The Eastern Front 1914-1917

by Norman Stone

  The events of October were confused and bewildering—a situation not helped by Ludendorff’s subsequent construing of these events as a great German victory. The German corps pushed forward from their railheads north of Cracow, expecting to find a Russian flank. Instead, they found an empty space. From 24th September, Ivanov withdrew his forces west of the San, and set them marching back along the eastern banks of the Vistula. Once they came to safe crossing-points, such as Ivangorod, they would muster on the western banks, in preparation for the invasion. This movement took a great deal of time: for over three weeks, some thirty divisions were more or less subtracted from the battle-field while they took up positions elsewhere. The Central Powers were free to manoeuvre at will: Conrad followed the Russian retreat as far as the San, and Ludendorff pushed his troops, with an Austro-Hungarian corps, towards the Vistula. Both represented these advances as a victory. In reality, the only serious engagement, between 11th September, when the Austro-Hungarian retreat began, and 11th October, when the first real action opened on the Vistula, was a minor affair, at Opatów, in the Vistula plains. The Russians left a cavalry screen west of the Vistula. A mixed group of infantry and cavalry under Mannerheim ignored its orders to retreat. Early in October, a German and an Austro-Hungarian corps collided with this force. The Russian cavalry decided not to risk battle after all, and withdrew—incidentally breaking the only convenient bridge under the weight of its horse-guns, and not informing the infantry brigadier, whose flank it was supposed to protect. In the outcome, the infantry brigade could not get its guns out, and also lost half of its men as prisoners. After that, the Germans arrived on the western bank of the Vistula, and indulged in desultory bombardment of such targets as they could find. Ludendorff wondered what to do. He decided that the Russians must have decided to give up the Vistula plains, and for want of anything better, sent three of his corps under Mackensen towards Warsaw. Conrad, on his side, thought that recapture of Lwów was first priority, and told his troops to cross the San. Only two corps and some cavalry remained at the join of the two armies’ fronts, opposite the fortress of Ivangorod.5

  Ivanov could not take much profit from this. His troops’ movement along the eastern bank of the Vistula suffered from one delay after another. They marched over a hundred miles in a downpour, on bad roads swamped in mud. Of the three armies involved—IV, V and IX—V was in the worst position. It could not feed its horses because hay did not arrive. The horses dropped. Shell-boxes had to be left behind, along with bridging equipment needed for the crossings to come. Even the railway-journeys that could be made once the forces came to usable railheads were difficult: one of the lines, through Ivangorod, came under German bombardment. Moreover, when V Army reached its stations to the south-east of Warsaw, it became dependent on Ruzski’s front for supplies, although receiving orders from Ivanov. It did not get priority from Ruzski, such that V Army was more or less out of action for a month. The other two armies arrived by 8th October, strung out along ninety miles of river, with only two crossing-points, at Ivangorod and Novo-Alexandriya. II Army assembled in Warsaw, also dependent on Ruzski for its supplies, and also left in the lurch. Its commander, Scheidemann, was mesmerised by reports that Ludendorff was attacking Warsaw, and his staff wrestled with problems of logistics as the army became an almost unmanageable mob in the Polish capital. On 11th October, after much prodding from Stavka, Ivanov told IV, IX and V Armies to cross the Vistula. IV and IX Armies, at Ivangorod and on the river to the south, attempted to cross, but were pinned by German and Austro-Hungarian bombardment to small bridgeheads, in which they lost heavily. V Army had no bridges, and its troops had to cross by raft or barge, through machine-gun fire. Pontoon equipment did arrive some days later, and a bridge was thrown up. Then the Vistula rose, and carried off the bridge, which floated downstream to the suburbs of Warsaw, where it came to rest. The army staff ‘forgot’ what it had done with the field-mortars; and all manner of other equipment lay strewn around the roads to the south, such that the army really depended on supplies from Warsaw, itself in a state of seemingly inextricable confusion. By mid-month, the Russians’ attempts to cross the Vistula had all broken down.6

  The Central Powers did not do much better. Ludendorff had sent a strong group against Warsaw. It had not much difficulty in following the Russians’ advanced-groups’ retreat into the city, and by mid-October there was talk of a German occupation of Warsaw. But Ludendorff appreciated that his flank on the Vistula was weak, and he was also told that there were about nine Russian divisions in Warsaw to his five. Prudently, on 18th October, he decided not to risk anything, and secretly ordered retreat, to begin on 20th October. Conrad on his side was less prudent. He set his armies to cross the San. Their attempts to do so broke down again and again, for much the same reasons as Russian attempts to cross the Vistula had broken down. Further south, there was nothing but an indecisive imbroglio in the Carpathians. Conrad produced a fancy scheme. He would, as Ludendorff demanded, send troops (his I Army) to help hold the line opposite Ivangorod. These troops, and the German corps on their left, would withdraw; the Russians would cross; and then the Austro-Hungarian group would counter-attack, when the Russians were only half-across. By 22nd October three separate operations were thus planned. Ivanov wanted to set IV and IX Armies across the Vistula, at Ivangorod and Novo-Alexandriya. Conrad was prepared to meet them with his supposed flank-attack: Ludendorff meanwhile would retreat from Warsaw. Matters on the Russian side now became still more disjointed because Ruzski was put in charge, first of II and then also of V Army, because this was the only way by which they could rely on his support. As it happened, the Austro-Hungarians were sharply defeated opposite Ivangorod. They allowed the Russians to cross, but their own flank-attack was not successful, and in any case they could not interfere with the crossing of all the Russian divisions hitherto penned in on the wrong bank of the Vistula. On 22nd October there were ten divisions to the Austro-Hungarians’ and Germans’ eight; on 26th October, thirteen to eight. The Austro-Hungarian I Army was itself taken in flank, lost 40,000 men and withdrew to the south-west.* At the same time, Ludendorff retreated as he had planned. By the end of October, the Central Powers had retired almost to where they had started from a month before.

  The Russian armies had clearly had the best of this fighting, whatever Ludendorff subsequently claimed. The Germans’ attack in central Poland had encountered nothing substantial; their attacks on Warsaw and Ivangorod had failed; and now they were retreating towards the south-west. The Austrians had failed to break out across the San and made progress only in the scarcely-defended Bukovina, far to the south-east. As Russian forces advanced on the north bank of the Vistula, the Austrians were forced to retire south of it, abandoning the San, and allowing the fortress of Przemyśl to be once more shut in, with a garrison of 120,000 men. They fell back towards the Dunajec-Biala positions in early November, covering Cracow, and the Russian III Army duly followed.

  Had the Russian command-system been functioning with anything like adequacy, this might have been a dangerous moment for Ludendorff and Conrad. But the two fronts were divided: the south-western one naturally gravitated towards the south-west, the north-western one, when Ruzski allowed it to gravitate anywhere at all, to the north-west. The armies in central Poland were divided now, for reasons of supply, between the two commands. Ivanov tended to draw IX Army, the southernmost one, into his battles with the Austrians, whose resistance, on the San, turned out to be stronger than expected. Consequently, its neighbour to the north, IV Army, was perpetually confused as regards its southern flank. On the other side, Ruzski was preoccupied with East Prussia and even, grotesquely, felt that there should be a strong flank-guard against a German breakthrough from there towards Warsaw—mistaking a German Landsturm brigade at Thorn for an army corps. This was a thesis that Stavka itself endorsed: ‘The Grand Duke insistently expresses himself on the indispensability of securing success in East Prussia and on the San, without which there can be no prop
er safety for our operation in the plains of the Vistula’. A new I Army was therefore placed to guard II’s right and X’s left. There were nine army corps in II and V Armies, and these were placed across the open western flank of the Germans, with four army corps. But V Army was held up for the sake of the flank of II, II was held up because Ruzski expected German resistance where there was to be none, and supply-problems completed the picture. All’commands now vacillated between the needs of front and flank; and Stavka itself behaved like ‘a weather-cock’—telling Ruzski on the one side to pursue the Germans towards the south-west ‘with iron energy’, on the other that ‘the next step in securing further advance must be to press the enemy in East Prussia and on the San’. Early in November, contradictory instructions were issued four times, Ivanov remarked that ‘frankly speaking, it is impossible to detect in Stavka’s instructions either an exact task or a fixed objective’. Russian soldiers stumbled bewilderedly through empty Polish territory, supplied, in IV Army, by biscuit brought along by staff-cars. Not until 12th November was the shell-dotation per gun brought up even to ninety rounds; and the railways were not brought back into service until mid-November. The wounded were taken back, first to Warsaw, where they lay on straw in long lines along the station-platforms, and then to Petrograd or Moscow, where they were also unloaded onto straw, on station platforms—this time, perhaps, with the amelioration of being tended by a Grand Duchess. Stavka, aware of these problems, and knowing, too, the division of the fronts regarding the directions of advance, decided to call a halt. The invasion of Germany was not to begin until 11th November; meanwhile, to make sure it was co-ordinated, Ruzski was put in charge of IV Army as well as II and V. This meant that Ivanov and Alexeyev would continue their private battle with the Austrians—though without IV Army, the help of which could have been decisive.

  Meanwhile, the Germans were supposed to be passively waiting on the borders to the west. It was thought that they would defend Silesia. Ludendorff had a different idea. He disliked having to co-operate with the Austrians, would be happier further north; he was also, by the hour, in receipt of Russian wireless-messages, now ably decoded. He appreciated the delays on the Russian side; knew that his own troops could be transported by rail. He transported most of IX Army in five days to Toruń, from where it could move south-east, into the flank of the Russian II Army, as it moved west to invade Germany. In the former positions north of Cracow, he agreed to leave the Landwehrkorps and the Guard Reserve Corps; to these, the Austrians added five divisions, taken as II Army from their troops in the Carpathians. These troops were sufficient to hold the Russian IV Army, while the Austrians held the attention of IX, III and VIII to the south.

  Two manoeuvres were being planned—an advance by the Russian II and V Armies towards Germany, which Ludendorff proposed to counter by a great flank-attack on II Army. By attacking south-east from Toruń, he did find the weakest point in the Russian line. Most of the Russian divisions in central Poland had already been committed to the

  Lódz, 1914.

  Galicia, 1914–15.

  invasion of Germany, and could not easily react to this new threat to their flank. In any case, Stavka did not guess at what Ludendorff could have done, and told the front on 9th November that the Germans maintained ‘at least five-six corps at Czestochowa and Kalisz’—a message repeated three days later, and four days later by a personal letter of the Grand Duke to Ruzski. Stavka still, essentially, took this view after the German attack had begun—indeed, three days after its opening on 11th November.7

  Tactically, too, the Russians were unprepared for what was to come. II Army expected, legitimately, that its flank would be guarded by I Army. But I Army had a long front to control, opposite the southern frontiers of East Prussia, and it was too weak to cover all areas adequately. Ruzski also prodded its commander, Rennenkampf, towards East Prussia rather than towards the south. The corps on its left wing—5. Siberian—was isolated on the southern bank of the Vistula, its nearest neighbour (6. Siberian Corps) being some way to the north; the nearest bridge was fifty miles upstream, and although a makeshift bridge was built closer than this, it broke down under the weight of heavy guns. One of the divisions was still supplied from the fortress of Novogeorgievsk; another had no technical equipment, and the corps as a whole had only thirty-five small spades per company. The commander, Sidorin, responded fitfully to these circumstances—half-digging first one position, then another.

  When, on 11th November, three German corps with five times Sidorin’s artillery attacked, his force inevitably collapsed—his artillery (all but fifteen guns) typically saving itself while two-thirds of the men were made prisoners. The rest of the corps went back along the Vistula and a gap of thirty miles opened between the river and the right of II Army. Ruzski did not see this. He still thought the Germans were far to the south-west, and, having little faith in the second-line troops under Sidorin, ascribed their defeat to at most two German divisions, making a feint. The only response, both on his and Stavka’s part, was to encourage II Army to hurry up with the invasion of Germany, V Army to help it. The Germans had only fifteen divisions to the Russians’ twenty-four, but strategically their situation was much superior. Of the five corps of II Army, four were already some way to the west; and the fifth was already attacked in front and flank by the German IX Army. On 14th and 1 5th November, the Russians suffered a further tactical reverse of some seriousness. The right-hand corps of II Army was almost overwhelmed; and a single German reserve corps (under Morgen) held off the attacks of such reinforcements as the Russian I Army had managed to send over the river to help 5. Siberian corps.

  Only on 15th November did the Russian commanders appreciate quite what had happened. II and V Armies prudently decided not to go on with the invasion; instead, they swung about, to go back east on their supply-centre, the large town of Lódz. They performed something of a miracle, marching almost without stopping for two days and more, and reached Lódz before the Germans, marching south-east, could do so. When the first German troops arrived, they found seven Russian corps on the perimeter of Lódz—a manoeuvre that, in the end, saved the battle for the Russians. For the moment, none of the Russian senior commanders appreciated the virtuosity of II Army’s performance. Stavka announced to Ruzski its ‘extreme irritation at some of your senior commanders’ dispositions’; of the retreat, Ruzski complained, ‘Everything has followed from this blunder. The details are not worth going into, they’re too depressing’. Both Stavka and Ruzski wanted a concentric attack—the troops brought over the Vistula by I Army, the troops in Lódz, and the corps of II Army that had been defeated in detail a few days before. These orders sometimes did not reach the army commanders, who in any case were hardly in any position to execute them. By 18th November they were content merely to hold Lódz against Germans, rapidly arriving. Ludendorff as often before and later imagined he had won a great strategic success, instead of a good tactical one. He thought the Russian armies were now retreating to the Vistula, and sent his men against Lódz in the hope of cutting the Russians off before they could accomplish their retreat. In practice, he was running into a trap. II and V Armies were not only defending Lódz, they were better able to do so than the Germans to attack it, for it was their supply-centre. They also out-numbered the Germans—on the western sector, thirty-six battalions and 240 guns to sixty-four and 210, on the northern sector thirty-six and 240 to seventy and 170, in a terrain greatly favouring the defender. By 22nd November, many German units had run out of munitions—one corps having only seventy rounds left per battery of six guns. German attacks slackened, failed.

  Only in one area, east of the town, was there still a gap in the defence. A German reserve corps and a Guard division—thirty battalions and 140 guns—had reached it before the retreating Russians could; following Ludendorff’s instructions, they moved south-east to cut off a Russian retreat they supposed to be occurring. On the Russian side, not much, initially, could be done. In Lódz the defenders
were held along the city perimeter. Further north, I Army command was still sorting out the troops hit first at Wroclawek, on 11th–13th November, and then at Kutno on 14th–15th November; a thin German cordon sufficed, for the moment, to contain most of I Army and even to drive it back. In the circumstances, there was nothing substantial in the path of the three German divisions. They went on to the south, then turned west towards Lódz. Here they met Russian troops hurriedly sent to the city’s eastern side, and although they were only twenty miles from the German western wing, the three divisions were held, by 21st November. Their situation was dangerous—they could not break out to the west, south or east; and their passage to the north might be blocked by a reviving Russian I Army. By the 22nd Russian troops did indeed take Brzeziny, on the road to safety in the north. What followed was an illustration of the superior quality of German reserve divisions, for a force of lesser quality would simply have been taken prisoner—indeed, Danilov ordered trains brought up to take the expected 50,000 prisoners back to Russia.