5 Forgotten Fights on the Eastern Front in WWI

In 1914, an arms race and Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in Serbia triggered a network of political alliances across Europe. As nations declared war on each other, the Allied Russian Army faced the Central Powers in the East. Unlike trench warfare in the West, the East witnessed a large-scale mobile war. From the Carpathians and Ukrainian steppes to Turkey and the Baltic Sea, the East saw human grit clash with technological advances and the rise of nationalist movements. Discover five forgotten battles on the Eastern Front that helped shape history.

As the Balkans crisis sparked World War I, the German military steamroller prepared to crush the Russian bear. When Austria declared war on Serbia, Russia stepped in to defend the tiny nation. Germany declared war on Russia and France, which set off the alliances’ domino effect.

The German Schlieffen Plan focused on attacking France first and then mopping up the Russians afterward. Their plan banked on the belief that Russia would take six weeks to mobilize and defend its Pan-Slavic interests. Instead of dragging its heels, Russia deployed the strategic Plan 19.

Both the Russians and Austro-Hungarians brought similar troop numbers to the table. The forces facing each other in Galicia totaled two million. The sheer size of the Eastern Front meant that each power struggled to gain complete military control over its vast territories. One Austrian soldier expressed the sentiments shared by both sides about the nature of the war in the East: “This monstrous front will devour us all.”

The opponents’ war plans differed. The Austrians intended to concentrate their 1st and 4th armies in the northern sector of the zone, wipe out the 4th and 5th Russian armies, and roll up their troops with a swift rear movement. In contrast, the Russians planned to deploy an attack without waiting for reinforcements to prevent the Austro-Hungarians from breaking through towards Kraków, Poland.

On August 18-19 (or August 5-6 in the Julian calendar), the two forces under battlefield commanders Conrad von Hötzendorf and Nikolai Ivanov joined in battle in Galicia. A series of hot engagements ensued that made up the larger battle for Galicia. The front split into two sectors with dual operations along the Lublin-Cholm and Galich-Lviv lines. Aware that the Russians knew their attack plan, the Austrian commander shifted his lines, executing a flanking movement around the Russian 4th Army. Suddenly, the Russians found themselves outnumbered two to one.

In the north, Russian forces near Lublin launched an offensive toward Przemyśl that exposed the Austrians’ right flank. For two days, Austrians under Viktor Dankle tried to turn the 4th Russian Army under Baron Anton Zaltsa from both sides. This resulted in the encirclement and defeat of several Russian corps.

In contrast to defeats in the northern sector, the 3rd Army under General Nikolai Ruzsky and the 8th Army commanded by General Aleksei Brusilov cut through weaker Austro-Hungarian units to the south at the Battle of Gnila Lipa. It took four days of savage fighting before the Russian 3rd Army broke through the Austrian front near Przemyśl. Near Lviv, Russian Don Cossacks and Austro-Hungarian Hussars collided in a scene of close-combat carnage at the Horodok Lakes (also known as the Battle of Gródek). After a six-day battle, the Russian Army defeated the Austrians at Horodok and caused them to retreat in disarray. The battles for Galicia culminated in the Battle of Rawa (Rava-Ruska), which ended on September 11.

This pushback resulted in the Austro-Hungarian Army’s retreat. Russian forces took the eastern Galicia region, blocking access to the Przemyśl Fortress and forcing the Austrians back to the Carpathian Mountains. The Russian victory in Galicia rolled back the successes of the Austrians’ East Prussian offensive. It drove the Austro-Hungarians out of Galicia, diverted significant forces from Serbia, and reduced Austrian military efficiency in the East for the next nine months.

World War I trenches harbored rats and disease, but chemical warfare brought a new kind of hell on earth.

In April 1915, the Germans deployed asphyxiating chlorine gas at the Battle of Ypres. Four months later, the Germans unleashed this new weapon of terror on the Russians defending Osowiec Fortress in Poland.

Osowiec Fortress occupied a strategic salient at a narrow, swampy place on the Biebrza River. Built in the nineteenth century, Osowiec Fortress guarded access to the Russian Empire’s western border. Much to German chagrin, Osowiec proved a major obstacle to consolidating power in the region. Seizing it would open the road to Lithuania and Belarus.

Every attempt to take the fortress by battering it with artillery fire, aerial assaults, and infantry attacks failed. Inside the citadel, the 22nd Zemlyansky Regiment had almost no shells left. After bombardments failed to budge the garrison, the Germans deployed a more calculated tactic. They planned to cut off the fortress and destroy its defenders once and for all.

During the night, the Germans inserted thousands of metal pipes into the ground facing Osowiec Fortress. These cylinders contained chlorine gas. Toward dawn, the Germans deflated the pipes when the wind started blowing toward the Russians. The pressurized pipes began spraying tons of concentrated liquid chlorine and phosgene into the air.

At 4 a.m. on August 6, a wall of insidious green fog 28 to 32 feet high enveloped the Russian lines. In ten minutes, a thick green cloud rolled for 12 miles and spread up to five miles wide. The grass turned black. Leaves curled and fell off the trees like an apocalyptic plague. Without warning, poisonous gas permeated every crevice of the fortress. An invisible enemy crept over the men inside. They had no gas masks, only rags drenched in decontaminant, and no defense against the killer smog. Gas attacked their eyes, nose, and lungs. It blistered their faces and blinded them. The survivors knew that they only had a short time left.

Outside, red rockets flared through the sky as three Landwehr infantry regiments launched an assault. The Germans had such complete faith in the total efficiency of chemical warfare that they had prepared carts to haul out the corpses. As they advanced, most Germans, equipped with gas masks, just stepped over dead Russian bodies and kept going.

Several hundred Russians huddled in the forts and surrounding areas in various stages of poisoning. Patriotism, revenge, and a desire to make their last moments count compelled them to make a final decision. Condemned to death by gas, they could sit still and die, or they could muster one last attack.

They chose action.

Coughing up blood and pieces of their lungs, the defenders rose like the undead. Led by their half-dead officer, Lieutenant Vladimir Kotlinsky, the remnants of the 8th, 13th, and 14th companies staggered out of the poisonous fog towards the German trenches. They had no bullets left, only bayonets. Driven by sheer determination, sixty men faced over 7,000 Germans.

As they neared the railroad, Kotlinsky, a topography officer, knew they could not go in blind. He had his men lie down and shelter behind a hill. Then he stood up, binoculars in hand, and went out to view the battle to scout a favorable position to attack. This act cost him his life. Kotlinsky went down, mortally wounded. But he gathered vital intelligence to guide his men’s counterattack. Twenty-one-year-old Second Lieutenant Vladislav Maximilanovich Strzheminsky took command. In the fog, surviving Russian artillery began to fire back at the Germans.

Myth later merged with reality. Stories report that the shocked Germans turned and ran when they saw the Russians stumble like zombies out of the fog. In fact, the German gunners, not expecting to see anyone left alive, opened a heavy artillery fire.

Sixty men, consumed by a single goal, kept going until they overran the German lines. A bloodcurdling war cry rose from their raw throats. Seeing the terrifying specter of gas victims up close, men with wild eyes and bloodstained cloths wrapped around their faces turned green from toxic fumes and covered in chemical burns, choking, gasping for air, spitting up chunks of their lungs, and fueled by rage and despair, the Germans took to their heels. They trampled each other and tangled fatally in their own barbed wire defenses.

In a regular battle, a company could not have defeated superior forces. The element of psychological shock took the Germans by surprise. They expected zero resistance. River fog, supporting artillery, and a dying wind helped cover Russian troops and slow the spread of gas.

By 8 a.m., the last-ditch effort resulted in a Russian victory. Kotlinsky died the next day. He was posthumously awarded the St. George Cross for leading the “Attack of the Dead.” The Germans failed to take the fortress that day, but after raining 4,000 tons of shells on it, they breached the citadel on August 9. Three weeks later, the Russians, threatened by encirclement, set detonating charges and blew up the fortress as they left.

Fortress battles on the Eastern Front did not always involve defensive action. After centuries of rivalry between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, Turkey joined the Central Powers in October 1914. In January 1916, Russian forces on the Caucasian Front undertook a bitter winter campaign to seize the Turkish fortress at Erzurum.

Preparations for the Erzurum operation began in the autumn of 1915. The harsh, remote landscape traversed by the Caucasian Army featured steep, treeless mountains and deep gorges treacherous with snow and ice. Despite rugged conditions and supply difficulties, they set their sights on the Turkish fortress at Erzurum.

This fort held the key to military dominance in eastern Anatolia. Instead of trench warfare, Turkey utilized the rugged local terrain in their defense strategy. Sitting at a two-mile-high elevation and guarded by multiple forts, Erzurum had a reputation as an impregnable citadel.

The situation required tactical delicacy and stealth. The Russians wanted to avoid attracting Turkish reinforcements at all costs. They regrouped troops, studied positions, and identified possible approaches. Above all, they needed shells to reach the fort’s altitude. Preparations took three weeks. Finally, the guns arrived by car from Kars.

On January 29, the Russians attacked the Erzurum fortress. Seventy-eight battalions, fifty-five Cossack sotnias or “hundreds,” four sapper companies, and 180 guns joined the assault. By January 30, the Russians had captured the first two forts guarding Erzurum. This enabled them to attack the Turkish positions from the rear. On February 3, they broke through Turkish defenses into Erzurum, throwing Turkish forces back 60 miles to the west. For over a month, the Russians pursued them toward Memakhatun and then withdrew due to lack of food and weapon transport difficulties along wild mountain roads in winter.

This strategic battle stopped Turkey’s advance on the Suez Canal and into Egypt. It also released pressure on the British Expeditionary Army in Mesopotamia. The Russian capture of Erzurum put the Turkish army on the back foot in Anatolia and gave Russia control of a large part of eastern Asia Minor.

Sea battles brought an apocalyptic element that rivaled the war on land. In autumn 1917, the Germans launched Operation Albion, a naval offensive action designed to capture the Moon Sound islands near the Gulf of Riga.

The Germans considered the Moon Islands, located at the mouth of the Gulf of Riga on the Estonian archipelago, a strategic imperative to strike at Russian territory. Capturing these islands became the Germans’ prime naval target.

In a strategic move, Germany planned to break into the Gulf of Finland to threaten Russia’s capital, Petrograd. Operation Albion became the largest German amphibious attempt of the war.

The Russian Naval Staff knew that they did not have the resources to match the Germans in a naval fight. Instead, they developed a strategic plan that combined minefields with long-range coastal artillery. These defenses turned the sea into a gauntlet that the Germans would have to break through to assault the capital.

On September 29, 1917, German troops landed on the northwest side of Moon Island, known as Ösel, or Saaremaa, in Tagalaht Bay. The assault force, backed by three cruisers, six U-boats, ten battleships, 47 destroyers, 72 trawlers, antisubmarine screens, and minesweepers, totaled 320 vessels.

From his place aboard the battleship Moltke, Vice Admiral Ehrhardt Schmidt commanded the High Seas Fleet. Six zeppelins and 100 aircraft provided aerial support for 24,000 troops ready for an amphibious invasion.

In contrast, the Russian defense under Vice Admiral M. K. Bakhirev had 120 ships and other craft supported by 13,000 soldiers and 96 coastal guns. Since the February Revolution, the Baltic Fleet experienced mutinies and massacres of officers that decimated the fleet’s ranks and lowered morale. These events had a critical impact on Operation Albion’s outcome.

Compared to the area’s high defense needs, Russian coastal defenses proved inadequate. The 12th Tserelsky battery and an extensive minefield guarded the entrance to the Gulf of Riga. Further on, the Takhona battery covered access to the Gulf of Finland. While minefields bristled at the entrance to Moon Sound Strait, a lack of resources left significant gaps along the coastline undefended.

The Germans took advantage of the situation. Their attack plan included a united effort and effective integration of naval and infantry forces.

On the morning of October 1, the Russians on Ösel spotted German dreadnoughts approaching Tagalaht Bay. In a coordinated attack, the Kaiser’s fleet cut through the Irben Strait and shelled the battery. German naval guns wiped out the Hundva and Ninast batteries. Within hours, motorcyclists swarmed the island, slicing telephone wires and cutting off communication.

Trapped between fire from the German navy and the landing forces, at least one Russian battery held out. The garrison, already unstable, began to retreat. German motorcyclists blocked the causeway to cut off their retreat. Outnumbered and desperate to get off the island, the Russians stormed the causeway and opened the way out.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Nikolai Sergeevich Bartenev, commanding Battery No. 43 at Cape Tserel on Ösel, found himself in an impossible situation. German battleships pounded Tserel. Behind them, German troops advanced via land. Aircraft strafed the battery from the skies. A direct hit exploded a powder magazine, killing 120 men. Amid airborne death, Bartenev took up an unequal battle with the Kaiser’s navy. Despite being wounded in the bombardment the night before, Bartenev went to the garrison to ask for support. But the soldiers refused to fight. Tserel’s guns, designed to aim at the sea, could not swivel to fire at an attacking land force.

They were on their own.

Bartenev knew the longer his battery held out, the more time it gave the Baltic Fleet to evacuate troops and local people from the island. With its first salvos, Tserel Battery hit several German battleships. Despite retreating, they continued to fire back at the battery. These shots took out two of the four guns and scattered the crew. Darkness descended. Only three officers and a few soldiers and sailors kept firing. According to witnesses, the blaze from the battery looked like a continuous strip of fire erupting along the coast. Green flashes filled the sky.

In the middle of this chaos, the Russian navy assumed the Germans had captured the battery and turned the guns on them. In response, the battleship Grazhdanin received orders to destroy the battery. The Grazhdanin’s guns opened a deadly fire.

As the battleship’s searchlights swept the battery, they spotted a man clinging to a board floating in the water.

When they pulled him up on deck, the man shouted, “What are you doing? You’re shooting at your own people!”

Tserel’s battery kept up a barrage of accurate fire until the German battleships retreated. Bartenev, two officers, and ten sailors mined and blew up their last guns and ammunition. They thwarted German attempts to breach the Gulf of Riga that day, but holding out came with a price. As they tried to break out of the encirclement, Bartenev fell into German hands. He spent the following year in a prison camp before being repatriated to Russia.

After a two-day battle between German battleships and Russian destroyers on Kassarsky Reach, the Germans stormed the islands on October 3. The Russians sank a battleship, but this failed to stop the Germans. Officers then asked the minelayer Pripyat to block the route with mines, but the team refused. This action enabled the German fleet to enter the Gulf of Riga.

The next day, the Russian battleships Slava and Citizen collided with German battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. Forced to withdraw from the archipelago, the Baltic Fleet scuttled the damaged Slava and four other ships to block the Gulf of Finland’s entrance.

Operation Albion proved well-coordinated, seamless, and effective. Within a week, the Germans occupied the Moon Islands. For the next two weeks, they fought to break through Russian anti-landing defenses and minefields in the Gulf of Finland. In the end, the Germans abandoned their goal to threaten Petrograd.

With the Bolsheviks in power in Russia and Slavic independence movements in full swing, operations on the Eastern Front dragged into the fourth year of the war. By this time, only a skeleton of the former Russian Imperial Army remained, bolstered by the Czech Legion.

The Legion fought some of Russia’s last battles against the Central Powers. On January 22, 1918, the Central Rada declared Ukraine a sovereign state. The next day, Bolshevik forces attacked Kyiv. After bombarding the city with shells and chemical warfare, the Bolsheviks led a twenty-day reign of terror against former imperial officers, pro-Ukrainian leaders, and the civilian population.

One day after the Soviets captured Kyiv, the Rada appealed to the Germans and Austrians for help. On March 1, the Ukrainian People’s Army, supported by the Central Powers, retook Kyiv. On March 8, the Czech Legion fought the Soviets’ final battle in World War I against a numerically superior German army at Bakhmach.

With a railway hub defended by Czech armored trains and a key bridge near the German front lines, Bakhmach occupied a strategically important spot. Defending this area would help prevent the Germans from advancing through Ukraine. The battle ended on March 13 with a victory for the Czech Legion.

On March 3, 1918, the Soviets recognized Ukrainian independence, an uneasy truce that lasted until January 7, 1919. On that date, the Soviet Army, led by Josef Stalin, invaded Ukraine to capture Kyiv. On March 3, 1918, the Soviets signed a separate peace, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, with Germany. The November armistice ended the First World War with an Allied victory. The Treaty of Versailles invalidated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and forced Germany to relinquish its territorial gains in the East.

For four years, the Allies and Central Powers fought a savage, fluid war across the Eastern map.

These five pivotal battles saw significant advances, tactical achievements, the clash between human determination and modern technology, the disintegration of three powerful empires, and the rise of independence movements.

The Eastern Front in World War I carried strategic significance. With a front that extended from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, the Eastern Front had a geographical size twice as long as the Western Front, which helped shape its history as a war of movement.