Battles of Dunajec, Przemysl, Krasnik and Przasnysz, and the Evacuations of Warsaw and Fort Grodno

Russian Forces, 2,500,000

Grand Duke Nicholas, Commander-in-Chief
General Yanushkevitch, Chief of Staff
General Ivanoff
General Alexeieff
General Brusiloff
General Dmitrieff
General Ewerts
General Lechitzky

Austro-German Forces, 3,000,000

General Hindenberg, Commander-in-Chief
General Ludendorf, Chief of staff Northern Army Group—General Hindenberg
General Below
General Eichhorn
General Scholz
General Gallwitz
Central Army Group — Prince Leopold
General Woyrsch
Southern Army Group — General Mackensen
Archduke Joseph Ferdinand
General Boehm-Ermolli
General Marwitz
General Pflanzer
General Linsengen
Archduke Frederick

Irreparable disaster befell Russian arms in May, 1915, when a tornado of shell-fire from 3,000 heavy German guns ripped open a 40-mile gap in the Russian front, along the banks of the Dunajec and Biala Rivers, blowing General Dmitrieff's army into oblivion and compelling the entire Russian line to fall back into the far interior, with a resultant loss of 350,000 in killed and wounded and 1,250,000 prisoners. Her tremendous victory gained for Germany possession of 100,000 square miles of Russian territory, comprising all of Poland and Courland, the greater part of Galicia and several other large provinces, whose aggregate population was 20,000,000.

This disaster, which bore fruit two years later in red revolution and the quick collapse of the Russian Empire, was due primarily to Russia's inferiority in guns and lack of ammunition, which left her impotent before Germany's unparalleled concentration of artillery on the most vulnerable point in the Russian line. The European Allies for months had been endeavoring to get munitions into Russia. The only practicable route for the transport of supplies from the West was through the Dardanelles and Bosphorus, past Constantinople and thence by way of the Black Sea. The failure of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns had definitely closed this route to the Allies.

On...

THE BATTLE OF THE DUNAJEC

THE EASTERN SITUATION

On May Day, 1915, a huge German army under Field Marshal von Mackensen attacked the Russian army commanded by a Bulgarian general, Radko Dimitrieff, and standing between the Dunajec and Biala rivers, some thirty miles east of Cracow, well-nigh destroyed it and began that long offensive which was not to end until German armies had penetrated deeply into Russian territory, taken Warsaw and BrestLitovsk, and temporarily paralyzed Russian military power.

The Battle of the Dunajec is the second of the great conflicts of the war—the Marne, the Dunajec, and Verdun. These are the great struggles of the first three years and in many respects the Dunajec must rank after the Marne, while viewed from the standpoint of the present hour it seems certain to prove one of the truly decisive battles of human history, for by this disaster were sown the seeds of that Russian Revolution which was to come less than two years later. It marked the decisive step toward the overthrow of the Romanoff dynasty and the consequent total transformation of the character and prospects of the war on the eastern front and, in a sense, of the whole war. Just as the Battle of the Marne supplies the central unity of the first phase of the war, the Dunajec furnishes the same central point for the second. All the campaigns and all the important developments derive their chief significance from this great struggle, which (so remote did the Galician field seem to the world at the moment) appeared insignificant beside the barren trench struggles about the ruins of Ypres.

The conditions under which this battle were fought are simply told. From the Battle of Lemberg onward Germany had sought steadily to bolster up the shaken Austrian armies. She had endeavoured by one costly offensive after another, directed at Warsaw from her own territory, to relieve the pressure upon her ally, throw the Russians back behind the middle Vistula and the Niemen, and ...