Start of the Battle of Vilna

On 9 September 1915 the left wing of General Hermann von Eichhorn’s German 10th Army went over to the attack north of Vilna, between Vilkomir and Shirvinty. The blow fell on the junction of two Russian armies, covered mainly by cavalry. So began the Battle of Vilna, the last great German offensive on the Eastern Front in 1915. On the same day, further north, the Niemen Army set off for Dvinsk.

The Germans had been preparing this blow since the fall of Kovno in mid-August. For several weeks heavy fighting had gone on along the northern bank of the Viliya against General Yevgeny Radkevich’s Russian 10th Army, and neither side could gain the upper hand. General Erich Ludendorff, chief of staff to Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, still hoped for a great envelopment. The 10th Army was to outflank Vilna from the north, and the cavalry was to get behind the Russians and cut the railways leading to Molodechno, Polotsk and Minsk. Ludendorff recalled that the preparations dragged on endlessly, because the unfinished railway through Kovno had little capacity, the roads were bad and the troops tired. “At last, on 9 September, the attack began,” he wrote.

The Russian armies were being reorganised at the time. At the end of August those in the north were divided into two fronts. North of Vilna stood the 5th Army of General Pavel Plehve of the Northern Front, while Vilna was defended by the 10th Army of the Western Front, commanded from the beginning of September by General Alexei Evert. A few days earlier the Germans had taken Grodno, and on 5 September the Tsar had assumed supreme command of the army.

The main attack was led by General Johannes von Eben’s group, and beside it the divisions of General Oskar von Hutier. North of them General Otto von Garnier’s cavalry corps, with the 1st, 3rd and 9th Cavalry Divisions, moved off. The Russian cavalry detachments of Generals Nikolai Kaznakov and Mikhail Tyulin, which covered the junction of the armies, fell back in the first days of the attack, the first to the north-east, the second behind the Širvinta river. According to some studies, on the first day the Germans broke through the Russian positions at Shirvinty to a depth of about 20 kilometres. The Russian Guards Corps, defending north-west of Vilna, was threatened on its flank. The German communiqué of 10 September mentioned only fighting near Vilkomir and a few hundred prisoners.

Between the wings of the Russian 5th and 10th Armies a gap several dozen kilometres wide was opening. In the following days Garnier’s cavalry passed through it towards Sventsiany, and then turned onto the rear of the Russian 10th Army.