Germans take Grodno

During the night of 2–3 September 1915 units of the German Eighth Army of General Friedrich von Scholtz crossed the Niemen and, after fighting for individual houses, took Grodno. The German headquarters communiqué of 3 September reported that assault troops, “thanks to swift action”, had crossed the river and captured the town, taking 400 prisoners. During the day fighting continued for the forts on the right bank of the Niemen, and during the night the Russians withdrew eastwards. The next communiqué, of 4 September, announced that the fortress with all its forts was in German hands. This is why the Austro-Hungarian official history gives 4 September as the date of the capture of Grodno, while Russian sources give 21 August in the Julian calendar, that is 3 September.

A fortress without guns

Grodno, a provincial capital on the Niemen, had almost 47,000 inhabitants according to the 1897 census. Almost half were Jews, and the rest mainly Poles, Russians and Belarusians. A modern fortress, with a ring of forts on both sides of the river, had begun to be built a few years before the war, but according to Belarusian researchers of its history not a single fort had been even half finished by 1915. Grodno nevertheless played an important role in the winter, when the Russian troops based on it halted the Germans after the battle in Masuria. In the summer it was reinforced with dozens of heavy guns, including howitzers bought in Japan.

At the beginning of the summer Grodno was still meant to be one of the pillars of the Kovno–Grodno–Brest line on which the Russians intended to stand. After the fall of Kovno the Russian command changed its mind. On 20 August a telephone message from the front’s Commander-in-Chief, General Mikhail Alekseyev, stripped the town of its status as a fortress. From then on it was merely a fortified section of the field army’s position, to be abandoned together with it. The evacuation of stores and artillery began, and some of the forts on the right bank were blown up even before the battle. Of several hundred guns, a dozen or so fortress guns and ten Japanese howitzers were left. The defence was taken over by field troops, above all the I Army Corps, two militia (opolchenie) brigades and the former garrison of Osowiec, together about 22,000 men according to Russian estimates. They were commanded by the fortress commandant, General of Infantry Mikhail Kaygorodov.

The assault on the forts

Scholtz assigned the 1st and 11th Landwehr Divisions and the 75th Reserve Division to the attack, supported by 35 batteries. The heaviest German guns were of 210 mm calibre. On 31 August the Germans drove the Russians from their forward positions west of the town, and on 1 September they attacked the forts on the left bank of the Niemen. The hardest fighting was for Fort IV, whose sector was defended chiefly by the 95th Krasnoyarsk Infantry Regiment. In the evening, after a day-long bombardment, the German Landwehr broke onto the ramparts. According to the Belarusian historian Dmitry Lutik, a military engineer then ordered the sappers to blow up the fort, but the soldiers took the fuses from them, because about 150 wounded were lying in the underground gallery. The German communiqué of 2 September reported that “North German Landwehr” had taken 500 prisoners in Fort IV and that Baden troops had captured the neighbouring work with 150 defenders. The 95th Regiment alone lost about a thousand men, two thirds of its strength.

On the evening of 1 September Kaygorodov gathered his commanders and decided to give up the left bank. During the night the Russians blew up the remaining forts on that side of the river and withdrew into the town. The next day the Germans prepared to cross, and at night they crossed the Niemen within the town limits. On 3 September the last fighting was for the forts on the right bank. When their defenders ran out of ammunition, the sappers blew up the works and the infantry withdrew. The Russians also destroyed the bridges over the Niemen. According to the German communiqué of 4 September, 2,700 soldiers were taken prisoner and six heavy guns captured in and around Grodno.

After the fall

Immediately after the battle Kaygorodov was summoned to army headquarters at Lida, and later an inquiry was opened into the surrender of the fortress. He was accused of failing to reinforce the garrison of Fort IV in time and of not defending himself stubbornly enough, so that Grodno fell a day earlier than the situation of the retreating armies required. The general defended himself by saying that he had asked front headquarters to leave several dozen guns in the fortress, but his request had been refused and almost all the artillery had been taken away.

After Kovno, Brest-Litovsk and Białystok, the Russians had now lost the last fortified town of the old line of defence on the Niemen. The front moved further east, towards Vilna and Lida, and Grodno came under a German occupation that lasted until the end of the war.