Fighting on the Rawka and Bzura

The fighting on the Rawka and Bzura was seven months of positional warfare in western Masovia, a few dozen kilometres from Warsaw. After the Battle of the Bzura the Russian armies dug in behind the lower Bzura and the Rawka, and throughout the winter and spring the German 9th Army tried to break through. The front moved no more than a few kilometres, but it cost both sides tens of thousands of dead. At Bolimów the Germans used chemical weapons on a large scale for the first time: tear-gas shells in January 1915 and, from May, chlorine. The fighting ended only in July 1915, when the Russians, threatened with encirclement, began the great retreat from Congress Poland.

Name and dates

The British chronology of the war on which our timeline is based dates the start of the battle of the Rawka and Bzura to 18 December 1914 and notes that it had no clear end, because the operations turned into trench warfare. The war diaries of some German divisions give the same starting date. Polish studies usually speak of the battle of the Rawka or of the fighting on the Rawka and Bzura, and call its best-known episodes the battles of Bolimów or Humin. Russian historiography describes the same events as several separate operations, and older sources give dates in the Julian calendar, thirteen days earlier.

On this page we adopt the dates 18 December 1914 – 17 July 1915. The end date is set by the Russian retreat: on the night of 16–17 July 1915 they abandoned their positions on the Bzura and Rawka, and on 17 July German troops entered Sochaczew. The Polish Wikipedia gives the same frame, from 18 December to 17 July, for the front at Bolimów. Some German units, incidentally, counted their “battle of the Rawka and Bzura” as shorter, up to February 1915, and treated the following months as positional fighting.

Background

In mid-December 1914 the autumn campaign in the central part of Congress Poland came to an end. The Russians gave up Łódź and Łowicz and fell back to a shorter defensive line closer to Warsaw, along the Bzura, Rawka, Pilica and Nida. On the northern sector, on the lower Bzura, from its mouth on the Vistula through Sochaczew, stood the 1st Army of General Aleksandr Litvinov. The sector on the Rawka, east of Skierniewice, was taken over by the 2nd Army of General Vladimir Smirnov. Facing them was the 9th Army of General August von Mackensen, reinforced by corps brought over from the Western Front.

The shortest road to Warsaw led through the Bolimów area, which was also crossed by the railway from Łódź. The valleys of both rivers were marshy, and the woods of the Bolimów Forest (PL) favoured the defence. Over time the Russians built further positions behind the first line, reaching as far as Błonie and the villages around Warsaw.

Course

December 1914. As early as 18 December the Germans attacked the Russian positions and entered Bolimów. According to German communiqués, over the following days they managed to cross the Bzura and Rawka in many places, and on Christmas Eve, in poor visibility, there was bayonet fighting. The Germans won bridgeheads on the eastern bank of the Rawka, but the Russian defence held. Until the end of the year and in the first weeks of January there was fighting for individual villages and farmsteads: Sucha, Borzymów, Humin, Wola Szydłowiecka and Mogiły. Some of them changed hands several times. Both sides dug in ever deeper.

January and February 1915: Humin and Bolimów. In January 1915 the German command decided to try once more. The new attack was also meant to pin down Russian forces ahead of the offensive in East Prussia planned for February. On a narrow sector a few kilometres wide between Humin and Wola Szydłowiecka Mackensen massed several divisions and several hundred guns, including heavy mortars. The bombardment began on the morning of 31 January. Among the ordinary shells the Germans fired some 18,000 shells filled with xylyl bromide, a tear agent. It was the first chemical attack on such a scale in this war. In the frost the gas vaporised poorly and did not have the expected effect. According to some accounts the Russians did not notice it at all; according to others the soldiers complained of watering eyes and headaches. The German infantry took the first line of Russian trenches but got no further.

From 1 February the Russians counter-attacked. General Vasily Gurko’s VI Corps was thrown into the front line, followed by further divisions, Siberian ones among them. The neighbouring 1st Army struck at Borzymów to draw the Germans away. The Russian attacks through the snow, under German artillery fire, brought enormous losses and regained little. Around 4–6 February both sides halted their attacks. The Germans held the strongpoints they had taken, but there was no breakthrough. A few days later the German offensive in Masuria began, and the front on the Rawka froze again.

Spring 1915: chlorine. In April 1915 Mackensen left for Galicia to prepare the blow at Gorlice, and the 9th Army was taken over by Prince Leopold of Bavaria. The German command, deprived of some of its divisions, decided to replace them with gas. In May the sappers of a special gas regiment placed some 12,000 cylinders of chlorine in the trenches on the sector from Zakrzew on the Bzura to Wola Szydłowiecka. The attack, postponed several times because of the wind, began at dawn on 31 May. More than 240 tonnes of chlorine flowed onto the Russian positions, far more than a month earlier at Ypres. It was the largest gas attack on the Eastern Front. Thousands of Russian soldiers, mainly from the 14th Siberian and 55th Infantry Divisions, were poisoned. Even so the Russians, supported by reserves, beat off the German attacks, and the Germans returned to their starting positions.

Gas was used twice more. On 12 June the Germans released chlorine on the Bzura, in the area of Żylin and Kozłów Biskupi, and advanced 2–3 kilometres. According to some Polish sources the attack was personally supervised by Fritz Haber, the creator of German chemical weapons. On the night of 6–7 July, at Borzymów and Wola Szydłowiecka, the wind changed direction and pushed the gas cloud back onto the German trenches. More than a thousand Germans were poisoned, and several hundred of them died.

July 1915: the Russian retreat. The fate of the Rawka front was decided elsewhere. After the breakthrough at Gorlice in May 1915 the armies of the Central Powers drove the Russians out of most of Galicia, and in July they struck at Congress Poland from the north, across the Narew, and from the south. The Russian armies in the western part of Congress Poland began to face encirclement. In mid-July the commander of the North-Western Front, General Mikhail Alekseyev, ordered a retreat to a line near Błonie. On the night of 16–17 July the Russian units quietly left the trenches on the Bzura and Rawka. The Germans occupied Sochaczew and set off after them. On 5 August 1915 Prince Leopold’s 9th Army entered Warsaw.

Gas at Bolimów

The attacks at Bolimów are among the most important in the history of chemical weapons. The January bombardment was the first attempt to use gas shells on a large scale, three months before the famous chlorine attack at Ypres in April 1915. The failure in the frost led the Germans to change their method: instead of shells they began to release gas from cylinders and rely on the wind. The May attack showed how terrible this weapon was, and the July one how unpredictable.

Casualty figures vary widely. According to Russian historians, on whom the English Wikipedia among others relies, after the attack of 31 May some 9,000 Russian soldiers were poisoned and about 1,400 died within a few days. Polish studies give much higher figures, reaching several thousand or even more than ten thousand dead. The Russian units were not prepared for a gas attack. The Russian press presented the defence at Bolimów as the heroism of civilisation in the fight against a “barbaric” weapon.

Civilians

The front cut across the densely populated land between Sochaczew, Skierniewice and Łowicz. The inhabitants of villages lying on the trench line were expelled, and their abandoned buildings were destroyed by artillery or turned into strongpoints. Both armies lived off the local population, requisitioning everything that might be of use to them. Sochaczew suffered most, lying for seven months on the very front line on the Bzura. According to data collected after the war, artillery completely destroyed 64 per cent of its buildings, and 85 per cent in total were damaged. The inhabitants fled the town and returned to the ruins only in the summer of 1915, when the front moved on.

Poles fought on both sides of the trenches: conscripts from Congress Poland in Russian regiments and Poles from the Prussian partition in German regiments. For many inhabitants of Masovia it was a foreign war, “the war of the partitioning powers”, which is why its memory faded for a long time.

Losses

The exact losses of the fighting on the Rawka and Bzura are not known. Local studies estimate that over the seven months between 70,000 and more than 100,000 soldiers of both armies were killed on the sector between Sochaczew and Skierniewice. The winter fighting was the bloodiest. According to the Polish Wikipedia, in the Battle of Bolimów at the turn of January and February 1915 the Russians lost about 40,000 killed and wounded and the Germans about 20,000, although other estimates of German losses are higher. Russian historians put Russian losses in the fighting of May, June and July 1915 at more than 46,000 men, and German losses at about 7,000.

Cemeteries and memory

The fighting is commemorated by more than 30 war cemeteries scattered across the Skierniewice, Łowicz, Żyrardów and Sochaczew districts. Many of them are decaying in the woods. The Germans laid them out soon after the Russians left in the summer of 1915, burying soldiers of both armies together. The largest, the cemetery at Joachimów-Mogiły (PL) in the Bolimów Forest, holds by estimates about 1,200 soldiers from 1914–1915, and in the 1990s German soldiers of the Second World War, exhumed from Warsaw, were also buried there. At Humin (PL) there stands a mausoleum over the grave of Germans and Russians, begun in the 1930s and never completed. Other cemeteries are located at Wólka Łasiecka and in Bolimów, among other places.

For decades the Rawka front was almost forgotten in Poland. This has changed in recent years. Archaeologists are studying the trenches and shelters preserved in the forest, and re-enactments of the 1915 fighting are held in Bolimów. The small town has preserved two old fire gongs made from halves of German chlorine cylinders.

Significance

The fighting on the Rawka and Bzura was the last German attempt to take Warsaw from the west by a frontal assault. It ended in failure. The Germans broke the Russian defence neither in winter nor in spring, despite their superiority in artillery and the use of gas. Warsaw fell only in the summer of 1915, when the armies of the Central Powers outflanked it from the north and the south. For half a year, however, the Rawka front tied down considerable Russian forces that were lacking elsewhere.

Bolimów went down in history as the place where chemical warfare began on the Eastern Front. The attacks on the Rawka showed both sides that gas could kill thousands of people within a few hours, but could not by itself break a front.