CAMPAIGN IN SOUTHERN POLAND—MOVEMENT UPON WARSAW

By the 1st of July, 1915, the stupendous enveloping campaign of the Teuton armies on the eastern front had advanced to a point where the Allies were forced to recognize the imminence of a catastrophe, which could be averted only by the most decisive action of the Russian armies.

Far in the north, on the extreme right wing of the Russians, the army of General von BÜlow was hammering at the defenses of the Dubissa line. Off and on fighting was taking place in the neighborhood of Shavli. Russian counterattacks, reported from day to day through June, with difficulty had held in check this army, which evidently was aiming at the Warsaw-Petrograd Railway on the sector between Vilna and Dvinsk. On the right flank of these forces operated the troops of General von Eichhorn, with the line of the Niemen for their objective. Next to these on the south, aiming at the Bobr River and the Upper Narew, were the forces of General von Scholtz, and on their right the army of Von Gallwitz, based on Mlawa with Przasnysz in front of it. Below the line of the Vistula, before the Bzura and down to the middle course of the Pilica, operated the Ninth German Army, commanded, at least in the later stages of the Warsaw campaign, by Prince Leopold of Bavaria. The whole group of northern and central armies was acting under the general direction of Field Marshal von Hindenburg.

The armies to the south of this group, cooperating in the drive under Field Marshal von Mackensen which had gained the Teutons Przemysl and Lemberg, had as their left flank the forces of Generals von Woyrsch and KÖvess between the Pilica and the Vistula mouth of the San. The troops of Archduke Joseph Ferdinand were pushing forward on the right of these, and the army directly under Mackensen himself came next in line to the eastward, joining up with the armies still operating in Galicia at the extreme right of the great German battle line.

The chief danger to the Russians at this stage still threatened from the south, where the archduke and Mackensen had pushed forward irresistibly in their advance to the east of the Vistula toward the railway running from Warsaw through Ivangorod, Lublin, Cholm, and Kovell to Kiev and Moscow.

The advance of these Austro-German armies, which had operated in the neighborhood of Lemberg, was extremely rapid in the last days of June, 1915. In four days they covered from thirty to forty miles in pursuit of the Russians. By the 1st of July, having swept out of Galicia, their right, under Mackensen, entered the upper valley of the Wieprz, a marshy country which presented considerable difficulty to the advance of troops where a tributary of the Wieprz, the Por, afforded the Russians a natural line of defense. Drasnik, on the Wyznica, which here extended the Russian defensive line westward, was occupied by the archduke's forces on Mackensen's left on the 1st of July, 1915. The drive of the Austro-German armies through Galicia has been dealt with in the account of the Austro-Russian campaign. As we carry forward the account of the activities of the greatest part of the forces concerned in that series of operations from the point where they crossed over the boundary between Galicia and Poland out of Austrian territory, it will be well to glance backward a moment to enumerate here briefly the gains of these armies on Polish soil up to the 1st of July.

On June 16, 1915, the Teutonic allies forced the Russians to fall back upon Tarnograd from north of Siemandria, thus pushing this section of the front across the boundary into Poland about to the line of the Tanev. Tarnograd itself was occupied by the Teutons on the 17th, and on the 18th the Russians retreated behind the Tanev. There was little change in this particular sector during the fighting which was crowned for the Austro-Germans by the capture of Lemberg on June 22, 1915. Further to the east, however, to the south of the Pilica and west of the Vistula, Von Woyrsch was exerting pressure, and on the 20th of June Berlin announced the capture of several Russian advance posts by these troops. By the 24th the Slavs had begun to retreat before Von Woyrsch in the forest region south of the Ilza on the left bank of the Vistula; thus rear guards had been thrown across the Kamienna, and Sandomir was occupied by the Austro-Hungarians. On the 25th the fighting developed on the line Zarvichost-Sienno-Ilza, to which the Russians had fallen back.

Defeats of the Russian rear guards on June 29, 1915, to the northeast and west of Tomaszow, where Teutonic forces had now also crossed into Poland, caused the Slavs to begin the relinquishment of the Tanev forest district and the lower San. Tomaszow itself was occupied by the pursuing troops. By the 30th the Teutonic allies had swept forward beyond the Tanev region to Franpol, Zamoez, and Komarovo, and on the same evening they threw the Russians out of their strong defenses on the Zavichost-Ozarow-Sienno line, west of the Vistula. The pursuit was pushed energetically on both sides of the Kamienna. The important bridgehead on the Vistula, Josefovo, was taken on the 1st of July.

The Russians between the Bug and the Vistula were now offering strong resistance with large forces on the line Turobin-Krasnik-Josefovo, the rivers Por and Wyznica forming roughly their defensive front, as previously pointed out.

In its daily bulletins of July 1, 1915, the German Great Headquarters made this announcement for the eastern theatre of war (from the Baltic to the Pilica): "The booty for June is: Two colors, 25,595 prisoners, including 121 officers, seven cannon, six mine throwers, fifty-two machine guns, one aeroplane, also a large amount of war material." For the southeastern theatre of war (from the Pilica to Bukowina) the headquarters announced: "The total booty for June of the allied troops fighting under the command of General von Linsingen, Field Marshal von Mackensen, and General von Worysch is 409 officers, 140,650 men, 80 cannon, 268 machine guns." The Austro-Hungarian General Staff on the same day reported: "The total booty for June of the troops fighting under Austro-Hungarian command in the northeast is 521 officers, 194,000 men, 93 cannon, 364 machine guns, 78 ammunition wagons, 100 field railway carriages, etc."[Back to Contents]