Battle of Tarnopol ends

On 16 September 1915 the fighting between the Seret and the Strypa turned into an artillery duel. The Russian infantry, exhausted after ten days of attacks, no longer left its trenches. That day the commander of the South-Western Front, General Nikolai Ivanov, ordered the troops of the Eleventh Army and Ninth Army that had moved forward to return to their old positions on the Seret. He judged that the short offensive had fulfilled its purpose: it had drawn enemy forces away from the Eighth Army fighting in Volhynia. The Central Powers’ troops noticed the withdrawal only on the morning of 17 September and sent pursuit detachments after the Russians.

The battle, which had begun on 7 September with the rout of Bolzano’s brigade, looked dangerous for the Central Powers for several days. On 10 and 11 September the Russian XVIII Corps broke into the positions of the Austro-Hungarian 19th Infantry Division at Dołżanka, west of Tarnopol. According to the Austrian official history the division lost more than 6,500 men there. General Felix von Bothmer, commander of the South Army, reported that many of its soldiers, mostly Czechs, had surrendered. On 12 September he withdrew General Marschall’s German corps to the west, and on 14 September the Russian XI Corps broke through the lines of the Austro-Hungarian 55th Division at Burkanów and crossed to the western bank of the Strypa. The Austro-Hungarian command even considered a retreat to the Złota Lipa. Further north, on 13 September, the Russians broke the Austro-Hungarian V Corps at Rydoml, on the sector of the Second Army of General Eduard von Böhm-Ermolli.

The chief of the general staff of the Austro-Hungarian army, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, would not, however, agree to a retreat. Instead he brought further divisions into East Galicia, including VI Corps, which was soon to attack Serbia. On 14 September the Czech Infantry Regiment No. 88 stopped the Russians on the western bank of the Strypa. On 15 September units of the Austro-Hungarian Seventh Army attacked from the bridgehead at Buczacz, and General Czibulka’s group pushed the Russian XVIII Corps back along the Seret and took more than a thousand prisoners. Ivanov then concluded that further attacks would achieve nothing.

The Russians had halted the offensive that Austria-Hungary had launched at the end of August in East Galicia. According to the Russian historian Neznamov, cited by the Austrian history, by mid-September the Eleventh and Ninth Armies had taken about 36,000 prisoners, 34 guns and 126 machine guns. Tarnopol remained in Russian hands, and the Austro-Hungarian armies, which once again had to be helped by German divisions, suffered heavy losses. The Second Army alone had lost about 45,000 men since 27 August. In East Galicia the front settled between the Seret and the Strypa and stayed there for many months. The great Russian retreat of 1915 had come to an end on the southern wing of the front. In Volhynia, however, the fighting went on, because Aleksei Brusilov had launched his own counter-offensive there towards Łuck.