The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (43 page)

The essential difficulty was that attackers were not sufficiently mobile. The internal combustion engine could not be used for front-line purposes. Certainly, by 1917, tanks were in use on the western front. But, unless the enemy were surprised, and to some degree also demoralised, they were not effective enough. They moved too slowly—five miles per hour—and were vulnerable, at that slow pace, to well-handled field artillery. They tended to break down, or to stick in mud (it is notable that, in eastern European conditions, cavalry could be more effective than tanks, as was shown in the Russian civil war, and to some extent also in the Russo-Polish war of 1920); in the Nivelle offensive of spring 1917, half of the tank crews were grilled alive, such that Ludendorff wrote off tanks as a fancy civilians’ scheme of no value. In other words, there seemed no alternative to the horse—hence the clutter of cavalry squadrons that waited in attacking armies’ rear, complicating supply to an intolerable extent, merely as insurance against the event of break-through. But the horse was too vulnerable except against armies that had been so badly demoralised that they surrendered as soon as a Cossack
sotnya
appeared to whom surrender might be made.

In the circumstances, there seemed no solution at all except ‘attrition’—to attack the enemy where he could be hit hardest, where he would be obliged to fight, i.e. his strongest point—and then make him lose many thousands of men by heavy bombardment. This was the method chosen by Falkenhayn in summer, 1915, and executed particularly by Mackensen. A great phalanx would be assembled in the central part of the front, with thousands of shells for up to a thousand guns—Gorlice; Radymno; Krasnostaw; Przasnysz. The validity of this method had been impressed on Russian commanders in the most direct possible way, and most of them now could only think of producing some imitation of the German phalanx-system. Shcherbachev had tried it on the Strypa, and Pleshkov had tried it at Postawy. Now Evert had much the same in mind for the summer offensive. It was certainly true that these methods more or less announced in advance that attack was coming, and gave the enemy time to move up reserves, if he had any (as the Russians believed, in 1915, that they had not, at least none with sufficient mobility). Consequently, the break-through operation would have to be attempted again, as Mackensen had seen.

In December and March, the Russians had failed with these methods. Of
these failures, various interpretations were possible. On the south-western front, the view was taken, by Brusilov though not by some of his subordinates, that the break-through operation had failed precisely because strength had been too narrowly concentrated. Pflug, commanding 2. Corps on Shcherbachev’s front, had attacked on a single kilometre of front; Pleshkov in March had really attacked only on a front of two kilometres, out of twenty. The theory, here, had been that a great weight of concentrated shelling would at least remove anything living from the small space involved—which was usually true enough—and that the Russian army did not have shell for more than two or three kilometres of front to be the object of such concentrated fire. It needed 400 heavy shells to tear a gap of fifty yards on three-strand barbed-wire, or 25,000 light shells; and when Austro-German wire was stepped up to nineteen or twenty strands, as came to be the case late in 1915, with not one but three different belts, the quantity of shell became literally incalculable, the more so as heavy artillery was not particularly accurate. Officers thought that only an extreme concentration of fire could bring results. In December, this had proved to be true: two, three Austro-Hungarian trench-lines would be occupied. But, in a small area like this, the attackers became highly vulnerable to enemy artillery to right and left, since it could rake them from both sides and front, while they were un-protected, and their supply-lines, reserve-lines and the rest were open to bombardment. Yet to deal with this problem—enfilading fire—seemed to demand a contradictory solution—attack on a front sufficiently broad that troops breaking through would not be within range of guns to right and left—in other words, a front of at least thirty kilometres. But a front of this length could not be broken through, since there would not be enough shell—or so the theory ran. Most commanders preferred to believe that the break-through operations had failed for a variety of other causes—not enough shell in particular; reserves not moved into support fast enough; troops lacking in ‘elan’, and so on. Each of these had sufficient validity to be convincing to many experienced observers. But they were far from being the whole truth.

Brusilov and his staff came up with good answers to all of this. It was, first, vital to disrupt the enemy’s reserves—his local reserves and his frontal ones. When the break-through came, the attackers would not therefore have to face the resistance and counter-attack of fresh troops. This could be achieved, first, by surprise—the enemy must be caught off his guard. Preparation must be concealed as far as possible—if it had to be done, it must proceed along the whole length of the front. Then, there must not be one single attack, but several, at more or less the same time, so that the enemy would not know where to expect the main blow. As
regards the problem of breaking-through, the blows must be delivered along a front of not less than thirty kilometres, so as to avoid the problem of enfilading-fire. Reserves must be brought close to the front line, hidden in great, deep dug-outs (
‘platsdarmy’
) with excellent communications to the front line. When troops got through a breach in the wire, they must be immediately followed by reserves. The artillery must co-operate closely with infantry—gunners living in the front trenches, carefully studying the problems, getting to know the infantry officers involved. There was one drawback to this method—that it entailed not assembling huge forces of infantry and cavalry at any point, so as not to draw the enemy’s attention to the point of attack. If a break-through came, it could not be exploited very greatly. Moreover, Brusilov not only failed to make use of cavalry, but seems even to have forbidden more than a division or two to take part in his offensive, at least on the main front, near Lutsk. He lost mobility, though no doubt gained endlessly better supply-arrangements.

The preparation ordered by Brusilov’s staff was thorough beyond anything hitherto seen on the eastern front. The front-trenches were sapped forward, in places to within fifty paces of the enemy lines—at that, on more or less the entire front. Huge dug-outs for reserve-troops were constructed, often with earth ramparts high enough to prevent enemy gunners from seeing what was going on in the Russian rear. Accurate models of the Austrian trenches were made, and troops trained with them; aerial photography came into its own, and the position of each Austrian battery noted—an innovation, since on the other fronts pilots were not given any training in aerial photography at all. The fact, too, that reserve-troops were under the same command for a number of months also helped organisation—another comparative rarity.

Preparation of this intensity was comparatively rare on the Russian front. According to Klembovski, on most of the other front-sectors, communications-trenches were primitive; there were not even notice-boards showing where troops should go. In some areas, foreign observers were astonished to find gaps of three miles between the enemy lines, on occasion even with inhabited villages in no-man’s-land. It took much pressure from Brusilov himself to make sure that subordinates undertook novel work of the type he had in mind; and Brusilov himself appears to have been the best type of commander—striking the fear of God into his subordinates, but never to the point where they became terrified of responsibility. He was himself a tireless worker, but not one like Alexeyev—for whom work became an end in itself. He and his staff paid continual visits to the very front lines, again a considerable rarity, although Brusilov, as the example of 1917 was to show, lacked the common touch. He had
to deal with innumerable objections from his subordinates. Kaledin, commanding VIII Army, showed little stomach for action; Lechitski, of IX Army, complained continually of poor heavy artillery; Shcherbachev, one of the cavalry-General Staff would-be imitators of French methods, also had his own schemes and grumbled at Brusilov’s challenge to French supremacy. Only, perhaps, Sakharov of XI Army had much sympathy with what Brusilov was attempting. For Brusilov to force, not only the three dissenting army commanders, but also the dissenting Alexeyev, to accept his methods shows tactical skills of an unusually high order. By mid-May preparation was complete.
⁵

The Russian plan Was for four separate attacks to be made, by each of the armies on the entire front; and the front of attack was not to be less than thirty kilometres. The plan seemed impossible—what had eluded a single, immensely strong group on one short front was now to be attempted by four much weaker groups on longer fronts. Overall, the Russian superiority was not at all marked. Brusilov reckoned it at 132,000 men. In terms of divisions, it was a superiority of insignificant proportions—forty infantry and fifteen cavalry divisions to thirty eight and a half and eleven, 1,770 light and 168 heavy guns to 1,301 light and 545 medium and heavy. There were over 600,000 Russian soldiers to about 500,000 Austro-Germans. The separate armies certainly lacked decisive superiority of any kind. VIII Army, which had the main task of breaking through towards Lutsk, had fifteen divisions to thirteen, 640 light guns to 375 and 76 heavy guns to 174. On other fronts, the Russian superiority barely existed at all. IX Army had ten infantry and four cavalry divisions to nine and four, 448 light and forty-seven heavy guns to 350 and 150, VII Army with seven infantry and three cavalry divisions was roughly equal to the defenders, while XI Army was actually weaker than them in all ways. Brusilov, seemingly, would merely bombard for a short while and then his troops would walk forward. It is true that, for light shell, there were now no alarms. VIII Army had 2,000 rounds per gun—160,000 light and 40,000 heavy shells surplus to a requirement of 100 rounds per day, and there were also 52,000 Japanese shells. IX Army had a similar surplus of light shell—87,000. Austro-Hungarian guns are reckoned to have had 400 rounds apiece, though in the confusion many of these were not fired. Certainly, such quantities of shell were much less than had been present in March, 1916. The enemy line was also very strong. Alexeyev raised continual alarms, up to the last moment begging Brusilov to attack only on one front,
⁷
at that shortening his front of attack to twenty kilometres. Kaledin seemed near the verge of break-down at times, and Brusilov had again and again to go to Rovno to put heart into him. Lechitski, for IX Army, rose from his sick-bed aghast at what had been done in his name
and protested that he would have to face 100,000 Austro-Hungarians with ‘an extremely insignificant quantity of heavy artillery’. It is curious, and significant, to note that the Austro-Hungarian commander subsequently put down his immense defeat in this area to ‘enemy heavy artillery of undreamed-of effect’
⁸
of which there was ‘a huge superiority’. None the less, attacks were set by Brusilov to begin on 4th June.

The great victory that followed was simply put down by all observers to the low quality of the Austro-Hungarian army. Victories against these troops could not have any lessons for the serious belligerent states, any more than victories over Neapolitan troops in the nineteenth century could. The opinion was widely-held in Germany—beginning, of course, with Falkenhayn. But it was also, most curiously, put about by the Austro-Hungarian official historians; and similarly Berndt, chief of staff in IV Army, reckoned that ‘the main cause’ of defeat was the surprisingly low fighting quality of the troops.
⁹
The Slav soldiers are held to have surrendered at once: an opinion, naturally enough, supported by Slav propagandists. Conrad himself was usually too loyal to blame his own men for letting him down; but he slipped all too easily into such talk when the situation required.

But what was said later does not at all accord with what was said at the time, by the units involved. Neither IV nor VII Army—which faced the greatest defeats—show the slightest record of shell-shortage in June 1916. More surprisingly, there is not the slightest indication in either force of fear for the morale or the fighting qualities of the men—at divisional level, or at corps or army level. There had of course been worries before, in September 1915 particularly. In May 1916, there appears to be not the slightest alarm.
¹⁰
The incidence of desertion was less than normal, and in any case trivial—from 15th to 30th April, for instance, losses came to 439 killed and wounded men, 2,476 sick, thirty-nine missing, for an army of over 100,000 combatants. Yet on one day there had been 129 Russian deserters, which appears to have been the rule. The sick-lists could be an important indication of morale. It is true that the command of IV Army noted, on 22nd April, ‘the surprisingly high sick-lists’ of 10. Corps (Martiny) and 2. Corps (Kaiser)—1,048 in 10. Corps in the first half of April. But these ran down again as the spring drizzles gave way to summer—losses of all types, in this force of 30,000 men, came to 689 in the first half of May, 674 in the second half. Far from being alarmed about its troops, IV Army command recorded in mid-May that ‘reports on the troops’ fighting qualities read relatively favourably’; and an order of the high command itself singled out a largely Czech unit, 25. infantry division, as an example of how commanders could, with the help of priests, ‘ethically influence’ their troops. IV Army was offered more of such
‘appropriate clergymen’, but turned down the offer. If morale was as bad as subsequently made out, then clearly the commanders were not doing their jobs. As things were, sick-lists, soldiers’ letters, discipline in general seem to have offered few signs for alarm—at least, none were reported. It could of course be that alarms were not reported by divisional and regimental officers so as to avoid trouble, discredit. But on the whole it seems unlikely. The truth of the matter seems to be that if such troops were ably commanded, they fought well. If they were not ably commanded, then they collapsed much more than other troops might have done—partly because of the language gap, partly because of the class-gap between officer and man. In the outcome, it was probably easier for Ruthenes to surrender since they knew they might expect favourable treatment at Russian hands. But the heart of the matter was leadership.