The counter-offensive in Eastern Galicia begins

At three in the morning on 19 July 1917 (6 July in the Julian calendar), hundreds of German and Austro-Hungarian guns opened fire on the positions of the Russian Eleventh Army between Zborów and the village of Zwyżeń, north-east of Złoczów. Seven hours later the German infantry went into the attack, largely divisions brought from the Western Front in the preceding weeks. Before evening it had broken through all the Russian lines and torn a gap 20 kilometres wide in the front. So began the counter-offensive which within ten days drove the Russians out of almost all of Eastern Galicia. The British chronology of the war gives 18 July as its start, but the Austrian official history, Russian works and the English-language literature agree in dating the blow to 19 July. From as early as 17 July the artillery of the German-Austrian South Army further south had begun a feint bombardment intended to mislead the Russians about the place of the attack.

An offensive that stalled

Three weeks earlier it had been the Russians who were attacking. On 1 July the offensive began for which the Minister of War, Alexander Kerensky, had been rousing the soldiers at mass meetings all spring. On the Eleventh Army’s sector the attack brought successes in the first days, above all the breakthrough at Zborów, but as early as 6 July new attacks broke down against fresh German divisions. In the south, beyond the Dniester, the Eighth Army of General Lavr Kornilov broke through the Austrian front and took Halicz and Kałusz, but there too the attack soon petered out. Orders to resume the offensive, issued in mid-July, were not carried out, because whole units refused to attack or to occupy new positions. The best soldiers, the volunteers of the shock battalions and the officers, had been killed or wounded in the first days. The rest listened ever more willingly to agitators calling for an end to the war. In Petrograd the July Days, armed demonstrations against the Provisional Government, had been going on since 16 July.

The Germans had been preparing a counter-stroke since the end of June. An order of Kaiser Wilhelm II of 27 June provided that, if the Russians attacked, the army group of Colonel-General Eduard von Böhm-Ermolli would go over to the offensive through Złoczów towards Tarnopol. Its execution was entrusted to the commander of the Złoczów sector, General of Infantry Arnold von Winckler. The date was postponed several times, first because of the crisis of the Austrian Third Army at Kałusz, which swallowed up some of the reinforcements, then because of downpours which from 12 July flooded the valleys of the Seret and the Strypa. On 14 July the Commander-in-Chief in the East, Field Marshal Prince Leopold of Bavaria, moved his headquarters from Brest to Złoczów.

Seven hours of fire

According to the Austrian official history, 600 guns and 180 heavy and medium mortars were deployed against the Russian positions. They fired gas shells first, to silence the Russian artillery, then high explosive, into the trenches and the rear areas. An hour before the main attack two regiments of the German group of General Karl Wilhelmi attacked the hills north of Zborów and drove the Russian XVII Corps off them. Where on 2 July the Russians and the Czechoslovak Rifle Brigade had celebrated victory, the Germans now had the upper hand.

At ten o’clock four divisions of General Hugo von Kathen’s XXIII Reserve Corps went into the attack: the Prussian 1st and 2nd Guards Infantry Divisions, the 6th Infantry Division and the Austro-Hungarian 33rd Infantry Division. The first Russian line fell within minutes, the second before noon. The Russian batteries soon fell silent and began to withdraw. The German 6th Division had crossed the Seret as early as 10.20 a.m. and taken the village of Harbuzów. The soldiers of the Russian XXV Corps, which had only taken over this sector in mid-July, fled towards Załoźce, carried along by a regiment of the 6th Grenadier Division which had mutinied and abandoned its positions. Only in the village of Zwyżeń did groups of Siberian riflemen put up a stubborn defence, until the Prussian Kaiser Franz Guard Grenadier Regiment and the Austro-Hungarian 19th Infantry Regiment broke in from two sides with bayonets and grenades.

In the afternoon the corps of General Albrecht von Berrer moved up behind the Guards, with orders to wheel south-east and roll up the Russian front. A Russian counter-attack from the south was easily repulsed. At about five o’clock Kathen ordered his divisions to pursue the retreating enemy. Despite a downpour that began in the late afternoon, the 1st Guards Division reached Załoźce in the evening, and the 2nd Guards Division and the Austrians halted on the Seret near Ratyszcze. That day, according to the Austrian official history, the Germans took 2,900 prisoners, including 83 officers and two regimental commanders, and 10 guns.

The rout begins

For a long time the Russian command did not understand what had happened. According to Russian works it at first regarded the blow as local, sent small forces against it and went on setting the troops offensive tasks. On 20 July the commander of the South-Western Front, General Aleksei Gutor, ordered a counter-attack along the whole line between the Seret and the Strypa. On the same day the commander of the Eleventh Army, General Ivan Erdeli, threw his reserve into the fight, but the soldiers refused to counter-attack, and whole corps left their trenches without fighting. The roads east, towards Tarnopol, filled with crowds of deserters, carts and baggage trains.

The defeat stemmed not from the enemy’s superiority but from the fact that the Russian infantry no longer wanted to fight. A few days later Kornilov, who had taken over the whole front, reported that the ratio of forces had been roughly one German to five Russians. The front, broken on 19 July at Złoczów, was to fall apart along its whole length from the Seret to the Carpathians.