For months, the Germans had been grinding up the Russians in the northeast, taking towns
and fortresses and hundreds of thousands of prisoners, but the Russians have new tactics
to stop the Germans, and this week, Russia finally stems the tide.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week 300,000 Bulgarians invaded Serbia from the east as the simultaneous Austro-German
invasion from the north continued. The Italians began a third battle at the Isonzo River,
the Germans used phosgene gas in Champagne, and far to the north German forces were threatening Riga.
We haven’t looked much at the Northeastern Front the past few weeks, so let’s go there first today.
After the German army had taken Vilna in September they had repeatedly tried to advance on Riga,
but had not been able to, but perhaps more important than Riga was Dvinsk. Actually,
not even perhaps, the huge strategic importance of Dvinsk was well understood by both German
Field Marshal von Hindenburg and Russian General Russki. If the Russian line was broken there
with sufficient width, it would lay open the way to Petrograd, Smolensk, and Moscow. The
Germans had been banging their heads against Dvinsk for weeks, but even though their war
machine was mighty, Russki had been reinforced from Petrograd and the Russian interior and
the Russian High Command had sent him all available guns and munitions, for Dvinsk could
not fall. Now, the Dvina River and the local lakes and marshes provide excellent natural
defenses, but Russki had his men do something really novel here that stopped the Germans:
his men dug crescent shaped trenches with the points facing the enemy. In order to find
a place big enough for a strong attack, the Germans had to frontally attack the main part
of the trench, but when they did so, Russian machine guns at the crescent tips just mowed
them down. Also, the trenches were very narrow and dug very very deep, so the fearsome German
artillery was finally stymied.
Now, you might be thinking, the Germans aren’t stupid, why would they continue to frontally
assault the Russian crescent trenches? Well, they didn’t know they were doing that. The
Russians had advance trenches connected to the crescent that were manned with relatively
small forces, whose job it was to offer just enough resistance to draw in a good sized
force of Germans. Then they would retreat to the crescent, the Germans would follow
and be slaughtered, and just as this happened the Russian artillery would strike behind
the German forces to prevent any reinforcements from coming. It was brilliant, and Hindenburg
had become convinced by this time that he would not take Dvinsk before the Russian winter
came, so he had been peeling off his troops toward Riga and launched a triple pronged
attack there from the south, west, and southwest. This was repulsed by Russian machine guns
and the big guns of the Russian navy in the Gulf of Riga. The Germans were finally being
forced to withdraw, and the Great Bear was, for the time being, safe.
But one country that was anything but safe at the moment was Serbia, where the triple
invasion by Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary, and Germany continued.
By October 24th, the Bulgarian army advancing in Serbia into Macedonia had driven a wedge
between the French and Serbian armies. Hey, here’s a quote I found in the old book “The
Story of the Great War” about the fighting between Serbs and Bulgarians near Pirot:
“Here artillery played not so important a part. Both Bulgars and Serbs, primitive,
rugged fighters, threw military science to the wind and plunged into battle face to face
and breast to breast... in some struggles the men lost their guns, they picked up the
boulders that lay about them thickly and hurled them at their enemies or they gripped each
other with their hands and fought as animals fight. Quarter was neither asked nor given.
Witnesses state that in neither of the two Balkan wars was there such ferocious fighting,
such awful slaughter, as during the encounters between the Serbians and Bulgarians along
this section of the frontier... whole companies and even battalions were hemmed in against
the rock walls and then exterminated to the last man.
But finally numbers began to show the advantage, and the Serbians were obliged to retire from
ridge to ridge. Village after village was taken and burned.”
Serbia was being invaded by something like 700,000 men, and the situation was dire.
And while the situation further south at Gallipoli was perhaps not as dire as that of Serbia,
it remained grim.
Charles Monro was the new British commander at Gallipoli, where up to 300 sick soldiers
were being evacuated daily. Ammunition was so low that artillery was allowed two rounds
per gun per day. On the 28th, Munro got a telegram from Lord Kitchener asking to know
as soon as possible if Munro thought they should stay there or leave. He asked each
of his commanders if they were up for a new offensive, and they all said the men were
not capable of more than 24 hours sustained battle. So on October 31st, Monro wrote back
to Kitchener and recommended withdrawal, but that didn’t happen.
By this time at Gallipoli, around half of the 100,000 or so troops were unfit for duty
because of illness, and you really couldn’t ignore the approach of winter. They were going
to need huge storage depots in case of a long spell of bad weather, piers would have to
be re-built to withstand winter storms, winter uniforms issued, and proper dugouts or somewhere
for the troops to live.
The former commander there, General Sir Ian Hamilton, who had been wrong so many times
about so many things, would never again hold active command. Thing is, when you think about
it, Hamilton’s tasks at Gallipoli were pretty nearly impossible from the get-go, considering
the terrain, the opposition, the restricted amount of both troops and artillery he had,
but what was a likely failure had been really turned into disaster by Hamilton. His blind
optimism, his ridiculously complicated plans, his refusal to report the seriousness of the
situation there to Kitchener was gasoline on the fire. Even so, had he been a brilliant
general he would likely have made only minor tactical gains.
Monro was a different kind of man. A practical soldier who had served on the army staff in
the Boer War, had then been the Commandant of the school of Musketry at Hythe- seriously,
musketry- and made major general in 1911. In 1914 and 1915 he had served first as a
divisional commander on the western front, then promoted to Corps commander, and finally
to general of the newly formed third army. At Gallipoli, he was very aware that part
of Hamilton’s failure was because of his disinclination to say anything unpleasant
to Kitchener and he resolved to be blunt. But still the men remained. If it was a war
of attrition, then it was mostly attrition by illness at this point, since the fighting
was pretty much over.
A real war of attrition was going on, though, over on the Western Front.
The French offensive in Champagne was now over a month old, and the French casualties
were tremendous both at Champagne and at Artois, at this point over 150,000 men. French General
Joseph Joffre had actually abandoned the idea of a breakthrough in early October and intentionally
pursued a war of attrition since the Germans were outnumbered two to one, but their defenses
were formidable. The death toll mounted day by day.
A side note, on October 27th, Britain’s King George visited the French armies there.
The following day he was thrown from his horse and injured fairly seriously.
And another side note, this one from the Italian front, where the Third Battle of the Isonzo
River was in full swing.
On the Isonzo front there was an epidemic of cholera, which forced the Italian commanders
to often isolate entire units. Paratyphoid was also epidemic. One soldier who was afflicted
was Private Benito Mussolini, the socialist editor and future leader of Italy. He wrote
in his diary, “Rain and Lice, these are the two enemies of the Italian soldier. The
cannon comes after.” Now, his trenches were on Mount Nero, 6,000 feet above sea level,
and he also pointed out in his diary that his army “doesn’t take fortresses by force,
they must take the whole mountains.” This was a pretty good observation. The casualties
were piling up as aside from the main attack on Görz (Gorizia), there were Italian offensives
spread out along the whole line, which diluted and blunted the effect of the attack. The
Austrians held the high ground.
And the week ends, with ongoing French and Italian efforts producing thousands of fresh
corpses, the Serbs and Bulgarians fighting like demons, and the Russians brilliantly
stopping the Germans.
I do wonder what would’ve happened if the Germans had broken through at Dvinsk; could
they have reached Petrograd before the winter? This is a good time to look at all the war
zones, because last year we saw the wasteful death, disease, and misery that came from
being unprepared for winter campaigns on all European fronts; whole armies obliterated-
hundreds of thousands of men freezing or starving to death in the ice and snow. Let’s hope
at least some of the leaders have learned from the past, for this is the plain truth:
winter is coming.
And we all remember how little Hötzendorf sent his army through the Carpathian mountains
in Winter and on cardboard soles where they would be eaten by wolves. If you want to find
out why he did that, check out our episode right here.
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