Germans capture Kovno

On 17 August 1915 troops of the German 10th Army took Kovno, the strongest Russian fortress on the Niemen. The day before, the corps of General Karl Litzmann had broken through the line of the oldest forts on the western bank of the river. During the night the Russian garrison began to leave the fortress, and its commandant, General Vladimir Grigoriev, drove off to the rear. In the course of the day the Germans took the rest of the defences on the western bank, crossed the Niemen and entered the city. In the evening the news of the fall of Kovno went round the world. The last Russian fort fell the next day.

The night of flight

From 8 August heavy German artillery, including 42 cm mortars, had been shelling the forts on the south-western sector of the fortress, between the Niemen and the Jesia. On 16 August, after a hurricane bombardment, Litzmann’s infantry broke into Fort II and rolled up the whole line of forts between the two rivers. According to Russian figures the garrison of this sector lost three quarters of its men.

On the night of 16–17 August the remnants of the defenders of the western bank crossed the Niemen, and the soldiers from neighbouring sectors, fearing encirclement, began to abandon the fortifications. The Russians blew up the bridges over the river, including the great railway bridge. At about 4 a.m. Grigoriev telegraphed to the headquarters of the 10th Army that the garrison had left the fortress and was demoralised. The army commander, General Yevgeny Radkevich, reported a few hours later to General Mikhail Alekseyev that the garrison was “fleeing in complete disorder”, and that the commandant had been found at about 7 a.m. near Rumšiškės, some 20 kilometres east of the city. Already during the night, unable to get in touch with him, the army staff had handed command of the remnants of the defence to General Nikolai Lopushansky.

The Germans on the Niemen

Litzmann gave the Russians no time. His artillery shelled the inner rampart on the western bank and, once it had been taken, also the units that had fallen back to the eastern bank. Under fire, first small detachments and then larger forces crossed the river, and engineers built two bridges in place of the destroyed ones. In the course of the day the forts of the northern front fell, attacked also from the north, and then the eastern forts. According to Ludendorff the city survived apart from the factories, which burned down, but most of the inhabitants had fled. The Germans rounded up hundreds of recruits there, who claimed that at the last moment about 15,000 unarmed replacement soldiers had fled from Kovno.

The Russian command did not at once accept the loss. Radkevich, and after midnight Alekseyev as well, ordered a counter-attack to retake the fortress. The night attacks failed, and on 18 August the Germans took the last fort still holding out, Fort V. The German communiqué of 18 August announced that the fortress “with all its forts and countless matériel, including well over 400 guns” was in German hands. Later the Germans spoke of more than 20,000 prisoners and more than 600 guns, and the final tallies of about 1,300 guns.

Echoes

Emperor Wilhelm II telegraphed his congratulations to Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg on the capture of the “first and strongest bulwark” of Russia’s inner line of defence. The commander of the 10th Army, General Hermann von Eichhorn, received the Pour le Mérite, and Litzmann the oak leaves to it. The fall of Kovno opened the way for the Germans to Vilna, deep into the Russian front, at a time when the Russian armies, after the loss of Warsaw, were still retreating east. On the same day, near Warsaw, the Germans were taking more forts of the fortress of Novogeorgievsk.

Grigoriev was arrested and brought before a court martial, which in the autumn sentenced him to 15 years’ penal servitude.