Eastern Front (World War I)
| Eastern Front | |||||||
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| Part of World War I | |||||||
A German trench in the swamp area near the Mazurian Lakes on the Eastern Front. Picture taken in February 1915, just before the German winter-offensive started in heavy snowstorms. | |||||||
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| Belligerents | |||||||
.svg){kind=small} German EmpireFile:Austria-Hungary-flag-1869-1918-naval-1786-1869-war.svg Austria-Hungary |
.svg){kind=small} Russian Empire Romania | ||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||
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Paul von Hindenburg Erich Ludendorff File:Austria-Hungary-flag-1869-1918-naval-1786-1869-war.svg Conrad von Hötzendorf |
Nikolay II Grand Duke Nicholas Constantin Prezan | ||||||
The Eastern Front was a theatre of war during World War I in Central and, primarily, Eastern Europe. The term is in contrast to the Western Front. Despite the geographical separation, the events in the two theaters strongly influenced each other.
The geography of Eastern Europe in general has played a key role in how both World Wars' Eastern Front conflicts played out. Eastern Europe is, for the most part, physically similar to Western Europe as both belong to the same European plain. The key difference was the level of economic development. While Belgium and Northern France were among the most industrially advanced areas in the world, Eastern Europe was undeveloped in comparison.
Furthermore, the length of the front in the East was much longer than in the West. The theatre of war was roughly delimited by the Baltic Sea in the West and Moscow in the East, a distance of 1,200 kilometers, and Saint Petersburg in the North and the Black Sea in the South, a distance of more than 1,600 kilometers. This had a drastic effect on the nature of the warfare. While World War I on the Western Front developed into trench warfare, the battle lines on the Eastern Front were much more fluid and trenches never truly developed. This was because the greater length of the front ensured that the density of soldiers in the line was lower so the line was easier to break. Once broken, the sparse communication networks made it difficult for the defender to rush reinforcements to the rupture in the line to mount a rapid counteroffensive and seal off a breakthrough. In short, on the Eastern front the side defending did not have the overwhelming advantages it had on the Western front.
Because of this, front lines in the East kept on shifting throughout the conflict, and not just near the beginning and end of the fighting, as was the case in the West. In fact the greatest advance of the whole war was made in the East by the German Army in the summer of 1915.
In Russia
At the outbreak of the war, Czar Nikolay II appointed his cousin, Grand Duke Nikolay as commander in chief. Although not without ability, the Grand Duke had no part in formulating the war plans. This led to disaster.
The war in the East began with the Russian Army attempting to invade Germany’s East Prussian province and the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia. The first effort quickly turned to a disaster followin the Battle of Tannenberg in August 1914. However, the second incursion was completely successful, with the Russians controlling almost all of Galicia by the end of 1914. Under the command of Nikolay Ivanov and Aleksey Brusilov, the Russians won the Battle of Lemberg in September and began the Siege of Przemysl, the next fortress on the road towards Kraków and the Austro-Hungarian border.
This early Russian success in 1914 on the Austro-Russian border was a reason for concern to the Central Powers and caused considerable German forces to be transferred to the East to take pressure off the Austrians, leading to the creation of the new German Ninth Army. At the end of 1914 the main focus of the fighting shifted to Central Poland, west of the river Vistula. The October Battle of the Vistula River and the November Battle of Łódź brought little advancement for the Germans, but at least kept the Russians at a safe distance.
The Russian and Austro-Hungarian armies continued to clash in and near the Carpathian Mountains throughout the winter of 1914–1915. Przemysl fortress managed to hold out deep behind enemy lines throughout this period, with the Russians bypassing it in order to attack the Austro-Hungarian troops further to the west. They made some progress, crossing the Carpathians in February and March 1915, but then the Germans sent relief and stopped further Russian advance. In the meantime, Przemysl was almost entirely destroyed and the Siege of Przemysl ended in a defeat for the Austrians.
Despite these successes, the effectiveness of the Russian Army at the same time rapidly declined as the underdeveloped Russian arms industry proved unable to meet the demands of the front. Furthermore, as the situation on the Western Front stabilized, the German command decided to make its main effort on the Eastern Front in 1915, and accordingly transferred considerable forces there.
To eliminate the Russian threat the Central Powers began the campaign season of 1915 with a successful Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive in Galicia in May of 1915. After the Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes, the German and Austro-Hungarian troops in the Eastern Front functioned under a unified command. The offensive soon turned into a general advance and then a strategic retreat by the Russian army. By mid-1915, the Russians had been expelled from Russian Poland and hence pushed hundreds of kilometers away from the borders of the Central Powers, removing any threat of Russian invasion of Germany or Austria-Hungary. At the end of 1915 the main part of the front reached a line which in general outline did not change until the Russian collapse in 1917.
In 1916 the Russians attempted a large counteroffensive under the leadership of General Aleksey Brusilov (the Brusilov Offensive). The attack, aimed against the part of the front held by Austro-Hungarians, was initially a spectacular success. However, a successful counterattack by German units halted the Russian assault.
By 1917]], the Russian economy finally neared collapse under the strain of the war effort. While the equipment of the Russian armies actually improved due to the expansion of the war industry, the food shortages in the major urban centres brought about civil unrest which led to the abdication of the Czar and the February Revolution. The large war casualties also created disaffection and mutinous attitudes in the army, which was fueled by Bolshevik agitators and the Russian Provisional Government’s new liberalization policies towards the army (stripping officers of their mandate by giving wide sweeping powers to “soldier committees”, the abolition of the death penalty). The very last offensive undertaken by the Russian Army in the war was the brief and unsuccessful Kerensky Offensive in July of 1917.
In November of 1917, the Communist Bolsheviks took power under their leader Vladimir Lenin. Lenin’s new Bolshevik government tried to end the war but the Germans demanded enormous concessions. Finally, in March, 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed and the Eastern Front ceased to be a war zone. The Germans were able to transfer some of their divisions to the West, in order to mount an offensive in France in 1918. However, by then the arrival of American units in Europe was sufficient to offset the German advantage. Even after the Russian collapse, about a million German soldiers remained tied up in the East until the end of the war, attempting to run a short-lived addition to the German Empire in Europe. In the end, Germany and Austria would lose all their captured lands, and more, under the Treaty of Versailles.
In Romania
Also, in the night of 14 august 1916, Romania entered the war on the side of the Entente, and had a successful offensive until September. After that it started to suffer great losses and several defeats from German-Austrian-Bulgarian-Ottoman forces, as the Romanian Army was poorly equipped and the Russian allies didn't offered much support on the front.
See also
Human cost
The Russian casualties in the First World War are difficult to estimate, due to poor quality of available statistics. Some official Russian sources list 775,400 battlefield fatalities. More recent Russian estimates give 900,000 battlefield deaths and 400,000 dead from combat wounds, for a total of 1.3 million dead. This is about equal to casualties suffered by France and Austria-Hungary and about one-third less than those suffered by Germany. When Russia withdrew from the war, 3.9 million Russian POWs were in German and Austrian hands. This by far exceeded the total number of prisoners of war (1.3 million) lost by the armies of Britain, France and Germany combined. Only the Austro-Hungarian Army, with 2.2 million POWs, even came close.