So far this war things had looked grim for the Russians. They had unwillingly entered
the war in the first place and the colossal defeats at the battles of Tannenberg and Masurian
lakes had convinced the German and Austro-Hungarian armies that Russia’s army was both backward
and incompetent, but beginning this week they would learn that Russia was no pushover at
all and had two enviable assets- men and space.
I’m Indy Neidell. Welcome to the Great War.
Last week we saw Antwerp fall to the Germans, and the Belgians and the British retreated
into Flanders to build their defenses and try to prevent the Germans from pushing to
the sea, while the French held the line further south. In the East, the Austrians were under
siege in their fortress at Przemysl awaiting relief, the Russians further north were marching
to positions to cross the Vistula and attack Germany, and the Germans were now only 20
km from Warsaw.
Here was the general German plan in the east- to strike, with Austrian help, at Warsaw and
Ivangorod and outflank the Russian army there while the Austrians were being relieved from
the siege further south.
The Russians, after weeks of disastrous marching through the mud, had finally reached their
crossing point, built a bridgehead, and began to cross. The Germans reached Warsaw on October
12th, but their attacks were thrown back and there would be no outflanking. See, the Germans
had seen the Russian march and its colossal mismanagement and believed that Russia was
weak around Warsaw, but what they didn’t realize was that the Russians armies were
arriving and entering the battle in sections, and more and more of them were coming. So
we see that before October 15th, the Germans had the upper hand, but after that, not so
much. Soon there was no prospect of German General von Hindenburg getting a decisive
victory in view of the seemingly endless Russian reinforcements, now coming from central Asia
and Siberia.
It’s important to realize that by this point there were actually four fronts in the east-
German-Russian in East Prussia, German-Austrian-Russian on the Vistula, Russia-Austrian on the San
River, and Russian-Austrian in the Carpathians, and the middle two of them were now a concerted
operation
So along the San River, the Austrians had finally managed to break out, relieved by
General Boroevic von Bonja on October 11th. This was timed to coincide with Hindenburg’s
German advances toward Warsaw further north.
Boroevic, eventually a Field Marshall, was a brilliant defensive strategist who later
showed what he could do on the Italian front, but for now he had to deal with his chief
of Staff Conrad von Hotzendorf. section deleted Conrad thought that the combined forces of
the Austrians from within Przemysl and Boroevic’s relief army could beat the Russians, so on
October 14th, he ordered his men to try and cross the San river and engage the enemy.
It was a catastrophe, his men were bombarded not only by the Russians but by their own
side because of miscommunications and there were no pontoons to make bridges, so they
had to use boats to ferry themselves over, and since one of the Austrian commanders thought
a marching band might improve morale, he had one playing on the Austrian shore. Imagine
being one of those poor Austrian soldiers; trying to cross a river in a boat while being
bombarded by both the enemy and your own men, your comrades are dying around you by the
dozen while a marching band on the shore plays “inspiring” music for you. It was truly
a scene from a madhouse.
So now that we’ve imagined being an Austrian soldier, lets imagine that we live in Poland
in October 1914.
The Germans march in, then the Russians, sometimes the Austrian[n][o]s, then the Germans again,
back and forth and up and down- by now the basic situation in the towns of Russian Poland
was total anarchy. At least the German officers had some training in civic leadership which
their Russian counterparts lacked completely. There sprang up a huge black market in this
region for liquor and food, as you may guess, but also weapons, uniforms, anything that
the locals could scavenge from a battlefield, or sadly, get from a soldier in exchange for
food- even winter clothes with winter soon here. Really, the troops were so desperate
for food they were selling their winter boots, knowing that Russian winter was coming in
just a few short weeks.
Another effect of anarchy in Russian Poland was that when the German troops arrived, the
local populations often turned against the Jews, claiming they were secretly sympathetic
to the German cause, and they began a series of atrocities against them. Shops and synagogues
were looted and burned, and Jews were hanged every day. The idea that Jews were sympathetic
to the German cause totally ignored the fact that a quarter of a million Jews were serving
in the Russian army at the time.
And that army was finally beginning to turn itself around, not only because of its enormous
size, but because Russia had a way of approaching battle that none of the other combatants had.
See, Russia had no problem giving up land to the enemy and using space to fight a war
instead of just force. This had always held true- think of Napoleon marching on Russia
100 years ago and the disaster it ended in for him. Russia had thousands upon thousands
of miles of land and if the enemy made some gains, or even took a whole province- so what?
It would simply be re-taken when the enemy stretched itself too thin and became exhausted.
And how does an enemy counter this when the enemy can’t think like that?
None of the other armies had that luxury. It was immoral for the Germans to cede any
of East Prussia to Russia, it was humiliating to the Austrians that Russia now held Austrian
ground and cities, and it was absolutely unthinkable for the Belgians and French to give up an
inch of their land to the Germans in the west, where the war for a decisive victory was now
a war for roads, villages, and hills.
The Race to the sea had been going on for weeks as the Germans tried to outflank the
British, French, and Belgians, and vice versa. The trench lines grew ever longer as neither
side was able to gain an advantage and both sides were forced to dig in.
Battles that would rage for weeks began in places like La Bassee, Armentieres, and Messines
as the line grew further and further north. On the 11th, the Germans began bombarding
Lille, which surrendered on the 13th and would remain in German hands for the next four years.
This part of France and Belgium, called Flanders, was still mostly untouched by the war, and
when on October 14th, some British forces entered the town of Ypres, it seemed like
a nice quiet country town. They promptly began calling it Wipers.
The next day they marched east a few miles and made preparations to make a quick advance
on the Germans as soon as the rest of the British expeditionary Force turned up. No
one realized yet that this quaint little patch of Belgian countryside would soon become the
gravesite for over 200,000 British soldiers during the next four years.
British soldiers were going to a watery grave this week as well, as the German submarine
U-9, already infamous for dispatching three British cruisers in one hour, torpedoed the
Hawke in the north sea- 525 British sailors drowned. Only 21 were saved.
However, as the war in the seas grew and developed, the British gained a lucky advantage. Russia
sent them a German navy signal book it had captured when the German signalman about to
destroy it was killed by an artillery shell. Because of this, British cryptographers in
future had a leg up decoding wireless messages and finding their adversaries at sea.
So there we are at the end of the week, with the British arriving at a nice quiet town
called Ypres at the northern end of the miles and miles of trenches, the Austrians sinking
into despair as their maneuvers once again prove disastrous, the Germans realizing that
Russia was nowhere near as incompetent as they’d thought, and the Russians bringing
more, and more, and ever more men to bear down on the Germans along the Vistula River.
Germany and Austria knew, of course, that Russia had the population advantage, but they’d
gone to war confident that their advantages in tactics and equipment would more than make
up for this. And for the Germans, at least, so far it had. But nobody quite realized the
depth of the Russian reinforcements and as the enemy army’s initial forces were depleted,
that depth, as well as the use of the endless open space, had finally made the Russian army
a real force to be reckoned with, and over the next two months, hundreds of thousands
of men would die on the enormous battlefields of the Eastern Front.
See you next week.
If you’d like to see how trench warfare developed in this war, check out these episodes
about the battles on the banks of the Aisne River, and click subscribe to never miss an
episode. For the next four years.