Battle of Lake Narach

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Battle of Lake Narach
Part of: First World War
date March 18 to the end of March 1916
place Narach lake ( Belarus )
output Russian defeat
Parties to the conflict

German EmpireThe German Imperium German Empire

Russian Empire 1914Russian Empire Russia

Commander

German EmpireThe German Imperium Hermann Eichhorn
Oskar von Hutier

Russian Empire 1914Russian Empire Alexei Ewert
Alexander Ragosa

Troop strength
German EmpireThe German ImperiumParts of the 10th Army :
75,000 men and
400 guns 		Russian Empire 1914Russian Empire 2nd Army :
350,000 men
1,000 guns
losses

over 20,000 men

about 110,000 men

Major military operations on the
Eastern Front (1914-1918)

The battle on Lake Naratsch in the spring of 1916 was an attempt by the tsarist army to regain the initiative on the Eastern Front after the Great Retreat in 1915 and then to be able to advance aggressively again. The attempt failed in spite of the vastly superior troop strength due to significant poor leadership of the Stawka , the army commanders and outdated tactical views and led to a severe defeat for Russia .

background

General Mikhail Alexeev, Chief of the General Staff of the Tsarist Army

After the defeats in East Prussia and near Gorlice-Tarnów , the Russian army had to evacuate almost all of Poland in the Great Retreat in autumn 1915. A defeat that was likely due to military conditions had been averted, but the army's public prestige was badly damaged. In addition to the military defeats, the munitions crisis was the main cause of the failures. Due to bad planning, the stock of bullets in the artillery area had fallen below the absolute minimum and the only option left for the generals was to clear wide sections of the front. Like all nations, Russia was only prepared for a short war. In addition to the shortage of materials, of all things, the warring nation with the greatest population was found to have a shortage of soldiers. The reasons for this were internal political quarrels and the ineffective conscription system together with the inadequate infrastructure of the gigantic empire. The lack of experienced officers was just as negative , as the losses of the first two years of the war could not be compensated. Thus one refrained from attracting academics or students in order not to provoke the liberal opposition.

After the shortage of ammunition and weapons could be remedied in the winter of 1915, the Russian General Staff saw the possibility of consolidating the Russian army. The Stawka initially rejected the Entente's demands for further offensives, but then gave in. Again, political pressures mixed into the plans of the top military leadership. At the end of February 1916, France had a difficult time in the Battle of Verdun and the Western ally pressed for a Russian offensive to withdraw German forces from the Western Front.

Planning

A third front had been added to the two previous fronts due to the larger expansion, and the commandos had also been newly manned. The northern front was now under General Kuropatkin , the central western front under General Ewert and the south- western front under General Brusilov . The chief of the general staff Mikhail Alexejew tried to start the new attacks in the northern section of the eastern front in the section of the Lithuanian lakes. In the new plan of operations, the greatly increased Russian 2nd Army was to take action against the sparsely occupied front section of the German 10th Army under Colonel General Hermann von Eichhorn . The attack took place on both sides of Lake Naratsch , about 80 kilometers northeast of Vilna . The city of Vilnius was the strategic target of the Russian offensive and at the same time the headquarters of General Eichhorn.

The skills of the Russian troop leaders, who usually owed their positions to seniority or relationships, were no longer up-to-date and inflexible due to the further development in the technical field. A large number of the officers were still uncritical of their own propaganda despite the defeats of the previous year. The generals insisted on the tactics that prevailed on the Western Front in 1915: First, strong artillery preparation with the following mass attacks. The fact that the German front in the west had held up so far, despite the significant superiority of the Entente, did not make the Russian generals rethink. Instead, they blamed their own material inferiority in terms of ammunition and supplies, inadequate railway lines and insufficiently heavy artillery for the previous failures. Chief of Staff Alexeyev had already tried unsuccessfully to remove General Ewert , the Commander-in-Chief of the Western Front, because of conflicting views. The commander-in-chief of the 2nd Army, General Vladimir Smirnov , was to be replaced by more energetic leaders who were able to carry out new attacks with the necessary self-confidence, just like the senior corps general Leonid-Otto Sirelius.

Mutual forces

Russian attack forces

General Alexander Ragosa

General Smirnov, overwhelmed by the pressure from headquarters, reported sick in time for the offensive, and on March 11th Alexejew was able to occupy the army high command with General Alexander Ragosa as deputy commander in chief. For the purpose of better conduct of operations, the 2nd Army also subordinated the bulk of the 5th Army (General Vasili Gurko ), so that around 350,000 men in three attack groups were involved in the offensive:

Northern Army Group Pleschkow (parts of the 5th Army), deployed between Tveretsch and Postawy:

Medium army group Sirelius between Postawy and Lake Narotsch:

Southern Baluev Army Group south of Lake Naroch to north of Smorgon :

  • V Corps under General Pyotr Baluyev with the 7th and 10th divisions
  • 3rd Siberian Corps under General Vladimir Trofimov with the Siberian 7th and 8th Divisions
  • XV. Corps under Lieutenant General Fedor Torklus with the 6th and 8th divisions
  • XXXVI. Corps under Lieutenant General Nikolaj Korotkewitsch with the 25th and 68th Divisions
  • Reserve: XXXV. Corps under Lieutenant General Pawel Parchewski with the 55th and 67th Divisions

The German defenders

Eichhorn's 10th Army had a total of around 12 infantry and three cavalry divisions. That was in the main area of ​​attack between Postawy and Lake Naroch

From Lake Wiszniew via Dubatowka south to Smorgon this defended

Course of the offensive

Battle of Lake Naroch

Army group Pleschkow

The army group Pleschkow was to begin the attack on the right wing in the Postawy area on March 18 . Pleschkow had covered the German positions for three days with artillery over a width of 2,000 meters. But he had criminally neglected the investigation of the enemy positions. The artillery fired according to a stubborn fire plan that artillery officers worked out without the assistance of the infantry. The Russian fire was imprecise, there was practically no coordination between heavy and light artillery. The Germans moved their units back from the firing line and in the meantime brought in reserves. Pleschkov's artillery strike was also unsuccessful because he underestimated the protective effect of the German field fortifications, trenches and the shelters up to ten meters deep. The first mass attack that followed with 120 battalions of infantry was intended to open up a gap and force a breakthrough. Behind the troops followed the NCOs, who also shot their own retreating soldiers. The Russians who attacked in several waves in an outdated manner (see Human Wave ) did not find sufficient cover when crowded together, and there was no mutual fire protection.

At first the Russians achieved a sham success when the first trench of the German 42nd Division was captured with enormous losses . But then their columns got caught in a strong defensive fire in front of the second line. Covered on three sides by machine guns and artillery that had remained intact, they lost 15,000 dead and wounded in the first eight hours. In complete misunderstanding of the situation, Ewert had sent more and more soldiers into the alleged gap, which led to the catastrophically high losses in the battle.

Army group Sirelius

After Smirnov's illness, General Sirelius would have been the "senior officer" instead of Ragosa in command of the 2nd Army. Reluctantly, he left parts of his XXXIV, which was at the center of the attack groups. Corps in support of the northern group at Postawy proceed. However, after the failure of the northern group, his troops did not attack at all. His own corps, the Siberian IV, remained completely inactive south of Lake Miadziol .

Army group Baluyev

The southern group under General Baluyev was the only one able to achieve tactical success. This happened at the same time as Pleschkov's second attack in the north. Here the senior officers of the artillery and infantry had agreed, which enabled a better accuracy of the artillery strike. The gain was the conquest of a square kilometer of land and the bringing in of about 1,000 German prisoners. However, the surge was quickly stopped by bringing in reserves on the German side.

The continuation of the offensive

The unsuccessful attacks cost a total of 20,000 Russian soldiers their lives on the first day. Pleschkow repeated his attacks over the next few days with reserves brought in. Kuropatkin's northern front began strong relief attacks on Lake Dryswjaty to tie up German reserves in the north, but these were repulsed by the Richthofen cavalry corps opposite . At the same time strong attacks against the Scholtz Army Detachment and the 8th Army were carried out in front of Dünaburg and Jakobstadt . The crisis among the Germans was overcome by the evening of March 21st, and on March 23rd the situation could be considered stable. The 107th Division, 119th Division and 80th Reserve Division had adequately reinforced the attacked front of the Hutier Corps. On March 26th, on the most violently attacked north wing, Lieutenant General Otto von Moser was able to defend the swamp trenches between the Olsiza and the Komaika against new Russian attacks. Here the mass storms of the Russian 76th Division and the 1st Siberian Rifle Division crashed, on the following day the 2nd Siberian Rifle Division and the 45th Division were turned away near Postawy. A counter-attack by the German 86th Division with the Adriani brigade recaptured the "garnet hill" off Mokrzyce in the middle section on March 27.

At the end of March, the unsuccessful Russian attacks slowly subsided. On April 28, a counterattack by III. Reserve Corps with the 86th Infantry and 80th Reserve Divisions to recapture the few lost positions. The German losses of over 20,000 men, including 2,500 prisoners, were offset by a total Russian loss of 110,000 men, including around 10,000 prisoners.

consequences

The battle on Lake Naroch ended the dominance of the old military elite of the tsarist army, and their commanders lost hope of a victorious outcome of the war. After 350,000 Russians with sufficient ammunition and an artillery superiority of 3 to 1 against 75,000 opponents had been unsuccessful, the prospects for further warfare were very bleak. The battle also did not bring the hoped-for relief to the Entente on the western front. With improved tactics to attack the Austrian section near Kovel during the Brusilov offensive that followed in the summer of 1916 , the tsarist army still achieved a great military success, which, however, was a Pyrrhic victory due to the catastrophic losses it suffered and which subsequently accelerated the fall of tsarist Russia .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Reichsarchiv: The World War 1914–1918, Volume X., Supplements - Sketch 24

Web links

Commons : Battle of Lake Naratsch  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 54 ° 51 ′ 12.6 "  N , 26 ° 46 ′ 34.1"  E