Battle of Vilna

The Battle of Vilna was the last great German offensive on the Eastern Front in 1915 and the last attempt to encircle the Russian army, which since the spring had been retreating from Galicia and Congress Poland. The Tenth Army of General Hermann von Eichhorn struck north of Vilna, into a thinly held gap between two Russian armies. Several German cavalry divisions passed through the breach and, by way of Sventsiany, reached the rear of the Russian Tenth Army near Molodechno and Smorgon, with their patrols going even further, as far as the Berezina. The Russians, however, moved new corps into the threatened area in time, abandoned Vilna during the night of 17–18 September and withdrew eastwards without letting themselves be encircled. At the end of September the offensive died away, and the front came to rest on a line where it was to remain for more than two years.

Name and dates

On this page we use the dates 9 September – 2 October 1915. This is how the “Battle of Vilna” (Schlacht bei Wilna) is dated in the official German list of battles, which the histories of German divisions follow. According to Ludendorff, the decisive attack also began on 9 September, and the British chronology of the war records the start of the battle under that date. The earlier fighting west and north-west of Vilna, from the fall of Kovno to 8 September, is treated in the German list as a separate battle, the Battle of the Niemen. Some studies, among them the German Wikipedia, combine it with the Battle of Vilna and date the latter from 26 August.

Russian historiography speaks of the Vilna operation, the second part of which it calls the Sventsiany breakthrough (Sventsyansky proryv). According to Russian authors, the breakthrough began on 27 August Old Style, that is, 9 September, and was sealed off by 19 September Old Style, that is, 2 October, when the front stabilised. Both traditions therefore close the battle on the same day. Russian dates are often given in the sources according to the Julian calendar, 13 days behind, which can cause confusion: the capture of Vilna, for example, appears in them under 5 September.

Background

After the fall of Kovno on 17–18 August the road to Vilna lay open, but the Germans were unable to exploit it at once. The Russian Tenth Army of General Yevgeny Radkevich took up position west and north-west of Vilna, and in the second half of August and early September heavy frontal fighting took place on the northern bank of the Viliya, in which neither side gained the upper hand. Ludendorff recalled that this was another period of “great anxiety”, and the preparations dragged on because the unfinished railway line through Kovno had little capacity, the roads were bad and the troops were tired.

The chief of staff of the German Eastern Front command, General Erich Ludendorff, and Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg clung stubbornly to the plan of a great envelopment. Ludendorff considered a more modest thrust through Olita towards Lida but rejected it, because all similar attempts in the summer had failed. The Tenth Army, reinforced with divisions from captured Novogeorgievsk, was to strike in the direction Kovno – Vilna – Minsk, the Niemen Army of General Otto von Below was to cover it from the north by advancing on Dvinsk, and strong cavalry was to pass between them into the Russian rear, towards the Polotsk – Molodechno and Orsha – Minsk railways. The chief of the German General Staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn, looked at these plans sceptically. At the end of August he ordered the construction of fortified positions in the east and was preparing to transfer many divisions to the west and against Serbia.

On the Russian side there were great changes in this period. At the end of August the North-Western Front was divided into the Northern Front of General Nikolai Ruzsky, covering the road to Petrograd, and the Western Front, commanded from the beginning of September by General Alexei Evert. On 3 September the Germans took Grodno, and on 5 September Tsar Nicholas II assumed supreme command, with General Mikhail Alekseyev as his chief of staff. The boundary between the fronts fell north of Vilna, between Radkevich’s Tenth Army and the Fifth Army of General Pavel Plehve of the Northern Front. This junction was covered mainly by Russian cavalry, and it was precisely there that the Germans decided to strike.

Course

The breakthrough, 9–13 September. On 9 September the left wing of the Tenth Army went over to the attack north of the Viliya, between Vilkomir and Shirvinty. The main weight lay with the group of General Johannes von Eben (I Corps and the divisions attached to it), while to the south of it the divisions of General Oskar von Hutier attacked. The Russian cavalry detachments of Generals Nikolai Kaznakov and Mikhail Tyulin, which covered the junction of the armies, fell back, the first to the north-east, the second behind the Shirvinta river. Between the wings of the Russian Fifth and Tenth Armies a gap opened, 50–60 kilometres wide according to various sources. Into it went the cavalry corps of General Otto von Garnier (Höheres Kavallerie-Kommando 6), made up of the 1st, 3rd and 9th Cavalry Divisions, later joined by the 4th. To the north of it the cavalry of the Niemen Army advanced. The Russian Guards Corps and III Siberian Corps defended themselves fiercely north-west of Vilna but had to bend their front back towards the east. According to Ludendorff, the German wing made good progress in the first two days, after which it only pushed the Russians back behind the Viliya step by step. On 12 September German cavalry took Novo-Sventsiany and cut the Vilna – Dvinsk – Petrograd railway, and on 13 September Sventsiany.

The cavalry raid, 13–17 September. From Sventsiany Garnier’s divisions turned south-east, towards Smorgon, Molodechno and the railway to Polotsk. Around 14–15 September the Germans took Vileyka and Smorgon, cut the Vilna – Molodechno – Polotsk railway and threatened the lines of retreat of the Russian Tenth Army. A few squadrons reached the area of Borisov on the Berezina and damaged the Minsk – Smolensk railway. Ludendorff later wrote that the cavalry had found “a new field of action” here. Behind it, however, the infantry followed slowly, over bad roads and in the rain, and the weak cavalry divisions with little artillery could not hold the captured junctions for long.

Meanwhile the Russians reacted quickly. As early as 11 September Alekseyev ordered the new Second Army of General Vladimir Smirnov, made up of corps taken from the front of the First, Third and Fourth Armies, to be sent into the gap. The corps were moved by rail and on foot to the area of Oshmiany and Molodechno. The German 3rd Cavalry Division got to within 3–4 kilometres of Molodechno, where it was stopped by arriving units of the Russian XXVII Corps. The 1st and 4th Cavalry Divisions ran into XXXVI Corps near Oshmiany and Soly. The cavalry group of General Vladimir Oranovsky was to close the gap from the east.

The fall of Vilna, 17–18 September. On 17 September the Russian headquarters, in the name of the tsar but in practice Alekseyev, ordered the armies of the Western Front to fall back from the night of 17–18 September to the line Mikhalishki – Oshmiany – Novogrudok – Baranovichi. The Russians abandoned the fortified positions around Vilna, which they had been building all summer with the help of the civilian population. During the night of 17–18 September the last Russian troops left the city, and on 18 September Vilna was occupied by the German Tenth Army. A German communiqué of 19 September announced that “fortified Vilna” had fallen into German hands and that the enemy was in hasty retreat along the whole front.

The Russian counter-attack, 19–27 September. The capture of Vilna did not end the fighting. On 19–20 September the corps of the Russian Second Army drove the German 1st Cavalry Division out of Smorgon. Ludendorff called its fight on the Russian line of retreat “exceedingly tragic”, because it had to give way with heavy losses just before the German infantry arrived. The attack of General Vasily Flug’s group east of Vilna, on the other hand, was repulsed. The Russian Tenth Army fell back in good order to the east, and the German infantry followed slowly, fighting rearguards, and by 25 September reached the area west of Smorgon. The Russian cavalry pressed ever harder on the exposed German wing. Ludendorff admitted that during the slow march from Vilna towards Smorgon he realised the operation would have to be broken off.

Withdrawal of the German wing, 27 September – 2 October. On 27 September Hindenburg declared the attack over and ordered a move to long-term winter positions. In the evening the left wing of the Tenth Army began to fall back, and Garnier’s cavalry, covering this movement, withdrew gradually by 30 September to the line Lake Myadel – Postavy. Oranovsky’s Russian cavalry still attacked near Dunilovichi and Postavy. At the turn of September and October the front settled on the line of Lakes Drisvyaty and Naroch and further through Smorgon to the south. At the beginning of October the Russians tried once more to break through the new German positions north of Lake Naroch, but their attacks were repulsed, and on 7 October the front commander, Evert, halted the attacks.

Losses

There are no complete figures for the losses. German communiqués of the second half of September reported each day from about two to nine thousand prisoners taken by Hindenburg’s whole army group, including on the sectors at Dvinsk, Grodno and on the Shchara, without singling out the fighting at Vilna. German losses, especially in the cavalry, were severe but have not been precisely counted in the available sources. The Russian armies lost Vilna and a large part of the Vilna region but kept their fighting capacity.

Significance

The Battle of Vilna gave the Germans Vilna and a large area of Lithuania and western Belarus, but not what Ludendorff was after. The Russian armies slipped out of the trap that had been set for them. Ludendorff wrote that at no time in the war had the Germans been so close to fully exploiting a strategic breakthrough as between Vilna and Dvinsk, but the manoeuvre began too late, and the army had too few forces to close the pocket. General Wilhelm Groener, chief of field railways, noted on 22 and 24 September that the “sack” looked fine on the map, but there was no strength behind it to draw it shut, and that Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s envelopment had ultimately failed.

The Russians owed their escape to a rapid regrouping, which earned Evert a high decoration, and to the fact that the front of their armies, retreating since the spring, was by now far enough east for the new corps to reach the Viliya in time. They were also helped by the decisions of the Germans themselves. Falkenhayn was just then taking from the Eastern Front divisions needed in the west and against Serbia. According to Russian studies, more than twenty of them had left by the end of September, including a dozen or so from Hindenburg’s army group.

The battle concluded the great retreat of the Russian army of 1915. The line from Dvinsk through Lakes Drisvyaty and Naroch to Smorgon and further south became a static front that lasted almost unchanged until 1917. In the spring of 1916 the Russians struck precisely here, in the Lake Naroch offensive, and suffered a heavy defeat. Vilna remained under German occupation until the end of the war.