Second Battle of Kraśnik

The Second Battle of Kraśnik was fought in July 1915 on the same hills of the southern Lublin region where eleven months earlier Viktor Dankl’s army had won Austria-Hungary’s first victory of the war. This time the roles were reversed: it was the Russians who defended fortified positions, while the Austro-Hungarian 4th Army of Archduke Joseph Ferdinand attacked from the south towards Lublin and the Ivangorod–Lublin–Chełm railway, the most important supply line of the Russian forces in the Kingdom of Poland. The Austro-Hungarians broke the Russian front at Kraśnik and advanced a dozen or so kilometres, but fresh Russian corps stopped them short of Lublin and partly pushed them back. The battle brought no decision, but it drew in Russian reserves and prepared the ground for Mackensen’s great offensive in mid-July.

Name and dates

On this page we adopt the dates 1–19 July 1915, from the 4th Army’s advance on the Russian positions on the Wyżnica to the night of 18–19 July, when the Russians abandoned their lines along the whole front between the Vistula and the Bug. This is where the British chronology of the war, on which our timeline is based, closes the fighting at Kraśnik, and Polish regional studies describe it similarly. The Austrian official history gives the name “Second Battle of Kraśnik” to the narrower period of 1–10 July, that is, the 4th Army’s attack and the repulse of the Russian counter-attacks. It treats the fighting of 16–18 July as part of the joint offensive of Mackensen’s whole army group, whose main engagement was the Battle of Krasnystaw. Russian historians include these battles in wider operations, which they name after Krasnystaw and after Lublin and Chełm.

Background

After the recapture of Lviv on 22 June 1915 the Central Powers decided not to go further east but to turn north, between the Vistula and the Bug. Field Marshal August von Mackensen was to strike there with the German 11th Army and the Austro-Hungarian 4th Army, while the armies standing to the east, on the Gniła Lipa and the Bug, covered his right flank. The objective was the railway from Ivangorod through Lublin to Chełm. Cutting it would threaten all the Russian armies still standing in the western part of the Kingdom of Poland.

Under pressure from Mackensen’s troops, the Russian 3rd Army of General Leonid Lesh abandoned the line of the Tanew on the night of 28–29 June and fell back to the hills north of the river’s marshy forests. Units of the 4th Army crossed the forests day and night along the same roads on which Dankl’s army had marched in August 1914. The Russians were to make their stand on long-prepared positions on the line Urzędów–Kraśnik–Szczebrzeszyn, behind the rivers Wyżnica and Por (PL). The 4th Army staff believed that the main Russian forces were retreating to Lublin and that it would meet only five to eight exhausted divisions. Mackensen instructed the archduke to advance quickly, with his left wing along the Vistula and his right towards Lublin.

Course of the battle

First clashes, 1–2 July. On 1 July, a sultry, hot day, four corps of the 4th Army (from the west, VIII, X, IX and XVII) set off northwards on a broad front. They threw back the Russian advance guards but were unable to cross the Wyżnica valley, which was under fire from the northern slopes. Three companies of X Corps broke into Kraśnik in the evening but had to withdraw to the southern edge of the town. On the right wing the Austro-Hungarian 11th Infantry Division, together with the German X Corps, crossed the Por. On 2 July the fighting spread along the whole front. The Russian XV and IX Corps defended themselves stubbornly, and the 4th Army staff decided to concentrate the attack of two corps, IX and XIV, under the joint command of General Joseph Roth, on the hills east of Kraśnik and of the Bystrzyca (PL), where the Russian position had no water obstacle in front of it.

The breakthrough, 3–4 July. On the afternoon of 3 July, after a bombardment lasting several hours, five divisions of Roth’s group broke into the Russian lines and by evening had passed through the entire trench system on a 14-kilometre sector. On the same day the 24th Infantry Division took Kraśnik. On 4 July the attack continued. The Russians were pushed back from line to line, as far as beyond the hills near Kiełczewice and beyond Wilkołaz. According to the Austrian official history, in these two days the breach was 40 kilometres wide and 15 deep, and 29 officers and 8,000 men were taken prisoner. The centre of the 4th Army stood a day’s march from the Lublin–Chełm railway. Only VIII Corps on the Vistula, which attacked together with the German 47th Reserve Division, made hardly any progress.

Russian reserves, 5–6 July. The defeat of XV, IX and X Corps alarmed the commander of the North-Western Front, General Mikhail Alekseyev. On 4 July he reported that the 3rd and 13th Armies were utterly exhausted and that X Corps numbered no more than 4,000 rifles. Alekseyev sent to the Lublin and Chełm area all the reserves he had to hand: XXV Corps, brought across the Vistula from the 4th Army, as well as VI and II Siberian Corps. On 5 July a composite group with the 3rd Grenadier Division and the Ural Cossack Division attacked near Urzędów. The Austro-Hungarians repulsed it, and the Hungarian 37th Honvéd Division reached Urzędów. On 6 July the 4th Army gained a little more ground, but its staff, unaware of the full scale of its own losses, ordered a two-day pause in the attack in order to bring up artillery ammunition.

The Russian counter-offensive, 7–10 July. The Russians did not wait. On the night of 6–7 July fresh divisions of XXV Corps and Siberian riflemen struck the most advanced units of the 4th Army between Wilkołaz and Urzędów. The Austro-Hungarian 106th Landsturm Division fell back beyond Wilkołaz, and X Corps behind the Urzędówka (PL) river. In the afternoon the Russians took the hills near Popkowice and broke the front of the 37th Honvéd Division. Local studies based on Russian sources state that on 7 July the Russians took about 2,000 Hungarians prisoner here and recaptured Urzędów. The gap was closed by the German 47th Reserve Division and a brigade of Polish legionaries sent from the Austro-Hungarian 1st Army and committed to battle near Wyżnianka. On 8 July Siberians and Cossacks broke into the position of the Czech 21st Infantry Regiment on the Bystrzyca, which according to the Austrian official history gave way almost without a fight (an inquiry into its conduct was later opened). This led to the retreat of the whole 8th Infantry Division and neighbouring units by several kilometres. On 9 and 10 July the Russians attacked along the whole front, especially the hills south of Wilkołaz, but they could no longer break the Austro-Hungarian defence and began to dig in.

The last week, 11–19 July. After 10 July relative calm descended on the front. The Russians voluntarily abandoned the forefield on the southern bank of the Urzędówka, while the Austro-Hungarians sorted out their intermingled units and received reinforcements, among them the 4th Infantry Division. The 1st Brigade of the Polish Legions arrived near Urzędów. Its commandant, Józef Piłsudski, was quartered in the town from 14 to 19 July. On 16 July the 4th Army, which according to the Austrian official history then numbered about 100,000 rifles and nearly 600 guns, renewed its attack as part of Mackensen’s great offensive, with the main thrust along the Lublin road. For three days it captured only individual points of the Russian position, and lost many of them again in counter-attacks. The decision came from other sectors. The German 11th Army broke the front at Krasnystaw, and on the western bank of the Vistula the troops of Remus von Woyrsch broke through the Russian lines at Sienno. On the night of 18–19 July the Russians abandoned their positions along the whole front and fell back to a prepared line on the Chodelka and at Niedrzwica, just in front of the Lublin–Chełm railway. As they withdrew they set fire to Urzędów, which burned almost to the ground.

Losses

The exact losses of the two sides are not known. According to the Austrian official history, between 1 and 10 July the 4th Army took 56 officers and 15,500 men prisoner and captured 6 guns and 21 machine guns. Its own losses were very high. The commander of X Corps reported that some units had lost up to half their strength, the regiments of Tyrolean imperial riflemen (Kaiserjäger) numbered 300–400 men each, and the 10th Infantry Division was considered “worn out”. The Russians also suffered heavy losses, especially in XV, IX and X Corps. Numerous war cemeteries from this battle survive around Urzędów, Kraśnik and Dzierzkowice.

Significance

The Second Battle of Kraśnik did not bring the 4th Army the victory its staff had expected. The Austro-Hungarians broke a strongly fortified position and came close to the Lublin–Chełm railway, but after the Russian counter-offensive they had to give up part of the ground they had won. The Austrian official history admits that in Teschen it was at first regarded as a worrying setback. The battle, however, had wider consequences than the course of the fighting itself. It drew in XXV Corps and part of the Russian reserves that could have been used against Mackensen, which according to the Austrian official history made the German attack at Krasnystaw easier. The defeat of the Russian 3rd Army in the first days of July also prompted Alekseyev and Grand Duke Nicholas to take the first decisions on withdrawing the armies from the middle Vistula. A few weeks later these led to the abandonment of Lublin, Ivangorod and Warsaw.

For Poles the battle has one more dimension. For the second time in a year it devastated the area around Kraśnik and Urzędów, and in its last phase the 1st Brigade of the Legions fought here. About thirty volunteers from Urzędów joined the brigade at that time, and Piłsudski’s stay in the town is commemorated today by a plaque.