Carpathian offensive begins

At dawn on 23 January 1915 Austro-Hungarian troops, supported by the German South Army, went over to the attack in the Carpathians. On a front more than a hundred kilometres long, from the Low Beskids to the Wyszków Pass, the infantry left their trenches into deep snow and severe frost. So began the winter battle in the Carpathians, one of the bloodiest and most exhausting campaigns of the war.

A race against time

The offensive was devised by the chief of the Austro-Hungarian general staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf. He had two reasons for haste. First, since November the Russians had again been besieging Przemyśl, and the commander of the fortress, General Hermann Kusmanek, reported that his food would last until March at most. Second, Russian troops stood on the Carpathian ridges and had twice, in September and in November, already descended into Hungary. Another invasion could shake the monarchy and even induce neutral Italy and Romania to enter the war on the side of the Entente.

The victory at Limanowa in December 1914 had not solved this problem. The Austro-Hungarian Third Army had failed then to break through to Przemyśl, and in the last days of the year a Russian counter-attack had pushed it back into the mountains. Conrad decided that the fortress had to be relieved across the Carpathians, by the shortest route from the south, and immediately, without waiting for spring.

The plan of attack

The main blow was to be delivered by the Third Army of General Svetozar Boroević. Its units attacked in the western Bieszczady towards Baligród, Lesko and Sanok, while General Sándor Szurmay’s group advanced from the Uzhok Pass towards Turka and Sambor. East of it struck the South Army, formed in January from German and Austro-Hungarian divisions under the German general Alexander von Linsingen. Its objective was Stryj, and its route led through the Verecke and Wyszków (PL) passes. Further east still, in Bukovina, General Karl Pflanzer-Baltin’s group was preparing to attack.

According to the most frequently cited estimates, the assault forces numbered about 175,000 men. Boroević warned from the start that his troops were not prepared for winter warfare in the mountains. Many soldiers had neither warm greatcoats nor boots fit for marching in snow. Guns and supply wagons had to be hauled along a few icy roads and narrow tracks.

The first days

The attack began promisingly. The Russian units on the passes were weaker, and in the first days the Austro-Hungarian columns advanced, in places by several dozen kilometres. In the first days the Uzhok Pass, which the Russians had taken at the beginning of January, returned to Austrian hands. The South Army took the Verecke Pass.

It soon became clear, however, that the Russians had no intention of merely defending themselves. The commander of the Russian South-Western Front, General Nikolai Ivanov, was himself preparing an offensive across the Carpathians into Hungary. A few days earlier he had ordered an attack by the Eighth Army of General Aleksei Brusilov, which struck around 25 January in the area of the Dukla and Łupków passes. Two offensives thus collided in the mountains. The fighting was for individual ridges and passes, in blizzards and in frosts that reportedly reached 20–25 degrees below zero.

That same night, from 23 to 24 January, several hundred kilometres further east, in the Gorgany, Russian units attacked Rafajłowa, held by the 3rd Infantry Regiment of the Polish Legions. The legionnaires repulsed the attack in the night-time Battle of Rafajłowa.

Frost deadlier than the enemy

Within a few days the reports from the front were dominated by the numbers of frostbitten and sick. Soldiers spent the nights in the snow, without tents or fires, and the wounded who could not be carried down quickly froze to death. Supplies arrived late or not at all. Austro-Hungarian officers wrote of whole units found frozen to death in the morning where they had bivouacked.

The offensive, which was to have reached Przemyśl within a few weeks, bogged down in the mountains. Conrad, however, did not abandon the plan, and the fighting in the Carpathians was to last almost three more months.