The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (58 page)

b) G. Korolkov:
Varshavsko-Ivanorodskaya operatsiya
(1928 edition, Moscow);

c) G. Korolkov:
Lodzinskaya operatsiya
(1928 edition, Moscow);

d)
Strategicheski ocherk voyni 1914–1918 gg. na russkom fronte
vols 2 and edited respectively, by Korolkov and A. Neznamov, Moscow 1922–3);

e) Reichsarchiv
Der Weltkrieg
vols. 5 and 6

f) Bundesministerium f. Landesverteidigung:
Oesterreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg
vols. 1 and 2 (1931–2).

⁴
P. Cherkasov:
Shturm Peremyshla
(Moscow 1927) discusses Shcherbachev’s siege. The Grand Duke forbade attempts against the fortress (O. D. 8th September to Ivanov). He was ‘misunderstood’.

⁵
Varshavsko-Ivangorodskaya operatsiya
p. 129f; cf. A. von Schwarz:
Ivangorod v 1914–1915 gg.
(Paris 1969) p.44f.

⁶
Varshavsko-Ivangorodskaya operatsiya
nos. 81–101 cover V Army, nos. 44–63 IV Army and nos. 64–80 IX Arm in this eriod of transfer.

⁷
Stavka’s
attitudes in
Lodzinskaya operatsiya
p. 199ff. (nos. 225f.)

⁸
Captain Neilson. His despatches (in diary form) are quite useful: v. WO. 106 nos. 1119-21 (23rd November 1914).

⁹
N. Novikov:
6. sibirskaya strelk. diviziya v boyakh pod Lodzyu (Moscow 1926)
H. Kraft: ‘Brzeziny’ in
Wehrwiss. Rundschau
1966/11 usefully corrects German legends on the subject.

¹⁰
Lodzinskaya operatsiya
p. 79f. and on II Army p. 149f. covers supply. O.D. 30th November 1914 gives minutes of the Brest meeting of that day.

¹¹
All of this was cast as a great Austro-Hungarian victory, Limanowa. v. J. Roth:
Limanowa
(Innsbruck 1929). The Russian side is cursorily dealt with in
Strategicheski ocherk voyni
, the account of which is however difficult to expand. Some points can be gleaned from A. Rostunov:
General Brusilov
(Moscow 1964), F. P. Rerberg:
Istoricheskiye tayni: 10. korpus
(Alexandria 1925, manuscript in the Golovin Archive, at the Hoover Institution) and the
Soldier’s Notebook
of A. Brusilov (London 1929).

¹²
FO. 371/2448 Russia (War): minute on Buchanan’s despatch of 28th May 1915.

¹³
Oesterreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg
vol. 2 pp. 30–260 adequately covers the strategic problems of early 1915—the original correspondence between Conrad and Falkenhayn is in
Kriegsarchiv
: AOK. Op. B. Fasz. 512, esp. nos. 5999, 6005, 6052 and 6058–9. In
exchange for the offensive, the Austrians gave up some of their rights in conquered Polish territory, particularly minerals. Ludendorff, as the correspondence of Conrad’s liaison officer shows (Fasz. 6182) had doubts as to the Carpathian offensive, but suppressed them, no doubt in order to convince Falkenhayn that his own East Prussian scheme was a necessary complement to Conrad’s.
Südarmee
suffered in other ways than from the snows. It had the highest syphilis-rate in the German army, excepting the garrison in Romania (v. Reichskriegsministerium :
Sanitätsberichte
vol. 3 (Berlin 1934) Tafel47 p. 65.).

¹⁴
Lodzinskaya operatsiya
no. 516 pp. 447–9 gives the text of this report. Russian operations thereafter are ably discussed in: M. D. Bonch-Bruyevitch:
Poterya nami Galitsii
(2 vols. Moscow 1920 and 1923), vol. 1 p. 2of. and 34f. for Danilov’s report, and Kholmsen:
Mirovaya voyna. Nashi operatsii na vostochnoprusskom fronte zimoyu 1915 goda
(Paris 1935). For the Austro-Hungarian sector, Russian sources are not rich, although the work of A. M. Zayonchkovskiki:
Mirovaya voyna: manevrenny period
(Moscow 1929) fills some of the gaps.

¹⁵
Kholmsen p. 51f.

¹⁶
e.g. a Croat regiment that had to spend the night in the snow lost 28 officers and 1,800 men from frostbite (
Kriegsarchiv
B/50, Nachlass Pflanzer-Baltin,
Tagebuch, Mappe
1, entry of 2nd February 1915).

¹⁷
Kriegsarchiv:
Conrad-Archiv B/13 Tagebuch d.Obstlt. Kundmann for the period 5–17th March shows the depressed mood of Conrad, who blamed Falkenhayn and Linsingen. II Army lost 40,000 men from frostbite alone in the first few days of March.

¹⁸
Neilson’s despatch of 23rd March: W. O. 106/1122. Przemyśl would probably have fallen before if the Russians had been able to manoeuvre their artillery. But it took ten days to move heavy artillery from the naval base of Kronstadt to the nearest railway-station alone, and once it reached the mud of Galicia, it was virtually immobile: Barsukov;
Russkaya artilleriya
p. 204.

¹⁹
v. his article in
Voyenni sbornik
(Belgrade) V (1924) pp. 231–60.

²⁰
Kholmsen p. 36. The most authoritative account of the battle on the Russian side is N. Kamenski:
Gibel 20. korpusa
(Moscow 1921). The account in Reichsarchiv:
Der Weltkrieg
vol. 7 should be used with care. Budberg, Sievers’s chief of staff, wrote an interesting justification in
Voyenni sbornik
VI
pp. 148
ff.

²¹
Kemenski p. 155f; cf. Kholmsen, chapter 7.

²²
A. Khmelkov:
Borba za Osowiec
(Moscow 1939) p. 55f; cf. Bunyakovski: ‘Kratky ocherk oborony kreposti Osowiec’ in
Voyenni sbornik
V pp. 289–307.

²³
The best source for this period is Bonch-Bruyevitch;
Poterya
vol. 1, but its bias should be corrected with reference to the O.D. series of orders, and the exchanges over Balkan matters with Russia’s allies: v. ‘Stavka i ministersvo inostrannykh del’ in
Krasny Arkhiv
27 (1928) pp. 3–57, and N. Valentinov:
Snosheniya
I pp. 32, 52–3.

²⁴
Vysochayshe utverzhdenniye osobiye zhurnaly sovieta ministrov
1915 no. 508 (26th June).

²⁵
Kriegsarchiv
: Conrad-Archiv B/13 Kundmann diary for 30th March cf. AOK. Op. B. Faszikel 512 nos. 8483 and 8445/I.

CHAPTER SIX

¹
F. Franek: ‘Probleme der Organisation im ersten Kriegsjahr,
Erganzungsheft
I of the Austro-Hungarian official history (Vienna 1930) and Entwicklung der öst.–ung. Wehrmacht in den ersten zwei Kriegsjahren’,
Ergänzungsheft
5 (1935). Two manuscripts,
prepared for the Carnegie series, but not used, are of some help in this context: Oberst Klose: ‘Deckung des personellen Bedarfs’ and A. Krauss: ‘Kriegsphasen’. Both exist in the manuscript collection of the Vienna
Kriegsarchiv
. A very brave attempt to sort out the confusions of call-up has been made by R. Hecht:
Fragen zur Heeresergänzung
(dissertation, Vienna 1969, of which the
Kriegsarchiv
has a copy).

²
Oberst Pflug:
Bewaffnung und Munition
(manuscript, originally designed for the Carnegie series, in the
Kriegsarchiv
) is the most authoritative work on artillery and munitions. Parts of it were used in G. Gratz and R. Schüller;
Der wirtschafiliche Zusammenbruch Oesterreich-Ungarns
(Vienna 1930) and R. Riedl:
Die Industrie Oesterreichs während des Weltkrieges
. (Vienna 1932). Pflug’s table p. 109 is revealing.

³
R. Lorenz: ‘Aus dem Tagebuch Marterers’ in
Oesterreich und Europe
(Festschrift for H. Hantsch) ed. R. Plaschka (Vienna 1967) p. 471.

⁴
Tisza to Burián, copy to Conrad in
AOK. Op. B.
Fasz. 561 Op. Nr. 19380 30th December 1915. In similar vein, Tisza demanded that, since most of the medals were won by Hungarians, the factories to produce them should be put up in Hungary.

⁵
Klose ms.
Beilage
1.

⁶
Kriegsarchiv: Neue Feldakten: 4 Op. AKdo.
Fasz. 70 Tagebuch 1 p. 14 (9th August).

⁷
Kriegsarchiv: Abt. 3 Kriegsüberwachungsamt
Fasz. 120 No. 8 of 9th October 1915 (‘um ein Liebesverhältnis anzuknüpfen’).

⁸
‘Sämtliche kompromittierte Schüler wurden dem Militärgericht geliefert’: Coudenhove’s report to Stürgkh 21st May 1915, copy to AOK. in
Op.B
. Fasz. 31, Op. Nr.113 52 cf. Fasz. 37 Nr. 13729 of 31st July for further details of the same type. A thorough investigation of the whole matter is C. Führ:
Armeeoberkommando und Natioialitätenfrage
(Vienna 1968).

⁹
The whole question of desertion is of course very complex, and not much clarified by rival claims at the time. Czech propagandists made out that all Czechs were waiting for a chance to get away; Austrian soldiers sometimes made the same claim. The documents of the time are not so clear. Pflanzer-Baltin (
Tagebuch
, Mappe 3–4 of 24th May 1915) quotes 10th infantry division as ‘striking proof’ that Czechs and Romanians could do very well in attack; IV Army command, in answer to enquiry from AOK, thought on 20th October 1914 ‘the morale and condition of the troops is generally very good’.—
Tagebuch
3 (Fasz.70), while Archduke Eugen, on the Italian front, was lavish in praise of the performance of his Slav troops, and was adamant that good leadership could overcome nationality-problems while bad leadership exacerbated them (
AOK. Op.B.
Fasz. 37,1915 No. 13781 of 5th August). This, probably, touched the heart of the matter, for sloppy commanders quite often seem to have blamed disaffection for the consequences of their own blundering. A famous instance of desertion was that of the 28th Infantry Regiment, recruited in Prague. Thorough investigation has revealed that a combination of Austrian sloppiness and Hungarian arrogance had as much to do with this regiment’s well-documented disaffection as initial Czech disloyalty. When they went up to the front, they had had little training, and, as simple Czech townsmen, were singularly ill-suited to mountain-warfare. They were treated, from the beginning, as if they had the plague, being for instance sent to Szeged in Hungary for their training, instead of being left in the Bohemian capital, with its ‘malign influences’. When they went up to the front, after a series of incidents with the Hungarian population in Szeged, and particularly with a Hungarian officer—whose reports are more revealing than he supposed—a great muddle was made of their transport. The train pulled out of Miskolc station, with the officers’ waggon (and the offices) attached, while the men were still eating in the station itself. There was inevitably much hooting as the crestfallen officers
came back. At the front, the soldiers seem simply not to have defended themselves at all, and the regiment was officially disbanded (though re-constituted, after its nucleus had behaved well on the Italian front). The affair was thoroughly investigated by R. Plaschka: ‘Zur Vorgeschichte des Uebergans von Einheiten des Inf.Regt. 28’ in
Oesterreich und Europa
(op. cit. note 3) pp. 455–67. A separate collection of documents concerning this regiment and the 36th infantry regiment exists in the
Kriegsarchiv
, with a substantial selection from Op. Nr. 4329 to Op. Nr. 13016 (1914–15) as the army authorities traced the history of the units.

¹⁰
Conrad’s
Denkschrift
of 3 1st March 1915 in
AOK. Op. B.
Fasz. 551 No. 8577 expounds the view that Italian intervention would mean the end of the Monarchy in six weeks.

¹¹
AOK
.
Verbindungsoffiziere: Oberost
. Fasz. 6182 (unnumbered) of 4.3.15;
Kundmann-Tagebuch
10.3.15; cf. letter to Bolfras,
Kundmann
5.3.15.

¹²
W. Groener:
Lebenserinnerungen
ed. F. Hiller von Gaertringen (Göttingen 1957) p. 226–7;
Straub-Tagebuch
5th–11th April passim. In general, Reichsarchiv:
Der Weltkrieg
vols. 7 and 8 supply an adequate account of the origins of the campaign as well as its course, which can be checked from Austro-Hungarian sources in
AOK.
Op.
B. Fasz
. 551 and 560.