Battle of the San begins

Early in the morning of 16 May 1915 the first units of the German Guard Corps entered Jarosław. During the night the Russian XXIV Corps, after two days of fighting for the bridgehead, had withdrawn to the eastern bank of the San and set fire to the bridge behind it. That same day the Guard and the Austro-Hungarian VI Corps began to cross the river on pontoons. The British chronology of the war regards 16 May as the first day of the battle of the San, in which the armies of the Central Powers fought to cross the river and the Russians tried to stop them.

A line that was meant to hold

Two weeks had passed since the breakthrough at Gorlice. In that time the Russian Third Army of General Radko Dimitriev had lost the whole of western Galicia, and according to Austrian figures the Russian armies had given up more than a hundred thousand prisoners by mid-May. The commander-in-chief, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, and the commander of the South-Western Front, General Nikolai Ivanov, nevertheless decided that the retreat would end on the line of the San and the Dniester. The troops were to dig in here, receive reinforcements and go over to the counter-attack. The Russians still held two strongly fortified bridgeheads on the river, at Radymno and Sieniawa, and Przemyśl, which they had taken in March, was again being prepared for defence.

On 16 May Ivanov issued a new directive to the armies of the front: they were to repel the attack in their present positions and wait for reserves. He placed two corps of the Third Army, XII and XXI, and the garrison of Przemyśl under General Aleksei Brusilov, commander of the neighbouring Eighth Army, with the task not only of defending but also of striking at the enemy’s flanks. The greatest problem for the Russian commanders was ammunition. Regiments bled white in the retreat were receiving replacements, but the artillery had several times fewer shells than the enemy.

On the river

On the other side the German Eleventh Army of General August von Mackensen already stood on the San along the whole width of its advance, from near Przemyśl to the mouth of the Wisłok. To the north of it the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army of Archduke Joseph Ferdinand had reached the lower San at Leżajsk, Rudnik and Nisko. On Mackensen’s left wing the Germans threw the Russian III Caucasian Corps back across the river, and during the night of 16–17 May crossed the San at several points and dug in on bridgeheads near Makowisko, Cetula and Radawa.

The Russians were still shelling Jarosław from the other bank, and their command was preparing a counter-attack. For the next week heavy fighting went on along the San for the bridgeheads and crossings, in which the Russian counter-attacks failed to push the Germans and Austrians back across the river.