The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (46 page)

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 amounts 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

Lechitski’s attack began with a tactical victory near the town of Okna. In a bend of the river Dniester—the ‘Samuszyn-Schlinge’—the Austrians had taken up a highly unfavourable line, over-looked by the Russians. It was held because retreat here would have meant retreat elsewhere; but the sector did not even have a separate divisional command. Lechitski’s troops sapped forward to within thirty paces of the Austrian lines, and
nothing could be done to prevent this. On 4th June bombardment began—200 guns south of the Dniester firing 100,000 shells, in an ably-programmed style. The bombardment was much more effective than before, since light and heavy guns stuck to their tasks the heavy ones maintaining fire on the Austrian rear to prevent reserves from coming in, while the light ones were well-timed—stopping for fifteen minutes as supposed prelude to attack, firing again once the Austrians had come out of their dug-outs. After several such episodes, the defenders did not come out of their dug-outs, and many were captured in them. On 5th June a considerable tactical success was achieved near Okna, where the Austrian salient was taken, with 11,000 prisoners and fourteen guns.

But the dimensions of Lechitski’s victory turned out to be much greater. Pflanzer-Baltin now committed all of his troops to the area south of the Dniester, where two heights buttressed his line. He was led to commit all of his forces by continuing Russian attacks on these heights. The attacks, generally, failed over the next few days. None the less, there was nothing to spare for his front north of the Dniester, and a well-staged attack by Russian forces there on 7th June brought collapse—the Austrian corps retiring in disorder over the Dniester itself. As they retired, they bared the left flank of the defenders to the south, and collapse set in—a collapse that found most of the troops already committed to their front line and almost unable to escape. The tactical victory on Lechitski’s front was therefore as great as on VIII Army’s. But, because Brusilov had seen the importance of disrupting enemy reserves, of confusing the Austrians as to the direction of attack, the victory turned out to be a still greater one. Pflanzer-Baltin ordered retreat on 9th June. But he ordered retreat to the south-west, into the Bukovina, which he imagined Lechitski wished to take. The Austro-Hungarian high command, however, was told by Falkenhayn that retreat must be towards the west, where Pflanzer-Baltin could keep his links with the German
Südarmee
. Retreat therefore had to go first south-west and then west—a confusion of transports that brought the entire movement to a stop. By mid-June VII Army had almost disintegrated, parts of it holding the river Prut to the south, parts of it fleeing west, on the side of
Südarmee
. Lechitski’s troops arrived on the Prut. On 17th June an Austrian bridgehead fell, with 1,500 prisoners, for Russian loss of one man, wounded. Demoralisation was such that the artillery now ran off: a Russian observer noted that ‘although the artillerists knew their business well, they did not now have the courage to do their duty by the infantry. Batteries made off to the rear much earlier and more rapidly than they should have done, and left the infantry to its fate’. There were even cases where Cossack troops seized whole batteries. Now, part of VII Army had gone off to the west, and another part retired
to the southern reaches of the Bukovina. Pflanzer-Baltin himself reckoned that he had lost 100,000 men, talked of his
‘ruinierte Armee’
. That morale alone had not been responsible for this was shown in that only forty per cent of the loss could be ascribed to capture—at that, mainly in the confused conditions of retreat. It was tactical and strategic mishandling that brought about this defeat.

By 12th June two Austro-Hungarian armies had been broken up almost completely. Brusilov’s command reported its captures (and perhaps under-stated them) as:
²⁸

In other words, the Austro-Hungarian army had lost over a third of its men as prisoners in less than a week of action; with other casualties, the losses came to over half of the forces in the east. The blow to Austrian morale was irreparable: from now on, Austrian troops fought with an ineradicable sense of inferiority, and the loss of positions which had been universally thought impregnable led to a deep disbelief in commanders and in fortifications of all kinds. From now on, the Austrian army was useful only in so far as it could be joined with German troops—which happened, increasingly, even to the degree that companies of Austrian and German troops were joined to make mixed battalions. It is probably not an exaggeration to state that the Austrian army survived, now, by grace of the Prussian sergeant-major. Except on the Italian front, the heirs of Radetzky were not much more than stage-props pushed around, often contemptuously, by German managers. Pflanzer-Baltin had Seeckt foist on him as chief of staff;
²⁹
Südarmee
, under its German commander, Bothmer, took over most of the east-Galician sector; the command-area of Linsingen’s Army Group—though theoretically under Conrad’s orders—came to include the Austrian I as well as IV Army; and IV Army itself had most of its units mixed with German ones, under German command—although the Austrian army command, again theoretically, remained in existence. In time, pressures for establishment of a German command of the entire eastern front came up—Falkenhayn proposing first Mackensen, then late in July having to preside over the extension of Hindenburg’s powers to include the bulk of the Austrian front as well as the whole of the,
German one. Austrian independence, late in July, was shown only in the existence of ‘Army Group Archduke Karl’—south-eastern Galicia and the Bukovina—and even this had Seeckt as its chief of staff. Conrad sometimes grumbled that peace would have to be made, that the Germans should abandon their ‘limitless’ plans for conquest in Europe.
³⁰
But it would have been difficult, on the ground, to withdraw the Habsburg army from action, since it was already so much intermingled with German troops; and in any case the junior officers of the Austro-Hungarian army were probably more loyal to the German alliance than they were to the wreckage of the supra-national Habsburg Monarchy. Hitler’s satellites existed before Hitler.

But, even though Austria-Hungary had almost collapsed, Brusilov could not follow up his victory at once. The losses of VIII Army had not been insignificant—35,000 by 8th June, of which two-thirds were wounded—and much of the shell-reserve had been fired off. The rapid advance to Lutsk, and later Dubno, brought the infantry beyond their supply-lines, and when the advance went over the Styr at Lutsk, the problem was still more complicated. It was true that the defence had been shattered; Russian cavalry even reached Vladimir Volynski, headquarters of IV Army. But there was not much cavalry, and as usual it could be held up even by platoons of infantry in passable condition. The infantry could not move fast enough, and so the Austrians were able to retire until no Russians were following them. In later years, Brusilov was much criticised for his failure to have reserves of infantry and cavalry to exploit his break-through—he had only one cavalry division in reserve, that of Mannerheim, later President of Finland. But he did not have reserves, partly because his was meant to be an ‘auxiliary’ attack for which no great reserves were made available, and partly because his very method ruled out assembly of reserves—most of the men took part in the immediate, long-front attacks, instead of waiting behind the lines for someone to break through on a tiny sector, as had happened at Lake Narotch. As far as cavalry was concerned, Brusilov had simply dismounted his divisions and used them as infantry: again from a reasonable judgment that cavalry divisions—for instance Smirnov’s preposterous 233 squadrons of cavalry in March 1916—merely complicated supply to an intolerable degree. In this case, failure to exploit the break-through was almost a direct consequence of breaking through in the first place, and it was unfair to ask more of Brusilov.

Faced with the physical impossibility of going on against the remnant of IV Army, Brusilov turned his attention to the north. Here was the vast weight of Evert’s front, with its three-fold superiority in guns and men. Some way must be found of bringing that superiority into play. Brusilov allowed his forces to halt their advance to the south-west,
against the Austrians, in order to turn to the north-west, in the direction of Kowel—his main aim being to dislodge the defenders of this area, and thus roll up the German line opposite Evert’s front. In later years, he was accused of missing a great opportunity, for going on south-west to destroy the Austrians. But supply-problems cut across this; in any case, Kaledin, commanding VIII Army, was nervous that the Germans would come to attack him as he moved on, baring his flank to the north. In September 1915, VIII Army had re-taken Lutsk, and had then been humiliatingly expelled from it when German forces moved south into VIII Army’s flank. Kaledin seems to have thought much the same would happen now—as a trickle of German troops was reported—and even ordered that positions should be dug just west of the Styr. Brusilov himself was in two minds. He knew that Evert, not he, had the main task in the summer offensive; he acquiesced in Kaledin’s halt, and even confirmed it—telling Kaledin, somewhat later, that he might move towards Kovel but ‘you are on no account to advance towards Vladimir Volynski’—i.e. against the Austrians. Typically enough, Brusilov himself had won a brilliant victory by methods that had been intended almost as a
ballon d’essai
; and now he too relapsed into orthodoxy, fear for his flank ruling out the energetic pursuit that might have been organised once VIII Army had got over its supply-problems.