by Peter Hart
Great strides in expanding the BEF had been instituted back in 1914 by Kitchener, widely acclaimed as the greatest British soldier of his generation. Right from the start, he had been convinced that the war would be a long, hard-fought endeavour, to be measured in years and certainly not ‘all over by Christmas’. An independent figure, he was not enamoured of the idea of expanding the Territorial Army, which he rather distrusted as ‘amateur soldiers’, but instead sought to start anew, raising hundreds of thousands of men with a new improvised structure of volunteer ‘Service Battalions’ linked to the county regiments. He launched a successful recruiting campaign in which by far the most long-standing image proved to be a poster of Kitchener himself with the caption ‘Your Country Needs You!’ The response from the British public was unparalleled and soon the new legions of ‘Kitchener’s Army’ offered the chance to expand the BEF into a truly continental army. But these masses of new young soldiers were terrifyingly inexperienced. Would the Germans allow them the chance to attain full maturity as fighting units?
6
THE EASTERN FRONT, 1915
‘As regards Russia it seemed of less consequence than usual merely to gain ground. The essential thing was to smash the enemy’s fighting machine.’1
General Erich von Falkenhayn, General Headquarters, German Army
THE EASTERN FRONT would move to centre stage in 1915. Although the German Chief of Staff General Erich von Falkenhayn was convinced of the primacy of the Western Front, he had been pressured by forces within the German military and political hierarchy to amend his plans and send reinforcements to the east where the twin stars of Hindenburg and Ludendorff were firmly in the ascendant. The Eastern Front had been frozen during the depths of winter and, although the fighting had slowed in pace, the minds of the staff officers were racing as they planned their next moves. Ludendorff, working in co-operation with the Austrian Chief of Staff General Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, agreed a programme for offensives by the Austrians in Galicia and the Germans in East Prussia, near-simultaneous in order to maximise the impact and with the ambitious overall intention of forcing the Russians to evacuate central Poland or run the risk of being cut off. The Germans had reorganised their forces and managed to construct a new Tenth Army in East Prussia, capitalising on the divisions so grudgingly extracted from Falkenhayn.
The Russians were also still engaged in an increasingly vituperative debate between those who considered they should concentrate on the Germans in East Prussia or Silesia and those who advocated a renewed offensive in Galicia and the Carpathians in an attempt to knock the struggling Austrio-Hungarians right out of the war. It was no coincidence that one of the main advocates of the former approach should be General Nikolai Ruzsky, commanding the North-West Front, while the other faction was led by General Nikolai Ivanov, who commanded the South-West Front. This tension led to a failure to co-operate or concentrate resources for a joint course of action as each of the two front commanders clung to his own plans. In the event, Ruzsky decided to launch a new offensive in East Prussia in mid-February, in anticipation of which he slowly built up his new Twelfth Army around the Narew River sector on the southern frontier of East Prussia. However, the Russian plans would be rendered redundant when the Germans struck first.
On 7 February 1915, Ludendorff launched the Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes with a two-pronged attack by the Tenth Army in the north and the Eighth Army in the south, both driving in on the flanks of the Russian Tenth Army which was occupying defensive lines in East Prussia, wedged neatly between the sea and the Masurian Lakes. As on the Western Front, at this stage of the war the Russian trench defences were hardly sophisticated, often amounting to little more than deep ditches, usually with no support lines or communication trenches. The Tenth Army was also in poor shape, suffering from low morale, with many units considered to be of only second line status. Shortages of rifles and ammunition meant reinforcements often arrived at the front unarmed, reliant on pillaging the bodies of the dead for weapons. The weather was dreadful, with howling blizzards reducing visibility almost to nothing. Initially the Russians were taken by surprise. The German forces massed on both flanks, then drove forward seeking to choke off escape routes and achieve another battle of annihilation. They were at least partially successful, but the Russians soon began to fall back and it was difficult for the Germans to maintain their momentum in such awful conditions. Both sides suffered problems of command and control, but the bulk of the Russian Tenth Army managed to evade the net as it retreated back into Russia, although the fate of the XX Corps – cut off and captured in the dark depths of the Augustów Forest – showed what might have been. Following an unsuccessful siege of the Osowiec Fortress, the German attacks pressed east into Russia to try to create a buffer zone. However, in March the Germans withdrew to their own borders under heavy pressure from the Russian Tenth and Twelfth Armies. Afterwards Hindenburg and Ludendorff claimed a great victory, pointing out that they had liberated the last slice of occupied German mainland territory. Falkenhayn was less sanguine, considering it a meaningless success which had cost the lives of far too many highly trained reinforcements while it had cost the Russians only manpower, of which they had a near-endless supply.
The Austrian contribution to the winter offensives had actually begun earlier, on 23 January 1915, when Conrad ordered forward his troops, assisted by a joint Austrian–German Südarmee group. It was a bold, some might say suicidal scheme, launching a series of attacks to secure control of the passes of the western and central Carpathian Mountains in the freezing cold of January. It was also intended to push deep into Galicia and relieve the besieged fortress town of Przemyśl. A further flanking attack was to be made to the east into Bukovina. The conditions in the Carpathians made military operations almost impossible. The soldiers found that their rifle bolts froze solid and could not be fired; the advance through the passes slowed to a crawl. Frozen corpses littered the ground, for burial was impossible. Some progress was made but only at a terrible cost. Soon it became evident that nothing of substance could be achieved, while relieving Przemyśl was out of the question. Then the Russians counter-attacked and for the Austrians the situation deteriorated still further, although the Russians would be stymied too by the horrendous conditions, with the casualty figures on both sides ballooning through the multiplier effects of exposure and rampant frostbite. By early March, the fate of Przemyśl was beginning to dominate Austrian thoughts. The garrison had launched occasional attempts to break out, which had been fended off easily by the Russians. Equally the Russians were unable to batter down the fortress due to their continuing problems in deploying the super-heavy artillery required to smash the fortifications. But at last the stores began to run out and, with no hope of relief, the garrison finally surrendered on 22 March.
These were desperate times for the Austrians, with a multi-national army which, when placed under this kind of pressure, began to fray at the edges. Throughout the war there had been speculation that various nationalities – Czechs, Ukrainians, Hungarians and various Slav groupings – were surrendering far too easily or, worse still, were going over voluntarily to the other side. These rumours had a corrosive effect on morale and would do much to undermine the Austrian Army’s performance for the rest of the war.
With the fall of Przemyśl, Ivanov was finally allowed to launch a major offensive on the South-West Front designed to capture the Carpathian passes and finally defeat the Austrians. To facilitate this plan the North-West Front was put on a defensive basis, which promptly triggered the resignation of the ‘exhausted’ Ruzsky. His replacement would be General Mikhail Alekseyev, who had been Ivanov’s Chief of Staff, and whom the Stavka expected to form a more harmonious liaison with his old chief. They would be sadly disappointed, for as soon as Alekseyev arrived at the North-West Front headquarters he immediately adopted all the old Ruzsky arguments as his own with the passion of a convert. This led to a continuing failure to release sufficient troops to allow
Ivanov to capitalise on his initial successes against the Austro-Hungarian Army. A further problem was the spring thaw, which brought flooding rendering many of the mountain passes impassable. The Russian Carpathian Offensive was eventually suspended on 10 April. By this time it has been estimated that the Austrians had suffered some 750,000 casualties already in 1915. As Ivanov amassed such forces as he could for the next stage of the fighting it appeared that Austria-Hungary was finished, especially as her old adversary, Italy, was considering joining the war on the side of the Allies in an attempt to make territorial gains at Austria’s expense. However, strong forces were moving against Ivanov’s command.
The imminent collapse of Austria-Hungary left Falkenhayn with no choice but to accede to the piteous demands for reinforcements emanating from the Eastern Front. This was entirely against his own inclinations to concentrate on the Western Front. However, he was determined to retain some strategic control of what was going on, resisting the idea of simply passing the divisions to Hindenburg. Instead, Falkenhayn adopted a plan that originated, at least in part, with Conrad to send eight divisions from the Western Front to form a new Eleventh Army, which would be combined with the Austrian Third and Fourth Armies as an army group under the overall independent command of General August von Mackensen and deployed in the Cracow area for an offensive on the Russian Third Army in the Gorlice–Tarnów sector, with the intention of achieving a local superiority of numbers. This had the additional advantage of placing Austrian troops under German command, making a force of some 300,000. Mackensen also had the inestimable advantage of having a huge concentration of artillery – some 1,700 guns, of which over 500 were heavy artillery, all served with plentiful ammunition supplies. For Falkenhayn there was the additional political consideration that Mackensen was not operating under the aegis of the Hindenburg-Ludendorff team. The stresses that had fractured German High Command over the question of an East versus West grand strategy were beginning to take effect.
There was an extensive amount of diversionary activity undertaken prior to Mackensen’s offensive, with attacks made by the Germans in the north and by the Austrians in the south in order to deflect Russian attention from the crucial sector. In any case the Russians ignored a series of intelligence reports drawing attention to the German build-up in the Cracow area, distracted as they were by their own plans for a Carpathian Offensive. The Russians were also hampered by the continuing failure of the commanders of the South-West Front and the North-West Front to co-operate in any meaningful way. The result was that the Third Army, commanded by General Radko Dimitriev, was left facing vastly superior forces. Yet through over-confidence Dimitriev had failed to ensure that his men had dug themselves in properly on a front which stretched from the Vistula, all along the Dunajec and Biala Rivers and across into the Carpathians. Mackensen planned to use his guns to blast aside the thin defences between Gorlice and Tarnow, allowing his three armies then to burst through the Russian lines, with the German Twelfth Army driving onwards at the front, while the Austrian Third and Fourth Armies advanced in echelon on either side, protecting the flanks.
When the guns blazed out on 1 May 1915, everything went according to plan as the heavy German and Austrian shells smashed through the Russians’ simple linear trench lines, killing and burying many. Those who ran for their lives were massacred by the shrapnel fire of the German field guns. By the time the infantry attacked on 2 May it was a procession, as they smashed through the Dunajec and Biala line. The minimal Russian reserves were thrown into the bonfire and merely added to the flames. The Third Army – or what was left of it – tumbled back in confusion all the way to the San River, the armies on either side of it being forced to conform or themselves be destroyed. Then the San River line was also breached, with the Germans pouring through, and it looked like Przemyśl would fall. Even the news that the Italians had finally decided to join the Allies on 23 May 1915 could do nothing to save the Russians. The Germans and Austrians emphatically did have the heavy – and super-heavy – artillery that the Russians had so conspicuously lacked in their siege of the fortress. Discretion was the better part of valour and Przemyśl fell without a struggle on 4 June, while the city of Lemberg was also recaptured on 22 June. All the Russian gains of 1914 had been swept away.
By mid-June the situation was desperate for the Russians. The German-led assault had destabilised their whole line and Russian Poland was looking particularly vulnerable to being pinched out by the German forces running rampant in East Prussia and Galicia. In the end the Grand Duke Nicholas and the Stavka sanctioned the Russian withdrawal from Galicia, while resolving to cling on to Warsaw and their Polish possessions. For the Germans, with the Austrians acting firmly under their directions, there seemed to be only opportunities: attacks were being prepared in Galicia, Poland and in Lithuania to the north with all three timed to start in mid-July. Falkenhayn was still in overall control and he put aside Ludendorff’s plans for a gigantic battle of encirclement, preferring instead to chew up the Russian forces in tightly controlled battles using his artillery as a battering ram. Most of all he was determined not to repeat Napoleon’s mistake and venture too far into the Russian interior. It was summer then; but in Russia winter never seems far away.
As part of the series of offensives, huge forces were concentrated on both the north and south frontiers of Russian Poland, with the intent of smashing through to take Warsaw. If the Russians sought to retain the city then they would risk another disaster like Tannenberg. In the end they had little choice but to fall back, finally surrendering control of Warsaw to the Germans on 5 August. By the end of August the Russians had lost all of Russian Poland but as they fell back they relied on a scorched earth policy, destroying and burning everything of possible value to the Germans. The Russians were losing ground elsewhere, too, falling back in the area of the Baltic provinces to a German thrust that threatened the important port of Riga. For Falkenhayn it was a strange time: while rejoicing at the successes achieved, his underlying conviction remained that ultimate victory over Russia was impossible. Even during these glorious triumphs, the Germans and Austro-Hungarians were still suffering casualties at an unacceptable rate. The two bugbears of fighting the Russians: the immense distances and their inexhaustible manpower remained to haunt them. Falkenhayn was determined to control the more ambitious activities of Hindenburg and Ludendorff; indeed, having already created the Mackensen army group to operate independently with the Austrians, he now created a new central German army group under the independent command of Prince Leopold of Bavaria, thus further diluting Hindenburg’s power. What Falkenhayn still really wanted was a separate peace with Russia, but his compatriots were blinded by their successes and could not envisage making the kind of territorial surrenders that might tempt Russia to desert her allies. Worse still, feelers put out to the Russians were brusquely rejected. Falkenhayn would have to settle for the long-term military damage to Russia that would shore up the position of Austria-Hungary. That, by his judgement, had been achieved by the late summer of 1915. At the end of September, a combination of increasing Russian resistance and Falkenhayn’s insistence that troops would have to be diverted back to the Western Front forced the Germans to come to a halt. As they dug in it was evident that the war was not yet over in the east.
For the Russians had not given up. They had lost a depth of up to 300 miles of territory, and had suffered over 2 million casualties, but if anything their army was still growing. Indeed, tactically the new defence line had considerable merits in that it was safer than the ungainly Polish Salient. The new line ran from close to Riga in the north all the way down to the Dniester River and the border with Rumania, which had the effect of shortening its overall length from 1,100 miles to 650 miles, a saving which allowed the creation of reserves behind the new defensive positions. A further advantage lay in the superior defensive terrain they were now occupying. A combination of lakes, rivers, forests and the vast expanses of the Pripyat Marshes helped to buttress the
line, making it less vulnerable to sudden breakthroughs. In essence the Russian position had been strengthened.
The Russians now engaged in a thorough reorganisation of their High Command. At the top Grand Duke Nicholas was dismissed and replaced as titular head by Tsar Nicholas on 1 September 1915. As Chief of Staff of the Stavka he appointed General Mikhail Alekseyev, who would be the man actually responsible for the direction of the Russian armies. They were now to be divided up into three fronts: the North Front, with General Nikolai Ruzsky restored to its command (although he would be replaced by General Alexei Kuropatkin in February 1916); the West Front, commanded by General Alexei Evert; and the South-West Front, commanded by General Nikolai Ivanov, although he too was replaced, in March 1916, by General Alexei Brusilov. Born in 1853, Brusilov had served as a young officer in the Russo-Turkish War of 1870 and afterwards become an acclaimed cavalry expert eventually being promoted to lieutenant general. During the war he had excelled, demonstrating a rare combination of aggression and tactical acumen. By 1916 he was confident that he had the measure of the Austrians – if only he could get at them without German interference.
Buoyed up by such positive thoughts, the new Russian High Command began to turn its collective mind to the possibilities for 1916. Indeed at another Allied conference held at Chantilly in December 1915, they were enthusiastic about co-ordinating their offensives to hit the Germans on both main fronts simultaneously so that the Germans were unable to switch divisions from one front to the other. Thus, while the British and French attacked on the Somme, the Russians would launch a major new offensive on the Eastern Front in June 1916. They also agreed that, should one of them be attacked, they would all act in concert to try to alleviate the situation by launching their own attacks.
