The First World War
Page 21
That was not the end of the fighting in Serbia in 1914. On 6 September the Serbs followed up the victory they had won, and crossed into Austrian territory. It was an unwise manoeuvre and they lost nearly 5,000 casualties when forced to withdraw across the Sava. Later in the month, however, the Serbs found a weak spot in Potiorek’s defences on the Drina, crossed into Bosnia and raced towards Sarajevo, panicking the prison officials there into transferring Gavrilo Princip and his accomplices to the fortress of Theresienstadt in Bohemia. The murderer of the Archduke would die of tuberculosis in April 1918 at Theresienstadt which, in the Second World War, became infamous as “the model ghetto” for elderly, uprooted German Jews, later to be exterminated in the Final Solution. The Serbian occupation of eastern Bosnia lasted only forty days. On 6 November, Potiorek, whose peacetime command Franz Ferdinand had visited Sarajevo to inspect, opened a general offensive with strong reinforcements behind a heavy artillery preparation and, by concentric attack, drove the Serbs back from one line to another in north-eastern Serbia as far as the line of the Morava, eighty miles from the Bosnian frontier. Twice Putnik ordered a general disengagement and retreat, through a worsening winter that covered the hills with three feet of snow. On 2 December the capital, Belgrade, fell and King Peter released his soldiers from their oaths, to go home without dishonour if they chose.29 He announced that he intended to continue the fight and appeared in the front line, carrying a rifle. His example may have marked a turning point. Putnik, believing the Austrians overextended, launched a new offensive on 3 December which broke the Austrian line and in twelve days of fighting drove the enemy clear of Serbian territory. Over 40,000 out of the 200,000 who had campaigned against Serbia since November were lost. The Shvaba, as the Serbs contemptuously nicknamed the Austrians and Germans, would not resume their effort to conquer the kingdom until the autumn of 1915. Then the Serbian epic would take a grimmer turn.
The Battles of Lemberg
The Serbian campaign, however, had never been more than a sideshow to Austria’s great battle on its northern frontier with Russian Poland. There operations had begun with an encounter battle. Both the Austrians and the Russians had pre-war plans to attack as soon as deployment was completed. Both marched to the offensive, with varying results. Conrad’s plan was to strengthen his left and attempt an encirclement of the Russian flank in the great Polish plain south of Warsaw, while conducting an “active defence” on his right, in eastern Galicia, where he could use the great fortresses of Lemberg and Przemysl as a buttress. The Russian plan was also for an encirclement in western Galicia but for rather more than active defence in the east. There had been divided counsels on the Russian side, Alexeyev, Chief of Staff of the South-Western Front, favouring the western effort, Danisov, the guiding light of the Stavka, the eastern. A sort of compromise plan for a “double envelopment” was devised, but the Russians, though stronger than the Austrians, lacked the strength to impose equal pressure in both sectors. The opening phase of the Galician battle was, in consequence, to be confused and indecisive.
Yet physical circumstances favoured the Russians. The terrain suited their enormous formations of hard-marching infantry and their plentiful cavalry. So did the geographical features defining the boundaries of the theatre of operations. The Austrian positions on the forward slope of the Carpathians formed a salient, which projected between the River Vistula and its tributary, the San, on the left and the River Dniester on the right. The Vistula, running north, boxed in the Austrians on the left; the Dniester, running south-east, gave the Russians a strong support to any thrust they might make against the Carpathian salient from the right. Geography thus forced the Austrians to advance into a pocket, which the Russians threatened to dominate on two sides while being able to ignore the third.
A major additional disadvantage to the Austrians was the unreliability of parts of its army. This is a much debated matter, over which opinion has swung backwards and forwards ever since the war years. During the war, Allied publicists made much of the disaffection of Franz Josef’s Slav soldiers and of their sense of brotherhood with the Russians on the other side. The readiness of some Slav contingents, particularly Czech and Austrian Serb, to surrender at will was widely reported and the collapse of the Austrian army at the end of 1918 was taken to confirm the truth of Allied propaganda about the intrinsically unstable nature of the empire. There were post-war revisions, arguing that desertions were the exception and that the army as a whole had remained remarkably Kaisertreu; with reason, for no Austrian defeat can be attributed to large-scale disloyalty. Today, opinion seems to have moved to the centre. Of the nine language groups of the army, of which 44 per cent was Slav (Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Serb, Slovene, Ruthenian, Polish and Bosnian Muslim), 28 per cent German, 18 per cent Hungarian, 8 per cent Romanian and 2 per cent Italian, the Germans were always dependable, if some never wholly enthusiastic; the Hungarians, non-Slavs and privileged co-equals, remained reliable until defeat stared them in the face at the end; the Catholic Croats had a long record of loyalty to the empire, which many of them maintained; the Poles, hating the Russians, distrusting the Germans and enjoying large electoral and social privileges under the Habsburgs, were Kaisertreu; the Bosnian Muslims, sequestered in special, semi-sepoy regiments, were dependable; the Italians and the rest of the Slavs, particularly the Czechs and Serbs, lost the enthusiasm of mobilisation quickly.30 Once war ceased to be a brief adventure, the army became for them “a prison of the nations,” with the ubiquitous German superiors acting as gaolers.
This was an unhappy destiny for an army which, for much of Franz Josef’s reign, had been a successful and even popular multi-ethnic organisation. Commanded in their own languages, spared the brutal discipline of the Kaiser’s army, prettily uniformed, well-fed, loaded with traditions and honours that ascended to the seventeenth-century Turkish siege of Vienna and beyond, the regiments of the imperial army—Tyrolean Rifles, Hungarian Hussars, Dalmatian Light Horse—made a kaleidoscope of the empire’s diversity and, for three years of a young conscript’s life, provided an enjoyable diversion from the routine of workshop or plough. Annual manoeuvres were a pleasurable summer holiday.31 Regimental anniversaries, when the band played, wine flowed, and the honorary colonel, an archduke, a prince, perhaps the Emperor himself, came to visit, were joyous feasts. The return home, time expired, brought more celebration and adult respect. The reality of war was a distant eventuality.
Reality intruded rapidly and cruelly on the Carpathian front in August 1914. At the first encounter, the Austrians prevailed. They deployed thirty-seven infantry divisions, organised from left to right on a front of 250 miles, into the First, Fourth and Third Armies, with detachments on either flank, and a screen of ten cavalry divisions spread out ahead. The Russians, moving forward in an arc opposite, deployed the Fourth, Fifth, Third and Eighth Armies, comprising in all fifty-three divisions of infantry and eighteen of cavalry. Despite the Russians’ superiority in numbers, Conrad’s first thrust succeeded. His left wing ran into the Russian right at Krasnik, just across the River San inside Russian territory on 23 August, and attacked.32 The leading Austrian formation was the First Army, largely composed of Slovaks from Pressburg (Bratislava) and Poles from Cracow; both Catholic, the Slovaks as yet unpoliticised, the Poles anti-Russian, they fought fiercely for their Catholic Emperor in a three-day battle against the Russian Fourth Army which had come forward without waiting for its reserves.33 The Russian General Staff recorded that, at the opening, “the 18th Division fell under violent enemy fire, which obliged the Riazan and Riaysk Regiments to retreat … while the 5th Light Infantry were almost encircled.”34 Things went from bad to worse. By 26 August, the Russians had retired twenty miles towards Lublin (where Stalin would establish his puppet Polish government in 1945). On the same day the Austrian Fourth Army encountered the advancing Russian Third at Komarov, just short of the River Bug; again, the Russians were unlucky in the racial composition of the enemy they met: the Austrian II Corps was formed
of Vienna regiments, including the capital’s Hoch and Deutschmeister, whose colonel was always the Emperor, in tribute to the dynasty’s association with the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights; the IX Corps was raised from Sudetenland Germans and the XVI from Hungarian Magyars. No more solidly imperial foundation for an Austrian victory could have been assembled and, after a week of fighting, it had been gained. By the conclusion, the Russians were almost surrounded.
Then the geographical insecurity of the Austrian position began to assert itself. East of Komarov, the frontier with Russia made a sharp turn to run south-eastward towards the border with neutral Romania. Superficially, this flank offered was easily defensible, since a succession of river lines, the Bug, the Dniester and its tributaries, the two Lipas and the Wereszyca, ran behind it at intervals of twenty or thirty miles; the headwaters of the Bug, moreover, were protected by the great fortress of Lemberg (Lvov), with a second even stronger fortress at Przemysl not far in its rear. The Austrian Third Army should, in such terrain, have easily been able to present a strong resistance to the Russians, since the Second Army in Serbia was now sending back to it the divisions attached to the Balkan Group, while the heart of the army itself was the famous XIV Innsbruck Corps, containing the four regiments of Tyrolean Kaiserjäger and their Kaiserschützen reserve battalions. These eagle-feathered mountain sharpshooters were the truest of the true, bearing a particular loyalty to the Emperor, who was colonel-in-chief to all four regiments.
Third Army, however, had been disfavoured by Conrad’s decision to give it an “active defensive” role, while First and Fourth attempted the encirclement of the Russian flank in western Galicia. As a result, it was deployed well inside Austrian territory, some sixty miles behind the frontier, standing on the River Gnita Lipa. There it should have been safe, had it stayed put. On 25 August, however, Brudermann, its commander, learning of the advance of “five or six Russian divisions” westward from Tarnopol, decided to act offensively and moved forward.35 It was the day, moreover, when he lost XIV Corps, called northward to Second Army. By transfers and movements of formational boundaries, his army now consisted largely of Romanians (XII Corps), Slovenes and Italians (III Corps) and local Ruthenian-speaking Ukrainians (XI Corps), more akin to Russians than any nationality within the Habsburg empire.36 Not only was the ethnic mix almost the least Kaisertreu in Franz Josef’s army, the Third Army was also to find itself grossly outnumbered by the Russian Third Army it was advancing to meet. When the encounter came, less than a hundred Austrian infantry battalions, supported by 300 guns, ran headlong into nearly two hundred Russian, supported by 685.37 In three days of fighting in the broken country between the two Lipa rivers, the Austrians were first defeated at Zlotchow, twenty-five miles short of Tarnopol, and then driven back in confusion, sometimes panic; some of the defeated Austrians fled as far as Lemberg.
Had the Russians followed up their victory, the whole of the insecure Austrian wing might have been overwhelmed. Ruzski, the responsible general, did not follow up and Brudermann’s Third Army survived. It was an odd situation, though not unprecedented in war before or since. Each side misappreciated the extent of its own achievements. Ruzski believed he had won no more than “a fine defensive success,” and paused to regroup his forces.38 Conrad believed he had won a great victory on the other side of the theatre of operations, that the reverse on Third Army’s front was local and temporary and that, if he reinforced Brudermann, he could further the double envelopment which was the basis of his war plan. By 30 August he had increased Austrian strength opposite Ruzski to a hundred and fifty battalions, supported by 828 guns, largely through the return of most of the Balkan Group to Second Army. Since Ruzski was not advancing, he judged the moment ripe to reopen the offensive, largely with Second Army fighting on Third’s right, the two forming an army group under the successful commander of Second Army, Eduard von Böhm-Ermolli, brought down to energise activity. Under Conrad’s orders, Second Army attacked again on 29 August between the Lipa rivers, this time with results even more disastrous than at first. Russian strength opposite now exceeded three hundred and fifty battalions, supported by 1,304 guns, and, in the ensuing maelstrom, 20,000 Austrians were captured and thousands more killed and wounded.
In the face of all the evidence, Conrad continued to believe he was winning. His local successes on the left wing, the dilatory Russian movement on the right, persuaded him that he could allow Third and Second Armies to make a deep withdrawal behind Lemberg, drawing the Russians after them and then bring Fourth Army down from the north to attack the enemy in flank. The main line of resistance was to be the River Wereszyca, a tributary of the Dniester running southward between Lemberg and Przemysl. He was motivated in part towards this doomed enterprise by a desire to emulate the success of Hindenburg and Ludendorff in East Prussia and by the apparent success of the German armies in the west; the decision for the Lemberg operation was taken before the opening of the battle of the Marne. He was also driven by the growing impatience of his allies with the Austrians’ failure to pull their weight. “Our small army in East Prussia,” Kaiser Wilhelm remarked acidly in early September to Conrad’s representative at OHL, “has drawn twelve enemy corps against it and destroyed one-half and engaged one half … more than this could not be demanded.” The Kaiser exaggerated; but, since Conrad was opposed at most by fifteen corps, the taunt stung. He was determined to drive his tired and battered armies to victory.39
In the event, the plan nearly worked. The Russians were slow to follow up the abandonment of Lemberg, which they did not enter until 3 September, thus allowing time for the Austrian Fourth Army, exhausted and depleted by losses as it was, to make its advance across the front of the Russian Third Army towards Lemberg. The Third and Second Armies actually won some success on the Wereszyca position, thus delaying for a few days the closure of the Russian encirclement of the Austrian centre, the imminent danger of which was becoming even more evident. The Russians perceived it; on 5 September Alexeyev communicated to Davidov, “the vigorous Austrian effort to break our dispositions [north of Lemberg] may be regarded as in paralysis. The moment for announcing our counter-offensive is at hand.”40 Conrad continued to ignore the threat. The Fourth Army marched on until, at Rava Russka, thirty miles north of Lemberg, it fell on 6 September into heavy combat with a concentration of the Russian Third Army and was halted.
Conrad’s efforts to outflank with a weaker force a stronger force that was attempting to outflank him now threatened catastrophe. A huge gap had opened between his First Army still battling against the Russians in the north and his other three, locked in conflict behind Lemberg. He had no reserves of his own and the detachment of a third-line German reserve formation to assist resulted only in severe mauling. The Russians, gathering reinforcements daily, including the Ninth Army which had been assembling near Warsaw, stood with open jaws ready to close on the Austrian Fourth, Third and Second Armies. Sixteen Russian corps now faced eleven Austrian, most of which were bunched in a narrow pocket which the enemy dominated from both sides. First Army, moreover, was suffering a battering it could not resist in its isolated situation to the north, despite the efforts of the alpine troops of XIV Corps, which was fighting as a link formation between the two halves of the Austrian front into which Conrad’s concentration had now been divided. He appealed to the Germans for help; the Kaiser replied “Surely you cannot ask any more of [Hindenburg and Ludendorff] them than [they] have already achieved.”41 He forced Second and Third Armies into a renewed offensive in the Wereszyca. When that failed, and with Russian cavalry raiding through the gaps in his line of resistance into the Austrian rear, he had no recourse but to order a general retreat, first to the River San, then to the Dunajec, a tributary of the Vistula only thirty miles east of Cracow, the capital of Habsburg Poland and the greatest city of Catholic Eastern Europe between Vienna and Warsaw. Przemysl, the huge fortress guarding the gaps in the Carpathian chain where the Rivers San and Dniester rise to flow into the Polish pla
in, had been abandoned, leaving its garrison of 150,000 soldiers surrounded behind Russian lines. Austrian territory to a depth of a hundred and fifty miles had been surrendered. The Habsburg Emperor had lost 400,000 men out of the 1,800,000 mobilised, including 300,000 as prisoners.42 Among the heaviest of the casualties were those that had fallen on the 50,000 men of the XIV Tyrolean Corps, formed of Franz Josef’s four treasured Kaiserjäger regiments, their Kaiserschützen reservists, the 6th Mounted Rifle Regiment and the corps mountain artillery batteries.43 No less than 40,000 had become casualties, a loss that deprived the Austrian army of its best and bravest element, never to be replaced.44 They had paid the price of acting as Conrad’s task force in the crucial effort to hold its front together during the climactic battle around Lemberg.