The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (23 page)

The Central Powers’ May offensive attained much greater results than Ludendorff’s and Conrad’s enterprises in February, although the forces allotted were not greatly different. It was partly a matter of weather: by 2nd May, when Mackensen’s attack began, the roads were everywhere passable, which had not been the case in February. It was partly a matter of Russian weakness in matériel, though this—certainly for the initial break-through—was exaggerated. The factor that lent Falkenhayn’s May offensive such dimensions of success was above all strategic. The Russian III Army, defending the front south of Cracow and in the western Carpathians, was strategically isolated and lacked reserves, because of the quarrelling seemingly endemic to
Stavka
and the two front commands.

This isolation ought not to have happened, since the army was in the central part of the Russian front and theoretically could call on help from armies to north and south. In Ludendorff’s February offensive, X Army had been isolated, to some extent, in terms of ground: other troops were some way off. On the other hand, the German advance against X Army was always weakened because its flank was extended, with in particular the Russian XII Army in position to strike that flank. In May, the Russian III Army did not have these advantages.
Stavka
had first decided on an East Prussian offensive, in the first three months of the year. Then it had gone for a Carpathian offensive, in April, and proposed, now, to carry it into May. A new Army, called IX, was to be assembled in the Bukovina, in the end with six army corps, withdrawn mainly from the central theatre. XI Army went from the blockade of Pszemyśl into the Carpathians, joining VIII. III Army itself had been obliged to take over a substantial part of the Carpathian front, and the gaze of its commander, Radko-Dmitriev, was fixed there. This part of his long front contained five of the seven corps staffs, and all but five and a half of the eighteen and a half infantry divisions he commanded. The need to build up a substantial force for the renewed Carpathian offensive also meant that there were few disposable reserves for III Army’s western front. This, in
the first instance, was a consequence of
Stavka’s
decision to pursue a Carpathian offensive. More profoundly, it was a consequence of the abdication of
Stavka’s
responsibilities between two front commanders, north-western and south-western. The north-western front was now relatively inactive. Yet it had fifty-seven and a half infantry divisions, soon to be fifty-nine and a half, against the south-western front’s forty-one.
Stavka
did ask Alexeyev to part with some of these, and met obstruction after obstruction: the front was too long; it lacked 300,000 men; the Germans were going to attack; the railways were too occupied with current business; there should be an offensive, not in the Carpathians, but in the central theatre. A second-line division and 3. Caucasus Corps were wrenched from Alexeyev’s jealous clutch, but even then with great delays, as transport-officers of the north-western front put these troop-movements low in their list of priorities. Ivanov’s front, for the Carpathian offensive, had to help itself, and the result was a strategic isolation of the western part of III Army—the two corps south-east of Cracow, holding the lines of the rivers Dunajec and Biala near Gorlice. It was here that the Germans concentrated their forces. At the point of break-through, they had ten divisions of their XI Army ready, with eight Austro-Hungarian ones in IV Army to the north, against five and a half Russian ones, at that second-line troops of poor quality. On the Central Powers’ side, there were 120,000 soldiers (in XI Army alone) with 370 light, 144 medium or heavy guns and 96
Minenwerfer
to 60,000, with 141 light guns and four heavy ones, which blew up when men attempted to fire them, and of course no
Minenwerfer
.
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It was later said that German material superiority had been so crushing that even the most stoutly-led army could not have withstood it; that the only way for the Russian army to make its weight tell was for it to get some of the shell and artillery that the western Powers had begun to manufacture in such quantities. This was a refrain heard again and again from Russian representatives, and, increasingly, from the ‘easterners’ in British political circles. It was of course true that, in this period of the war, the Russian army faced a munitions-crisis. On the other hand, there was a great deal that simple strategy and tactics could do to make up for material shortages, and these possibilities were, on the whole, ignored by senior Russian commanders. In the instance of the Germans’ May offensive, for one, it was strategy and not material weakness that had gone wrong on the Russian side. The Russian III Army, as a whole, had in fact a respectable quantity of artillery and shell:

Russian III Army: 219,000 men; 18½ infantry divisions; 5½ cavalry divisions; 675 light and medium guns; 4 heavy guns.

German XI Army: 126,000 men; 10 infantry divisions; no cavalry divisions; 475 light guns; 159 medium and heavy guns.

Austro-Hungarian IV Army: 90,000 men; 8 infantry divisions; I cavalry division; 103 light guns; 150 medium and heavy guns.

Including part of the Austro-Hungarian III Army (which faced the left wing of the Russian III), the Central Powers had 733 light and light-medium, 175 larger-medium and 24 heavy guns to the Russians’ 675 and 4.
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If the Russian III Army had had its guns in the right place, there would have been much less difficulty.

Superiority in artillery certainly did exist on the Central Powers’ side. But the superiority—both here and in the later, similar, campaign on the Narev—was much less than the superiority which the western Powers enjoyed over the Germans in France, a superiority that, in the offensives of 1915–17, was turned to remarkably little account. In the Allied offensive of May 1915, the attackers’ superiority was considerably greater than the Central Powers’ superiority in their May offensive against Russia: 664 guns of up to 149 mm. calibre on the German side, to 1,554 on the Allied, and respectively 119 and 203 in larger calibres (i.e. larger medium and heavy). In 1916 and 1917, the attackers’ superiority in artillery was sometimes vast. At Verdun, the Germans had 488 light field guns to the French 242; 254 light-medium to 57; 939 larger-medium to sixty-nine; 170 heavy to ten, and the proportions are still more in the Germans’ favour when age and type of gun (trajectory) are considered. On the Somme, the British IV and French IV Armies had 1,655 light guns to the German II Army’s 454; 510 light-medium to 206; 423 larger-medium to 166; 393 heavy to eighteen; and when it came to Haig’s Flanders offensive of July 1917, he had 2,112 light to 612, 1,295 heavy to 536 and 128 very heavy guns to fourteen. Despite these enormous superiorities, the western Powers’ offensives in France and Flanders made much less progress than did German offensives in the east in 1915, based on incomparably smaller superiority in artillery, which strongly suggests that there was a great deal more to the Russian army’s poor performance in that year, and overall, than simple inferiority of matériel.
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Shell provided a rather similar story. It was undoubtedly true that the Russian army lacked munitions in this period of the war; but it was not the case that lack of shell led to loss of defensive battles, provided they were properly-waged. As a matter of fact, the shell-reserve of III Army in the battle of western Galicia in May was far from trivial. According to Tarachkov, director of the Army’s artillery, the various corps had an average of 400 rounds per gun in their depots, front and rear, and if the army s own reserve is included, 500. Langlois, a French observer,
asserted that III Army was rather better-off for shell than other armies, since it had been inactive for much of the time, and he cited this an instance of mismanagement’s complicating shell-shortage. Rerberg, who was chief of staff in10. Corps—one of those attacked at Gorlice—asserted that ‘not once, in my nine months’ service as chief of staff, was there a shortage of shell.
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But of course the delivery of this shell was another matter. Everyone in the rear suspected that, if it were delivered to the front, it would be wasted. Corps artillery chiefs held shell back from batteries, army artillery chiefs from corps, and the front artillery managers from the armies. Huge quantities were stock-piled in the fortresses, and then frequently concealed from inspection by commanders worried that they might have to give it up. Thus, although the quantities of shell were probably sufficient for a well-managed defensive operation, deliveries to the front were so irregular as to compromise the best tactician’s plans.

In any case, even a sizeable German local superiority in this war, need not have produced the wholesale collapse of the Russian army that followed from the May offensive. A break-through was, of course, always possible provided that the local superiority were great enough. In this early period of the war, trenches were not usually very complex or deep, and defence-tactics were not subtle. Assembly of sufficient weight could usually procure a break-through, in the sense that nothing living would be left on a given stretch of enemy line. One reason why the western generals continued with their attempts at break-through was that success always seemed to dance before their eyes: one more effort, and victory would be there. The British did, technically, break through in May 1915; the French did break through on 25th September, in Champagne, when they took many thousand prisoners and ninety guns; again, the British did break through on 13th–14th July, in the Battle of the Somme, near Thiepval, when their cavalry made a rare appearance on the field. The difficulty came, not with the initial break-through—provided preparations had been good—but with exploitation of it. The defenders’ reserves would arrive by rail and road; the attackers would be moving up through mud, pitted with shell-holes, and their every movement could be painful. Hence, the defender would have time to construct a new line, and the process would have to begin again. When the British broke through in Artois, their reserves were far from this new German line; and when the French broke through in Champagne, they lost 100,000 men in ‘grignotage’ against it. The defenders reserves were the key to the problem of break-through.

For a variety of reasons, the Russian army in summer 1915 was unable to handle reserves with the same kind of flexibility as the Germans in the
west. It was partly a simple problem of numbers: there were not enough troops both for the front and for reserves. Indeed, resistance to break-through and resistance to exploitation of it demanded almost contradictory solutions, or so it seemed. The break-through could only be prevented if there were a ‘thick front line’, i.e. sufficient fire-power in the first position to defeat enemy penetration. But if the front lines were thickly-held, there would be little to spare for reserves. In eastern conditions, a break-through was generally more baneful in its consequences than in the west. Since there were fewer railways, and particularly fewer roads, and since weather-conditions often created mud, it was difficult for defenders to retreat with any speed. If their line were broken through, then troops to right and left of the break-through area could be out-flanked and surrounded before they could withdraw—hence the large number of prisoners that distinguished this front. The only way of resisting seemed to be the ‘thick front-line’ principle, to which the Russian army, and the other two, adhered for most of the war. Consequently, the proportion of troops used by the Russian army as reserves was much smaller than in the German or French case. To create reserves, it was necessary to withdraw troops from the front-line of a passive theatre, with all the complications of rivalry between the front-commands that this involved.

Furthermore, the functioning of railways on the Russian side was much less efficient than on the German, so that even when reserves did slip through the jealous clutch of a front-command, they could not be shifted rapidly. The assembly of IX Army in the Bukovina, in May 1915, appears to have taken a month, as had the assembly of XII Army on the borders of East Prussia in February. Even in 1916, transfer of a single corps of two divisions took twenty-three days or, if complete priority were given, a fortnight. This had little to do with the actual speed of trains—even slow trains could cover the whole length of the front from Vilna to Cherson in three or four days, if the journey were not interrupted.
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It occurred because of bottle-necks in rolling-stock: not enough could be freed at one time for the movement of a division in four days. The contrast with German handling of reserves were plain, for all to see. When the Germans shifted their IX Army early in November from just north of Cracow to their jump-off points around Toruń for their Lódz offensive, they sent four army corps in five days, with 800 troop-trains, and had performed much the same feat when they set up IX Army late in September. In the last ten days of April, using the relatively poor lines south of Cracow, they sent eight infantry divisions to help the Austrians, with sixty trains daily; and similarly took only four days to send three divisions from Ludendorff’s front in East Prussia to southern Hungary—174 trains, at
forty-four per day. More significantly, when the Germans were actually in occupation of the railway-lines used by the Russian army in 1914–15, their exploitation of them was much more efficient, even though problems of wartime devastation were complicated by those of the different Russian gauge. In the first week of July 1916, to counter the Russian break-through on the Styr, they sent 494 troop-trains, with ten divisions, and ninety-eight artillery trains on lines to Kowel, Cholm and Vladimir-Volynski that in Russian days were supposed to be painfully undeveloped.
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