Second Battle of Kraśnik begins

On 1 July 1915 the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army of Archduke Joseph Ferdinand set off on a broad front northwards, between the Vistula and the Bystrzyca, towards Lublin. At Kraśnik it came up against the strongly fortified positions of the Russian Third Army. So began the Second Battle of Kraśnik, fought almost on the same ground as the first, in August 1914.

After the recapture of Lviv the Central Powers directed their main thrust northwards, between the Vistula and the Bug. Field Marshal August von Mackensen commanded the German Eleventh Army and the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army there. The objective was the railway from Ivangorod through Lublin to Chełm, which supplied the Russian armies in the Kingdom of Poland. During the night of 28–29 June the Russians abandoned the line of the Tanew, and the Archduke’s troops passed day and night through its marshy forests, along the same roads by which, eleven months earlier, Viktor Dankl’s army had marched on Kraśnik. Since most of the Eleventh Army had to cover the eastern flank towards the Bug, the weight of the advance to the north now fell on the Fourth Army. Mackensen ordered it to press forward quickly, its left flank along the Vistula and its right on Lublin.

The Fourth Army’s staff was optimistic. According to the Austrian official history, it expected to meet at most five to eight exhausted Russian divisions between the Wieprz and the Vistula, and believed that the enemy’s main forces were falling back to Lublin. In fact the Russian command had ordered the Third Army of General Leonid Lesh to stand on the long-prepared Urzędów–Kraśnik–Szczebrzeszyn position, behind the Wyżnica and the Pór (PL) rivers. Airmen had seen trenches and wire entanglements there several days earlier.

1 July was a sultry, hot day. The four corps of the Fourth Army, from the west the VIII, X, IX and XVII, threw back the Russian advance guards, but could not get across the Wyżnica valley, because heavy fire came from its northern slopes. Three companies of the X Corps broke into Kraśnik, but in the evening had to withdraw to the southern edge of the town. The IX Corps came up against the Russian positions on the hills east of the Bystrzyca (PL). On the right flank the Austro-Hungarian 11th Infantry Division helped the neighbouring German X Corps and after hard fighting crossed the Pór at Mokre Lipie. East of the Wieprz the divisions of the Eleventh Army met equally stiff resistance that day.

Even so, the Fourth Army’s staff still believed that it was dealing only with strong rearguards. The advance was to continue, and if the Russians did not give way, the Archduke intended to throw the reserve XIV Corps into the battle. The first decision had to wait until 3 July, when five divisions attacked the hills east of Kraśnik.