The Great War

by Peter Hart

  On 1 August 1914, Germany declared war on Russia following the Russian general mobilisation on 31 July. It is ironic that Austria-Hungary, which had declared war on Serbia on 28 July, only belatedly declared war on Russia, on 6 August. Rumania and Bulgaria had resolved to stay out of the war but the Eastern Front created was still immense, stretching some 1,000 miles. The distances involved in military operations were vast, forcing a dependence on railways as the only feasible means of moving the huge armies of men and the incalculable quantities of supplies and munitions they needed to live in the field. For the Germans and Austrians, blessed with superb railway networks, this was not a problem, but over the border in Russia the system was far more ramshackle. Russian railway lines were a sparse resource which linked only the main population centres, while there was an additional complication in the wider track system they employed. French investment had improved matters a little, but the paucity of their railways restricted the ability of the Russians to respond quickly to changing circumstances. The Russian Commander in Chief was Grand Duke Nicholas, the Tsar’s brother. In the north, the Russian First and Second Armies faced the German Eighth Army. Deep behind the salient of Russian Poland, the Ninth and Tenth Armies, which had been belatedly added to the plans, were slowly forming up with the intention of eventually advancing right through Poland to threaten the lightly defended German Silesia. In the south, the Fourth, Fifth, Third and Eighth Armies faced the Austrian First, Fourth, Third and (eventually) Second Austrian Armies. Three great empires were fighting for their very existence in a titanic battle in which defeat was unthinkable: the scene was set for a murderous campaign that would match the Western Front in every respect.

  The most dramatic early campaign took place in the north, in East Prussia. The Russian First and Second Armies were mobilising well behind the frontier, fearful of being caught by surprise while still vulnerable. The plan was simple: the First Army, commanded by General Paul von Rennenkampf, would advance into East Prussia north of the Masurian Lakes, while the Second Army, under General Alexander Samsonov, would advance south of the lakes. The whole offensive would be coordinated, at least in theory, by General Yakov Zhilinsky, although communications would prove dire, and problems with ciphers led to many occasions when orders were broadcast uncoded over the wireless – to the enormous benefit of the listening Germans. This confusion in command and control was exacerbated by a virulent personal feud between Samsonov and Rennenkampf dating back to disagreements during the Russo-Japanese War.

  On 16 August Rennenkampf began his advance, pushing aside resistance from the German Eighth Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Max von Prittwitz, during heavy fighting at Gumbinnen on 20 August. Both sides lost around 17,000 casualties, but the Germans were forced to retreat by weight of numbers. Rennenkampf followed up tardily, first reorganising his units for a couple of days and then advancing far too slowly, thereby allowing the Germans to break contact with his forces. This might not have mattered much, as Prittwitz was already panicking, concerned as he was by the threat to his communications from Samsonov’s Second Army which he knew was poised to begin crossing the Prussian border from Russian Poland on 21 August. A desperate Prittwitz resolved to retreat all the way back to the Vistula River, thereby abandoning the whole of East Prussia. This was far too much for Moltke, who immediately dismissed the hapless Prittwitz and replaced him with General Paul von Hindenburg, a traditional, stolid-looking officer, born in 1847, who had enjoyed a successful career, rising to general but then retiring in 1911 before being recalled to the colours. He was accompanied by his Chief of Staff, Major General Erich von Ludendorff, a far more mercurial character. Born in 1865, he was a piercingly intelligent and exceptionally hard-working staff officer who had been involved in some of the pre-war reworking of the Schlieffen Plan, and had already earned considerable renown for his conduct during the Battle of Liège on the Western Front. They would prove to be one of the great command teams of the Great War.

  When Hindenburg took command on 23 August he was immediately proffered a plan of action by the Eighth Army staff officer Colonel Max Hoffmann. This plan fell in with Ludendorff’s own early inclinations to take advantage of the failure of the Russian armies to co-ordinate their operations thus far. Hoffmann suggested leaving only screening forces in front of the slow-moving First Army and utilising the efficiency of the superb German railway system to switch the bulk of the Eighth Army to challenge Samsonov’s Second Army head on as it marched north and north-west into East Prussia. The plan was to defeat the superior Russian forces in detail, switching the Eighth Army from front to front, allowing it to fight in turn first the Second Army and then the First Army. This was a risky scheme at least partially reliant for its success on the failure of Rennenkampf to advance, or react with any speed as events unfolded. Yet the new command team grasped that it was their best – if not only – opportunity for success and so the Eighth Army’s retreat was stopped in its tracks and the complex redeployment begun. The German staff were much helped in their analysis of the situation by the regular interception of Russian orders transmitted without encryption over the wireless – an astounding lack of basic security. Shortly afterwards Hindenburg was pleased to discover that Moltke, under heavy pressure from various civilian sources over the perceived threat to the East Prussian homelands, had detached two corps and a cavalry division from the forces currently wheeling through Belgium. Given the Germans’ overall strategy of knocking France out of the war in the west before turning to the east, this represented a considerable change in tack.

  Samsonov knew nothing of this, but he was already dogged by serious problems. Countless lakes and woods scattered the countryside, splitting up his corps and even divisions, while transport conditions were dreadful and his communications almost non-existent, leaving him operating in a vacuum – just as Hoffmann had predicted. Whatever Samsonov thought was happening, reality burst upon him only in stages: first his left wing was attacked, then his right. Before the Russians could react it was already too late: by 28 August the whole of the Second Army was cut off, at first only by a weak German force, but as the Germans pressed on the Russians found themselves effectively surrounded by a ring of steel, with no chance of escape. The various entrapped formations flailed away ineffectively, trying to punch their way out, but there was no co-ordinated effort and the Germans fended them off easily. Rennenkampf attempted to move his First Army south to rescue them, but by now it was far too late. Soon the Russians had no option but to surrender. By the end of August, over 90,000 would have trudged off into captivity. A further 78,000 were dead or wounded and just 10,000 escaped. Samsonov was not one of them. He is reputed to have committed suicide wandering alone in the dark, forbidding forests. The Battle of Tannenberg, as it would be known, was an unmitigated disaster for the Russian Army; the Germans suffered only 13,000 casualties.

  Then it was time for the second stage: the Germans moved smoothly round from the north, leaving only token screens behind them, ready to take on Rennenkampf’s First Army. By this time the Eighth Army had received the two corps of reinforcements whisked across Germany from the Western Front. Chastened by the destruction of the Second Army, Rennenkampf had suspended his advance and withdrawn to a more defensible line stretching from Königsberg in the north down to the Masurian Lakes to the south. The Germans concentrated on the left of his line and on 7 September managed to break through. The Tenth Army was still forming up in Poland and so was unable to lend any assistance. Rennenkampf was forced into a humiliating retreat, falling back across the Prussian border he had crossed with so much hope less than a month before. The Russians finished the campaign in utter disarray: Samsonov was dead; Rennenkampf was rumoured to be panicking under the pressure; and Zhilinsky, the man who bore ultimate responsibility, was dismissed. The Germans had not only held East Prussia but now stood poised to attack. Only in November 1914, after weeks of fighting, with a German lunge into Russia followed by waves of Russian counter-attacks swaying drunken
ly backwards and forwards, did the lines finally settle down not far from the original borders. Trench warfare and prepared defensive positions had gradually blocked all freedom of manoeuvre. In view of the requirements of the Schlieffen Plan merely to hold in the east, this represented a very considerable achievement by the Eighth Army.

  Meanwhile, the first gigantic clashes were occurring in Austrian Galicia between the Russian Fourth, Fifth, Third and Eighth Armies (under the overall command of General Nikolai Ivanov), and the Austrian First, Fourth and Third Armies, commanded the Austrian Chief of Staff General Conrad von Hötzendorf. The Russian advance commenced on 18 August and the series of epic battles that ensued were redolent of an earlier age of warfare. Slow-moving, monolithic armies crashed into each other on the Galician plains, complete with cavalry skirmishing in the gaps between the armies and dramatic manoeuvring as both sides sought the flanks of their opponents while desperately fending off threats to their own. All this while severely hampered by minimal communications, and with a near total lack of accurate intelligence as to their opponents’ movements. One thing was certain: both sides suffered shocking casualties as simplistic infantry tactics frequently exposed men en masse to the coruscating power of modern weaponry. But something else was also becoming apparent: for all their manifold problems the Russians had the edge over the Austrians in battle. On 3 September the Russian Third Army captured Lemberg, a key railway centre and the fourth largest city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This success can be seen as the first major Allied victory of the war. Further complex fighting followed until the Austrians were forced to withdraw back to the San River on 11 September. This left the important fortress town of Przemyśl besieged by the Russians from 22 September, although they lacked the super heavy artillery to make much of a dent on the ring of modern fortifications that defended it. Still the Austrians fell back to the south-west, finally finding a defensible line along the Dunajec River–Biala River line east of Cracow.

  By this time the Russians had managed to position their units in roughly a north–south line and had two main options before them. The first was to reinforce Ivanov’s success and carry on attacking the hapless Austrians in the south-west with the intention of capturing Cracow and bursting through into Hungary. Alternatively, they could launch the Ninth and Tenth Armies across Poland and into German Silesia. By now some of the urgency had been removed: the situation on the Western Front may not have been resolved, but the Battle of the Marne had been fought and won by the French early in September 1914. Nevertheless, in the end Grand Duke Nicholas and his headquarters, the Stavka, resolved to continue with the Silesia option, fearing that a vigorous campaign to the south-west could be taken in the flank by the Germans from the north.

  The Germans had their own problems to contend with, namely that their Austrian allies had already suffered the loss of some 325,000 men, while having inflicted only around 225,000 losses on the Russians. Such an exchange rate was hardly a problem for the Russians, but it certainly was for the Austrians. Grudgingly, the Germans took action to bolster their faltering allies by swiftly creating a new Ninth Army in German Silesia to be commanded by the now much acclaimed Hindenburg–Ludendorff team. Already, the phlegmatic Hindenburg had proved to be the ideal foil for Ludendorff, who, though brilliant, was prone to panic under pressure. On several occasions during the tense build up to the Tannenberg encirclement, Hindenburg had exerted his calming influence on Ludendorff to prevent him from switching plans unnecessarily when faced by relatively trivial obstacles.

  The Ninth Army linked up with its Austrian neighbours and from 29 September began to advance into Russian Poland, reaching as far as the line of the Vistula by early October. However, Grand Duke Nicholas and the Stavka utilised a rare intelligence coup in their favour to re-jig their plans and allow the Russian Fourth and Ninth Armies to attack the new German Ninth Army frontally across the Vistula, while the First Army would move on their right to strike at the German left flank. This promising plan was ruined by the continuingly lax Russian wireless security leaking orders and the capture of plans indicative of the existence of a trap. The Germans swiftly transferred across their XI Corps in time to protect the vulnerable left flank of the Ninth Army. But it had been a close run thing and, as the Russian forces built up around them, the Germans were eventually forced on 18 October to fall right back to their start lines from their furthest point of penetration just seven miles west of Warsaw.

  Meanwhile, the Austrians had taken advantage of Russian distraction to advance once again to the San River line and were able to relieve Przemyśl on 9 October. However, it would soon be cut off again, once more to languish behind the Russian lines, hostage to the see-saw battles, as Conrad was once again forced to order a retreat to the Dunajec River–Biala River line.

  At last the Russians were ready to implement their long-planned and, due to poor wireless secrecy, much-advertised lunge into German Silesia, intended to commence on 14 November. But the Germans were more than ready for them. By this time the German Chief of Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, had been inveigled into appointing Hindenburg as Commander in Chief of the Eastern Armies, with Ludendorff as his Chief of Staff, while General August von Mackensen was promoted to command of the Ninth Army. Ludendorff used information provided by Russian intelligence gaffes to carry out a manoeuvre which would have been logistically unthinkable for his opponents. The German Ninth Army was spirited away as if by magic and moved by rail north from where it could attack the right flanks of the Russian invading armies; indeed, the Germans managed to attack first with devastating force on 11 November. Russian dreams of a Silesian offensive had to be put aside, as they fell back to the supply centre of Lodz, where their Second and Fifth Russian Armies concentrated to to block Mackensen’s further advance. Again the fighting had a strange fluctuating quality as both sides attempted to encircle their opponents and the Germans pushed hard to capture Warsaw. Both sides came close to disaster, evading it by the narrowest of margins. To make matters worse the weather broke – hardly a surprise in late November – and it began to snow heavily. In the end the German Ninth Army fought its way out of trouble, successfully pulling back from Łódz. The Russians entrenched, hacking away at the rock-solid frozen ground to carve out a front line west of the Vistula.

  While the Russians dug themselves in for the winter, the Germans pondered their next move at a conference in Posen attended on 1 December by Falkenhayn, the Kaiser, the recently promoted Field Marshal Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Falkenhayn found himself bombarded with demands for more reinforcements with the twin objectives of bolstering the faltering Austrians and knocking Russia out of the war. This was a philosophy utterly rejected by Falkenhayn, who firmly believed that the war could only be won in the west, not on the endless plains of the east facing the inexhaustible manpower of Russia. Furthermore, he believed that the strategic situation was such that the best option was to secure a significant victory and then to negotiate a political settlement, which in turn meant scaled down war aims. Neither side would concede the case and a grudging agreement to differ was hardly a positive step forwards. All that Hindenburg would get were the three corps that Falkenhayn had already grudgingly agreed to despatch from the Western Front. He might not have bothered had he known what Ludendorff was planning: a winter frontal assault, lacking even a pretence of subtlety, on the Russian lines in Poland.

  The Ninth Army began its assault well, capturing Lodz on 6 December, only to crash into the Russian trench lines. The German guns raged and both sides attacked again and again, small tactical objectives taking on an importance that existed only in the minds of obsessed local commanders. The Russians proved doughty defensive fighters and the Germans could make little progress, unable to breach the river line. German casualties mounted wildly, totalling up to 100,000 in the last six weeks of the year. Finally Ludendorff had to give in. He was running out of troops and it was unlikely that Falkenhayn would countenance their replenishment for such an ill-conceived operatio
n.

  Throughout the Siege of Przemyśl was progressing with only occasional outbreaks of mild excitement. By this time there were some 127,000 Austrian troops trapped in the city. They were lucky, in that it had been a former storehouse for munitions, supplies and food, but even so they could not hold out for ever. Attempts were made to break out, but each had failed dismally. A localised Christmas Truce temporarily raised the spirits of the troops on all sides, but the underlying situation of the besieged Austrians did not change. The Russian armies under Ivanov were also making considerable progress in a drive on Cracow, the city widely held to be the gateway to both Silesia and Hungary. Sadly for Russian ambitions the Germans despatched reinforcements, which stiffened the Austrians’ resistance and managed to force the Russians back to the Dunajec River–Biala River line by 17 December.

  The see-saw nature of the fighting in the east – two steps forward, three steps back, one step forward – was becoming increasingly apparent all along the line. In the north, for all their efforts the Russians only managed to hold on to a token sliver of East Prussia. In contrast, they had lost much of Russian Poland to the German advance, but the strategic drawback of occupying this territory was such that this was not a particular disadvantage in the broader scheme of things. It was in the south, against the Austrians, that the Russians had made their biggest gains as they had over-run nearly all of Austrian Galicia. Just as on the Western Front, the scale of forces involved had been incredible: by the end of the year 143 Russian divisions faced fifty-three Austrian and thirty-eight German divisions. Losses on all sides had been simply breathtaking. By the end of 1914 up to 750,000 Russian soldiers, 500,000 Austro-Hungarians and 140,000 Germans had become casualties. All this in just five frantic months of mayhem.