Germans take Pinsk

On 16 September 1915 a German war communiqué announced that the town of Pinsk was in German hands. Halfway from Janów to Pinsk the Russians had tried once more to halt the pursuit, but their positions were broken. The Germans took six officers and 746 men prisoner and captured three machine guns. The town was taken by units of General Alexander von Linsingen’s Army of the Bug, operating in Field Marshal August von Mackensen’s army group. Many works, including histories of the town, give 15 September as the day the Germans entered. The Austro-Hungarian official history gives 16 September, and American intelligence, which after the war described the histories of the German divisions, noted that the 107th Infantry Division entered Pinsk precisely on 16 September.

Pinsk lay on the Pina river, in the heart of Polesia, and was the largest town of this land of marshes, forests and rivers. According to the 1897 census about 28,000 people lived there, nearly three quarters of them Jews. It was one of the most Jewish towns in the whole empire. The town lived from river trade: waterways ran along the Pina and the Pripet and through a system of canals to the Dnieper, the Niemen and the Bug. Before the Germans arrived the Russian authorities left the town.

Pinsk was the next stage of the pursuit that had begun after the fall of Brest-Litovsk. On 29 August the Army of the Bug captured Kobryn, and on 6 September it took the fortified line at Drohiczyn, on which the Russian Third Army had made a stand. Its commander, General Leonid Lesh, then barred the Germans’ way on the isthmus between the marshes on both sides of Janów, but this position did not hold either. After the loss of Pinsk the Russians withdrew behind the Yaselda and the Ogiński Canal, deep into the marshes along the Pripet. On 17 September a German communiqué reported that it was clearing the marshland north of the town of the enemy.

The capture of Pinsk also had consequences for Germany’s ally. South of Polesia the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army, which had been advancing on Rovno, was driven back by the Russians in these days and suffered heavy losses. The chief of the Austro-Hungarian general staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, concluded that Polesia, cleared by the Germans, made it possible to strike the Russians in the flank. He asked the chief of the German general staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, to send forces of the Army of the Bug south. Falkenhayn agreed to send two divisions, but on condition that the German reinforcements, the cavalry in Polesia and the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army itself were placed under the command of a German general, namely Linsingen.

At Pinsk the front came to a standstill for a long time. In the autumn of 1915 the Russian and German troops dug in among the marshes just east of the town, and the German divisions remained in the sector on the Ogiński Canal and the Yaselda for more than two years. Pinsk found itself behind the front, under a German occupation that lasted until the end of the war.