Not a masterpiece of grammar by any means, and missing the extensive footnotes, here's a briefing note I wrote for everyone on TOMMIES. I note on a skim read there are some references to Robert who, in the writing process, wound up doing different things.
It begins...
"How much of the overall picture would be understood by our characters on the ground is hard to say. For the moment, however, I am going with the idea that Russia, between two revolutions, is a place for vibrant discussion over meals and operating tables. In other words, this isn’t background so far as this episode is concerned: it is the very meat and drink of arguments being deployed by our characters. There are also two chains of information - roughly it’s the cavaliers and roundheads but in the same army. Tsar’s boys get their info at briefings and through orders, everyone else gets theirs through People’s Committees, samizdat etc.
Russia’s war is as beset by myths as any other.
In summary: do not be tempted into
1) Russia was a primitive behemoth; 2) it had a massed but under-resourced and badly-led peasant Army; 3) the German Army was vastly superior anyway.
1) Russia wasn’t primitive: its rapid economic and military expansion was the reason that Germany wanted to go to war with it in the first place. It feared the waking giant. If Russia was backward, it was in its mind, not the actuality.
2) Russia didn’t have a huge army to start with, and its professional core was able to get sharp early victories. There was a strong tendency, however, to see the men as untrainable sheep. As for supplies, they were actually pretty well provided for; there was just a tendency to whinge about it. This is going to sound pretty shocking: throughout TOMMIES we’re probably ready to hear all manner of insults hurled at the officers, but to hear them going the other way is almost exclusive to this front.
Russia was as under-resourced for war as every other country in the war, including the antagonist Germany. Let’s not forget the most international trend in 1915 was to have a shell-shortage. Every country had one: everyone was stumped by problems of development economics - you have to build the factory before you can make the shells, and who knew the war was going to turn into this static artillery slugging-match?
Russia’s curse was to have a shortage just like everyone else, but to self-flagellatingly believe it well beyond the point where shells were in plentiful supply, and use it as an inevitable excuse for failure. There was certainly corruption and misdirection, but these are just mirrors of other countries. What happened in Russia’s case, however, was to be the only country that fell to a revolution. As a result, the economic shenanigans are given extra weight. We have Robert perpetrating similar back in UK and largely speaking he and his kind have evaded the spotlight of history.
Similarly, there were lethal failures in leadership. Shelling your own men, however, was regularly done in error by the Brits and deliberately by the French. It gets headlines in the history of Russia because it fits the horrible Tsar story, and is airbrushed out of our own.
3) Russia fell to a vastly superior German army? Actually no. German bungling was freely available. In fact one of the reasons the Russian retreat of 1915 is always portrayed as a masterpiece of military organisation was German propaganda to conceal how woefully they had failed to exploit the situation.
(Russia’s eventual fall, which need not concern us now, was simple. The countryside could not be organised to grow the kind of quantities of food required for a huge and growing urban workforce (not to mention the needs of the army) when agriculture had previously been operating on a subsistence basis. Let alone the question of transporting such food had it existed. The change to collectivised agriculture was just too big to be made in the time available, especially with galloping wartime inflation caused by the peasants hanging onto their food in the countryside and not sending it into the towns. Once again, Robert and his pals weren’t moving food round Britain to increase their profits, but our WW1 did not end in revolution, so it doesn’t make the history books.)
With these myth-provisos in mind, the war begins, then, with the Germans attempting to beat France before turning on their real enemy, Russia. The Bear doesn’t oblige: it mobilises three days faster in August 1914 than expected and on the north of the front invades Eastern Prussia, striking for Berlin. Victory follows victory until the Germans finally hold the line, and fight back. (They notoriously switched which front they were fighting on by putting a whole army on the train and moving them 80 miles to strike the Russians where they least expected it.) The Russian Army was defeated at the Battle of Tannenberg. But it was defeated “not by its inferiority in artillery or men; it was crippled by its inability to use its superiority”.
Meanwhile the Germans blamed some of their shakiness at the Battle of the Marne (just before our 1914 episodes) on their need to shift troops over to defeat the Russians.
Just like the Western Front, the problem was to get together the huge weight of forces required to penetrate the enemy lines, then exploit it across ground smashed up by your own artillery bombardment. The advance could only be as fast as a man staggering under full kit. As Norman Stone puts it: “This was a 20th Century delivery system, but a 19th Century warhead.” Meanwhile, your enemy was bringing up his reserves across undamaged ground and using road and rail.
There was also little central control, because the army command, called the Stavka, was ignored by the two armies in the north and the south. If you want an idea how much longer the Eastern Front was than the Western one, if the Russian one ran down from Belgium it doesn’t halt at the Swiss border, it carries on way past Rome, and when Romania comes into the war it gets as far as the bottom of Sicily.
Back to August 1914. Five hundred miles to the south, the bottom end of the front as it were and where Celestine and Marjorie will be, the Russians fought Germany’s Austro-Hungarian allies, surging hundreds of miles into Austria-Hungary in an area known as Galicia, which we would think of as southern Poland. The A-H army is a weak Ruritanian thing, easily beaten.
In early 1915 the Russians attack in the north. The Germans respond with gas. The Russians lose 40000 men in 3 days. They blame their failure on ‘lack of resolution’ or ‘cowardice’, plus lack of shells. Not, you’ll notice, the foolhardiness of concentrating eleven divisions in a short 10k front where they could be shelled to bits, as well as bad weather, poor planning, and overloading of aged commander.
February 1915 saw a big German counter-attack in the north, which was largely successful. Crucially, however, it was supposed to be accompanied by an A-H attack in the south against Third Army. It was beaten back, and a front is established between the cities of Tarnow and Gorlice.
In May the Austro-Hungarians were ready to try again, but this time with the Germans fighting alongside them. This attack in Russia, then, commencing the night of 1/2nd May 1915 is the one which embroils our characters. It is the first where the Germans admit the A-H troops are no good unsupported and put massive German troop resources into the area.
They bombard the line from Tarnow to Gorlice, then punch through it. They got eight miles in two days. The commanding officer of the Russian Third army wasn’t on the phone and was away anyway at a St George Order celebration.
You can now imagine the Russian Third Army retreating, bumping along the top of the Carpathian Mountains until they reach the River San. They are going to make a stand outside Przemysl (remember this is a retreat across territory they thought they’d victoriously conquered, very psychologically damaging.)
As they retreated, hungry and running out of kit and ammunition, they kept coming across stores of all these things in the wrong places and were obliged to leave most of it behind. The stuff was there, but inertia seemed to hold the Russian organisation into functioning badly. An example of this was the idea that every soldier should get 4000 calories a day. This meant soldiers might see no food for days then come across tons of rotting meat due to supply problems created by the sheer bulk of it.
This was interpreted as a failure of the officer class, but was more to do an endemic slowness to adapt to the speed of modern warfare which you can find on every front in WW1.
The significant thing, though, is this: in any other country, failure would probably be met with a desire to do better next time. Here, it is met with a very Russian assumption that nothing can be done, because this is, after all, Russia. As well as a myth of Russian fallibility, there was also a myth of German infallibility. Compare the exaggerated belief among the British of Japanese invincibility that led to the collapse at Singapore in 1941.
A classic notion of WW1 is of the Generals well behind the lines being waited on hand and foot. Crucially it was felt in the Russian Army that this applied to the junior officers as well, whereas they were most definitely in the trenches with the men on the Western Front. Here, though, they were nowhere to be seen. And this divide led to a mutual distrust of officers for the men and vice-versa. Officers, fearing insurrection, handed down beatings and bullying probably through fear of what might happen, a self-fulfilling loop. They even shelled their own men for surrendering.
This is a function of the Flame of war. As we know, it demands we hate the enemy without reserve. Eventually, in the face of an invincible enemy, you turn your hate on the people who are letting you down - who by their very supposed uselessness are ‘helping’ the Germans to win.
By May 10th General Radko Demitriev, is saying that his army has “bled to death”. The Russians call for help from the Brits and the French - this is why we attack at Aubers Ridge and Festubert in May. By 18th May the Russians are holding a line outside Przemysl with little hope of success: on getting there, they discovered that the officers put in charge of the conquered town had sold the spades, the timber and barbed wire to build the trenches.
So. Why did it all go so wrong? The Germans did a good job, to be sure, but the material problems on the Russian side were probably exaggerated. The main reasons for the German success was the isolation of Third Army, a lack of reserves, and the Stavka and the two front commands quarrelling.
General Alexeyev in the north wouldn’t give over his reserves and he shifted the ones he was forced to give as slowly as possible. A shell crisis (also the topic we are humming with in the 1915 Western Front, London and Gallipoli episodes) was certainly blamed, but just looking at the numbers shows they had sufficient. It was where the shells were that was the problem: held in forts way behind the lines or not sent to the front where it would be ‘wasted’, just when a nice reserve had been built up. Also, you don’t need a huge number of shells in defence, you need strategy and tactics. The Russian generals have no tactics, so they blame lack of shells.
They also argue that the Germans had more guns than they did, and numerically that is true. However, consider this subtle point. Their numerical superiority was far less than the superiority of firepower enjoyed by the British over the Germans on the Western Front - and we all know that the Brits failed to break through the line. It’s what you do with your guns, not their bald numbers, that makes the difference.
So whatever is happening on the Eastern Front, it is not purely a lack of kit or shell.
More to the point is Russia’s lack of mobile reserves. Instead, they station everyone they’ve got in a thick front line. Once pierced, it can be rolled up with the huge captures of prisoners so symptomatic of this front. A railway journey from top to bottom of the front should take four days. Instead, it takes twenty-three. And Russia’s anti-reserve mindset cannot be better summarised than with the story of 10 Corps who wanted to build a reserve position, but were told this indicated they must have too many men, and they had regiments removed and sent to another front.
The quality of reserves was low: investigating a cut in the line, signallers found that new troops had cut down a telegraph pole for firewood.
Przemysl fell on 4th June, and the Russians proceeded to retreat across 300 miles of Russian homeland, losing a total of 2m casualties for 1915. Mixed in with this retreat of course were refugees, adding to the crisis."