The South Army in the First World War

The South Army (Südarmee) was the first joint army of Germany and Austria-Hungary, formed in January 1915 to help the ally in the Carpathians. It was commanded by German generals, first Alexander von Linsingen and from July 1915 Felix von Bothmer, but in its corps Austro-Hungarian divisions fought alongside German regiments, and later Turkish ones as well. For three years it fought in the Carpathians and Eastern Galicia, and it was one of the few armies of the Central Powers against which the great Russian offensives of 1916 and 1917 broke.

The Carpathians and the Stryj (1915)

At the turn of 1914 and 1915 the Russians were besieging Przemyśl and stood on the Carpathian passes, and Austria-Hungary asked for help. On 11 January 1915 the command of the Prussian II Corps was turned into the staff of the South Army, and its commander, Linsingen, took over the new army. The Chief of the German General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, wanted to give it Erich Ludendorff as chief of staff, which was meant to separate him from Hindenburg, but after a few weeks Ludendorff returned to the north. The army was inserted into the gap between the Austro-Hungarian Third Army and the group of General Karl Pflanzer-Baltin.

From the start it was a mixed army. On the eastern wing fought the corps of General Friedrich von Gerok with the German 48th Reserve Division and the Austro-Hungarian 19th Division, in the centre the Austro-Hungarian corps of General Peter von Hofmann with the German 1st Infantry Division, and the left wing was formed by the German 3rd Guards Infantry Division. Each of these groups crossed the mountains by its own road. From March the German divisions of the centre and the left wing formed Bothmer’s corps, and in May the army was also given the Austro-Hungarian corps of General Sándor Szurmay.

On 23 January the offensive began that was to save besieged Przemyśl. The South Army attacked in the eastern Bieszczady through the Verecke and Wyszków passes, in deep snow and frost, but for weeks on end it stormed the strongly fortified Zwinin range in vain. Zwinin fell only on 9 April, when Przemyśl had been in Russian hands for several weeks. The Winter Battle in the Carpathians cost Austria-Hungary hundreds of thousands of men in the snow and frost, and did not save the fortress.

That changed only with the breakthrough at Gorlice. The Russians had to leave the Carpathians, and in mid-May the South Army came down into the foothills before Stryj and Drohobycz. On 31 May Bothmer’s corps broke into Stryj and took more than 9,000 prisoners, and according to the Austrian official history the whole army took more than 40,000 prisoners from the end of May to 8 June. A Russian counter-attack, however, pushed it from its bridgehead at Żurawno back across the Dniester, and the Battle of the Stryj did not give it a crossing. Only on 23 June did the army cross the river, and on 1 July it broke the Russian defence on the Gniła Lipa.

Bothmer on the Strypa (1915–1916)

On 8 July 1915 Linsingen took over the new Bug Army, and the South Army passed to Felix von Bothmer, a Bavarian general whose corps had earlier taken Stryj. Some sources give the date as 6 July. On 2 September the army crossed the Strypa, and two days later its headquarters was set up at Brzeżany.

At Tarnopol, however, a Russian counter-attack put it in a critical position. Two regiments of the German Guard saved Bothmer from a widening breach, and in the following days he reported that many soldiers of the 19th Division, most of them Czechs, had surrendered. After the battle the front settled on the Strypa.

In the summer of 1916, when the Brusilov Offensive broke through the front of the neighbouring Austro-Hungarian Seventh Army, the South Army held. On 11 June the Russian Seventh Army of General Dmitry Shcherbachev attacked it across the Strypa, and the last major assault broke down on 21 June. Bothmer held the Strypa line until August, when the Russians took Stanisławów. In the night before 11 August he was ordered to pull his corps back behind the Złota Lipa by 14 August. There, on 22 August, the Ottoman XV Corps, sent to the army, took up positions: more than 30,000 men who had come by rail through four countries.

Brzeżany and the Zbruch (1917)

In the summer of 1917 the South Army stood on the Złota Lipa, in the centre of the front of General Eduard von Böhm-Ermolli’s army group, with German and Austro-Hungarian divisions and the Turkish 20th Division. On 1 July the Kerensky Offensive struck it. At Koniuchy and Zborów the Russians and the Czechoslovak brigade fighting at their side routed two Austro-Hungarian divisions, but at Brzeżany the South Army beat off the attack. There the Russian Seventh Army attacked the Łysonia and Dzikie Łany heights after four hours of drumfire. Russian losses on its sector were put at about 40,000 men.

From 17 July the South Army’s artillery kept up a feint bombardment meant to mislead the Russians about where the main blow would fall, and on 19 July German divisions brought from the west broke through the front near Złoczów. The beaten Russian armies fell back, and Bothmer’s divisions marched east, fording the Seret at Czortków, where the bridges had been burnt. Within the army the Hungarian 38th Honvéd Division took the bridgehead at Zaleszczyki on the Dniester. At the end of July the front came to rest on the Zbruch, the border river between Galicia and Russia.

Disbandment (1918)

The Russian army was falling apart, and on 15 December 1917 the armistice of Brest-Litovsk was concluded. As Germany moved divisions from the east to the west, the South Army was disbanded: according to the German record compiled by Hermann Cron on 25 January 1918, according to other sources on 3 February. In February Bothmer took over the Nineteenth Army on a quiet sector in Lorraine.