Central Powers' great offensive in the east begins

At dawn on 13 July 1915 German artillery opened fire on the Russian trenches at Przasnysz, in northern Masovia. A few hours later the infantry of General Max von Gallwitz’s army group moved south, towards the Narew. The British chronology of the war records under this date the beginning of the general Austro-German offensive on the Eastern Front. Over the following days further armies of the Central Powers went over to the attack: in Courland, between the Vistula and the Bug, and on the middle Vistula. Their common target was the Russian armies in the Kingdom of Poland, which were to be pushed back beyond the Vistula and the Bug and, at best, cut off.

The dispute over the direction of attack

After the breakthrough at Gorlice and the recapture of Lviv on 22 June, the Central Powers had to decide what to do next. In the Kingdom of Poland the Russian front formed a great salient bulging westwards, with Warsaw in the middle. From the south it was already threatened by the armies of Field Marshal August von Mackensen, which at the end of June had turned north, between the Vistula and the Bug, towards Lublin and Chełm. From the north, along the border of East Prussia, the salient was covered by the line of the Narew and the Biebrza, with the fortresses of Novogeorgievsk, Różan, Łomża and Osowiec.

On 2 July a conference attended by Kaiser Wilhelm II was held in Posen. The commander on the Eastern Front, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, and his chief of staff, General Erich Ludendorff, proposed a wide stroke far to the north-east, through Kovno towards Vilna, into the rear of the whole Russian front. The Chief of the German General Staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn, preferred a closer operation requiring fewer troops: a thrust from the East Prussian border straight south, across the Narew, to meet Mackensen. The Kaiser sided with Falkenhayn.

According to the 1922 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Hindenburg and Ludendorff warned that the strongly fortified positions at Przasnysz and on the Narew could not be crossed quickly enough to cut off the Russians west of the Vistula. Falkenhayn, however, had something else in mind. His offensive was above all to draw Russian reserves away from Mackensen’s front and force the Russians to retreat, not necessarily to close them in an encirclement.

The Central Powers’ plan

The main attack in the north was entrusted to Gallwitz’s army group, reinforced with divisions from the German Ninth Army and with heavy artillery. It was to break through the Russian positions at Przasnysz, where the first battle for the town had been fought in February, reach the Narew between Pułtusk and Różan, and push on towards the Bug. On its left flank the weaker Eighth Army was to attack towards Łomża and Ostrołęka.

In the south Mackensen, with the German Eleventh Army, the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army and the newly formed Army of the Bug, was to resume his march north, towards Lublin, Chełm and Brest-Litovsk. His troops already stood deep in the Lublin region, and in the first days of July the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army had fought heavy battles in the Second Battle of Kraśnik. In the centre, before Warsaw and on the Vistula, the German Ninth Army of Prince Leopold of Bavaria and the army of General Remus von Woyrsch were to pin the Russians down with frontal attacks. Far to the north Hindenburg also prepared a stroke in Courland and Samogitia. There the Niemen Army of General Otto von Below was to tie down and draw off as many Russian forces as possible.

The Russians before the storm

The Russian army emerged from Galicia weakened. It had lost hundreds of thousands of men and was short of artillery shells, rifles and trained replacements. In June the supply crisis cost War Minister Sukhomlinov his post. Most of the troops in the Kingdom of Poland were commanded by General Mikhail Alekseyev, commander-in-chief of the North-Western Front. At the beginning of July the Third and Fourth Armies, fighting in the Lublin region, were also placed under him, so that he had seven armies under his command.

According to Russian accounts, at a command conference at Siedlce on 5 July it was decided not to fight a decisive battle in the Kingdom, but to retreat gradually, sparing the soldiers and gaining time to expand war industry. The 1922 Encyclopaedia Britannica writes that the Russian command already intended at that time to withdraw to the shorter Kovno–Grodno–Brest line, and that the fighting in front of it was above all to gain time for evacuation. The fortresses and fortifications on the Narew, the Vistula and the Bug were to cover this retreat.

The first day

On 13 July the blow fell on the Russian First Army at Przasnysz. On a sector about 30 kilometres wide, between the Orzyc river and Grudusk, German artillery pounded the Russian trenches for several hours, after which the infantry of three corps went in to the assault. By evening the Germans had taken the first line of Russian positions on both sides of the town. That day Hindenburg came to Gallwitz’s headquarters at Willenberg, on the Prussian side of the border. The German communiqué of the following day, however, modestly spoke only of “some local successes” at Przasnysz, south of Mława, south-west of Kolno and in the area of Kalvarija.

The other attacks began within a few days. On 14 July the Niemen Army crossed the Venta near Kuršėnai and began its march deep into Courland and Lithuania. On 16 July Mackensen’s troops began heavy fighting between the Vistula and the Bug and broke through the Russian lines south-west of Krasnystaw. On 17 July Woyrsch’s army broke through the Russian front west of the Vistula. The Russians fought stubborn delaying actions, but everywhere the front began to fall back. Three weeks later, on 5 August, German troops entered Warsaw. By the autumn the Russians had abandoned the whole Kingdom of Poland, and the retreat, accompanied by the destruction of property and the forced evacuation of the population known as bezhenstvo, ended Russian rule over central Poland, which had lasted since 1815.