8. The Battle of the Dunajec and the Great Russian Retreat of 1915.— By 25 April 1915 the Russians thought they had consolidated their occupation of Galicia by the capture of Przemysl and by an extension of their control of the Carpathian passes. By this same date Hindenburg had practically completed the prep aration for Mackensen's big attack on the Dunajec which was to force the great Russian retreat of 1915. It is well to note the position of the Eastern Front at this moment, as indi cated on the map. Prattic,ally all of Galicia, except Cracow and the territory west of the town of Tarnow and the Dunajec River, was within the Russian lines; in Poland Russia had been forced by strategic reasons and by Hinden burg's persistent attacks to give up the Polish salient as far as a line which curved west of Kielce and the Rawka River; on the northern flank the battle front practically followed the East Prussian frontier except that the Ger mans controlled the Vistula below Plock, and the Russians had a foothold in East Prussia at Lyck. Perhaps the Russians might have held this line except for three great handicaps by which they suffered severely: (1) The. ladc of good communications for the ratad transfer of troops from one part of the front to another; of this nothing further need be said as it has been discussed above. (2) Treachery at home. The more we know about the war on the East ern Front the more it becomes clear that both at the front and in high circles around the tsar treachery was continually at work among pro-German sympathizers. At the front Ger man commanders always seemed to be well informed ahead of time of any movements the Russians were about to make. But it was im possible to get rid of all the traitors, particularly as both the military and civil service in Russia were filled in large numbers by the so-called Baltic Gertnans. These °Baltic Barons?' who owned large landed estates in Courland and Esthonia, were subjects of the tsar by the chance that the repo= had been annexed by the Romanovs a century or more before; but in their culture, sympathy and family ties many of the Baltic barons were far more closely in sympathy with the Prussian Junkers than with the tsar s government. One of the results for which they confidently hoped from the war was that Germany would seize and again con trol the Baltic provinces which had originally been conquered from the native Letts and Esthonians by the Teutonic knights seven cen turies before. It was not merely among the military officers that traitors were to be found. Much more dangerous were the pro-German sympathizers at court around the tsarina, a Ger man princess. These were the men who by their intrigues secured the dismissal, or counteracted the influence, of true Russian liberals and patriots who wanted to speed up the manu facture of munitions and conduct a vigorous war for the early victory of the Allies, The situation was summed up in the pathetic cry attributed to the little tsarevitch: °When the Germans win papa cries, and when the Rus sians win mama cries.° (3) The shortage .of atnmunition and guns, however, was the most serious cause of Russia's forced retreat in 1915. The experience of the first weeks of the war had shattered all calcula tions as to ammunition, based upon the lessons of the Russo-Japanese War. The stock of mu nitions on hand, which was considerable, was generously dealt out at the beginning and aided materially in the Russian occupation of Galicia and East Prussia; but by October 1914, a short age, especially of artillery ammunition, began to make itself felt. For months batteries in ac tion did not receive more than four shells per day per gun—and this at a time when the Ger mans made profuse use of an apparently in exhaustible supply. As Russian soldiers were killed or taken prisoners, Russia lost such .a large part of her stock of small arms that the new formations of men who were called into being in the winter of 1914-15 could not he completely supplied with rifles and equipment Unfortunately no plans had been made for in creased pro&ction of arms and ammunition during the war, so that when the shortage be came dangerous nothing was ready to remedy it. Generous offers of munition were made from abroad especially from America and from Japan. But the Americans wanted time to pre pare machinery to begin production on a vast scale, and the Russian Ministry of War could not make up its mind to place great orders because it feared that the American firms could not, or would not, make deliveries soon enough to meet the crisis. Japan furnished some small calibre rifles, but they could not use the same cartridge as the standard Russian °five-clip)) magazine rifles. For lack of equipment Russia actually had to disband several hundred thou sand men who had been called up for military service. And in some battles trained but un armed men stood behind the front ranks ready to step forward and take the guns of those who were killed. This shortage, of course, inevitably had a very bad effect upon the morale of the soldiers. It not only explains in part the great Russian Retreat of 1915, but it began to sow in the minds of the men a distrust of the efficiency and integrity of the tsar's government. The distrust was greatly increased after the Great Retreat and was one of the main direct causes of the overthrow of absolutism by the Revolution of March 1917. And the distrust was justified, as is proved by the patriotic but futile efforts of Rodzianko, president of the Duma, who tried in vain to get munitions pro vided. He visited the fronts. He saw soldiers armed with nothing but sticks. He was told by the Grand Duke Nicholas: lAn army can not go on fighting without rifles or boots.° He
tried to get production of munitions speeded up by calling a Zemstvo congress and then by a special conference. But for many precious months he was thwarted by the chaos and in trigue in the Ministry of War and by the per sonal rivalry between Sukhomlinov and the Grand Duke Sergius. Some of the chaos and intrigue was later exposed in the famous Suk homlinov trial. In justice to the liberals and the patriots in Russia, however, it should be added that by August 1915 a war trade com mittee was organized under the able leadership of A. T. Guchkov, who later became the first Minister of War after the Revolution. This committee energetically began to organize a great number of private firms, both large and small, for the manufacture of guns and muni tions, so that the shortages were gradually made up. By the spring of 1917 the generals at the front were at last made happy by being able to reckon upon a fairly adequate number of shells for the artillery and on about 100,000 4.8-inch trench mortar bombs. But the supply came too late to be of any avail in the spring of 1915; and, by the irony of fate, when the munitions were plentiful in 1917 the sohliers did not care to use them, for fhey had been demoralized as a result of the Revolution.
Thus handicapped by lack of transportation facilities, by treachery at home and by lack of munitions and officers, the long Russian front of 900 miles could not withstand the great offensive which the Germans had planned in Lithuania and on the Dunajec for the spring of 1915. In April and May 1915, German armies pushed rapidly over the Niemen along the Baltic Coast and took the important Lettish sea-ports of Libau and Windau. Advancing further through Courland, where they found much support from pro-German °Baltic Barons," they advanced to the Duna River and threatened the great industrial city and seaport of Riga, with its 600,000 inhabitants. Here, however, the Letts who had bitterly hated for centuries the domination of the German landlords and capitalists, hastily organized vol unteer rifle-battalions and heroically maintained the defense of their chief city. Their quick action and the natural defense formed by the broad waters of the Duna River and by the swamps near its mouth prevented the Germans for more than two years from capturing Riga. The city did not fall into German hands until September 1917, when the military chaos caused by the Revolution had destroyed all Russia's power of resistance. By advancing to the Duna the Germans had gained control of the greater part of Lithuania and Courland. This region was now organized by the Germans as °Ober-Ost,° i.e., as the military occupation dis trict of the supreme command in the East. It was provided with German officials, Gertnan postal service, German money, German colonists, and in fact treated in every way as if it were to become a permanent part, in accordance with Pan-German dreams, of the German empire in the East. While the Russian general staff was occupied in the north with this forced retire ment to the Duna, at the other end of their long line, in Galicia, they were about to be struck an irresistible blow by Mackensen's °phalanx? Though the Russians did not lcnow it, Hinden burg had been quietly massing troops by rail ways during March and April 1915, for a great blow on the Russian line in Galicia. In true Napoleonic fashion he had concentrated upon a single point — the Russian line behind the Dunajec River —a force which ltas been esti mated at nearly 1,000,000 men. It was cotn posed partly of Austrian troops; but its great strength came from the large number of Ger man units which included some of the finest of the German forces drawn from the Western Front, like the Prussian Guard Reserve corps and the 10th corps which had once been with von Kluck. It included also some °as sault divisions° which were created by skimming the cream from the first-line troops. These picked German troops, under the very able com mand of Macicensen, formed a powerful thrust ing force, ot.' °phalanx" — just the weapon needed for breaking through an enemy line. Not less important was the fact that the phalanx was supported by a mass of heavy artillery with an unlimited amount of ammunition. Hinden burg intended to break through the Russian line completely. He hoped thereby to accomplish several strategic purposes; he would demor alize the Russian troops in front of him, capturing or routing them, thus enabling him to recover Przemysl and Lemberg, and clear Galicia of the enemy; he could then strike at Warsaw from the south and east, on the right bank of the Vistula, and easily force the Russians to evacuate it; and he would cut off and capture Brussilov's armies in the Car pathian passes before they could secure their line of retreat. He succeeded, as we shall see, in clearing Galicia and taking Warsaw but not, thanks to Brussilov's brilliant manceuvres, in cutting off the Russians in the Carpathians.
The Russian front behind the Dunajec, south of the town of Tarnow, was commanded by Radko-Dmitriev. He was utterly unaware of what was being prepared against him, almost up to the very moment when the blow came. Only in the last days of April did he begin to realize that a great force was concentrating against him. He applied instantly to Ivanov for two additional corps. By some blunder of a staff officer, the request never reached Ivanov. Dmitriev was thus left to meet the enemy with no more than his winter strength of men_and with a pitiful shortage of anununition for his guns.