Battle of the Bzura begins

A British chronology of the war records under 30 November 1914 the beginning of the battle of Łowicz and Sanniki. The name and date come from the official German list of battles. On that day the left wing of the German Ninth Army began an attack on the positions of the Russian First Army north and north-west of Łowicz, in the area between the Vistula and the Bzura. In Polish tradition this fighting is usually called the Battle of the Bzura.

After the crisis at Łódź

At the end of November the Battle of Łódź was still undecided. The Germans had failed to encircle the Russian armies, and on 24 November General Scheffer’s surrounded group had broken out of the pocket at Brzeziny with difficulty. The Russians still held Łódź, and their First Army under General Paul von Rennenkampf was holding out near Łowicz. The commander of the Ninth Army, General August von Mackensen, had no intention of giving up, however.

Reinforcements were already travelling east. Paul von Hindenburg, newly appointed field marshal, had persuaded the Chief of the General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, in mid-November to send him several divisions from the Western Front, where the German offensive at Ypres was just dying down. On 27 November the Württemberg 26th Division, the vanguard of General Max von Fabeck’s XIII Corps, which only a few weeks earlier had been fighting in Flanders, reached the area of Gostynin. From East Prussia came the 1st Division, which reinforced General Kurt von Morgen’s I Reserve Corps, fighting north-west of Łowicz.

The attack on Łowicz and Sanniki

According to the German lists of battles, on 30 November the 1st Division and the 36th Reserve Division of Morgen’s corps went into action at Łowicz. The next day the 26th Division and the Hessian 25th Reserve Division were formed into Fabeck’s corps, which struck in the area of Sanniki, about 25 kilometres north of Łowicz. A Russian collection of documents on the Łódź operation describes the days from 27 November to 2 December as the attack of the German Ninth Army in the Łowicz area and the battle of the Russian First Army in that area.

German communiqués of 30 November and 1 December reported successful counter-attacks south of the Vistula and the capture of a total of some 14,000 Russians and 36 guns. They did not say exactly where the fighting had taken place, however, so these figures relate to the whole front in the northern part of the Kingdom of Poland, not just the Łowicz area.

Two battles side by side

For the first week the fighting at Łowicz ran in parallel with the battle for Łódź. That ended on 6 December, when the Germans entered the city, abandoned by the Russians. At Łowicz the fighting went on longer. The Russians defended themselves stubbornly, and the Germans advanced slowly, from one fortified village to the next. Only in mid-December did the First Army, commanded from the beginning of the month by General Aleksandr Litvinov, abandon Łowicz and withdraw behind the lower Bzura. There, on the Bzura and the Rawka, a few dozen kilometres from Warsaw, the front froze in the trenches until the summer of 1915.