Winter Battle of Masuria begins

The British chronology of the war gives 4 February 1915 as the start of the Winter Battle of Masuria, also called the Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes. Over the next two weeks two German armies drove General Faddei Sievers’s Russian 10th Army, which since the autumn of 1914 had held the eastern edge of the province, out of East Prussia.

The date

Most accounts take the battle to have begun on 7 February, when the German 8th Army went over to the attack. The 10th Army moved on 8 February, according to some sources only a day later. On 4 February no major fighting took place in Masuria. The German corps were then completing their concentration in their starting positions, making use of the dense East Prussian railway network, and the Russians still did not know what was coming. The date in the British chronology may therefore refer to the final preparations or result from a mistake. Russian accounts give the start of the battle according to the Julian calendar: 25 January.

Preparations

At the turn of 1914 and 1915 the Russians were planning another offensive into East Prussia, to be carried out by the 10th Army and the 12th Army then forming on the Narew. The Germans decided to forestall them. Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and his chief of staff Erich Ludendorff obtained four new corps from the Supreme Army Command, although the Chief of the General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, would have preferred to use them in the west. Three of them formed the new 10th Army of General Hermann von Eichhorn, deployed in the north, between Gumbinnen and the Niemen. The fourth reinforced General Otto von Below’s 8th Army, which held the line of the Masurian Lakes. Together the two armies numbered about 250,000 men.

Ludendorff wanted to repeat the Tannenberg manoeuvre on a larger scale. The 8th Army was to envelop the Russian left wing from the south, and the 10th Army the right wing from the north. The pincers were to close in the area of Augustów, cutting off Sievers’s army’s line of retreat. To draw the Russian reserves elsewhere, on 31 January the German 9th Army attacked on the Rawka, in the Battle of Bolimów, using tear-gas shells for the first time.

An attack in a snowstorm

At the beginning of February winter returned. On 7 February, in a heavy snowstorm, General Karl Litzmann’s corps of the 8th Army attacked from the area of Johannisburg (Pisz) towards Lyck (Ełk). A day or two later Eichhorn’s 10th Army struck in the north, heading for Wirballen and Kalvarija. The Russians, busy preparing their own offensive, were taken completely by surprise. Their trenches were shallow and poorly fortified, and for a long time their command did not understand that it was facing a major operation rather than local attacks. The infantry of both sides waded through snowdrifts, and the heavy guns and supply trains got stuck on snowbound roads.

The fighting took place on land that today mostly belongs to Poland: around Pisz, Ełk, Rajgród, Suwałki and Augustów. For the inhabitants of the Masurian towns and villages, under Russian occupation since the autumn of 1914 or just behind the front line, the German attack meant the end of the Russian presence in East Prussia.