Start of the Battle of Tarnopol

On 7 September 1915 the Russian forces in Eastern Galicia, which for several weeks had done nothing but retreat, went over to the counter-offensive. From fortified bridgeheads on the western bank of the Seret river, at Tarnopol and Trembowla, the corps of General Dmitry Shcherbachev’s 11th Army and of the right wing of General Platon Lechitsky’s 9th Army attacked. They had made the first breach as early as the afternoon of 6 September, which is why the Austrian official history counts the battle from that day. The British chronology of the war and Russian studies begin it on 7 September, when the attack extended to the whole front from Tarnopol to Budzanów.

Two plans for the same day

At the end of August Austria-Hungary had begun an offensive in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia that was meant to deal the Russians a final blow. The Austro-Hungarian armies broke through the Russian defences on the Złota Lipa, and on 2 September General Felix von Bothmer’s German-Austrian South Army crossed the Strypa and reached the Seret. There the Russians stood firm. Bothmer planned that on the morning of 7 September the German 3rd Guards Infantry Division and 48th Reserve Division, together with Colonel Bolzano’s Austro-Hungarian brigade, would break through the front south of Tarnopol. The commander of the Russian South-Western Front, General Nikolai Ivanov, set his own attack for the same day. With short thrusts from the bridgeheads he wanted to draw enemy forces away from General Aleksei Brusilov’s 8th Army, which was fighting hard in Volhynia.

The Russians chose the weakest sector of the front. Between Mikulińce and Trembowla stood the Austro-Hungarian corps of General Hofmann, made up largely of Landsturm units. On the afternoon of 6 September the Russian XI Corps, preceded by cavalry, broke into the shallow trenches of his 55th Infantry Division and held the ground it had taken.

The rout of Bolzano’s brigade

During the night units of the Russian XXII Corps passed through the breach. At dawn on 7 September they attacked Bolzano’s brigade, which was just getting ready to attack, in the flank and rear. According to the Austrian official history, Infantry Regiments No. 81 and 88 were scattered and fled as far as beyond the village of Nastasów, and the Russians took many prisoners and captured eight German guns that had been placed just behind the front line for the planned attack. Bothmer was saved from disaster by two regiments of the German Guard. They struck the Russians from the north, stopped them and recovered some of the guns. The Russians, for their part, did not pursue the enemy very energetically.

An attack by the Russian XVIII Corps from the Tarnopol bridgehead was beaten off by the Germans and Austrians. Further south things went much worse for them. The 55th Division, broken through in several places, fell back in the afternoon to the hills above the Strypa near Burkanów, and the Austro-Hungarian 131st Infantry Brigade was cut off from the rest of the corps and fought its way westwards through the cavalry units surrounding it. In the evening the Russians also drove the 36th Infantry Division of the Austro-Hungarian 7th Army back from the Seret at Budzanów. The Central Powers’ only success that day came from an attack by General Brudermann’s cavalry on the lower Seret, which yielded more than 3,700 prisoners. But even it had to return to its starting positions in the evening.

Good news for the Tsar

The attack from Tarnopol and Trembowla was the first clear Russian success for many months. It came two days after Nicholas II took supreme command. Russian sources speak of more than 8,000 prisoners taken on 7 September. The next day the Tsar wrote joyfully to his wife about a telegram from Ivanov according to which two German divisions had lost more than 150 officers and 7,000 men taken prisoner, as well as 30 guns. These figures were probably inflated, but after the defeats of the summer they were received with relief in Russia. For Bothmer the battle was only beginning. Instead of breaking through the front on the Seret, he had to spend the following days defending himself against Russian attacks between the Seret and the Strypa.