Winter Battle in the Carpathians

The Winter Battle in the Carpathians was a series of offensives and counter-offensives fought from January to April 1915 on the ridges and passes of the Carpathians. Austria-Hungary, supported by the German South Army, tried three times to break through the mountains to besieged Przemyśl and to push the Russians back from the Hungarian border. At the same time the Russians tried to cross the Carpathians onto the Hungarian Plain. Neither side succeeded. The fighting took place in deep snow and severe frost, without proper equipment, and cold and disease killed more soldiers than bullets. For the Austro-Hungarian army it was a catastrophe from which it never fully recovered.

Name and dates

On this page we use the dates 23 January – 15 April 1915. The first Austro-Hungarian offensive began on 23 January. The end date is set by the order of the commander of the Russian South-Western Front, General Nikolai Ivanov, who according to Russian studies halted the failed Russian offensive in the Carpathians on 2 April by the Julian calendar, that is 15 April by ours. German-language sources say likewise that the fighting died down in mid-April.

The literature uses different time frames. Russian historiography speaks of the Carpathian operation, counted from 20 January, when Ivanov issued the order for his own attack. The English Wikipedia dates the campaign to 23 January – 24 April 1915, while the German one limits the battle to March, that is, to the fall of Przemyśl. In Austria and Hungary people spoke of the winter battle in the Carpathians (Karpatenwinterschlacht), and its last phase, at the turn of March and April, was called the Easter battle. Local fighting in the mountains in fact went on until May, until the breakthrough at Gorlice.

Background

At the turn of 1914 and 1915 Austria-Hungary was in a difficult position. Since November the Russians had again been besieging Przemyśl, in which about 130,000 soldiers were shut up. The fortress commander, General Hermann Kusmanek, estimated that the food would last until March at most. Russian troops stood on the ridges of the Carpathians and twice, in September and in November 1914, had already descended into Hungary. The December victory at Limanowa pushed the Russians away from Kraków, but the Third Army, which was then to reach Przemyśl, was driven back into the mountains at the end of December. In this fighting the I Brigade of the Legions fought the battle of Łowczówek.

The Chief of the General Staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, decided to save the fortress with a winter offensive across the Carpathians. He also hoped that a victory would keep neutral Italy and Romania from entering the war. The Germans, though sceptical of the plan, sent help. In January 1915 the South Army was formed from German and Austro-Hungarian divisions under the command of General Alexander von Linsingen.

The Russians had plans of their own. Ivanov and his chief of staff, General Mikhail Alekseyev, argued to the high command that the quickest road to victory was a march across the Carpathians into Hungary and on Budapest, which could knock Austria-Hungary out of the war. Two offensives were to collide in the mountains.

Forces

According to the most often cited estimates, the strike forces of the Central Powers numbered about 175,000 soldiers at the start of the offensive. The Russian historian Sergei Nelipovich, who counts all troops along the whole Carpathian front, gives for 23 January about 390,000 infantry and more than 3,000 guns on the side of the Central Powers, and about 320,000 infantry and just under 1,500 guns on the Russian side. In the following weeks both sides brought new armies into the mountains.

From west to east the Austro-Hungarian front was made up of: the Third Army of General Svetozar Boroević in the Low Beskids (PL) and the Bieszczady, the South Army in the eastern Bieszczady, and the group of General Karl Pflanzer-Baltin in Bukovina and Pokuttya. Facing them stood the Russian Eighth Army of General Aleksei Brusilov and the left wing of the Third Army of General Radko Dimitriev.

Course

First offensive: January – February. On 23 January the Third Army set off towards Lesko and Sanok and from the Uzsok Pass towards Sambor, and the South Army through the Verecke and Wyszków (PL) passes towards Stryj. In the first days the Austrians retook the Uzsok Pass and the Germans the Verecke Pass. Around 25 January, however, the Russian Eighth Army set off and struck Boroević’s western wing in the area of the Dukla and Łupków passes. The Central Powers’ attack quickly bogged down in the snow. On 5 February the Russians took Medzilaborce (Hungarian: Mezőlaborc), an important railway junction on the Hungarian side of the mountains. For weeks on end the South Army vainly stormed the heavily fortified Zwinin ridge. By mid-February the Third Army had lost, according to studies, about 89,000 of its 135,000 soldiers, most of them sick or frostbitten.

Bukovina. The eastern wing achieved the most. From 1 February Pflanzer-Baltin’s group attacked in Bukovina and Pokuttya. On 16 February it took Kolomea, on 17 February it recaptured Czernowitz, and on 20 February it entered Stanislau. The Russians, however, moved new forces to this sector, together with the headquarters of General Platon Lechitsky’s Ninth Army. In March Stanislau returned to Russian hands, and the front came to a halt on the Dniester and the Prut.

Second offensive: February – March. Conrad moved the Second Army of General Eduard von Böhm-Ermolli, brought from the Kingdom of Poland, into the Carpathians. On 27 February a new attack began towards Baligród and Lesko. According to the plan the troops were to reach Przemyśl by 12 March. On the first day they reached the approaches to Baligród, but on the very next day the attack came to a standstill. In March the fighting went on in snowstorms and then in the thaw, which turned the roads into mud. According to estimates, by mid-March the Second Army had lost about 40,000 of its 95,000 men, the vast majority to disease and frost rather than enemy fire.

Fall of Przemyśl. On 19 March the Przemyśl garrison made a last, hopeless attempt to break out of the encirclement, and on 20 March the Austro-Hungarian V Corps renewed its attack from the mountains. Both attempts failed. On 22 March the fortress capitulated, and about 117,000–120,000 soldiers went into captivity. The Russian Eleventh Army, which had been besieging Przemyśl, could now reinforce the Carpathian front.

Easter battle: March – April. From 20 March the Russians went over to the offensive along the whole front. Their units took some of the passes in the Low Beskids and began to descend into the Laborec valley towards Humenné. The Hungarian plain once again lay open before them. German reinforcements came to Austria-Hungary’s aid. At the turn of March and April the Beskid Corps of General Georg von der Marwitz took up position on the Laborec, counter-attacked in the first days of April and stabilised the front. On 9 April units of the South Army finally captured the Zwinin. The Russian attacks weakened, the exhausted armies were short of ammunition, and on 15 April Ivanov halted the offensive.

Fighting conditions

The Eastern Carpathians are not high, but in winter they were almost impassable. A few passes carried the scarce roads and railway lines, and the rest of the mountains was covered with forest and deep snow. According to accounts, the frost reached 20–25 degrees below zero and blizzards lasted for days on end. Soldiers spent the nights without tents, often unable to light a fire. Many had boots that fell apart after a few days of marching. The wounded could not be carried down to the valleys quickly, so many froze where they fell. The historian Norman Stone wrote that shells bounced off the ice or sank into the mud, and in the morning whole bivouacs were found frozen. In spring the thaw turned roads and trenches into a swamp.

In Russian literature this fighting is called the “rubber war”, because the front in the mountains bent first one way and then the other but never broke anywhere. Both sides took and lost the same ridges and passes several times.

Losses

Losses in the Carpathians are hard to establish, because at a certain point the Austro-Hungarian army lost count of them. According to the Austrian official history, in the Carpathians between January and April 1915 Austria-Hungary lost about 800,000 soldiers killed, wounded, captured, sick and frostbitten. Most of them did not fall to bullets. Other studies, based on archival data, give lower figures, of the order of 450,000–520,000. German losses are estimated at about 20,000 men. On the Russian side, older studies gave about a million men, but this figure also includes other fronts and is questioned today. According to Nelipovich, the armies of the South-Western Front lost more than 450,000 killed, wounded and captured between mid-January and the end of April.

Significance

The offensive that was meant to save Przemyśl achieved none of its aims. The fortress fell, and the Austro-Hungarian army lost in the mountains a large part of the soldiers it had left after the defeats of 1914. After this winter Austria-Hungary was no longer able to conduct major operations without German help. The Russians did not succeed either: their march into Hungary stalled in the mountains, and the offensive exhausted their reserves of men and ammunition.

These losses soon had grave consequences for Russia. At the beginning of May 1915 German and Austro-Hungarian troops broke through the front at Gorlice, in the rear of the Russian armies fighting in the Carpathians. The Russians, who had sent their best forces into the mountains over the winter, had nothing with which to stop this offensive and within a few months had to abandon Galicia and the Kingdom of Poland.