14
On 8 June, after being notified that one of his corps commanders north of the breakthrough was making a tactical retreat to protect his right flank, Pflanzer-Baltin decided that the time had come to make a strategic retreat of more than 30 miles, permitting his shattered forces to regroup behind the lines of the Dnyestr and Prut rivers and then be in position to attack the left flank of the Russian advance, which he believed was aimed at Lemberg. Since this was opening up a 70-mile breach between his forces and Bothmer’s Südarmee to the north, Bothmer was furious and demanded to be given command over the disorganised Austrian forces in retreat, to close the breach and save the situation. For the usual reasons of national pride, Conrad refused to authorise this and tried to make amends by ordering Pflanzer-Baltin not to lose contact with Südarmee – which was pretty meaningless in the circumstances.
In the chaos of the Austrian retreat, strategic or otherwise, Lechitsky’s cavalry and infantry was pushing steadily westwards on a front of 20 miles or more, taking prisoner tens of thousands of ‘other ranks’ and several thousand officers. Momentarily, Pflanzer-Baltin’s left, or northern, flank stabilised, holding a new line with just enough men to stay in contact with Südarmee. Each time this happened, Lechitsky piled on the pressure against the other flank until the Austrian right flank collapsed. After a bombardment that began at dawn on 9 June and lasted three hours, three Russian infantry divisions attacked at 1000hrs and were briefly held by the largely demoralised defenders, reinforced at the last minute by the last five battalions of reserves in the sector. A lieutenant trapped in the midst of this chaos afterwards wrote, ‘(Our) units in the trenches had no ammunition; the reserves lay fully exposed; the regimental command had allowed a squadron to be posted to another sector in return for another, at the time unserviceable, unit.’1
The struggle had now become extremely unequal, with 122 Russian battalions against only fifty-four battalions of defenders. When the centre cracked at around 1030hrs on 10 June, the same lieutenant was unable to control his men, who streamed away from the trenches, and Florence Farmborough wrote:
Alexander Alexandrovich, one of our transport heads, offered to drive us to see the deserted Austrian dugouts. One excelled all others in luxury and cosiness. We decided it must have belonged to an artillery officer. It contained tables, chairs, pictures on the armoured walls and books; there was even an English grammar. We toured some of the smaller trenches; these too were amazingly well constructed. I thought of the shallow ditches with which our soldiers had to be content; even their most comfortable dugouts were but hovels compared with these.2
By noon the Russian breakthrough was so evident that Pflanzer-Baltin realised he had only two options: to retreat in as orderly fashion as possible and protect the Carpathian passes to his rear or see his troops annihilated where they stood. Conrad would not hear of it. Countermanding the decision to retreat southwest towards the passes, he ordered Pflanzer-Baltin to retreat in a north-westerly direction in order to maintain contact with Südarmee and prevent the Russians capturing the rail junction at Stanislau (modern Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine). It was too late. By now Austrian 7th Army was chronically reduced in numbers and the remaining forces had already begun moving southwest. The order to change direction completed the demoralisation of the rank-and-file by revealing to them that their commanders were now clutching at straws. One Hungarian division lost half its strength in twenty-four hours.
Also on 9 June Böhm-Ermolli sought permission to reinforce the rump of Corps Szurmay. Before permission was granted by Linsingen’s HQ, it was too late because the corps had been cut off from Austrian 2nd Army. Early on 10 June a sustained attack by Kaledin’s infantry forced a breach between the lines of Austrian 1st and 4th armies. By late afternoon, the gap was 35 miles wide, but the sheer speed of the Russian advance had outpaced the horse- and ox-drawn supply trains, so that it was necessary that evening to pause and consolidate the enormous salient almost 35 miles deep and 50 miles wide, in which 44,000 POWs had been taken – at a cost of 35,000 Russian casualties. Kaledin was also faced with a difficult choice: his mounted scouts reported the roads open north-west to Kovel and south-east to Lemberg. Which way to turn?
This pause allowed some respite to the retreating Austrians of X Corps, reduced to some 3,000 men. On its flank, II Corps was even more depleted in manpower. Some units were so shattered and separated from their official position in the line that they had to be absorbed into fresh formations and lost any independent identity. Russian 8th Army’s chief of staff was General Vladislav Klembovskii, who had been Brusilov’s personal choice to succeed him as army commander. He urged Kaledin to press on. Brusilov agreed with him that doing so at that moment might have brought the Hapsburg dynasty to its knees. On the other side of the lines, Böhm-Ermolli also shared this opinion, due not only to casualties and men lost as prisoners but also the effect on morale of all Austro-Hungarian units from the repeated retreats.
However, Brusilov decided that prudence was the better part of valour, and held back, unwilling to deepen the salient and make it more vulnerable to counter-attack on its exposed northern flank. A factor in his thinking was Kuropatkin’s failure to attack on the northern front and Evert’s continued delays in launching his offensive, which would have obliged Linsingen to keep north of the Pripyat River some formations that now threatened the new salient from the north. At Stavka, Alekseyev was unable to force Evert and Kuropatkin to move, but did scrounge a mixed bag of troops from their fronts as reinforcements for Brusilov. He used them to strengthen the northern flank of the salient, meanwhile regrouping for an attack towards Kovel.
The next moves depended on whether the Russians or CP forces were able to consolidate and regroup first.3 Throughout 11 June, gaps opened up in the new Austrian line. Pflanzer-Baltin did his best to plug them with fast-moving cavalry until the cavalry also had to retreat or be cut off. One soldier afterwards described the confusion of the retreat: ‘[There were] endless columns of wagons … with artillery placed among them. The troops came from all sides, tired and harassed.’4 And behind them, driving them on, were Lechitsky’s Cossacks riding down the fleeing infantry with sabres slashing in downward blows that could decapitate a man or lop off his arm and lances impaling bodies, then flicking them off before ‘pig-sticking’ a new, living human target. Tens of thousands of luckier ‘other ranks’ and thousands of officers went ‘into the Russian bag’, life as a POW being preferable to a painful death on the battlefield.
Four divisions of German reinforcements arrived at the Galician front under Linsingen’s command on 12 June. By then, one gap in the Austrian line was already 20 miles wide. By dawn on 14 June Lechitsky and Shcherbachev had to split their forces as the front widened even more. Even the unbroken enemy line was thinly held, Pflanzer-Baltin relying on the natural barriers of the Prut and Dnyestr – and on the sheer exhaustion and heavy losses of the Russian troops. By 14 June both sides had fought themselves to a standstill, but on the following day a random charge by a Cossack sotnya of probably less than 100 riders triggered another panic retreat, which was only stemmed by a timely reinforcement of the southern flank of Südarmee. By this time all units of Austrian 7th Army were severely under strength, so that, although the front seemed to have stabilised for the moment, the situation was summed up in negative terms by the new chief of staff imposed on Planzer-Baltin. Monocled Major General Hans von Seeckt was of strict Junker military stock and described by those who knew him at this time as having ‘an icy stare’. Certainly, he saw little to please him at Austrian 7th Army HQ, where his new commander labelled him ‘no friend of Austria’. Seeckt’s new colleagues at 7th Army found their German chief of staff abrasive and downright rude because he made no effort to conceal his contempt for their inefficiency. On 16 June, he wrote:
Whether (7th Army) still has the internal disposition to hold against a strong, well-prepared overall attack is doubtful. I fear that in the task of covering the area between the Prut and Dnyestr with its main force and securing the Bukovina region the army will be split in the middle.5
The chain of command on the Russian side was hardly less acrimonious, in this case because the delayed offensives by Evert and Kuropatkin still did not take place despite Brusilov’s protests to Alekseyev. On 14 June, when Evert’s delayed attack was supposed to go in, he had had the nerve to telephone Stavka and beg for another delay of four days on the grounds that the marshes around Pinsk, across which he was supposed to advance on an axis threatening Brest-Litovsk and Warsaw, were too wet! With very little sleep, master-minding his own offensive, Brusilov was understandably furious, and called Alekseyev, demanding that Stavka formally order Evert to attack without further delay. Alekseyev prevaricated. Brusilov did the unthinkable in writing directly to the Tsar for help, but Nicholas, as usual, refused to make any decision. As a sop to Brusilov, he was sent some more reinforcements and firmly told that Evert would attack the next day.
On 18 June, Evert had another excuse for not moving: the Germans forces in the line where he had intended to attack, had been reinforced; he wanted time to redirect his attack to a weaker point. Given permission by Stavka, Evert promised the attack would go in at latest by 3 July. Coming from the man who had repeatedly let him down, Brusilov placed little faith in that. He was right. As he recalled these events in his memoirs:
I did not consider that the Tsar was guilty, he being a mere amateur in military matters, but Alekseyev understood very well what was going on and how criminal the behaviour of Evert and Kuropatkin was. If we had had a different supreme commander, Evert would have been dismissed immediately for his indecisiveness and Kuropatkin should never have had a place in the active army (after his failures in the Russo-Japanese war).6
By the afternoon of the following day, Russian troops were across the Prut in three places and continued pushing Austrian 7th Army’s lines south and west for the next week. However, the three days required for regrouping constituted a near-fatal delay for Kaledin’s 8th Army facing Austrian 4th and 1st armies now commanded by General Karl von Tersztyansky, a Magyar nobleman whose extremely short temper had caused him problems in the past and was to cause him more in the future.
As further sop from Alekseyev, to compensate for Evert’s delays, Brusilov had been given temporary control of Russian 3rd Army, until then under Evert’s orders as part of western front. Its new commander was General Leonid Lesh, who was now ordered to make a diversionary attack near Pinsk – perhaps the ground had suddenly dried up? – while Kaledin’s 8th Army with some reinforcements advanced toward the rail junction at Kovel. South of there, Sakharov’s 11th Army attacked the Austrian 1st Army and Shcherbachev and Lechitsky kept up the pressure on the Central Powers line in the south of the front, to prevent troops being moved from there northwards. Unfortunately, Lesh had not been brainwashed by Brusilov in the preparatory stage and therefore attacked in traditional Russian fashion with human waves after a badly focused barrage, losing 7,000 casualties without making any real advance. To the south of that fiasco, 11th Army broke through on an axis aimed due west at Volodimyr-Volynsky, rather than either Kovel or Lemberg, but Tersztyansky blocked this move with adroit deployment of his mixed formations of German and Austrian troops.
Next morning, Sakharov threw elements of 11th Army against Austrian 1st Army, but not until late on the afternoon of 15 June, and after taking heavy casualties, did he achieve a breakthrough exactly where it could do most harm – on the demarcation line between the enemy’s 1st and 4th armies. This compelled General Puhallo to make a tactical withdrawal. That, in turn, forced Linsingen to plug the gap between the two armies, more than 8 miles across, at the cost of weakening the centre of his line. This would have been exactly the moment for Kaledin to pile on the pressure while the forces facing him were either disorganised or re-positioning themselves. Brusilov later wrote that the problem with Kaledin was that he was indecisive and always complaining, which had a negative effect on the troops under his command. Kaledin’s alibi was that by this stage he lacked the manpower to press on.
Desultory attacks continued throughout the day, but failed to prevent the Austrian 4th and 1st armies stabilising in new positions. In two weeks of heavy casualties on both sides, the only real change to the line was that Kaledin had gained the large salient that extended 20 miles west of Lutsk and Shcherbachev had gained a much smaller salient south of Tarnopol.
What does not show up on a map is how thin the CP lines were in places, nor how depleted were some of Kaledin’s units. By now, Brusilov’s forces had captured 4,013 officers and 200,000 men, together with booty of 219 cannons, 644 machine guns. 196 mortars, 150,000 rifles and other materiel. ‘Heroic’ is not a word often used in the context of this kind of slogging match, yet one has to admire the way exhausted men of both sides stumbled forward and were pushed back in places on 16 June. Then, something shameful happened overnight. Many officers in the Austrian forces reported sick and abandoned their men, who surrendered. This allowed Kaledin to expand the Lutsk salient to the north and to the south, where it reached almost to the town of Redkov (modern Ridkiv in Ukraine).
Linsingen begged desperately for more German reinforcements, but was told none were available. Attempting to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, he used whatever forces he could re-position to keep up the pressure on the Russian advance, again at a heavy cost in casualties. This continued for another four or five days, with a small advance being pushed back again and again in a strong-arm contest where neither contestant had enough strength remaining to push his opponent’s arm down to the table. Despite all the thousands of casualties and having taken those 200,000-plus prisoners, the majority of Brusilov’s forces were now ordered to dig in and prepare for a new offensive after reinforcement – whenever that might be.
On 24 June Russian 7th and 9th armies were ordered to advance while 11th Army held its position. Russian 8th Army was beating back repeated powerful counter-attacks intended to drive it back to Lutsk. Hindenburg sent two divisions of German reinforcements south in an endeavour to nip off the salient. Incredibly, a pompous officer in Austrian 4th Army, newly arrived in theatre, commented that the exhausted men shambling forward towards the line ‘did not march like Imperial troops, but like a flock of sheep. Stretched out all across the street, followed by countless stragglers, these columns offer a model of how not to march.’7 Two days later, Tersztyansky answered Linsingen’s order to attack with a report that he had neither sufficient ammunition for his artillery nor the men to execute it.
By 29 June, Lechitsky had overrun nearly all the Bukovina with Austrian losses of 40,000 taken prisoner and more than 120,000 dead. But the cost in Russian lives had also been enormous and Lechitsky no longer had the manpower to press on through the well-defended Carpathian passes or to drive into the widening gap between the two rivers as the Austrians retreated. Determined to throw Russian 8th Army back over the Styr at Lutsk, on that day Linsingen attempted to use a German battle group, relatively fresh to the front, to stiffen a new assault on the Russian line, only to find that Brusilov had scrounged fresh troops on his side also. A barrage by heavy guns preceded the attack, but little ground had been gained before the Russians drove back the Austrian troops who had briefly won a short length of their front line. Under withering fire from well-sited Russian artillery, one Hungarian reserve division refused to advance; the rest of Tersztyansky’s forces moved forward, however reluctantly, when ordered. But, as the afternoon wore on, Linsingen’s hope of retaking Lutsk became more and more impossible, the Austrian local commanders openly declaring their exhausted men incapable of further combat.
Not only the men in the line were exhausted. So also were the nurses of Letuchka No. 2. On 17 June, Nurse Farmborough fell asleep from exhaustion in the operating room and slept for hours. At 0600hrs more wounded arrived, one with an entry wound at the shoulder blade, with the bullet going down his right side to lodge in his thigh, causing much trauma on the way. Disregarding the groans and cries from her patients of, ‘Sestritsa, bolit!’ – little sister, it hurts! – she was washing the face of another soldier, covered with dust, grime and dried blood, when he said: ‘Leave it. I shall not go visiting (girls) any more.’ Seeing the ugly gash on his head that had been concealed by all the filth, she understood what he meant. A young officer was brought in, severely wounded in both legs, with fragments of rusty metal protruding from the swollen, discoloured flesh. The surgeon amputated one leg above the knee but, out of the patient’s hearing, the medical staff made no secret that he was going to die of gangrene anyway, having been left for twenty-four hours with open wounds in mud and filth near the wire.
At this point, an ominous note creeps into the diary for the first time. To comfort the wounded Austrian prisoners, Florence talked to them in German, but was warned by the chief dispenser that talking with prisoners in their own language might make her suspect. When she protested that, if they were English or French, she would speak to them also in those languages, he added: ‘A word to the wise.’8 Russians had always been xenophobic, but this was the beginning of the paranoia that would characterise Russia after the Revolution.
By July 1916, Brusilov’s offensive seemed to be well on the way to total success. Kaledin’s 8th Army was in position to drive right towards Kovel or left towards Lemberg. Choosing the easier option towards Kovel, it seemed possible to split the Central Powers’ front in two. In the south of the front, Russian 7th and 9th armies, suitably reinforced, looked able to reach the Carpathian passes. On the central and northern fronts, Evert and Kuropatkin had the resources easily to apply sufficient pressure to prevent German reinforcements being shipped south.
By 3 July Linsingen had to face the facts and commanded both his German and Austrian forces to dig in and await reinforcements before making any further moves. By 14 July elements of Russian 3rd and 8th armies had reached the left bank of the Stokhod River. During this time, Sakharov’s 11th Army made three brief attacks, advancing the line, taking 34,000 German and Austrian prisoners and capturing forty-five cannons and seventy-one machine guns. Russian 7th and 9th armies also regrouped to launch a new offensive along the line of the Dnyestr River, but Lechitsky was delayed by heavy rains until 28th July, which lost the element of surprise and gave the enemy time to move reinforcements to the threatened sector. On 28 July Russian 3rd Army and the Guards Army drove towards Kovel, meeting stiff resistance from the reinforced enemy positions and heavy artillery fire. Although Kaledin’s 8th Army had some success and the left flank of 9th Army did advance in a southwesterly direction, no progress was made towards Vladimir-Volynskii.
Altogether, from 4 June to mid-August Brusilov calculated that his armies had taken prisoner 8,255 officers and 370,153 other ranks – and captured some 500 cannons, 144 machine guns, vast quantities of rifles and ammunition and much other materiel. He was aware that the enemy was receiving reinforcements from other sectors of the front and some from France, but Stavka knew that the Western Allies planned a massive offensive along the Somme in July, which should prevent OHL moving any more German reinforcements to the east. Brusilov was not worried about Austro-Hungarian reinforcements. Although he now had 3rd Army added to his front as well as the freshly reconstituted Guards Army, whose various regiments looked marvellous on a parade ground, with every man tall and well-fed compared with the peasant conscripts of most other regiments, what worried him was the quality of their commanders. He wrote in his memoirs:
The commander of the Guards Army, General Bezobrazov had been sacked on several occasions for incompetence, but was an honourable man, though rather stupid and unbelievably stubborn. Count Ignatiev, his chief of staff, had never served on a staff and thus had no idea of the work despite having graduated from the General Staff Academy ‘with honours’. The commander of the Guards’ artillery was the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin – a stout fellow, but who had only the faintest idea of the modern uses of artillery. Commander of 1st Guards Corps was Grand Duke Prince Pavel Aleksandrovich. Although a sensible and personally courageous man, he understood nothing of military life. Commander of 2nd Guards Corps was Rauch, a clever, educated man who had a fatal flaw: he lost his nerve as soon as he heard the first shot and completely went to pieces once personally in danger, after which it was impossible for him to exercise command.9
With reinforcements like that, Brusilov hardly needed an enemy. He protested to Alekseyev that, to make the Guards Army of any real use, he needed to replace its commanders. They, however, were appointed by the Tsar personally, so only the Tsar could authorise that – and Alekseyev lacked the courage to ask him.
In one respect the Russian armies were better off than at any time since August 1914. That was in the supply of shells. In-country arsenals were now manufacturing them at the rate of 2.9 million in September 1916 alone. By the end of the year there was a reserve at the fronts of 3,000 shells per gun. Everything else needed for the war effort, from barbed wire to bandages, seemed to be available at last – although not always where it was most needed.10 Nothwithstanding all the problems of command, Brusilov’s offensive was the great Russian success of 1916, causing transfer of an estimated 30 CP divisions from the Western Front by the end of August and compelling OAK to cancel a planned offensive on the Isonzo front because sufficient forces could not be sent there. The battle lines had been moved an average of 20 miles and in places as much as 100 miles to the west with Central Powers’ losses of 200,000 casualties and 400,000 taken prisoner. Yet, the price for the success of the south-western front was high: in addition to 600,000 battle casualties, widespread desertion, punishable by firing squad if caught, had cost Brusilov a further 60,000 men. It is generally accepted that total Russian losses – dead, wounded and taken prisoner – were somewhere between 7.5 million and 11 million men, with 3 million of these happening in 1916. Nobody, apparently, had any thought at the time that this was the tip of an iceberg that was going to sink the Russian ship of state.
NOTES
1. Lieutenant Alphons Bernhard, quoted in Dowling, p. 74.
2. Farmborough, p. 193.
3. Dowling, p. 87.
4. Anonymous soldier, quoted in Dowling, p. 77.
5. Dowling, p. 77 (abridged).
6. Brusilov Vospominaniya (abridged).
7. Dowling, p. 97 (abridged).
8. Farmborough, pp. 204–5, 211–12 (edited).
9. Brusilov Vospominaniya.
10. Stone, pp. 211–12.