In both size and ferocity, the fighting on the eastern front from 1914–17 outdid even the western front. So why, asks Nick Lloyd, has eastern Europe become the forgotten theatre of the First World War?
It was “incomparably the greatest war in history. In its scale, in its slaughter, in the exertions of the combatants, in its military kaleidoscope, it far surpasses by magnitude and intensity all similar human episodes.”
Winston Churchill wrote these words in the early 1930s, in his six-volume chronicle of what was at the time the most terrible conflict of them all: the First World War. But Churchill didn’t have the trenches of France and Belgium in mind when committing this particular description to print. He was instead referring to the titanic battle for supremacy that unfolded in eastern Europe.
Today, when we think of the First World War, images of blood-soaked battles of the western front almost immediately spring to mind. This terrible deadlock has come to define how historians, and the public more generally in the west, have understood the conflict. Bloody and seemingly inconclusive clashes – at the Somme, Verdun and Passchendaele – have become instrumental to the memory of what George Kennen called “the great seminal catastrophe” of the 20th century.
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But the First World War was always much bigger than the western front. It stretched out into the Middle East, across Africa, on the high seas. It spilled over into the European colonial possessions in east Asia. And it triggered a four-year cataclysm across East Prussia, Poland and Galicia, as the Allies, led by the Russian empire, embarked on a mighty struggle with the Central Powers, dominated by Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Although the outcome of the First World War would ultimately be determined in the west, its origins can only be understood by looking at the power dynamics of eastern Europe and the Balkans.
A blank cheque
When a Serbian nationalist gunman murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, it sparked an international crisis that drew in the great powers. Russia moved to protect Serbia (its chief ally in the region), while Germany offered Austria-Hungary a ‘blank cheque’ to deal with the Serbs once and for all.
It was entirely possible that a conflict between Tsar Nicholas II’s Russian empire and Emperor Franz Joseph’s Habsburg empire might have been contained to Galicia (the Austrian province that bordered Russia) but for the inherent inflexibility of German offensive doctrine. It was this that turned a local war into a global catastrophe. Germany’s war plan, named after its founder, Alfred von Schlieffen, demanded a swift and decisive victory against France – Russia’s main ally – before the pondering Russian masses could mobilise, ensuring that Germany was not faced with a two-front war. The Habsburgs should not worry, Colonel-General Helmuth von Moltke, the German chief of staff, told his counterpart in Vienna: “The fate of Austria will be decided not on the [river] Bug, but on the Seine.”
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Perhaps for this reason, the battles that were fought in eastern Europe are much less well-known than their equivalents in the west. For many years, the only reliable account in English was Norman Stone’s The Eastern Front, which was first published in 1975. Although Stone’s work remains an essential guide, the fighting in the east was an afterthought in many accounts of the war, either too obscure to explain fully or with sources that were too difficult to access or translate. This means that our understanding of the First World War has for too long been strangely lopsided and uneven.
Fortunately, in recent decades a new generation of scholars have begun to analyse the war in the east and bring it in from the “deep freeze” (to quote the historian Sean McMeekin). These new accounts, often based on original archival research, offer fresh insights into the ‘other’ First World War, a dark mirror image of what was happening in France and Flanders, helping us to redress the balance away from the west.
The size of the eastern front was perhaps its most obvious difference with the western front. Spread across 900 miles of front – more than twice the length of the trenches in France and Belgium – it was a hugely demanding theatre of operations, and included areas of dense forest, marshes and swamps, as well as the rugged, snow-bound Carpathians.
It was little wonder that many of those who had fought in France and then deployed to the east, found it to be a strange and bewildering environment, almost primeval in its appearance. “The scene was suffused with three colours,” remembered one veteran of the Carpathians: “The ashen white of the endless fields of snow; the grave black of the endless mountain forests; the blood red of the flames of battle.”
Aura of invincibility
The fighting between Russia and the Central Powers was crucial to the outcome of the war. The German victory at Tannenberg in August 1914, when the outnumbered Eighth Army fought off the Russian First Army, disengaged, and then surrounded the Second Army, was a masterpiece of tactical and operational skill, and did much to give German forces the aura of invincibility that they retained for most of the war. On the contrary, Russia’s experience went from bad to worse, and culminated in the ‘great retreat’ of 1915 that surrendered most of Poland and (what would become) the Baltic States, forcing the tsar to take personal command of Russia’s armies.
The scale of the fighting was almost beyond comprehension. In East Prussia and Galicia, hundreds of thou- sands of soldiers engaged in swirling battles of manoeuvre that “exceeded all previously held expectations of… war”, as one Austro-Hungarian soldier recalled. Between late August and early September 1914, the Austrians lost approximately 250,000 men killed or wounded, and another 100,000 taken prisoner.
Junior officers, who were essential to the cohesion and effectiveness of the army, were killed off in vast numbers, causing Conrad von Hötzendorf, Austrian chief of staff, to bemoan (in December 1914) that the recruits he was now seeing were “far inferior in quality” to the troops he had when they went to war. By the spring of the following year, after the failure to relieve the besieged garrison at Przemyśl (which had cost another 800,000 casualties), the Habsburg army was little more than a rabble, unfit for major combat operations.
The Russian army mobilised in 1914 with a strength of 4.5 million men, the largest army in the world, and although it was never as effective as the British and French had hoped, it performed well against Austria and ensured that at least a third of the German army would be fixed on the eastern front for almost the entire war. But this came at an enormous cost. During the ‘great retreat’, the Russians lost around 1.4 million killed or wounded, with almost a million men being taken prisoner. “No cartridges, no shells. Bloody fighting and difficult marches day after day. No end to weariness, physical as well as moral,” remembered one Russian officer. “Our regiments, although completely exhausted, were beating off one attack after another by bayonet or short range fire.”
Given such astronomical losses, it is a miracle that both the Russian and Aus- tro-Hungarian armies were able to keep fighting after the bloodbaths of 1914 and 1915. This was testament to the fighting spirit and determination of their men, but also the support they received from their allies. Because the Austro-Hungarian army was so dangerously weak in firepower and often suffering from fragile morale, Berlin had no choice but to send troops to prop up her ally. The task of ‘stiffening’ Austrian forces, in a process known as Korsettstangen (‘corset stays’), was not what the German High Command wanted to fulfil, but the Habsburg empire would probably have collapsed by 1916 without such support.
This meant that German commanders were faced with a tortuous dilemma, and the correct balance of forces between east and west became a source of major disagreement within German strategy-making from 1914–17. “Any shift in one direction inevitably leads to a dangerous weakening of strength elsewhere,” Erich von Falkenhayn, chief of staff, wrote in August 1916. While many commanders in the east, including the powerful duo of General Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, advocated a much greater concentration against Russia, Falkenhayn correctly understood this was not possible given the strength of the British and French armies.
Laboratory of war
While the extent of the tactical and technological development on the western front has been widely acknowledged (such as the use of tanks, massed artillery, gas and aircraft), the eastern front has remained largely outside this debate. However, it should be seen as an essential laboratory of war, where new tactics and weapon systems were refined before being used elsewhere (including on the western front). For example, the first use of poison gas (xylyl bromide) occurred at Bolimov in Russian Poland in January 1915, three months before chlorine was used at Ypres in Belgium. Although the Germans would be disappointed by the effects of the gas at Bolimov (it was apparently so cold that the gas froze and was much less effective), it was a powerful indication of the technology that would be unleashed during the war.
Germany also made extensive use of the eastern front to hone its assault tactics. The capture of Riga in September 1917 became a textbook operation, which showcased a range of new tactics aimed at neutralising enemy defences, not destroying them. A gifted German officer, Lieuten- ant-Colonel Bruchmüller, orchestrated the use of gas as a counter-battery weapon (targeted at killing or disabling Russian gun crews). This was combined with a ‘creeping barrage’ that would move with the attack, behind which highly trained squads of ‘stormtroopers’ would infiltrate through the enemy’s defences, bypassing centres of resistance to sow chaos and terror. This was the blueprint for the devastating attack against Italy in October 1917 (the battle of Caporetto) and was then utilised again on the western front during the spring of 1918.
Nor was innovation and tactical development the sole preserve of the German army. The Russian empire may have suffered terrible losses in the opening phase of the war, but it learnt quickly how to conduct operations with remarkable sophistication. For example, the Brusilov Offensive in the summer of 1916 was one of the largest attacks of the war, as impressive as anything seen on the western front. General Aleksei Brusilov, the Southwest Front commander who masterminded the assault, focused on the closest cooperation between attacking infantry and supporting artillery, ensured that his plans were cloaked with an effective deception campaign, and coordinated a series of multiple thrusts that almost broke the Habsburg army.
The effect of the opening bombardment was devastating. “At times it sounded like heavy railroad trains crashing into each other at roaring speed,” wrote one eyewitness. “There was a wild raging, rumbling, crashing and splintering that shook you to your very soul.”
Then the Russians surged forward and quickly swamped the Austrian positions. Within just six days an entire Habsburg army had disintegrated, losing 82,000 casualties out of a total strength of 110,000 men, and bringing the empire to the brink of collapse. Once again, Falkenhayn had to send reserves to the Austrian front, and in return, demanded unified command, with Germany firmly in charge of operations in the east.
The Brusilov Offensive would prove the high point of Russia’s war. By March 1917 – with his armies ground down by mounting defeats – Nicholas II had lost the confidence of his generals and agreed to abdicate. This was perhaps the single most important decision in the history of the eastern front, setting in chain the world-shaking events of the Russian Revolution.
Although the tsar’s abdication did not immediately take Russia out of the war, the political chaos spreading out of Petrograd (the capital formerly known as St Peters-burg) was devastating for the fighting efficiency of the Russian army. By as early as 22 March, the command- er-in-chief, General Mikhail Alekseev, commented glumly that the revolution had “changed the strategic situation and the picture of the whole war dramatically… Agitators spread from Petrograd in all directions, reaching every part of the army”.
Last chance for victory
When Lenin’s Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government in November 1917 (the so-called ‘October Revolution’ of the old-style Julian calendar), a new age of world history had arrived. This would not only usher in an entirely novel kind of regime in Petrograd, a regime that actively sought to overthrow the entire international
Despite Germany’s triumph at Brest-Litovsk, no one really emerged victorious from the eastern front. By the time the guns fell silent in France on 11 November 1918, imperial Germany lay in ruins, the Austro-Hungarian empire had dissolved, and Russia was now a chaotic zone of competing ‘red’ (Bolshevik) and ‘white’ (anti-communist) elements. Even those powers that had nominally been on the victorious side – Romania, Serbia and Italy – were so damaged by the cost and consequences of war that it would take them generations to recover.
In this sense, the eastern front never really ended. It only changed and continued in one form or another for several more years. As western Europe returned to peace, fighting flared up across what had once been the western half of Russia, in Latvia and Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine and Poland, where new states, some stronger than others, were being established.
Writing in the early 1930s, Winston Churchill concluded that the conflict that wracked eastern Europe from 1914 was nothing less than the worst misfortune to hit mankind “since the collapse of the Roman empire before the barbarians”. The fighting in France and Belgium may continue to dominate narratives of the First World War. But, as Churchill was all-too aware, there is no way of understanding the conflict without centring it on the horrors that unfolded in the east.
Timeline: The Eastern Front
28 June 1914
Serbian nationalist student Gavrilo Princip guns down Franz Ferdinand, the heir presumptive to the Austro- Hungarian throne. A month later Austria declares war on Serbia, triggering a domino effect that will draw much of Europe into war.
23 August 1914
Austria-Hungary’s victory over the Russians at Krasnik in Galicia reveals how costly modern combat will be, with thousands of casualties.
26 August 1914
Germany’s stunning victory at Tannenberg, when its forces surround and rout an entire Russian army, secures East Prussia. It also gives German troops an aura of victory that will last until the final weeks of the war.
22 March 1915
Russia’s capture of the fortress of Przemyśl is a disaster for the Austro-Hungarian empire. It marks the high point of the war for the Russians and forces Germany to divert more troops to the eastern front.
2 May 1915
The Central Powers’ Gorlice-Tarnów counter-offensive proves one of the most decisive operations of the war. It sparks a chaotic ‘great retreat’ of Russian forces that ultimately hands Poland and much of the Baltic region to Germany.
5 September 1915
Tsar Nicholas takes personal charge of the war effort. The decision will be widely seen as a tragic error, taking the tsar out of the capital and associating his own person with the course of the war.
18 March 1916
The failure of another massive Russian attack – at Lake Naroch in modern-day Belarus – has a debilitating effect on the morale of the tsar’s armies and highlights the enduring challenges of conducting complex offensives on the eastern front.
4 June 1916
Russia launches the Brusilov Offensive, one of the most brutal battles of the First World War. The attack triggers the collapse of one Austrian army and effectively destroys Habsburg strategic independence.
15 March 1917
Nicholas II abdicates, ushering in a period of acute political crisis in Russia. The following month, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) arrives at the Finland Station in Petrograd on the fabled ‘sealed train’ from Zurich.
1 July 1917
The Kerensky Offensive (named after the Provisional Government’s war minister, Alexsandr Kerensky) is touted as the moment when a free Russia would embrace its new democratic identity. Instead, it is a dismal failure and reveals how poor morale is across the army.
7 November 1917
Lenin’s Bolsheviks storm the Winter Palace and seize power. The ejection of the Provisional Government ushers in the first communist dictatorship in the world.
3 March 1918
The Bolsheviks sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, a devastating peace with the Central Powers. Russia loses much of its western borderland. But the revolutionaries now have breathing space to consolidate their power.
23 August 1914