End of the Lake Naroch offensive

The British chronology of the war records under 30 April 1916 the end of the Lake Naroch offensive, the first great Russian offensive since the Great Retreat of 1915. The sources, however, show no event on that day that would close the battle. The Russian offensive, launched on 18 March at the request of the French fighting at Verdun, had already petered out at the end of March. On 29 March the Chief of Staff to the Supreme Commander, General Mikhail Alekseyev, ordered it to be halted, and on 30 March (17 March in the Julian calendar) the commander of the Western Front, General Alexei Evert, ordered the armies to go over to the defensive. Russian and English-language studies therefore end the battle on 30 March. The chronology’s date may be a month out, or it may also include the German counter-attack at the end of April. If that is counted, the battle ended on 28 April, when the Germans took back from the Russians the last of their March gains.

The German counter-attack

At the beginning of April the front at Lake Naroch quietened down. The Russians held only a narrow strip of German trenches, taken on 21 March in the isthmus between Lakes Naroch and Vishnev. On 2 April General Vladimir Smirnov returned after illness to command the Second Army. On the morning of 28 April (15 April in the Julian calendar), the German Tenth Army, after a bombardment of several hours involving about 200 heavy guns, including gas shells, struck in the isthmus with the III Reserve Corps, reinforced by the 86th Infantry Division and the 80th Reserve Division. In a single blow it recovered all the ground lost in March.

According to a German communiqué, the Germans took 56 officers and 5,600 men prisoner that day, and captured 5 guns, 10 trench mortars and 28 machine guns. According to Russian studies, the prisoners included about 1,200 soldiers from newly arrived drafts. Hindenburg’s chief of staff, Erich Ludendorff, wrote in his memoirs that this was the first fight on the Eastern Front in which the Germans used the artillery methods developed in the west, and that “the result was good”. In the following weeks there was no further major fighting at Lake Naroch.

The balance

The two offensives, the Russian one in March and the German one in April, left the front almost exactly where it had stood before 18 March. In the March attacks the Russians lost, according to Russian figures, almost 80,000 killed, wounded and frostbitten, and according to German figures even more. The defeat undermined the self-confidence of Evert and of the commander of the Northern Front, General Alexei Kuropatkin. When, two weeks before the German counter-attack, on 14 April, Stavka deliberated on the plan for the summer, both doubted that a new offensive would succeed, and according to the account of Aleksei Brusilov, the new commander of the South-Western Front, he alone asked for the right to attack. It was his armies that in June broke through the Austro-Hungarian front, while Evert long delayed his own blow.