The Eastern, Anatolian, and Italian Fronts, 1916

The Military History of the Great War, 1916

“On September 24th, 1943, I took the southern line of the great European railway out from Berlin to my hometown of Lviv. It had been some time; I could last recall being in the city in the summer of ‘21, when everyone was still astir in some sense or another. It struck me that there was something peculiarly hallucinatory about this journey. I did not remember what possessed me to begin it, yet as the Polish country-side gave way invisibly to the Ukrainian one, I could not help but feel that there was an inexorable logic to the whole matter.

This reminded me of an incident that occurred some time ago in the area of Tarnopol, when I was participating in that great movement known as the June Offensive. The Russians had broken through the lines, and the entire front was collapsing. It gave one the impression that the world was a sort of fragile sphere, which having been dropped now burst asunder, emitting a rancorous odor I remember to this day. Thinking this at the time gave me a strange comfort, not so much in the way that a man can feel comfort when being resigned to his fate, but in an altogether different manner which I still cannot wholly express.

The Train to Lviv took stops at Breslau, Krakow, Dresden, and Przemysl, among other, more minor destinations. The German stations replicated each other in a manner familiar to me, and hardly aroused much provocation, but the freshly built, modern Polish and Soviet stations cast everything around them in a cruel and startling light. The grey, ramshackle Galician cities which loomed in the background possessed a mixture of unalterable vibrancy and terrible melancholy, which is perhaps why I swore on that day that I could see new, inner variations of the gray-on-gray of the city walls which have yet to reveal themselves again…”

-Excerpt from W.G. Sebald, To Return to Your Side (Berlin: Minerva Publishing Cooperative, 1972).

The Eastern Front

The defeat inflicted on Russia by the joint Austrian-German-Bulgarian Polish offensive allowed German soldiers to advance to the outskirts of Minsk and Riga by the beginning of 1916. In Galicia, the front-lines had changed less drastically: in fact, Russian forces still held a slice of Austrian territory just east of the city of Tarnopol. Despite the man-power losses of 1915, Russia’s armament industry improved markedly in 1916, and imports of American weapons, financed by British loans, allowed for new armies to be raised and equipped.

The Entente plan for 1916 called for a series of concentric offensives in France, Italy, and Russia to paralyze the Central Powers and prevent reserves from being transferred from front to front. Although many in Russia called for a direct assault in the Baltic area to retake lost territories, prior difficulties in fighting against the German Army convinced the General Staff that Galicia should be the primary target. They were helped by fighting on the Italian Front, which forced Austria to commit around half of their reserves to Trentino.

In command of the main Russian forces was General Aleksei Brusilov, who had conducted several brilliant rearguard maneuvers against advancing German divisions during the Polish offensive. Brusilov was able to assemble four armies with 37 infantry divisions and 13 cavalry divisions. Opposite him were 43 Austro-Hungarian infantry divisions and 11 cavalry divisions in three defensive lines. Six German divisions were also in the area, and Austria had a reserve force of around 11 divisions dispersed through the Empire.

The Russian general staff were skeptical about beginning an offensive in 1916. Brusilov himself believed that it could succeed, but the numerical inferiority of the Russian forces and worries about a German counter-offensive in the north led Brusilov to develop a more cautious plan. He assigned the most experienced divisions to Alexey Kaledin’s Eighth Army, which was to attack south of Tarnopol with the aim of eventually taking Stanislau. Sakharov’s 11th would proceed straight to the city of Lviv, but it was not expected to be capable of taking the city until Kaledin seized Stanislau and then wheeled north. Further south, Lechitsky’s substantially smaller 9th army would take Czernovitz and pin the remainder of the Austrians in the south against the Carpathian mountains. At the northern flank of the advance, Scherbachev’s army would advance from Dubno to Lutsk and then move southeast, opting to bypass the logistical hub of Kowel in favor of simply cutting off its ability to supply Lviv, which would make re-supply and coordination more difficult between the Baltic and Galician fronts. At some point, Evert’s Western Army Group, based in Smolensk, was supposed to make a supporting attack against German forces in Pinsk in order to tie up German reserves in the north.

The Russian plan of attack. Please note that the red line ought to stretch east of Tarnopol, and that the blurry blue box in the upper lefthand corner of this image should, if possible, be ignored. ​

Brusilov’s Southwestern Army Group began attacking across the entire front on June 7th. The first breakthrough came in the south, against the Seventh Austrian-Hungarian Army. Kaledin’s forces broke through Austria-Hungarian lines in a frontal attack north of the Dniester river. Austrian reserves were not directed to the area because of threats of break-throughs on other fronts, allowing for a continued advance and the capture of around 65,000 Austrian troops on June 12th. On the 14th, the city of Czernowitz fell, and Lechitsky’s army split up, with half proceeding toward the Carpathian foothills and the other half advancing in a Northwestestern direction, aiming to link up with Kaledin’s forces for an eventual assault on Stanislau. Further north, several days of vicious battles around Tarnopol had finally seen the city fall to the Russians, but the attack on Lutsk had been foiled by the presence of German reserves.

In the south, thirty-thousand additional Austrian troops were captured, but a number were able to successfully retreat behind the cover of the Carpathian Mountains. On June 26th, elements of both Kaledin and Letchitsky’s armies reached Stanislau, but did not have the forces necessary to assault the city head-on after Austrian reserves were transferred to the area. In the middle of the front, Sakhorov’s 11th army was halted West of Tarnopol on June 29th in a series of bloody battles that saw several Austrian and Russian divisions decimated by artillery fire.

On July 2nd, the Fourth Austrian Army began attacking the city of Dubno, aided by German reserves moved from the north. Although they were not able to break through the Russian lines, the pressure placed on the city threatened Sakharov’s exhausted troops to the south. Brusilov frustratedly pressed for Evert to begin his counter-attack in the north to take pressure off the South-western front: it finally began on July 8th. For around a week, Russian forces haphazardly attacked German lines, losing 76,000 soldiers and advancing only around 2.5 km. Recognizing that it was Brusilov’s command which had offered the Russian Army its first real successes of the war, several additional armies were transferred to the Southwestern front, giving Brusilov renewed offensive capabilities. In response, Germany moved a half-dozen additional reserves to Galicia.

After reinforcing Dubno and Sakharov’s army in the centre, Brusilov ordered an advance toward Brody. This successfully inflicted devastating casualties on several Austrian divisions and captured another 35,000 Austrian troops, but was unable to take the city proper after counter-offensives out of Lutsk forced Sakharov to half the advance. In the south, several assaults on Stanislau were repulsed.

The Austrian Army, bruised but not beaten, began preparing for an August counter-offensive. On August 13th, with the aid of German troops that had been freed up from the end of the Battle of Lille, twelve Austrian Divisions and seven German ones attacked Sakharov’s 11th army, breaking through the lines and retaking Tarnopol within five days. The advance toward Proskurov rendered the position of Russian troops to the south and north untenable. Several attacks on the southern flank of the Austro-German advance by Kaledin’s Army were repulsed, and by August 24th, the initial gains of the June Offensive had been almost completely reversed.

Tactically, the June Offensive constituted a defeat for Russia, which lost around 535,000 troops (including prisoners) without gaining any of its objectives. Neither the Austrian nor the German army were shattered by the offensive, and though the Russian Army had a greater capacity to replenish reserves than the Austrian one, the decisive blow that the offensive dealt to Russian morale likely contributed to the revolutionary events of 1917.

Strategically, it is less clear that the offensive was a total failure. Although the Austrian Army was not destroyed, much of its offensive capacity was depleted by the loss of officers and experienced, front-line soldiers. The Austrians lost only a slightly smaller number of casualties than the Russians’, and would have a difficult time recovering from the blow. More importantly, perhaps, the offensive forced the Germans to commit a number of reserves and troops which were slated to stay in the west, which weakened Falkenhayn’s Verdun offensive later that year. It also contributed to the decision of Austrian commanders to halt their on-going assault in Italy.

The offensive had long consequences. It hastened the decline of both the Austrian and Russian armies, making each nation more dependent on the more “senior” coalition members, and revealed widespread demoralization among the troops in each force, many of whom deserted in the face of enemy offensives. In Russia proper, it contributed to a growing mood of national despair, and in Germany, a growing suspicion that its coalition partner could not hold out against the Russians without German support, which led later in the year to the imposition of a unified structure of command on Austria.

In November a further joint Bulgarian-German-Austrian offensive successfully seized Sumy and Rowno before running into logistical constraints. With large swathes of Western Ukraine now occupied by the Central Powers, a belief in German High Command soon formed that one or two more “heavy blows” against Russia would force it decisively from the war. In fact, a not insignificant number of Russians were coming to believe that the war could simply not be won. In the beginning of 1917, secret peace talks would finally begin between the Russian and German governments.

The Anatolian Front

The two fronts in Turkey had remained relatively quiet since the battle of the Sinai and the British capture of Palestine and Lebanon. After defeats in Poland, the Russian high command diverted increasing amounts of troops from the Anatolian front, robbing the armies there of their capacity for offensive action. In 1916, the British shifted away from an eastern strategy, and assumed a purely defensive posture in the Middle East. The strategic initiative thus fell to the Ottoman Empire.

The Russian incursion into Anatolia led to the occupation of Erzerum and a slice of land in Trebizond. The decision to conduct significant offensive operations against the Black Sea had protected one flank of the Russian Army and also made re-supply easier, but also made the position as a whole less defensible. In July 1916, a Turkish offensive in the area meant to reclaim Anatolian lands and divert Russian forces from the June Offensive successfully forced Russian forces to retreat from Trebizond. A further offensive into Erzerum proper later in August did not land any decisive defeats on the Russian forces, but did convince them to retreat from western Armenia in the hopes of finding a more defensible position.

The Italian Front

The Italian entry into the war in mid-1915 did not produce the permanent shift in the European balance of power which the Entente hoped for. Instead, after several failed offensives in Isonzo, the Italians were forced to take time to rest and re-equip their exhausted soldiers. A small Austrian offensive in 1915 nearly succeeded in capturing the key city of Caporetto, but was pushed back at the last moment. Italy did make some minor progress at the beginning of 1916, but they were never able to seize the town of Gorizia, which would have provided a boost to Italian morale. By February 1916, the successes in the east allowed the Austrians to free up further troops for the Italian front.

A plan was made to launch an attack south from Trentino into the Asiago Plateau, hoping to break through to the Po Valley, which would threaten the Italian troops to the east. In early April, Austrian troops began the Asiago offensive. They were able to successfully seize the offensive’s name-sake within a week, but the Italians soon formed a new defensive line in a number of mountain passes and narrow valleys. Despite the diversion of significant Italian troops from the Isonzo front, it was not clear these defenses would hold against the Austrian assault. Throughout May, Austrian troops slowly whittled down the Italian defenses, while an Italian counter-offensive was decisively repulsed. Britain was forced to send three divisions to help prop up the Italian defenses. It was only the commencement of the June offensive in Russia which forced Austria to call off the assault.

Two weeks later, British and Italian forces resumed the counter-offensive and managed to slowly push Austrians out of their defensive positions, at a heavy cost to the Italian Army. By August, Asiago itself had been retaken, ending the threat of Austrian soldiers breaking into the Po Valley.