First siege of Przemyśl begins

On 24 September 1914, according to the British chronology of the war, Russian troops cut off the fortress of Przemyśl from the Austro-Hungarian armies retreating westwards. The first siege of one of the largest fortresses in Europe began. Within its walls were more than 120,000 soldiers and over ten thousand civilians. Przemyśl became a symbol of the war in Galicia, and for the next six months the whole Habsburg monarchy followed its fate.

When did the siege begin?

The dates given in the literature differ by more than a week, because the encirclement of the fortress was a process spread over several days. The first Russian cavalry patrols appeared below the forts on 16–17 September, during the great Austro-Hungarian retreat behind the San. According to Polish studies, the first shot of the siege was fired on 17 September from the “Popowice” fort at a Russian patrol, and this date is usually taken as the beginning of the siege. Over the following days Russian divisions approached the fortress from the north and east, while the last units of the Austro-Hungarian field army withdrew west. The British chronology records Przemyśl being cut off on 24 September, and the ring around the fortress closed completely around 26 September. From that day the garrison no longer had any land connection with the rest of the army.

The fortress on the San

Przemyśl, an old town on the San, lay on the main road and railway line linking Kraków with Lviv. The Austrians began fortifying it in the 1850s, and the main expansion was carried out from the 1870s and 1880s. Two rings of fortifications were built. The outer one was some 45 kilometres in circumference and consisted of 17 main forts and many smaller forts, batteries and shelters. The inner ring surrounded the town itself. According to various tallies there were some forty forts in the two rings combined.

It was, however, a largely outdated fortress. Most of the forts had been built in the 19th century of brick and stone, with the artillery of that time in mind. Before the war there was no money for modernisation, so in the summer of 1914 soldiers and thousands of labourers hastily dug trenches, put up barbed-wire entanglements and built new artillery positions between the forts. Forests were cut down and whole villages that obstructed the field of fire were demolished. Their inhabitants had to leave their homes.

The garrison

The commandant of the fortress was General Hermann Kusmanek von Burgneustädten. At the beginning of the siege his garrison numbered, according to various sources, from some 120,000 to over 130,000 men. Together with the soldiers, thousands of horses, food stocks and hundreds of guns, many of them obsolete, were encircled.

It was an army of many nations. The strongest unit was the Hungarian 23rd Honvéd Infantry Division (PL), and according to Polish estimates there were between 35,000 and 40,000 Hungarians in the fortress. Most of the garrison, however, consisted of older reservists of the home guard (Landsturm), men aged around 37–42, poorly armed and trained. Among them were Austrians, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians and others, and many Poles and Ukrainians served in the regiments from Galicia. Orders of the day had to be issued in several languages, and the fortress newspaper appeared in Polish, German and Hungarian editions. The command did not trust some of the Slav soldiers, especially the Ukrainians, who were suspected of pro-Russian sympathies.

A town under siege

Before the war Przemyśl had several tens of thousands of inhabitants: Poles, Jews and Ukrainians. The authorities ordered the evacuation of those who had no food stocks, but many civilians stayed in the town. Sources state that between some 18,000 and 30,000 civilians were encircled, including refugees from the surrounding villages. For them the siege meant high prices, shortages, requisitions and the constant presence of the army. The inhabitants, especially Jews and Ukrainians, also fell victim to suspicions of espionage and to violence from soldiers.

The Russians below the forts

The fortress was besieged by the Russian Third Army of General Radko Dimitriev, a Bulgarian in Russian service. Several divisions took up position directly before Przemyśl, six according to English-language studies. Their commander soon became General Dmitry Shcherbachev. The main forces of the Third Army moved on west in pursuit of the Austrians. The Russians, however, had no heavy siege artillery. They counted on the fortress, defended by older reservists, surrendering quickly or falling to a sudden assault.

Dimitriev wanted to take Przemyśl before the Central Powers went over to a counter-offensive. On 4 October he sent an envoy to the fortress with a summons to surrender, and after the refusal he ordered an assault. From 5 October Russian artillery shelled the forts, and at dawn on 7 October the infantry went into the attack, most strongly against the forts in the Siedliska area to the south-east. Until 8 October the Russians also attacked the northern forts. All the attacks broke down on the entanglements and under the defenders’ fire. Russian losses are estimated very differently: in Polish studies usually at some 10,000 killed, wounded and taken prisoner, in some others at as many as 40,000. The garrison lost many times fewer.

Relief and the second siege

Meanwhile, at the turn of September and October, the Central Powers’ counter-offensive began. The Germans struck from Upper Silesia through Congress Poland towards the Vistula, and the Austro-Hungarian armies moved east from the Dunajec. The Russians broke off the siege and withdrew behind the San. On 9 October the first cavalry units of the Austro-Hungarian Third Army reached the fortress, and its main forces arrived over the following days. The first siege thus lasted several weeks.

The relief did not last long. The fortress could not be fully resupplied in that time, and some of its stocks were used up by the field troops passing through it. When the counter-offensive collapsed, the Austrians fell back again, and at the beginning of November the Russians surrounded Przemyśl once more. The second siege lasted more than four months. In the winter the garrison starved, and the attempts at relief in the Carpathians cost the Austro-Hungarian Army hundreds of thousands of men. On 22 March 1915, after a failed attempt to break out of the encirclement, Kusmanek blew up the forts, bridges and depots and surrendered the fortress. Some 117,000–120,000 soldiers went into Russian captivity, including several generals and thousands of officers. It was one of the largest capitulations of the war.

Significance

The first siege was a success for Austria-Hungary. For several weeks the fortress tied down considerable Russian forces and barred their way west, which gave the Habsburg armies shattered in Galicia time to rest and receive replacements. Repulsing the assault raised morale in the monarchy after a series of defeats. Przemyśl, however, also became a trap. The desperate attempts to save it over the following months exhausted the Austro-Hungarian Army, and its fall in March 1915 was a heavy blow to the monarchy. The Russians held the town only until 3 June 1915, when, after the breakthrough at Gorlice, German and Austro-Hungarian troops recaptured it.