The San in the First World War

The San, a Carpathian tributary of the Vistula flowing through Austrian Galicia, was one of the main front lines in the east in 1914–1915. On it lay the fortress of Przemyśl, which was to defend the crossings, and Jarosław. In September 1914 the Austro-Hungarian armies fell back behind the river, in the autumn they fought for the crossings for several weeks, and in November they again gave up its line to the Russians. In May 1915 the Germans and Austrians crossed the San, and soon afterwards they retook Przemyśl and marched on Lviv.

A river of fortresses

The San rises in the Carpathians and flows into the Vistula. From 1772 to 1918 the lands along the San belonged to the Habsburg monarchy. Przemyśl and Jarosław lie on the river. In the defence system of Galicia both towns were to guard the crossings: Przemyśl as a great fortress, Jarosław, about 30 kilometres to the north, as a fortified bridgehead with a large garrison. Ukrainians regarded the San as the western boundary of their ethnic land.

Retreat and the fight for the crossings (1914)

On the evening of 11 September 1914, after the defeat in the Battle of Galicia, the chief of staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf ordered a retreat behind the San. The exhausted armies crossed the river in mid-September, in rain and mud, but could not hold its line and fell back further, behind the Dunajec. On 21 September they left the bridgehead at Jarosław, the last on the eastern bank. Przemyśl, with a garrison of over 100,000, was left behind, and General Radko Dimitriev’s Russian Third Army shut it in the first siege.

In October the Austro-Hungarian counter-offensive came back to the river. The Russians withdrew from Przemyśl to the eastern bank of the San, destroying the bridges behind them, and on 9 October the relief reached the fortress. On the San the advance stalled. On the lower course a battle for the crossings at Rudnik and Nisko went on from 14 October. At Rzuchów the Austro-Hungarian XIV Corps won a bridgehead, but after two days had to withdraw, losing over a thousand men. South of Przemyśl the Battle of Chyrów was being fought at the same time. According to an exhibition of the museum in Stalowa Wola, Ulanów, Rudnik, Nisko and Rozwadów were practically wiped off the face of the earth in this fighting.

At the beginning of November the Austro-Hungarian armies withdrew again, and on 3 November the Russians returned to Jarosław and again surrounded Przemyśl. The second siege lasted until March. On the morning of 22 March 1915 sappers blew up the forts, the depots and the bridges over the San, and the garrison surrendered.

The crossings of May 1915

After the breakthrough at Gorlice the Russians fell back behind the San in mid-May 1915. The supreme command ordered the line of the San and the Dniester to be held at all costs, and strong bridgeheads remained on the western bank at Jarosław, Radymno and Sieniawa. Jarosław fell after a two-day assault, and on 16 May the German 11th Army began crossing the river on pontoons. According to German accounts, on 17 May Emperor Wilhelm II watched the attack from a hill above the town. Russian counter-attacks failed to push the Germans and Austrians off their bridgeheads.

On 24 May the attack on Radymno and Przemyśl began, and Russians fleeing to the river came under fire from the other bank; hundreds of them drowned. In the night of 26 to 27 May a Russian counter-attack at Sieniawa drove the Austrians back across the San, but did not change the course of the campaign. In the night before 3 June the Russians abandoned Przemyśl and blew up the bridges over the San, and at dawn the Germans entered the town. On 12 June the troops of August von Mackensen crossed the San and the Lubaczówka at Sieniawa, and ten days later the Central Powers were already in Lviv.

After the front

The front moved east, leaving ruined towns and war cemeteries along the San. According to local historians, about 6,000 fallen soldiers were buried in Jarosław and its surroundings alone. The river returned to politics in 1918. In October the Ukrainian National Council in Lviv proclaimed a Ukrainian state in Eastern Galicia reaching as far as the San, and when the fighting for Lviv broke out in November, a Polish detachment from Kraków drove the Ukrainians out of Przemyśl on 11–12 November and seized the bridge over the San. The relief force that decided the Defence of Lviv went this way.