End of the Battle of Krasnystaw

On 18 July 1915 the three-day Battle of Krasnystaw came to an end. Field Marshal August von Mackensen’s German Eleventh Army, which on 16 July had attacked west of the Wieprz, already had the town in its hands and a bridgehead on the eastern bank of the river. It had not shattered the Russian front, but it had driven so deep into it that on the night of 18–19 July the Russian Third Army fell back to the next line of defence.

Krasnystaw itself had probably fallen the evening before. According to the Austrian official history, the Prussian Guard took it on 17 July, and a Russian Guards officer recalled how that day the Germans marched into the deserted town in columns, with a band at their head. The exhausted Russian 52nd Infantry Division, which no longer had artillery support, had withdrawn from it. Some studies, including Polish ones, give 18 July as the date of the town’s capture, when the whole of it was already in German hands. The Guard also took, on the eastern bank of the Wieprz, the village of Góry. From this bridgehead it threatened the rear of the Russian positions on the Wolica and Wojsławka rivers, which for two weeks had held up the German and Austrian advance.

On 18 July Mackensen shifted the weight of the attack to the eastern bank of the Wieprz. The 105th Infantry Division moved east from the bridgehead at Góry. The Russian command, however, threw its best reserves into the fight, the Guards Corps and II Siberian Corps. The Russian Guardsmen stopped the 105th Division on the hills south-east of Góry, and north of Krasnystaw, near Zadworze and Stężyca, they fought the Prussian Guard regiments all day. According to officers’ memoirs, the Izmailovsky Regiment repulsed more than a dozen attacks, and the Preobrazhensky counter-attacked and lost about 350 men. South of Krasnystaw the Austro-Hungarian VI Corps of General Arthur Arz von Straussenburg broke the Russian front near Gajowniki at 9 a.m. and took 3,500 prisoners, but on that day alone lost about 1,200 killed and 4,700 wounded. West of the Wieprz the German Guard and XXII Reserve Corps again pushed forward, towards Częstoborowice and Olszanka.

According to the Austrian official history, between 16 and 18 July the Germans took about 15,000 prisoners west of the Wieprz and drove a wedge into the Third Army’s front 32 kilometres wide and 12 kilometres deep. Russian studies put the army’s total losses at 25,000–30,000 men. The commander of the Third Army, General Leonid Lesh, no longer had the means to stop the enemy on the old positions. On the night of 18–19 July his troops broke contact with the Germans and fell back to previously prepared trenches along the Siennica stream, through Fajsławice and Chmiel, not far from the Lublin – Chełm railway. With them the neighbouring Thirteenth Army, which for four days had repulsed the attack of the Bug Army, left its positions near Hrubieszów and Grabowiec. The Russian Guardsmen, who were getting ready to counter-attack, received the order to retreat with disbelief.

The battle did not bring Mackensen the decision he had hoped for, because the Russians withdrew in good order. It did, however, have far-reaching consequences. The very next day, 19 July, at a conference in Siedlce, the commander-in-chief, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich, allowed the commander of the North-Western Front, General Mikhail Alekseyev, to withdraw the armies from the Vistula. It was the decision to give up Warsaw and Ivangorod.