Counter-offensive in Eastern Galicia

The counter-offensive in Eastern Galicia was the Central Powers’ answer to the Kerensky Offensive, the last great attack of the Russian army in this war. On 19 July 1917 German divisions, hastily brought over from the Western Front, struck on a narrow sector between Zborów and Zwyżeń, north-east of Złoczów. The Russian 11th Army, which only three weeks earlier had itself been attacking, disintegrated within two days. Its soldiers abandoned their trenches en masse and refused to counter-attack. The neighbouring 7th and 8th Armies had to withdraw in its wake. On 25 July the Germans entered Tarnopol, which the Russians had held since August 1914, and a day earlier the Austrians had recovered Stanisławów. By the end of July the front had come to rest on the Zbruch, the border river between Galicia and Russia.

Name and dates

Polish historical writing has no settled name for this operation. In German and Austrian accounts it is the “counter-offensive in Eastern Galicia” or the “counter-stroke towards Tarnopol”; the English Wikipedia calls it the Tarnopol offensive, and Russian literature speaks of the Tarnopol breakthrough. The British chronology of the war refers to a battle in eastern Galicia and dates it 18–28 July.

We adopt the dates 19–28 July 1917. According to the Austrian official history (Österreich-Ungarns letzter Krieg, volume VI), the artillery bombardment opened on 19 July at three in the morning and the infantry moved off at ten. Russian sources give the same date, 6 July in the Julian calendar. The date of 18 July in the British chronology finds no confirmation in accounts of the fighting. Already on 17 July, however, the batteries of the German-Austrian South Army had begun a feint bombardment of the Russian positions further south, near Brzeżany, intended to draw attention away from the point of the real attack. We take 28 July as the end of the operation. On the evening of 27 July the army group commander, Colonel-General Eduard von Böhm-Ermolli, ordered permanent positions to be taken up on the Zbruch, and on 28 July the main forces of the strike group from Złoczów halted in a semicircle east of Tarnopol, while German units reached the Zbruch at Husiatyn. South of the Dniester the pursuit went on for a few more days: on 29 July the Hungarians took a bridgehead at Zaleszczyki, and on 3 August the Austrians entered Czernowitz. The English Wikipedia adopts the same dates of 19–28 July, and the Russian one states that the Russians halted on the Brody–Zbaraż–Zbruch line on 28 July (15 July Old Style).

Background

The Germans knew of the preparations for the Russian offensive from deserters and from aerial reconnaissance. On 27 June the commander-in-chief in the east, Field Marshal Prince Leopold of Bavaria, received an order from Emperor Wilhelm II: if the Russians attacked Böhm-Ermolli’s army group, it was to go over to the offensive through Złoczów towards Tarnopol, beat the Russians and advance roughly to the Czernowitz–Tarnopol line. The idea of striking along the upper Seret into the flank of the Russian forces standing further south is usually attributed to Leopold’s chief of staff, Colonel Max Hoffmann. A chain of ponds and marshes along the Seret was to cover the left flank of the attackers from the north.

When the Russians went over to the attack on 1 July, Paul von Hindenburg at once sent east the headquarters of the XXIII Reserve Corps, the 1st and 2nd Guards Infantry Divisions, the 5th and 6th Infantry Divisions and the 16th Reserve Division, and from Lithuania the headquarters of the LI Corps. The start of the counter-stroke was set successively for 12, 14 and 16 July. Trouble arose, however, from the unexpected success of the Russian 8th Army of General Lavr Kornilov, which on 6–11 July broke through the front of the Austro-Hungarian 3rd Army, took Halicz and Kałusz and threatened the oil basin around Drohobycz. Part of the German reinforcements, including two of the six divisions sent from the west, had to be diverted to rescue the Austrians. From 12 July torrential rain fell, softening the roads and flooding the valleys of the Seret and the Strypa. When the weather improved on 16 July, the date of the attack was finally fixed for 19 July. On 14 July Prince Leopold moved with his staff from Brest to Złoczów.

The attack was prepared by the commander of the Złoczów sector, the Prussian General of Infantry Arnold von Winckler. The main blow was to be delivered by the XXIII Reserve Corps of General Hugo von Kathen (the 1st and 2nd Guards Divisions, the 6th Infantry Division and the Austro-Hungarian 33rd Infantry Division), followed by the corps of General Albrecht von Berrer (the 5th and 22nd Infantry Divisions), which after the breakthrough was to wheel south-east and roll up the Russian front. A subsidiary attack on the heights north of Zborów was entrusted to the group of General Karl Wilhelmi. Russian sources estimate Winckler’s group at about 92,500 infantry and 935 guns. On the Russian side stood the 11th Army of General Ivan Erdeli. Its best units had bled themselves white in the attack at the start of July, and the rest no longer wanted to fight. Repeated attempts by the command of the South-Western Front to resume the offensive foundered on the soldiers’ refusal.

Course

Breakthrough at Złoczów (19–21 July). On 19 July at three in the morning 600 guns and 180 heavy and medium mortars opened fire between Zborów and Zwyżeń, first with gas shells, then with high explosive. The bombardment lasted seven hours. An hour before the main attack two German regiments of Wilhelmi’s group took the heights near Zborów, where on 2 July the Russians and the Czechs and Slovaks fighting on their side had broken the Austrian front. At ten Kathen’s four divisions moved off and went through all the Russian lines in a single sweep. The German 6th Division crossed the Seret as early as 10.20 a.m. and took Harbuzów. The soldiers of the Russian XXV Corps fled, carried away by a mutinous regiment of the 6th Grenadier Division. In the evening, in pouring rain, the Germans reached Załoźce. In a single day they had torn a gap 20 kilometres wide in the Russian front and taken 2,900 prisoners, including 83 officers.

On 20 July the attack advanced a further 16 kilometres. Erdeli threw his reserve, the XLIX Corps, into the fight, but most of the soldiers refused to counter-attack. The XVII Corps left its trenches without a fight, and the I Guards Corps, just relieved at the front, withdrew on its own initiative. The commander of the South-Western Front, General Aleksei Gutor, ordered a counter-attack along the whole line between the Seret and the Strypa, and the commander-in-chief, Aleksei Brusilov, called on the “revolutionary soldiers” in a telegram not to give up Tarnopol. German aircraft bombed the crowded roads around the town. By the evening of 21 July the Germans already stood on the heights west of Tarnopol, and the Russian 7th Army, threatened from the north, began during the night to abandon its positions between the Strypa and the Złota Lipa.

Collapse of the front (22–25 July). On 22 July the entire Russian front from the Seret to the Dniester began to retreat. The government in Petrograd, headed from 21 July by Alexander Kerensky, changed the commanders. Kornilov took over the South-Western Front from Gutor, General Pyotr Baluyev the 11th Army, and General Vladimir Cheremisov (PL) the 8th Army. Kornilov ordered the 7th and 8th Armies to fall back so as not to be cut off, and on 23 July the Austrians crossed the Łomnica, recovered Halicz and took up their old positions on the Bystrzyca Sołotwińska. On 24 July the Austro-Hungarian 16th Infantry Division entered Stanisławów, and Berrer’s corps crossed the Seret south of Tarnopol. In front of the town the I Guards Corps still held out in a bridgehead, but when the neighbouring V Corps began to fall back, the guardsmen abandoned their positions. Before noon on 25 July the Prussian 1st Guards Division, commanded by the Emperor’s son, Prince Eitel Friedrich of Prussia, entered Tarnopol.

Pursuit to the Zbruch (26–28 July). On 26 July, in the presence of Wilhelm II, the guardsmen took the heights north of Tarnopol, and other divisions took Trembowla. In the south the Austrians and Bavarians recovered Kołomyja, and on 27 July they reached Horodenka. General Felix von Bothmer’s South Army advanced east through Czortków, where the bridges over the Seret had already been burnt and the infantry had to ford the river. Russian rearguards with cavalry and armoured cars delayed the pursuit but could not stop it. On 28 July the German Beskiden Corps reached the Zbruch at Husiatyn, and German hussars rode into Borszczów. That day the main forces of Winckler’s group halted on the Hleszczawa–Borki Wielkie–Czystyłów line, in a semicircle east of Tarnopol. On the far side of the Zbruch the Russians, now defending the soil of their own state, dug in on old positions and met the Germans with heavy fire. Attempts to force the river in the following days produced only small bridgeheads, and on 2 August Prince Leopold ordered them to be halted.

Disintegration of the army

The defeat was not the result of the enemy’s numerical superiority. According to Kornilov, there were five Russian soldiers to every German. The Russian infantry simply stopped fighting. The commissars of the 11th Army telegraphed that the German attack was “growing into an immeasurable disaster”, that there was no longer any question of authority or obedience, and that the soldiers answered persuasion with threats and sometimes with shots. “Over hundreds of versts columns of deserters, with rifles and without, are streaming to the rear – healthy, vigorous, feeling themselves wholly unpunishable”. General Nikolai Golovin later wrote that a single shock battalion sent to the rear stopped 12,000 deserters near Wołoczyska in one night. The fleeing soldiers looted and set fire to towns and villages, murdered and raped the inhabitants, and also killed their own officers. Tarnopol and Stanisławów fell victim to plunder. Ukrainian historians write of robberies, violence and pogroms in Tarnopol, where part of the town, including the castle, also burnt down.

Not all units fled. The burden of the fighting was borne by the officers, the cavalry, part of the artillery and a few regiments, among them the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards Regiments. On 24 July at Krechowce, in the approaches to Stanisławów, the Polish 1st Uhlan Regiment (PL) of Colonel Bolesław Mościcki covered the retreat of a Russian division with its charges. The Provisional Government later honoured such units, including the Polish uhlan regiment.

Kornilov reacted harshly. On his first day in the new post he ordered commanders to fire without hesitation with machine guns and artillery on units leaving their positions without orders, and took upon himself the responsibility for the casualties. On 22 July (9 July Old Style) his troops shot without trial 14 soldiers who, during the evacuation of Tarnopol, had looted, raped and killed inhabitants. The same day he demanded that Brusilov and the government restore the death penalty at the front. On 25 July (12 July Old Style) the Provisional Government restored it and established military-revolutionary field courts.

Losses

The exact losses of both sides in the counter-offensive itself are not known. The Austrian official history states that over the whole counter-stroke, from July to the beginning of August, the Central Powers took more than 42,000 prisoners, 257 guns, 546 machine guns, 191 mortars and 50,000 rifles. According to the Stavka, the armies of the South-Western Front lost more than 58,000 men from 1 to 19 July, that is during the Kerensky Offensive itself. No one counted precisely the losses suffered during the retreat, and some historians put the total Russian losses in Galicia in the summer of 1917 at 125,000–200,000 killed, wounded, captured and missing.

Significance

Within ten days the Central Powers recovered almost all of Eastern Galicia, which the Russians had conquered in 1914–1916, and at the beginning of August also most of Bukovina. In places the Russians fell back more than 100 kilometres, but none of their divisions was encircled. The Germans and Austrians, with lengthened supply lines and out of ammunition, halted at the border. Böhm-Ermolli received the Commander’s Cross of the Military Order of Maria Theresa, although the Austrian high command regretted that so few Austro-Hungarian troops had taken part in the decisive blow.

For Russia the defeat had above all political consequences. Together with the July Days in Petrograd it undermined the authority of the Provisional Government and showed that the army was no longer capable of an offensive. Kornilov, the only commander who had achieved success in July and mastered the panic, became commander-in-chief on 31 July, and his demands for the restoration of discipline led in August to open conflict with Kerensky. The Germans concluded that they had a free hand on the Eastern Front and began to prepare an attack on Riga.