The death of the Russian Guard
In those battles, almost the majority of the personnel of the Guards regiments of the last set died, leaving Emperor Nicholas II without the best, most loyal troops on the eve of the February 1917 crisis.
After all four Russian armies of the South-Western Front successfully overcame the enemy’s defensive line and developed a “Lutsk” breakthrough in depth, before the commander-in-chief, A.A. Brusilov was asked about the future direction of a breakthrough. He had an alternative: to attack Lviv or Brest-Litovsk through Kovel. On reflection, he decided that the 8-I army of General A.M. Kaledin would have to work together with the troops of the Western Front in the general direction of Brest-Litovsk, which meant storming Kovel. And this assault could not have taken place otherwise than in the forehead - through the swampy valley of the Stokhod river ...
Kovel, who was the key to the whole Polesie, was fortified in advance by the enemy. In addition to the fact that the city was a powerful railway junction, it covered for itself the exit to Brest-Litovsk, and therefore, to the rear of the entire southern wing of the German front. Many railroads converged in Kovel, so it was very important for both sides, especially since the rail network of the Eastern theater of operations was very poor.
The capture of Kovel by the Russians would undoubtedly further divide the Austrians and the Germans in their efforts to counter the Russian offensive. North of Kovel is a difficult moorland. It was this period that divided the German and Austro-Hungarian defensive lines on the Eastern Front into two unequal parts.
The capture of Kovel suggested not only the interaction of the two Russian fronts in their offensive in Poland, but also the operational gap between the Germans and the Austrians.
The enemy would have to hastily collapse the constantly exposed flanks and thus, retreating in different directions, trying in vain to preserve the unity of the defensive front, to give the Russians the territory occupied in 1915. Only by pressure and constant threat from the flanks in the breakthrough on the Kovel direction, Russian troops would force the Austro-Germans to retreat without a fight.
The enemy also understood the meaning of Kovel perfectly. Therefore, already in the last days of May German units of the generals Luttwitz, Berngardi, Marwitz and others began to be transferred here: the 1 of the German army corps was fully concentrated here on June 10. It was the same Lower Saxon corps of General V. von Luttwitz (19-i Hannover and 20-i Braunschweig infantry divisions) that since the spring 1915 of the year (Gorlitsky breakthrough) played the role of "fire" connection on the Eastern Front.
The most selective here was the 20-I Braunschweig Infantry Division. At the beginning of the war, during the fighting on the Western Front, it was surrounded by the French in the Vosges. The French offered the encircled Germans to surrender, but they preferred to die, but not to submit. Brunswick fierce bayonet attack made their way out of the environment. For this feat, the division received the name "Steel" (by analogy, we had the "Iron" division of General AI Denikin) and the right to wear hats and helmets of the skull ("Adam's head").
It is characteristic that the Germans strengthened all directions with their divisions, interspersing German troops between the Austrians. Such a stripline, above all, allowed the use of numerous German equipment, especially heavy batteries, in all dangerous directions.
The main factor was the fact that in the presence of the Germans the Austrians no longer fled, but fought.
Only one German unit went to Kovel, which formed the maneuverable group of General A. von Linsingen. The Austrian troops, which had been transferred from Italy and from the rear units, reinforced the reeling front in the Carpathians and on the Lvov direction.
At a time when every hour was dear for the offensive, according to the decision of the command, the Russians began a prolonged regrouping. Our command, trying to protect itself from espionage activities, began the practice of evicting a “unreliable” population from a newly conquered territory. Thirteen thousand German colonists and their families were evicted from the Lutsk, Dubensky and Kremenetsky districts in a week.
Suspending the offensive of Kaledin's 8 Army in order to level out lagging armies along it allowed General A. von Linsingen to gain time and tighten up a few reserves at key points of the terrain folds. The Germans immediately, during the fighting, began to build from the isolated rear positions of a powerful fortified area. Thanks to the fortification of the area, the Austro-Germans managed to stop the Russians with smaller forces.
Also, the Germans began to concentrate in the Kovel region Aviation, skillfully used by them in battles for crossing the marshy valley of the Stokhod river. A contemporary wrote: “Concerned about the rapid advance of the Russian troops, the German command transferred large fighter forces to the Kovel area from near Verdun, and the balance of power in the air in this combat area changed significantly. “German aviation was able to very quickly, thanks to overwhelming numerical and technical superiority, seize complete dominance in the air and practically suppress the activities of Russian reconnaissance and corrective aircraft and thereby ensure complete freedom for its scouts and spotters.”
In the battles for Kovel, the Germans inflicted continuous bombing attacks on the location of the Russian troops, as well as on the forests near the front line, where Russian units could be located. In addition, the active operations of German aviation did not allow the Russians to conduct reconnaissance of enemy defensive lines, which were planned to attack. This circumstance, for example, was one of the reasons for the failure of the July offensive of the Special Army on Kovel, since the air reconnaissance failed to reveal the location of the German heavy batteries due to the opposition of the enemy’s aircraft.
In the summer of 1916, the researcher said that the “main part of the German air force” was deployed to the Eastern Front.
In the Russian 1 Army in July 1916, there were only two and a half hundred serviceable aircraft, and the losses reached up to fifty percent of the total number of aircraft per month.
During the July battles on the Kovel direction, German aviation almost every day launched bomber attacks on the main supply base of the troops storming the Kovel fortified area - Lutsk. Only by mid-August did the Russian side manage to wrest air domination in the Kovel direction from the hands of the enemy by the efforts of a specially created fighter air group of the front as part of three air detachments. But by this time the offensive outburst of the Russian armies had already dried up, and the enemy managed to turn Kovelskiy fortified area into an impregnable fortress.
The German reserves radically strengthened the defenses of the Austrian troops, and the enemy front began to acquire stability. From the beginning of June, the Austro-Germans began to deliver counter-attacks on the armies of the South-Western Front in all sectors of the breakthrough. The lack of heavy artillery did not allow the Russian troops to knock the Germans off their positions in front of Covel with one swift strike. Had to pull up slowly arriving reserves.
According to some modern researchers, having refused to advance in the direction of Lviv, General Brusilov passed the initiative on to the Germans. As a result, instead of bypassing the flanks of the Linsingen group, which would force the Germans to voluntarily clear Kovel, in order not to be surrounded, the wrong and dangerous decision was made about frontal pressure by means of an open assault on the swampy valley of the Stokhod river, which was a strong natural obstacle. A war participant said the following about the locality: “By itself, the Stokhod River is small, about 150 – 170 miles in length, but deep (with the exception of certain sections). It flows through a wide marshland, branching into sleeves, the number of which reaches twelve, which is why this river is called Stokhod. These sleeves then merged into the 1 – 3 channel, then diverging again, made the river deceptive, both in its depth and in its patency. And, in spite of its, at first glance, insignificance, this river in the 1916 year played a fatal role for the Russians ”.
By 25 June, units of the 3 and 8 armies, crushing a fiercely fighting enemy, reached the Stokhod River, shattering the front of the enemy’s resistance into a series of isolated areas. Some parts — the 30 Army Corps (gen. AM Zayonchkovsky) of the 8 Army and the 1 Turkestan Corps (general SM Scheideman) of the 3 Army — managed to force the river and hook on it left bank.
The left bank of the Stokhod river is high and protected by natural barriers. The right bank, to which the Russian troops went out, on the contrary, is low and sloping, shot through by artillery and machine guns. The enemy managed to burn the bridges, and General Brusilov did not have free reserves for the last desperate throw: the scatter of forces in several directions affected.
At the same time, the Germans still managed with counterblows to knock out our troops from the bridgeheads they occupied on the left bank of Stokhod: a shortage of heavy artillery that could support the infantry in the battle for bridgeheads affected.
Thus, the successfully launched offensive choked on the banks of Stokhod. All attempts by our troops to again force the river on a broad front were firmly interrupted by the enemy. It was not possible to connect the small bridgeheads into one. The German troops defending the Kovel direction, of course, fought skillfully and courageously.
The Germans removed the backup batteries and even some of the advanced, from the rest, unattached, sectors of the front, and threw them to Kovel. If the German reserves in the East were barely enough to hold the front north of Polesie, then technically the enemy still had superiority. That is why the enemy could maneuver to some extent with the equipment, directing the last resources to the most dangerous areas, in this case - under Kovel.
For the assault of the enemy fortified area under the Covel was created the so-called. The Guards Group, whose command was assigned to the commander of the Guards Corps (commanded from the beginning of the war until the end of August 1915), Adjutant General V.M. Bezobrazov.
According to reviews of contemporaries, he was loved in the guards units, giving the nickname "Voevoda".
The Guards Group included the 1 and 2-th Guards infantry corps, the Guards cavalry corps, as well as the experienced 1 and 30-th army corps attached for reinforcement, as well as the 5-th cavalry corps from the 8 army.
The guard, who last participated in the battles in the fall of 1915, was eager to prove herself. Over the winter of 1915 – 1916, troops were replenished, trained and morally strengthened. The guardsman - a participant in the war writes:
“Several months of parking, in reserve, made it possible for the guards units to bring themselves to a brilliant state. Numerous wounded, battle-hardened 1915 of the year, returned back into service, and the young, unstretched soldiers were eager to keep up with their older comrades. The spirit of all was excellent. Training and discipline did not leave much to be desired. "
However, tactical training in the guards units, especially among recruits, left much to be desired. War veteran V.Vishnevsky, who served as a volunteer in the Egersky Life Guards Regiment, recalled that during the stay of the Guards in the rear they were prepared almost as much as before the war in the Krasnoselsky camps.
In particular, V.V. Vishnevsky writes: “The tremendous experience of the positional war, which we have been carrying out since the fall of 1915, has remained little known or almost unknown for fresh recruits ... We were taught new tactical techniques a day or two before the offensive at Stokhod, and even briefly. Only the company received a book with instructions, on which stood the stamp "Secret." Replenishments did not know how to act confidently under fire: in attacks, during the breakthrough of multi-row trench strips, intertwined with wire from all sides, etc. These skills were somehow created on the move, but they were not able to transmit replenishments. But we rammed the ground and were ideally equal, no worse than the personnel officers at the anniversary parades in 1912 and 1913 years. ”
The whole thing was that the guard, which had been withdrawn to the reserve after the losses of the 1915 Great Retreat, was taught according to the canons of peacetime, with minimal front experience.
... 6 July The guard group of General Bezobrav was advanced between the 3 and 8 armies, replacing the 39 army corps with the gene. S.F. Stelnitsky. The site for its attack was chosen personally by the commander-in-chief of the front, Brusilov, and then confirmed by the Chief of Staff of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief gene. Mv Alekseev. In other words, the gene. V.M. Bezobrazov was a simple performer, on whose share it was just to build guards divisions for attack. And, of course, to carry out these attacks, but again with the amount of artillery that was allocated for it by higher headquarters.
Alas, the terrain, on which the guards divisions were to attack, could not even help the concentration of heavy batteries. Subsequently, high-ranking generals seemed to have completely forgotten that Bezobraz, before the start of the operation, protested about the disastrous section chosen for the offensive by the guard troops. They have also forgotten about their own participation in this matter. As a war veteran says, all this “did not prevent the present author, Adjutant General Alekseev, from initiating an investigation into the causes of weak achievements, silencing his authorship, and - as a result - changing Adjutant General Bezobrav, incorporating Guards into the new Special Army of General Gurko.”
The July offensive, as envisioned by the headquarters of the South-Western Front, should have a pronounced attacking character on the principle of a very large mass strike on a narrow sector of the front. At the same time, as many as three armies were already involved in the new attack on the Kovel direction — the gene group. V.M. Bezobrava (four infantry and two cavalry corps), 3-I army gene. L. V. Lesha (four and a half infantry and one cavalry corps), 8-I army gen. A.M. Kaledin (five infantry corps, one cavalry division). It is clear that such a mass of infantry could not crowd on a narrow section of the front, therefore the very blow to Kovel in the forehead, through the swampy valley of Stokhod, was assigned to the newly formed group of Bezobrazov. The rest of the army (3-I and 8-I) were to provide the main attack from the flanks.
All three Russian armies, taken together, had about two hundred and fifty thousand bayonets and sabers in their attack units against the enemy. The superiority of forces is unimportant, if we take into account the artillery firepower and the terrain itself, which greatly contributed to the defense and was inaccessible to the offensive. In addition, as mentioned above, Russian aviation failed to reveal the location of the German batteries concentrated under Covel.
Initially, the offensive date was set for July 10, then, due to bad weather, it was moved to the 15 number. This may also have been the reason for the ensuing failure of the offensive. So, a sapper officer who participated in the assault on Kovel, recalled that the Austrians were in front of the guardsmen. Therefore, the preparation of the source bridgeheads was not conducted so thoroughly, and the troops were confident of success. However, when the Russians went on the attack, they were already greeted by selected Germans. “Obviously, our command missed something here,” writes an eyewitness. “If our attack took place two days earlier, the first blow would have cost us much less losses, and the further course of the operation could have been completely different.”
Countless sleeves of spilled Stokhod created an extremely wetland, so the guards could attack on the front with no more than ten rotami. The rest of the troops were pillars to the back of each other, which greatly facilitated the work for the enemy artillery.
In turn, in this area the Germans had three lines of trenches, each with eight rows of wire barriers.
According to the testimony of war veterans, the Germans used Russian prisoners of war to build fortifications in the Kovelsky district. Under the fire of Russian artillery, prisoners dug trenches, erected wire barriers, and strengthened machine-gun points. At the same time, they wore old German uniforms so that they could not escape, and the Russian guns concentrated their fire on them.
The Germans skillfully placed their artillery batteries, which were shot in advance in the areas of possible attack by the Russian troops. The Russian batteries, mostly light, could not fight against the battery, since the German guns were located outside their area of operation. And it was impossible to carry the guns behind you, as it was during the May battles, through the marshes.
Also during the operational pause, the Germans managed to build machine-gun points in the most vulnerable places to repel the enemy attack.
However, in the 3 – 8 battles of July, the 6 of the Siberian rifle division captured up to three thousand soldiers, one hundred thirty-four officers, twenty-five guns and nine machine guns.
July 15 guardsmen went on the offensive. After a six-hour fierce artillery preparation, the Guards regiments attacked the enemy. At the townships of Tryst'en and Voronchin, the reinforced 10 corps gene was crushed. V. von Luttwitz.
In the 15 fights of July, the group gene. V.M. Bezobrava captured more than twenty thousand people and fifty-six guns. All three lines of enemy trenches were taken at many sites during the day.
The enemy retreated to Kovel, trying to cling to each more or less suitable line. This success was achieved through the efforts of the 2 Guards and 30 Army Corps, wedged into enemy defenses.
However, due to the indecision and tactical inexperience of the commander of the guards, General V.N. The success achieved was not developed without Bezobrav, although the situation prompted to rush after the retreating enemy and break into Kovel literally on the shoulders of the departing enemy.
For all that, the enemy, as it turned out, pre-shot his own trenches located in the rear, behind marshes, artillery batteries, which allowed the German artillery to crush trenches occupied by Russian guardsmen with impunity and in addition to successfully create a fire curtain between the first echelon of attack and reserves.
The main problem was that there were no reserves behind the 30 Army Corps, since they were all concentrated on the other flank of the group, where, in fact, the main attack was delivered. Meanwhile, in the rear of the Germans there was one single ferry across Stokhod, and if the Germans were defending themselves, complete destruction would have been expected, and the river would have been forced on the move. It was this development that was originally intended by the higher headquarters. But the strengthening of the defensive lines by the German forces forced our troops to lose too many fighters during the breakthrough, after which there was nothing to develop success. On the contrary, one could expect strong counter-attacks from the enemy.
As a result, General Bezobrazov stopped the 30-th Army Corps, which had pulled out ahead. A.M. Zayonchkovsky, equaling him for the rest of the parts, which somewhat fell behind his avant-gardes. But the Germans managed to throw heavy artillery into the direction of a clearly marked Russian strike, and in the battles of 16 – 21 in July, Russian troops could not move a single step, although the guard attacked to its full height with thick chains. A participant in this battle gives the following description of the Russian attacks: “After a weak artillery preparation, the Guards regiments chained by chain, almost in columns, moved forward. But it was only necessary to dream about the movement of people by normal dashes under enemy fire. The movement of the chains went very slowly, the legs were so sucked in by the swamp that people fell or pulled their legs out of the mud with their hands, so as not to leave their boots in the swamp. The branches of the river were so deep that the officers and soldiers drowned in them. There were not enough orderlies to help the wounded and remove them from the battle, but the healthy ones were shot by the Germans like partridges ... There was only about a company left from the regiment. Here, for the first time, we had to hear how ordinary soldiers sent curses to the highest authorities ... In general, intentionally or by failure — here, for the Russian guard, our command dug a grave, because the recruitment that completed the regiments was far from being a guard. ”
The soldiers of the attacking troops, in addition to military equipment, also dragged bundles of brushwood to fill up swampy areas and boards to overcome the barbed wire ...
As a result, the shock group suffered huge losses. To replenish their 17 number, the 2 Siberian Corps of General MM was transferred from the 1 Army of the Western Front to the group of General Bezobrav. Pleshkov.
The battle on the Kovel direction ended with the capture of soldiers and officers of the Keksgolmsky Life Guards Regiment of the village of Tristen, after which our troops could not move a single step further. A member of the battle subsequently recalled: “With the passage through Stokhod at the site of the 2 Guards Corps, the entire Kovel operation was, in effect, stopped. Reserves came to the Germans, our reserves were exhausted, and the old positional struggle began on the Stokhod line, with the only change that the enemy lost tete-de-pon (bridge fortification - A.P.) on the left bank of Stokhod, and we it is purchased on the right. Breakthrough on Kovel failed. All the sacrifices made by the guard remained barren. ”
As one of the staff officers noted, “none of the Brusilov’s armies during the July offensive of the entire South-Western Front repeated the successes of the May — Lutsk — breakthrough; the whole front remained on the same line. ”
The main loss of the Kovel strike was the death of the actual Guardsmen - the supports of the Russian throne and the monarch personally. The personnel officers of the Guards units were largely destroyed in the battles of 1914 – 1915.
So, if by the summer of 1914, about sixty thousand soldiers and two and a half thousand officers served in the guard, by the end of the year the guardsmen had lost over twenty thousand people only killed and seriously injured. By the summer of 1916, the guards regiments were again replenished with up to one hundred and ten thousand bayonets and sabers. Now all those nobles who had always formed the pillar of the imperial throne were finished off.
The losses of the guard in the battles at Stokhod amounted to about fifty thousand soldiers and officers (that is, almost half of all personnel).
And it was not without reason that Empress Maria Feodorovna on July 31 noted in her diary: “Again there is no unity among the commanders — vexation. The biggest and, as it turns out, the Guard suffered unnecessary losses - shame and disgrace! ”
I must say that the Guards cavalry was still lucky. During the operation, the Chief of Staff of the Supreme M.V. Alekseev, receiving information about the failures of the offensive, ordered Bezobrazov several times to hurry the cavalry divisions and throw them into battle. That is, not to the breakthrough that the infantry made in the enemy defense, as it was supposed before the start of the strike on Kovel, namely, to storm the German forts. It is hardly necessary to doubt that cavalrymen would have expected in this case ... Perfectly aware of this, Bezobraz invariably refused to General Alekseyev in such a hopeless demand.
The main culprit of the failure and heavy losses was presented exclusively by General Bezobraz. In a personal letter to the emperor from 13 of August, Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich mentioned: “I sincerely mourn the losses of the guard and the negative results of its heroic deeds due to indiscriminate and lack of leadership of the commanders. Almost all the officers in one voice accuse General Bezobrazov, who, as a result of his incredible stubbornness and imagination, that he is a talented commander, for the third time in vain destroys without a result thousands of dear to you lives ... "
In connection with such heavy losses in the Guards infantry (for example, in the 3-th Guards Infantry Division of General VV Chernavin only twenty-six officers remained in the ranks) five officers from cavalry guards regiments were sent to it by lot. And the fact that at the beginning of 1917, the guards continued to stand on the South-Western and Western fronts, the result was the success of a soldier riot during the February revolution of 1917 in the capital of the Russian Empire, Petrograd.
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