Battle of Sanok and Rzeszów begins

On 8 May 1915, according to the British chronology of the war, the Battle of Sanok and Rzeszów began in Galicia. It was the second phase of the offensive that German and Austro-Hungarian troops had begun a week earlier at Gorlice. The Russian Third Army, shattered there, was retreating eastwards, and its commander, General Radko Dimitriev, was trying to halt the pursuit on a new line, based on the Wisłok and the hills between the Wisłok and the Vistula. On 8 May the Central Powers attacked this line along its entire length.

The dates of this battle are conventional. The Austrian historian Ernst Joly, who described the campaign in 1922 for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, spoke of “the pursuit and the battles of Sanok and Rzeszów” on 6–11 May, and took the capture of Rzeszów on the night of 11–12 May as their end. The British chronology uses the dates 8–14 May. Polish historiography usually describes this fighting as part of the Gorlice operation, without a separate name.

The pursuit

On the morning of 6 May Austro-Hungarian and German troops entered Tarnów, abandoned by the Russians, and that evening, at about 10.30 p.m., entered Jasło without a fight. According to Polish accounts, the first to enter were soldiers of the Teschen 100th Infantry Regiment of Colonel Franciszek Latinik. General August von Mackensen’s German Eleventh Army crossed the Wisłoka and pressed on towards Krosno, which on 7 or 8 May, depending on the source, was entered by the Austro-Hungarian 12th Infantry Division, made up largely of Poles.

The most dangerous position was that of the Russians who were still standing in the Low Beskids. The German corps of General Otto von Emmich, advancing from Żmigród towards Rymanów, cut their lines of retreat in the area of Dukla. On 6 and 7 May the Russian 48th Infantry Division of General Lavr Kornilov, known as the “Steel Division”, was encircled there. Several thousand of its men were taken prisoner. Kornilov tried with a small group to break through the forests to his own lines. Meanwhile General Svetozar Boroević’s Austro-Hungarian Third Army was pushing the Russians off the Carpathian passes. On the night of 7–8 May they had to abandon the Łupków Pass, over which bloody fighting had raged all winter.

“Die in their positions”

On 7 May the commander-in-chief of the Russian army, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, arrived at Chełm, where the headquarters of the South-Western Front was located. He allowed General Aleksei Brusilov’s Eighth Army to withdraw behind the crest of the Carpathians, but still regarded the situation of the front as stable. Dimitriev received reinforcements from other sectors and, according to Joly, on 8 May once again had 18 infantry divisions and 5 cavalry divisions at his disposal, although many of them were mere remnants. He planned to halt the pursuit on a line from Nowotaniec through Besko and along the right bank of the Wisłok, and between the Wisłok and the Vistula on the hills near Wielopole, to reorganise the shattered units there and go over to a counter-offensive.

On 8 May an envoy of the Grand Duke arrived at the Third Army with an order to hold the positions it occupied at all costs. Dimitriev passed it on to the troops in an even harsher form: the soldiers were to die in their positions, but not retreat. On the same day the Central Powers attacked along the whole front. Mackensen sent the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army towards Rzeszów and Sędziszów. Its units drove the Russians out of Pilzno and Brzostek and came up to Dębica. At Frysztak the Prussian Guard and the Austro-Hungarian 10th Infantry Division fought a hard battle with the Russian III Caucasian Corps and seized a bridgehead on the Wisłok. Further south the troops of the Eleventh Army broke through the positions of the Russian XII and XXIV Corps. The Russian line that was meant to halt the pursuit began to crumble on the very first day.