The Eastern Front 1914-1917

by Norman Stone

  Lake Narotch was, despite appearances, one of the decisive battles of the First World War. It condemned most of the Russian army to passivity. Generals supposed that, if 350,000 men and a thousand guns, with ‘mountains’ of shell to use, had failed, then the task was impossible—unless there were extraordinary quantities of shell. Alexeyev himself made this point to Zhilinski, saying that the French Army itself demanded 4,200 rounds per light gun, and 600 per heavy gun,22 before they would consider an offensive, and Russia had not these quantities. In practice, even Russia could have assembled such quantities on a given area of front had the generals managed their reserves properly. But they had no way of arranging sacrifices by one part of the front to the benefit of another; they did not understand the tactical problems; and, certainly, recognition of the extreme incompetence with which affairs had been combined in March, 1916 remained platonic. As before, artillery and infantry blamed each other, the only positive consequence being a demand for yet more shell. The way was open to Upart’s demand for 4,500,000 rounds per month, and also to the eighteen million shells that were stock-piled, to no effect save, in the end, to enable the Bolsheviks to fight the Civil War. Now the western and northern army groups would have no stomach for attack. It was only the emergence of a general whose common-sense amounted to brilliance, and who selected a group of staff-officers who were almost a kernel of the Red Army, that gave the Russian army a great rôle in 1916.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Summer, 1916

  Lake Narotch paralysed much of the Russian army for the rest of the war. Both Evert and Kuropatkin now disbelieved in the possibility of breaking through at all—indeed, Kuropatkin resigned in despair, to go and practise against Central Asian rebels the military talents that had been of so little service against Germans. Evert stayed at his post, though disbelieving in his troops, his guns, his positions. Both of the fronts against Germany were now beset by crippling feelings of inferiority. If nearly 300,000 Russians had failed to defeat 50,000 Germans—figures that Alexeyev gave to Zhilinski—then the cause was lost in advance. Yet by now there was a superiority, on these two fronts, of almost 800,000 men. No-one had any idea as to how this might be used. Inevitably, the generals fell back on their standard excuse for failure—shell-shortage. Alexeyev told Zhilinski early in April that ‘the latest details I have concerning shell-output, particularly for the heavier calibres, compose a quite hopeless picture, since our own production would not suffice even for a three-week operation’. The army would just have to sit back until enough heavy shell were produced to make an utter wreckage of even the best German positions. This was a dangerous illusion. Shell, even in the mountains assembled on the western front in 1916—the French used 10,500,000 rounds in some eighty-four days in the Verdun fighting—did not have decisive effect at all. But as news came into Stavka of the vast quantities assembled by the British and French for their summer offensive, Russian commanders grew ever more depressed. They could not compete with these mountains of shell; better therefore to do nothing. Then the British might send some more supplies.

  But younger officers of the Russian army did have some notion that this pessimism was unnecessary. On the two fronts north of the Pripyat, they did not make much showing. But on the south-western front, their voices were heard. The south-western command did not altogether share the view that shell-shortage had caused defeat on the Strypa and on the Bessarabian border in December 1915. A report issued by Klembovski, chief of staff to this command, announced that ‘It must be said that our constant complaints, to the effect that failure was brought about only by shortage of mortar and heavy shell, are far from being invariably correct’.1 In one case, twelve shells had been used per square yard of front, and 700 rounds per gun in a day. Shelling had even been counter-productive—ploughing into a morass the ground that infantry had to cross; and in any case they had had too much ground to cross, since the attackers had often started from a mile away, with predictable effects. Preparation of the attack was much more important than the simple strewing of shell. In the early months of 1916, these officers began to get control of the south-western front. In the first place, Ivanov was removed from command in April, his place taken by Brusilov. It is notable that officers of this front, in particular, formed a strong kernel of the Red Army in 1918–19. Brusilov, who had begun life as a scion of south-Russian gentry, married a cousin of Stolypin’s and Izvolski’s, and studied in the Tsar’s corps of pages, ended up as inspector-general of Trotski’s cavalry. Klembovski, corps commander in 1914, Velichko, engineering-chief of the front Karbyshev, chief engineer of VIII Army, Kirey, senior artillerist of IX, and a large number of the divisional commanders and chiefs of staff all took prominent places in the Red Army, a mark of the Bolsheviks’ considerable ability to attract all that was best in the Tsarist army, elements, that in Stavka’s day, were sacrificed to the attitudinisers and the senile.

  A new Russian army was coming into existence, one where modest and sensible technicians were coming to power, men who could use the immensely promising natural qualities of the Russian soldier. Yet its emergence in 1916 broke a Tsarist pattern of much durability, and the dismissal of Ivanov, and his replacement by Brusilov, is a remarkable enough occurrence in the circumstances. Ivanov was a powerful figure in the army—associated with Sukhomlinov, yet careful to keep his links with the Grand Ducal side; in Lemke’s phrase, ‘a diplomat pretending to be a peasant’.2 But he, too, was something of a ‘great poster’—supposed to be very popular with his men, no doubt kept on for that reason. Alexeyev had no faith in him; and after the Strypa failure, his position weakened very greatly. He fought to retain his command—decorating the little Tsarevich for inspecting the wounded, dismissing a succession of chiefs of staff. The Tsar was persuaded to release him in spring 1916, and Brusilov arrived in Berdichev to take over the front—Ivanov sobbing throughout dinner. He went to Stavka—‘Ivanov has become a complete old granny and needs doping’—and sat ostentatiously in his motor-car as conferences went on, until in the end the Tsar appointed him ‘adviser’, and included him in the Stavka deliberations. In March 1917, because of his alleged popularity with the masses, he was entrusted with pacification of Petrograd—not a successful venture.

  The removal of Ivanov was a sign that, as far as questions of command went, a new type of officer was emerging. In the south-western command, sense and modesty prevailed. Brusilov himself is something of a surprise in this context. He had been a very successful commander since 1914, taking VIII Army and at times being responsible for the whole of the Carpathian front. Before 1914, he had clearly been intelligent and agile in exploiting the promotions-system to arrive at high command without falling foul either of the cavalry-General Staff clique or of the war ministry clique: of course his social origins helped. He shared with Count Ignatiev—military attaché in Paris, Guards officer, and then Red major-general—an ability to cut free of class-considerations, and to identify in good time which side would be the stronger; he had a gift of choosing able subordinates, and to enforce their will on recalcitrant conservatives. Himself unmistakably, and in the end fatally, part of the world of 1914, he none the less had enough of the new Russia to him for its elements to break through in the front under Brusilov’s command. A new style came at once to the headquarters in Berdichev. Headquarters was a small building with a mere two sentries at the door. Right away, a new style came to front orders—crisp, organised prose in place of Evert’s meandering literature.3

  On 14th April Alexeyev summoned a meeting of the front staffs in Mogiliev. The French and British had demanded some Russian help in the summer, and this meeting was to discuss what form such help should take. Ostensibly, it should be considerable—there were now 1,700,000 men with rifles, and soon, with the arrival of the new conscript classes, the overall superiority would rise to 745,000, on the front north of the Pripyat, and 132,000 south of the Pripyat. Alexeyev himself said, ‘We are capable of decisive attack only on the front north of the Pripyat’,
4 and put forward a plan not unlike that of March—double offensive from the Dvina and the front of II and X Armies. Neither Evert nor Kuropatkin agreed. Kuropatkin said, ‘It is quite improbable that we could break through the German front, the lines of which have been strongly fortified and so developed that success is hardly imaginable’. Evert remarked, ‘Without superiority in heavy artillery, there is no chance of success’. In the end, Evert was pushed into agreement. He would take a very small area, send in two waves, each of three corps, assemble almost all of the thousand heavy guns behind his front, and take two months over preparations. The front of attack would be no greater than twenty kilometres. Even so, he was not happy.

  The gathering was heartened by Brusilov. He said he would attack in the summer, that he would need only trivial reinforcements in men and guns. Kuropatkin ‘looked at me and shrugged his shoulders, in pity’. Brusilov was told to go ahead, although, since he had not much superiority of any kind—except leadership—over the Austrians, no-one expected from his offensive much more than a tactical success, and quite possibly only a repetition of the Strypa failures. Yet Brusilov’s team had come up with new ideas that made for the most brilliant victory of the war. They had studied the failures of December and January, which—as Zayonchkovski says—served something of the same purpose as the Russo-Japanese war had done. In reality, the Russo-Japanese war had led men often enough merely to a more vigorous repetition of the same views as before, whereas Brusilov’s command seems to have thought things out radically. Whatever the reason, these men came onto methods that were used—without acknowledgment—by Ludendorff in 1918, and then by Foch. To some degree, these new methods were forced on Brusilov by his very weakness. He could not hope for a crushing superiority of shell, and so had to think things out in other terms; in a sense, he had an advantage of backwardness, of being forced to move from 1915 to 1918 without passing through the stage of sacrificial Materialschlachten between them.

  The military problems of the First World War consisted of a number of circles to be squared. A successful offensive needed both surprise and preparation. These were incompatible: preparation of millions of men and horses took so long that surprise was impossible. In the same way, mobility and weight could not be reconciled. A huge weight of guns could be assembled. The enemy might be defeated. Then the guns could not be moved forward. In other words, armies would be mobile only if they had not the weight to make their mobility worthwhile. Brusilov’s staff noted that, in a break-through operation, there were too main problems—the break-through itself, and the exploitation of it. These demanded almost contradictory solutions. A break-through could only, it seemed, be achieved by assembly of great weight—enough shell to knock down thick belts of barbed-wire, destroy concrete enfilading-posts, dominate the enemy guns, destroy the defenders. But assembling this weight of guns and shell—and of course hundreds of thousands of men—would mean that the enemy knew what to expect, and when: just before Lake Narotch, for instance, German pilots had had no difficulty in spotting the long columns of Russian infantry marching through the snow towards the west. The defence would know where to put reserve-troops. Consequently, even if the break-through were achieved, the attackers would stumble onto a new line, not reconnoitred, with their own lines of supply complicated, crossing shell-torn ground known to the enemy, while the attackers’ artillery would be too far behind. Counter-attacks would follow; enemy artillery to right and left would enfilade the attackers in the area of break-through and the attack would collapse, despite its initial tactical success. This had happened on the Strypa in December.

  The essential difficulty was that attackers were not sufficiently mobile. The internal combustion engine could not be used for front-line purposes. Certainly, by 1917, tanks were in use on the western front. But, unless the enemy were surprised, and to some degree also demoralised, they were not effective enough. They moved too slowly—five miles per hour—and were vulnerable, at that slow pace, to well-handled field artillery. They tended to break down, or to stick in mud (it is notable that, in eastern European conditions, cavalry could be more effective than tanks, as was shown in the Russian civil war, and to some extent also in the Russo-Polish war of 1920); in the Nivelle offensive of spring 1917, half of the tank crews were grilled alive, such that Ludendorff wrote off tanks as a fancy civilians’ scheme of no value. In other words, there seemed no alternative to the horse—hence the clutter of cavalry squadrons that waited in attacking armies’ rear, complicating supply to an intolerable extent, merely as insurance against the event of break-through. But the horse was too vulnerable except against armies that had been so badly demoralised that they surrendered as soon as a Cossack sotnya appeared to whom surrender might be made.

  In the circumstances, there seemed no solution at all except ‘attrition’—to attack the enemy where he could be hit hardest, where he would be obliged to fight, i.e. his strongest point—and then make him lose many thousands of men by heavy bombardment. This was the method chosen by Falkenhayn in summer, 1915, and executed particularly by Mackensen. A great phalanx would be assembled in the central part of the front, with thousands of shells for up to a thousand guns—Gorlice; Radymno; Krasnostaw; Przasnysz. The validity of this method had been impressed on Russian commanders in the most direct possible way, and most of them now could only think of producing some imitation of the German phalanx-system. Shcherbachev had tried it on the Strypa, and Pleshkov had tried it at Postawy. Now Evert had much the same in mind for the summer offensive. It was certainly true that these methods more or less announced in advance that attack was coming, and gave the enemy time to move up reserves, if he had any (as the Russians believed, in 1915, that they had not, at least none with sufficient mobility). Consequently, the break-through operation would have to be attempted again, as Mackensen had seen.

  In December and March, the Russians had failed with these methods. Of these failures, various interpretations were possible. On the south-western front, the view was taken, by Brusilov though not by some of his subordinates, that the break-through operation had failed precisely because strength had been too narrowly concentrated. Pflug, commanding 2. Corps on Shcherbachev’s front, had attacked on a single kilometre of front; Pleshkov in March had really attacked only on a front of two kilometres, out of twenty. The theory, here, had been that a great weight of concentrated shelling would at least remove anything living from the small space involved—which was usually true enough—and that the Russian army did not have shell for more than two or three kilometres of front to be the object of such concentrated fire. It needed 400 heavy shells to tear a gap of fifty yards on three-strand barbed-wire, or 25,000 light shells; and when Austro-German wire was stepped up to nineteen or twenty strands, as came to be the case late in 1915, with not one but three different belts, the quantity of shell became literally incalculable, the more so as heavy artillery was not particularly accurate. Officers thought that only an extreme concentration of fire could bring results. In December, this had proved to be true: two, three Austro-Hungarian trench-lines would be occupied. But, in a small area like this, the attackers became highly vulnerable to enemy artillery to right and left, since it could rake them from both sides and front, while they were un-protected, and their supply-lines, reserve-lines and the rest were open to bombardment. Yet to deal with this problem—enfilading fire—seemed to demand a contradictory solution—attack on a front sufficiently broad that troops breaking through would not be within range of guns to right and left—in other words, a front of at least thirty kilometres. But a front of this length could not be broken through, since there would not be enough shell—or so the theory ran. Most commanders preferred to believe that the break-through operations had failed for a variety of other causes—not enough shell in particular; reserves not moved into support fast enough; troops lacking in ‘elan’, and so on. Each of these had sufficient validity to be convincing to many experienced observers. But they were far from being the whole truth.

  Brus
ilov and his staff came up with good answers to all of this. It was, first, vital to disrupt the enemy’s reserves—his local reserves and his frontal ones. When the break-through came, the attackers would not therefore have to face the resistance and counter-attack of fresh troops. This could be achieved, first, by surprise—the enemy must be caught off his guard. Preparation must be concealed as far as possible—if it had to be done, it must proceed along the whole length of the front. Then, there must not be one single attack, but several, at more or less the same time, so that the enemy would not know where to expect the main blow. As regards the problem of breaking-through, the blows must be delivered along a front of not less than thirty kilometres, so as to avoid the problem of enfilading-fire. Reserves must be brought close to the front line, hidden in great, deep dug-outs (‘platsdarmy’) with excellent communications to the front line. When troops got through a breach in the wire, they must be immediately followed by reserves. The artillery must co-operate closely with infantry—gunners living in the front trenches, carefully studying the problems, getting to know the infantry officers involved. There was one drawback to this method—that it entailed not assembling huge forces of infantry and cavalry at any point, so as not to draw the enemy’s attention to the point of attack. If a break-through came, it could not be exploited very greatly. Moreover, Brusilov not only failed to make use of cavalry, but seems even to have forbidden more than a division or two to take part in his offensive, at least on the main front, near Lutsk. He lost mobility, though no doubt gained endlessly better supply-arrangements.