The German offensive opened in complete surprise on April 15/28 with a withering artillery barrage of several days’ duration: it was the first saturation shelling of the war, which would be repeated the next year on an even greater scale at Verdun and the Somme. In the words of Bernard Pares, the Russian troops were “overwhelmed by metal” that blasted them out of their improvised trenches. When the guns fell silent, German infantry, with Austrian support, struck at the Russians and sent them reeling eastward. Then and throughout the 1915 campaign, the Russians continued to communicate in the clear using wireless, which, in Falkenhayn’s understated verdict, gave the war in the east a “much simpler character than in the west.”56 On June 9/22, the enemy recaptured Lemberg and approached Warsaw. There was no end to the tales of disaster pouring out of Poland and Galicia on the stunned Russian public, which had expected 1915 to bring decisive offensive operations on the part of the Allied armies.
25. Russian prisoners of war taken by the Germans in Poland: Spring 1915.
Still worse loomed ahead. Intelligence indicated that German forces in Pomerania and East Prussia were massing for an attack. Indeed, on June 30/July 12, the Twelfth German Army went into action, heading toward Mackensen’s advancing troops. A pincer movement was in the making: if allowed to close, the First, Second, and Fourth Russian armies would have been trapped. Although aware of this danger, Nikolai Nikolaevich and his staff hesitated. From the strategic point of view there was no alternative to evacuating central Poland. Politically, however, this was a most unpalatable and even dangerous course, given the effect it was bound to have on Russian opinion. In the end, strategic considerations prevailed. On July 9/22, the Russians began a general retreat, abandoning central Poland but escaping the trap that had been set for them. The fortresses in Poland, which had cost so much to construct and held a high proportion of the Russian heavy artillery, surrendered, some without putting up a fight. The Germans kept on pressing eastward, running into diminished resistance. They suspended offensive operations only at the end of September, by which time they had established a nearly straight north-south front running from the Gulf of Riga to the Romanian border. All of Poland as well as Lithuania and much of Latvia were in their possession. The Russian threat to the German homeland had been eliminated for the duration of the war.
To the Russians, 1915 brought unmitigated disaster, as painful politically and psychologically as militarily. They had lost rich lands that had been under their rule for a century or more, as well as Galicia, which they had conquered recently. Twenty-three million of the Tsar’s subjects—13 percent of the Empire’s population—came under enemy occupation. The defeats dealt a hard blow to the morale of Russian troops. Soldiers who had fought smartly against the Germans the preceding fall and winter now came to regard the enemy as invincible: the mere sight of a German helmet sowed panic in Russian ranks. The Germans, it was said, “could do anything.”57 One effect of this sense of hopeless inferiority that spread in the Russian armies in 1915 was a readiness to surrender. In 1915 the Germans and Austrians captured over one million Russians, whom they sent to work in the fields. Russian troops began to show signs of demoralization. To appease them, General Ianushkevich unsuccessfully urged the government to issue a pledge that after victory every war veteran would receive twenty-five acres of land. Officers were heard to grumble about the failure of France and Britain to help Russia with diversionary attacks as Russia had done for their benefit the year before.
The old Russian army was no more. By the fall of 1915, the frontline forces were reduced to one-third of what they had been at the start of hostilities, 870,000 men at most. Nearly all the cadres of the Russian army of 1914, including most of its field officers, were gone; so was a good part of the trained reserves. It was now necessary to induct reserves of the Second Levy and the National Militia, made up of older men, many of them without previous training.
