The Eastern Front 1914-1917

by Norman Stone

  The diversion of Germany s effort to the western front was much more important, in the eastern context, than Conrad’s Italian venture. There was an almost complete withdrawal of German support for the Austrian front against Russia,15 and the front against Russia, overall, was weakened greatly. In August 1915 there had been as many as twenty German divisions (to around forty Austrian) on the front south of the Pripyat. After August, Falkenhayn demanded most of them back, and left only a token force—82. reserve and 48. reserve. But at the same time German commanders still controlled much more of the front than these numbers warranted—Linsingen’s Army Group accounted for the Austrian IV Army and troops to the north (including 82. reserve division) and Südarmee still controlled, with the German Bothmer as commander, a section of eastern Galicia. Falkenhayn would probably have removed such German forces as he left on the Austro-Hungarian front, had it not been for his interest in maintaining these German commands. Even so, he successfully demanded that Conrad should leave equivalent forces on the German side of the front—the two divisions of the Austro-Hungarian 12. Corps, operating under Woyrsch’s command to the north of Linsingen’s army group. There was even a suggestion that Austrian troops should go to the Vosges—a suggestion not taken up until the summer of 1918, when Austro-Hungarian forces did arrive in the west, having to be given boots by the German command in Metz. These removals mattered more than the removal of six Austro-Hungarian divisions from the Russian front. The Austrians would be deprived of the vital German support, and there was only a vague agreement, late in May, that troops from the other parts of the eastern front might be sent to Linsingen’s front if required. Relations between Conrad and Falkenhayn were very tense. Conrad complained, as ever, that the Germans were ‘brutal, shameless, ruthless’.16 He resented being told so little of Verdun, and resented even more the little he was told. Falkenhayn’s disapproval of the Austrian offensive against Italy annoyed him, and for some time there had been such coolness in relations that Conrad was driven to send a letter of apology—the text of which has never been seen again. At bottom, the Austrians did not want to face the total war Germany now prepared to fight; at the same time, they could see no alternative to it—they too could now see that a ‘neutral’ peace would mean the end of the Monarchy. For better or worse this meant alliance to the bitter end with imperial Germany.

  Neither Conrad nor Falkenhayn worried very much over the Austrian front in the east. It was known that two-thirds of the Russian army had concentrated against the German front, and that forces in the southern sector were roughly in balance. Overall, Conrad reckoned there were eighty-eight German and Austrian divisions to between 127 and 130 (with six others in the interior of Russia), with forty-nine German and Austrian divisions on the German front, to eighty-five Russian, and thirty-nine Austrian ones on the front south of the Pripyat—that controlled by Conrad—to thirty-nine or so Russian divisions. Correctly enough, no great change was noted in Russian dispositions before June 1916. Conrad went on with confidence. He set great hopes in his Italian offensive. His troops were groomed for a great victory. But the snow caused some postponement, and the offensive did not get under way until mid-May. Once it did get under way, results were impressive. The Italians laid out their defences mistakenly—they held the mountains, while the Austrians resolutely went forward in the valleys, causing one mountain position after another to collapse from inanition. By the end of May, 380 guns and 40,000 prisoners had been taken, and the Austrians had reached the plateau of Arsiero-Asiago, almost on the edge of the mountains—about, it seemed, to emerge and cut off the retreat of huge Italian forces on the Isonzo to the north-east.

  This Austrian offensive caused Alexeyev in the end to shelve his doubts as to Brusilov’s methods. From 20th May, a series of appeals from Italy17 reached Stavka, ‘each more peremptory in tone than the last’. Joffre, through Laguiche at Stavka; the Italian representative there; the Italian embassy in Petrograd; finally the King of Italy in a personal telegram to the Tsar prevailed on Alexeyev. It seemed that only an immediate Russian offensive could help Italy; and if Italy dropped out of the war, then large numbers of Austrian divisions would be free to take up the battle against Russia. Alexeyev grumbled; he told Joffre that the situation was surely better than Italians said; in any case, the western Powers were supposed to attack on the Somme, and this would bring relief. ‘With our ineradicable weakness in heavy artillery the execution of an immediate, unprepared attack cannot promise success and would only lead to the disruption of our plan in general.’18 Evert, of course, would do nothing. In the end, Alexeyev had to ask Brusilov; and Brusilov agreed to attack at once, asking only for one corps more, to arrive after the offensive had opened. Alexeyev called him on Hughes’ apparatus and asked him to lessen the area of attack. Brusilov refused: he had confidence enough in his methods, felt at least they ought to be tried. Kaledin, Lechitski, Shcherbachev were also over-borne—the first two suffering from extreme nervousness, the other from a desire to imitate French methods too closely, on a relatively narrow front. Brusilov, showing a detailed knowledge of their fronts that took them by surprise, refuted their arguments. The offensive was to begin on 4th June with bombardments on the front of all four armies: VIII Army with the main blow, on the front in Volhynia between Rovno and Lutsk; XI to the south, at Sopanów where a bridgehead over the river Turya offered a convenient jump-off point; VII in eastern Galicia, on the roads west of Tarnopol; IX on the Dniester, and near the Romanian border.

  Alexeyev had ordered, on 31st May, ‘a powerful auxiliary attack on the Austrians… the main blow being delivered, later, by the troops of the western front’. But the supposed ‘auxiliary’ attack succeeded far beyond expectations, and certainly—as happened quite often in the First World War—far beyond the supposed ‘main blow’. This was, for a start, because enemy reserves had been disrupted. The Germans had drawn their troops against the northern and western fronts. The Austrians had of course sent six divisions to their Italian front, and beyond this had only two divisions that could be shuttled from one part of their eastern front to the other—both being sent, at first, to the wrong place. Moreover, Brusilov’s attack—being launched in four different places—caused great confusion with reserves, and first two, then four divisions spent their time going from one rear-area to the other, never even being engaged. There was, in particular, to be great confusion of reserves between Volhynia and the Dniester, contributing largely to the ineffectiveness of their intervention. Even tactically, within the area of each separate army—except in the case of VII Army—there was confusion of local reserves, since the fronts of attack were long, and reserves were either engaged in the wrong place or not engaged at all—being swallowed up in calamity before they could even retire, and staging at best an ineffective, piece-meal counterattack. From this point of view, Brusilov’s methods were a brilliant success.

  But the first task was to break through. The Austro-Hungarian lines were strong, and VIII Army, with 704 guns, was not significantly superior to the Austro-Hungarian IV Army, with 600; nor was the superiority in man-power—200,000 to 150,000—of much moment in a war of fire-power. The corps of VIII Army were drawn up on a long front—almost thirty miles for the three central ones, 39., 8. and 40., which had over half of the guns and some 100 battalions between them. Also, in much offence to orthodoxies of the First World War, these corps did not have anything like an overwhelming weight of heavy artillery—206 field guns, forty-four field-howitzers, four Austrian medium howitzers, forty-four heavy howitzers and twenty-two heavy cannon (42-cm.). The defence, with 600 guns and thirteen divisions, was absolutely, and of course relatively, much stronger than at Lake Narotch in March, where II Army, with a third more guns, had faced half those of the Austrian IV Army, and less than half the numbers of that army.

  The Brusilov campaign.

  The break-through succeeded by virtue of careful preparation.19 The guns knew what to achieve; they knew their targets; they co-operated with the infantry; r
eserves were hidden very close to the line in great dug-outs, and further reserves had a whole network of communications-trenches, duly sign-posted, along which they could move; the front lines were only seventy-five yards away from the Austrian ones; Russian guns operated no further off than two kilometres—all an innovation as far as Russian operations were concerned. On 4th June, the Austrians were astonished to discover that the Russians had even tunnelled below their own wire-obstacles—‘the first time they have been so thorough, for previously, when they meant to attack, they took the obstacles away themselves’. Now Brusilov was determined on surprise, and he unquestionably succeeded in some degree. On 4th June the Russian bombardment had much success. The Austrian artillery was either silenced in the opening phase, or its gun-teams ran out of shell in an effort to persuade the Russians that they had a great deal. The forward trenches were levelled, and even some of the dug-outs knocked in by heavy shells. Fifty-one ways were opened in the wire opposite the three main corps of VIII Army. An Austrian investigator subsequently discovered that ‘there was drum-fire of hitherto unequalled intensity and length which in a few hours shattered and levelled our carefully-constructed trenches’. Chaos had broken out: ‘Apart from the bombardment’s destruction of wire obstacles, the entire zone of battle was covered by a huge, thick cloud of dust and smoke, often mixed with heavy explosive-gases, which prevented men from seeing, made breathing difficult, and allowed the Russians to come over the ruined wire-obstacles in thick waves into our trenches’.20 Sand fell into rifles and machine-guns, and made them difficult to work.

  The Russian bombardment continued for most of 4th June. The next day, infantry attack followed—preceded by ‘testing’ patrols. In practice, the Austro-Hungarian defence had already been ruined. Two-thirds of the available troops were put in the front position—the three foremost trenches, in a belt perhaps a kilometre in depth. There were huge dug-outs in this belt which could sustain the heaviest artillery. But two great errors had been made: the Russian lines had been allowed to within seventy-five paces of the Austrian trenches, and the reserves did not emerge from their dug-outs until the last moment. Not surprisingly, the defenders of the very first trench were over-run, the dust and confusion affected defenders of the second trench and the reserves in their dug-outs, and the Russians—pumping reserves in fast from their own dugouts only a few hundred yards away—came up to the dug-out mouths only shortly after the bombardment had ended. The Austrian dug-outs were therefore traps, not strong-points: each a miniature Przemyśl.24 This happened with one division of 10. Corps, near Olyka, and the collapse of this division allowed Russian troops into the third belt of trenches even on 5th June—an advantage they exploited to attack the flanks of other divisions. By the end of 5th June, 10. Corps had lost eighty per cent of its men in consequence, and of course in the chaos, language-difficulties came to the fore, with non-German troops surrendering perhaps more easily than they might otherwise have done. In circumstances like this, there were no defences for the local reserves to pick up—they were merely involved in a retreating mass of men. Szúrmay’s corps was equally badly-treated, such that, by the evening of 5th June, virtually all three Austrian positions had fallen. In the first two positions, it was later found, eighty-five per cent of the casualties had been caused by gunnery and rifle-fire. In the third, a hundred per cent of the loss was prisoners. There were even tales of officers running back ahead of their men, artillery galloping away to the rear, and other signs of calamitous demoralisation. On 6th June the Russian central corps followed up their success, as far as the river Styr and Lutsk. Here the Austro-Hungarian disaster was completed. There were reserve-positions around Lutsk, the pride of Archduke Joseph Ferdinand. Belts of wire had been set up, with concrete fortifications, around the place. But it was defensible only if heights to the south, at Krupy, were free of enemy artillery; and yet Krupy was indefensible—it could be approached easily, and the attackers would even be invisible as they moved through long grass. No answer had been thought necessary for this. Szúrmay’s corps retired to the Krupy positions, and lost them in panic on 6th June. Russian guns occupied them. They fired on the defences of Lutsk. The Austrians panicked—hundreds fleeing over packed pontoon bridges across the river Styr. The defenders were also seized by panic, but could not get away so easily, since they were blocked by their own wire. Austrians soldiers were even impaled on it as they ran back; and their officers, naturally, chose to save themselves. In Lutsk, another huge packet of prisoners was taken by the Russians, who in two days had been able to claim 50,000 men and seventy-seven guns. Kundmann did not altogether exaggerate when he said that ‘the whole of IV Army has really been taken prisoner’.22 Szúrmay’s corps announced, ‘It’s a complete débâcle, we can do nothing with the troops’. The defence had simply disappeared. IV Army even after reinforcement came to 27,000 men; and so much Austro-Hungarian ammunition was captured that Russian factories hitherto making it—for the weapons already captured—were now told to convert back to Russian ammunition.23

  What gave this disaster a new dimension was that it came together with disasters elsewhere that ruined the effectiveness of reserves. XI Army, to the south of VIII, attacked after short bombardment on 4th June. It had not even the slight superiority that VIII Army had had; even so, it broke through at Sopanów, where a favourable tactical position—a bridgehead, where movements were protected by woods—could be exploited. The Austrians’ local reserves were drawn into action further south, and the forces at Sopanów broke through, two corps co-operating well and together taking 15,000 prisoners. This, combined with the defeat of the Austrian IV Army, led to the fall of Dubno. The initial defeat at Sopanów had even led Conrad to direct the front’s reserve to this area, and not to IV Army’s, so that it was of no use to the defenders of Lutsk. Similarly, there was a tactical success on the Strypa at Jazlowiec. In its way, this was a revealing affair. Shcherbachev and his chief of staff Golovin had been full of French talk; they would imitate French methods (the ‘chablons’ of 1915). The bombardment was much longer than elsewhere—forty-eight hours—and the enemy—Südarmee —knew what to expect. On the main front of attack, Shcherbachev failed. It was a subsidiary attack, forced on him by Brusilov, that succeeded, an entire Austro-Hungarian corps on the southern flank of Südarmee being surprised and destroyed—this success being achieved, revealingly, by rather less force than had been mustered in much the same area in December 1915. But since Shcherbachev had lost 20,000 men with his ‘chablons’ further north, he could not do much to exploit the gain.

  Further south, on the front of IX Army, there was a success almost as great as that on VIII Army’s in Volhynia.24 This was a revealing affair, for the army that lost—Pflanzer-Baltin’s VII Army—was the most solid of the Austro-Hungarian armies, one well-known for its comparative freedom from problems of morale, and composed mainly of Hungarian and Croat troops whose loyalty was never questioned even by commanders looking for excuses. Pflanzer-Baltin, in his diary, referred to ‘the enemy’s great superiority in long-range heavy artillery… of unprecedented effectiveness’. In reality, IX Army had only forty-seven heavy guns to Pflanzer-Baltin’s 150 medium and heavy. Many of the Russian guns were very old, and they did not have generous amounts of shell—such that Lechitski wished not to attack at all when, rising from his sick-bed, he found what his chief of staff, Sannikov, had carried out. There was some numerical superiority (150,000 to 107,000) and some slight superiority in light artillery overall; and of course at the points of break-through, the Russians could assemble greater weight than the defenders who had to maintain a strong front everywhere. Even then, it was not of decisive proportions. After Lechitski had won an astonishing victory, men did not know what to conclude. A British report ran,25 that if the Russians ‘have obtained such results with so small a number of antique guns, what would they not have done if properly armed’. In a sense, this was the very point. Russia’s inability to amass these huge quantities of heavy artillery or the crushing amo
unts of heavy shell (Lechitski had at most 300 rounds for his heavy guns, whereas the standard French quantity—without which there would be no attack—was 1,700 per gun) had forced commanders to think of something else, often despite themselves. In the case of IX Army, preparation had been as thorough as on VIII Army’s front, the director of operations (Kelchevski) having gone to France to study western trench-systems. The gunners were well-trained, and this army’s manuals of instruction for artillery co-operation were models of good sense. It is thought that artillery behaved with ‘unprecedentedly good timing and thoughtful preparation’.

  The Austro-Hungarian VII Army had already done quite well at the turn of the year—it had held the December offensive, at that without German help. Pflanzer-Baltin therefore supposed that his defensive tactics were correct. His guns had caused the Russians much harm, firing off a great deal of shell at once; and his ‘thick frontline’ system had worked well enough, for the Russians had been unable to break through significantly on any part of the front, while minor penetration was always held by enfilading fire. Two-thirds of the reserves were always kept close to the front line—the three trenches of the first position, or Kampfstellung. The troops seemed to be in good enough heart—an official investigator subsequently wrote that they had fought with ‘heroism deserving of recognition’.26 However, training had not been effective. As new troops appeared, they would be set to shift snow in the base-towns, and training took the form of repetitive drilling. Also, as rumours of an attack spread, a tense atmosphere developed, fostered by telephonists who listened-in to officers’ conversations and spread alarming rumours. ‘Tatar’ troops were supposed to be coming; and there was a persistent tale to the effect that the Russians would scalp any soldier they took who had on him a favourite Hungarian weapon, the fokó or bill-hook. On the whole, however, it was a tactical rather than a moral problem that ruined VII Army. The defence had been too far concentrated in the Kampfstellung, and the army’s front was bisected by the river Dniester, co-operation between the two halves being poor. The commander, Pflanzer-Baltin, was generally good, but he had not got over the lessons of 1915, and in any case had fallen ill just before battle began.27