 6th June, and by 20th June ten and a half new divisions, Austro-Hungarian and German, had been moved to the threatened eastern front. Even so, there was a new dimension to the disaster with the collapse of Pflanzer-Baltin on the Dniester. Reserves were n
ot even sent as a block to Volhynia: three divisons, one of them German (from Macedonia) had to be diverted to hold up the remnant of VII Army. The reserves were not much, in the context of two shattered Austrian armies, of the four corps sent to Brusilov as reinforcement. But Falkenhayn would not give anything away from the west; increasingly, too, Ludendorff, jealously controlling his independent front, would not part with significant reserves. In this way, he could embarrass Falkenhayn and take over command of the whole eastern front himself, perhaps even of the whole German army. If, to cut them down to size, the Austrians and Falkenhayn were defeated, so much the better for Ludendorff.

  The Central Powers did what they could, Conrad attempted to restore the morale of his men by moving into commands antiquated fire-eaters such as Tersztyánszki, who rapidly discovered that they did not speak the same language as the dejected and bewildered soldiers. By 10th June 10. Corps had 3,000 men left, Szúrmay, 2,000. The largest division of the army was the Viennese 13. Rifle Division—with 1,400 men of an establishment of 12,000. Tersztyánszki sent back ever more alarming messages to Conrad—the Germans were looking, now, ‘queerly’ on the Austrian efforts. Tersztyánszki told his men:36 ‘My patience is exhausted and I refuse to have my and the senior officers’ reputations dragged in the mud.’ The men, who in any case might legitimately have supposed that they were not fighting for their commanders’ reputations, remained unaffected by such literature. By the end of June, IV Army ceased to exist, except in so far as there was a German framework for it. To plug the gaps both here and in VII Army, Conrad had to stop the offensive against Italy, and obtain troops. He told Archduke Eugen, commanding the offensive, that the three divisions already sent (by 16th June) must be followed by another five, in two corps. ‘We are now forced to stop your offensive, having waited to the uttermost limits for you to fulfil your promises’ was Conrad’s instruction to the Archduke. On 24th June the Austrians in northern Italy had to retire to a suitable defensive line, and to fend off another Italian offensive. Eight divisions went back to the east.