Battle of Gródek and Rawa Ruska

The Battle of Gródek and Rawa Ruska was the last, decisive stage of the Battle of Galicia. In September 1914 the Chief of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, tried to recover Lviv, lost a few days earlier. His armies struck at the Russians on a front some hundred kilometres long, from around Rawa Ruska in the north to the Dniester in the south. The counter-offensive failed, and its defeat forced Austria-Hungary to give up most of Galicia.

Name and dates

The battle has no single, generally accepted name. The British chronology of the war on which this timeline is based calls it the Second Battle of Lemberg and ends it on 11 September. Many German and Austrian historians describe it in the same way, as the second phase of the Battle of Lemberg. Polish literature speaks of the Battle of Lwów, of Gródek Jagielloński or of the Battle of Rawa Ruska, depending on which sector of the front the author considers most important. Polish Wikipedia dates the fighting at Rawa Ruska to 3–11 September and the decisive phase at Lviv, also called the Battle of Gródek, to 6–11 September.

The differences arise because this was a series of linked engagements. At Rawa Ruska the first fighting broke out as early as around 3 September, when Auffenberg’s regrouping army ran into the Russian Third Army. The general Austro-Hungarian offensive along the whole line began on 8 September, and we take that date as the start of the battle. Everyone takes 11 September, the day of Conrad’s order to retreat, as its end.

Background: Lviv lost

At the end of August Galicia became the scene of two different battles. In the north, in the Lublin region, the Austro-Hungarian armies were successful: General Viktor Dankl’s First Army won at Kraśnik, and General Moritz von Auffenberg’s Fourth Army pushed back the Russians at Komarów. In eastern Galicia things were quite different. The Russian armies of Nikolai Ruzsky and Aleksei Brusilov routed the weaker Austro-Hungarian Third Army on the Złota Lipa and the Gniła Lipa. On 2 September the Austrians abandoned Lviv, and the next day the Russians entered the city.

Conrad had no intention of accepting this. He judged that the Russians beaten at Komarów were weakened enough for him to take Auffenberg’s main forces and turn them south. The Fourth Army was to strike from the north, from around Rawa Ruska, at the flank of the Russians marching west from Lviv. At the same time the Third Army, taken over after Brudermann’s recall by General Svetozar Boroević, and General Eduard von Böhm-Ermolli’s Second Army, brought from the Serbian front, were to advance from their positions on the River Wereszyca (PL), west of Lviv, and retake the capital of Galicia.

The plan was bold but very risky. In the north, on the Huczwa, only the weak group of Archduke Joseph Ferdinand remained, and a gap was opening between the Fourth Army and Dankl’s army, fighting alone near Lublin. Meanwhile the Russian commander of the South-Western Front, General Nikolai Ivanov, had numerical superiority and was bringing up further forces.

The fighting at Rawa Ruska

Auffenberg began regrouping on 3 September, and soon his corps, moving south-east, ran into the corps of the Russian Third Army marching west. Instead of a blow at the enemy’s flank, a heavy encounter battle broke out in the wooded, marshy country between Rawa Ruska, Magierów and Niemirów. From 6 September the Austrians were stuck, and in the north Joseph Ferdinand’s group was falling back under pressure from Russian corps advancing from Tomaszów. Among the units shattered in the retreat was the famous Tyrolean Kaiserjäger regiment.

The greatest danger, however, lay still further to the north-west. The Russian Fifth Army of General Pavel Plehve, which Auffenberg had almost encircled at Komarów a few days earlier, rebuilt its strength and moved south into the gap between the Austro-Hungarian armies. With every day it threatened the rear of the Fourth Army more. At the same time the Russian armies were defeating Dankl’s First Army at Tarnawka, which began to fall back on 9 September.

The attack on the Wereszyca and at Gródek

On 8 September the Third and Second Armies went over to the attack on a front from Janów to the Dniester. Among those fighting here were regiments from Carinthia and Styria, reinforced by march battalions from the fortress of Kraków. Brusilov’s Russian Eighth Army, which bore the brunt of this attack, found itself in a difficult position. Brusilov had to throw his last reserves into the fighting, and on the southern sector units of the Second Army pushed the Russians back several kilometres. For a moment the Austro-Hungarian staff believed that Lviv was within reach again.

The successes, however, were local and bought with enormous losses. The exhausted regiments, driven into one attack after another for three weeks, could not break the Russian defence. By 10 September the attack on the Wereszyca had petered out, and in several places the Russians went over to counter-attacks.

11 September: the order to retreat

On 11 September the Russian XI Corps broke through the front of the Austro-Hungarian XVII Corps at Rawa Ruska. Plehve’s corps were approaching from the north, and Russian cavalry was appearing in the rear of the Fourth Army. Conrad realised that his armies were in danger of being cut off from the crossings on the San and encircled. On the evening of 11 September he issued the order for a general retreat behind the San. The next day the Russians occupied the abandoned Rawa Ruska.

The Russians, however, did not immediately launch a determined pursuit. Their troops were also exhausted, and supplies, especially of artillery ammunition, could not keep up with the front. Thanks to this the Austro-Hungarian armies managed to break contact with the enemy, although the retreat in the rain along sodden roads cost them tens of thousands of prisoners, abandoned equipment and a huge number of stragglers.

Losses

The losses of the Battle of Gródek and Rawa Ruska alone cannot be separated from those of the Battle of Galicia as a whole. Estimates for the whole campaign, from the second half of August to the middle of September, vary widely. According to various authors, Austria-Hungary lost between some 320,000 and 400,000 soldiers killed, wounded, missing and taken prisoner, including some 100,000–130,000 prisoners. Russian losses are usually estimated at some 225,000–250,000 men. Particularly painful for the monarchy was the loss of experienced professional officers and NCOs, who could not be replaced.

The Austrian poet Georg Trakl served on the fields near Gródek as a military pharmacist. After the battle he had to care on his own for several dozen severely wounded soldiers, without any means of giving them real help. Broken, he ended up in a military hospital in Kraków, where he died in November 1914. His poem “Grodek” is one of the best-known works of German-language poetry about the First World War.

Significance

The defeat at Gródek and Rawa Ruska ended the Battle of Galicia. Austria-Hungary lost eastern Galicia and soon a large part of central Galicia as well. The fortress of Przemyśl was left behind the Russian front and was surrounded as early as the second half of September. The Austro-Hungarian Army suffered losses from which it never fully recovered, and from then on it depended more and more on German help.

The blame for the failure was placed on Auffenberg, although it was Conrad who had ordered the risky turn of his army to the south. At the end of September Auffenberg was recalled, and command of the Fourth Army passed to Archduke Joseph Ferdinand. On the Russian side the victory enhanced the reputations of Ruzsky and Brusilov. Ruzsky took command of the North-Western Front that same September, and the Third Army was taken over by the Bulgarian-born General Radko Dimitriev.