The night was silent and pitch-black, but Austro-Hungarian sentinels were still watchful.
The Russians lay no more than 100 meters ahead, and their enemies knew they were up to something.
Skirmishes had been scarce, but there had been some unusual movement of hostile
forces for the past few days. Although bored, the soldiers kept their machine
guns and rifles aimed at the opposite trenches. It was then that they heard the echoes of more
than one hundred hostile artillery pieces and realized the inevitable was about to happen.
Another attack. But this one was unlike any other,
giving way to one of the most lethal offensives in history, and the largest of World War 1,
with numbers involved in the long behemoth of a battle rising to the millions…
Russia Falls Back The first Chantilly Conference
of July of 1915 stipulated that only concerted, coordinated action would lead the Allied forces
to victory against the Central Powers. During the second Chantilly Conference
held during the early days of December of 1915, the French, British, Italian,
and Russian representatives agreed once again that only coordinated simultaneous attacks
on the Western Front would crush the German, Ottoman, Bulgarian, and Austro-Hungarian armies.
Still, weather problems, logistics, and hostile enemy offensives prevented this from happening.
As the infamous Battle of Verdun raged on, taking the lives of thousands of men every single day,
French General Joseph Joffre urged Tsar Nicholas II and his generals to launch an offensive
in the East to relieve him of German pressure. He hoped the Germans would be forced to transfer
some divisions from Verdun to the Eastern Front. The Tsar agreed, and in March of 1916, the Russian
Army began the Lake Naroch Offensive in Vilnius, Lithuania, to push back the Prussian Army.
Unfortunately, the offensive failed. The Teutons held their ground, and their machine guns and
artillery decimated the attacking forces, inflicting heavy casualties on the Russians.
Over 100,000 Russians from the Second Army lost their lives at the cost of
20,000 Germans. Still, the Allied commanders insisted on launching another series of
coordinated offensives in May of 1916. The Russian Army losses at Tannenberg,
the Masurian Lakes, and the recent offensive soon began taking their toll on the fighting
spirit of the men and their officers. Although the Russian Army was now equipped
with more machine guns, artillery pieces, and better-trained soldiers,
some Russian generals were reluctant to go on the offensive as they were afraid of being
pushed farther back by the Prussian Army. Still, during an April 1916 war council
with the Stavka, or Russian High Command, General Aleksei Brusilov did the unthinkable: he proposed
a massive offensive against the Austro-Hungarians stationed at Galicia on a scale never seen before.
General Aleksey Brusilov Brusilov’s plan was genuinely revolutionary.
If approved, it would involve a full-scale offensive with tens of thousands of men,
even a million. Still, other Stavka generals did not see Brusilov’s plan as something that would
help the Russian Army achieve a decisive victory. Brusilov was born in the Russian aristocracy and
trained as a soldier from a very young age, and he was an excellent cavalry officer.
Some top officials distrusted Brusilov because of his cavalry background,
even after his victories against the Austro-Hungarians in mid-1914 and 1915.
However, to his distractors' dismay, Brusilov knew his enemy well enough to be promoted to General
Adjutant by Tsar Nicholas II when he visited his 8th Army at the front and was given command of
the Southwest Front in March of 1916, allowing the seasoned general to operate freely in the region.
Brusilov cunningly tested his enemy's defenses and weaknesses. He knew that the Russian Army
had failed to achieve successful breakthroughs in the past few months, not because of a lack of
courage from the Russian soldiers but because the attacks concentrated in smaller sectors.
This strategy allowed the Central Powers to strengthen their garrisons in the sector, making
it even harder for the Russians to go beyond the first lines of defense. The limited attacks
resulted in an escalating number of casualties at the cost of minimal territorial gains.
Brusilov’s plan, however, would change that, one way or another.
Despite the opposition of other Russian generals, namely Alexei Evert from the Western Army Group,
the Tsar decided to hear Brusilov’s proposal. His objectives were simple. First, regain the
territory lost to the Central Powers in 1915. Second, take pressure off France,
Britain, and Italy, fighting the enemy on the Western and Isonzo Fronts.
But Brusilov’s third objective was the most ambitious: to deal such a tremendous blow to
the Austro-Hungarian Empire that it would not be able to conduct another offensive.
And Brusilov was ready.
Brusilov’s Breakthrough
While the British prepared to launch an offensive near the Somme River,
the 63-year-old Brusilov was hard at work nailing the last details of his ambitious operation.
It was May of 1916, and the French urgently needed a renewed offensive at the Eastern Front.
Brusilov had assembled four armies comprising 40 infantry divisions and 15 cavalry divisions.
Based on intelligence gathered by the Russian High Command, the Austro-Hungarians held 39
infantry and ten cavalry divisions in Galicia, so the odds were even.
The task of the Russian divisions was to capture the cities of Kovel, Lviv, and Lutsk.
Brusilov had asked for additional supporting offensives at the Northern
and Western fronts to deceive the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians, but his request was denied.
His offensive was already draining the Russian Army of more than enough
manpower and resources, so he had to settle for what he had at his disposal.
The launch of the offensive was set for June 4, and the rest of the Russian Army would
attack the enemy frontlines ten days later. Brusilov knew that the Austro-Hungarians
had formed a row of three defensive lines and that once the attack began,
it was a matter of days before Prussian soldiers arrived to reinforce the sectors.
Soon, Brusilov’s armies began deception efforts to confound the enemy before the attack.
Some of them were false orders, radio traffic, dummy artillery, and false troop movements.
To increase the sheer force of the attack, Brusilov also ordered his troops to dig
trenches that, in some cases, were just 100 meters away from the enemy lines. Additionally,
tunnels were dug just below the Russian lines to house thousands of soldiers
and increase the scale of the attack during the first hours of the offensive.
On the night of June 3, Brusilov instructed his officers that the attack would begin
with heavy artillery fire that would open breaches in the Austro-Hungarian defenses.
Finally, at 1:00am on June 4, 1916, a devastating artillery barrage of 76-,
120-, and 155-millimeter guns began to pound the Austrian defenses. It was time to fight.
Relentless Assault
Over one million Russian soldiers jumped out of their trenches and began advancing straight into
enemy territory as the artillery from machine gun nests and infantry fire covered them.
Tens of thousands of men then began pouring into the breaches created
by the artillery across the entire front. Steel met steel from the Pripet marshes to
the Bukovina region to the southwest, deep into the Carpathian Mountains.
The enemy lines were well defended. Barbed wire, mines, electric fences,
and meticulously drawn trenches made the advance extremely difficult in zones where the artillery
had failed to destroy the hostile defenses. Some Russian units were utterly pinned down
by Austrian machine guns and obliterated by the thousands. Still, the Russian soldiers
kept advancing wave after wave until the enemy ran out of ammunition. They moved
without turning back through the mud, artillery holes, and debris from destroyed fortifications.
The next day, the Russians overran the first line of defense. Hand-to-hand
combat and bayonet attacks got rid of the scattered Austro-Hungarian resistance.
At Lutsk, more than 190,000 Austro-Hungarian forces led by Archduke Joseph Ferdinand clashed
with some 150,000 Russians. Coupled with the artillery barrages, the Russians triumphed and
took over 25,000 prisoners in a single day. By June 13, the Russian rampage was still
going strong and had resulted in more than 100,000 Austro-Hungarian casualties and 200,000 prisoners.
In addition, the Russian armies had captured more than 400 artillery pieces, 650 machine guns,
and hundreds of tons of ammunition and food. Archduke Joseph Ferdinand had run out of
ammunition, men, and initiative, forcing him to seek the aid of Prussian General Alexander
Adolf August Karl von Linsingen, who was stationed at the Bug River.
Close to the frontlines, General Brusilov was grinning: his battle plan was working.
Austro-Hungary Collapses The massive losses of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire during the first weeks of the invasion forced Commander Conrad
von Hötzendorf to discard an offensive he was planning against Italy in the Trentino region.
He had no option but to divert weapons and entire divisions back to the East to stabilize the front.
The situation was so grim for the Austro-Hungarians that von Hötzendorf urgently
requested more German troops from the Second Chief of the German General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn.
The petition took Falkenhayn by surprise. His forces at Verdun had the French with
their backs against the wall. It was a matter of time before they surrendered.
Unfortunately for Falkenhayn, the four German divisions he transferred to the East would cost
him the victory and the French would take this opportunity to counterattack and keep fighting.
This decision would cost the German general his removal from the General
Staff after the failure of Verdun in August of 1916.
Meanwhile, the fighting in the Southern sector was getting more challenging for the Russian
forces. The initial momentum had waned down. The Russian infantry had advanced so much into enemy
territory that it had broken contact with its supply network, which led to a temporal halt.
Still, the soldiers of the Tsar had captured Czernowitz, Kolomea, several areas across the
Siret River, and the Lutsk salient. Their plan had succeeded, but it had come at a high cost.
Russian casualties had increased to around 285,000
men, and they were growing by the thousands as the army kept pushing forward every day.
For almost a week, the Russians, Germans, and Austro-Hungarians fought
desperately to gain control of the Lutsk salient, but it only led to more losses.
A Severe Loss
On July 2, Brusilov ordered the second wave of attacks across the entire front. General Alexei
Evert pushed forward, but German and Austrian lines held up and inflicted more than 80,000
casualties at the cost of fewer than 16,000 men. However, Brusilov managed to even the odds
by pushing the enemy back more than 90 kilometers to the north.
Realizing that he could still win more territory, Brusilov’s units were reinforced with more than
690,000 men to swiftly destroy the opposition of some 420,000 German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers.
By late July, the situation was so desperate for the Central Powers that
Prussian Generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff had to assume command of the Austrian front.
Still, there was nothing else the two German generals could do except reinforce the new
lines drawn from the attacks. On July 24, the Russians attacked Kovel and could only capture it
after more than 12 days of consecutive fighting. This marked the end of Brusilov’s offensive. The
general had achieved all of his objectives, but the cost was so high that it paved the
way for Russia's withdrawal from the Eastern Front one year later.
More than 440,000 Russian soldiers were lost, and more than 450,000 were
wounded. The Central Powers had similar numbers. As for Austro-Hungary, it was almost knocked out
of the war and was forced to rely on the support and leadership of Germany to keep fighting.
Still, the brutal war would rage on for another two years…
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