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Updated: June 11, 2025
No fewer than sixteen divisions were withdrawn, between June and September, by the Germans from the Western front and one from the Balkans to meet Brussilov's offensive, and they included some of the best of the Prussian Guards. Austria diverted seven divisions from Italy, and even the Turks sent two.
Here, as well as in other places, the Austro-Hungarian-German forces employed all possible means to stem the Russian onrush, and a large part of the losses suffered by General Brussilov's regiments was due to the extensive use of liquid fire.
"General Brussilov's operations on the flanks of the Austro-German army under Von Linsingen are proceeding with wonderful rapidity. All the efforts of German reenforcements to drive in a counterwedge at Kolki, Rozhishshe and Targowica, at the wings and apex of our Rovno salient, proved ineffectual.
That Germany should have divisions to spare for another Balkan campaign after Verdun, and while the battle of the Somme and Brussilov's offensive were at their height, amazed the Entente Powers, and was, indeed, quite inconsistent with the versions of those campaigns to which they had given currency.
On May 8, 1915, the Third Russian Army and the Forty-eighth Division had reunited with Brussilov's main army in the neighborhood of Sanok, twenty miles north of the Lupkow. When the commanders of a retreating army lose their heads the rank and file will inevitably become demoralized and panic-stricken.
Brussilov's movements had been partly military and partly political. From the passes, in those mountains Hungary could be attacked, and unless he could be driven away there was no security for the Hungarian cornfields, to which Germany was looking for food supplies. Moreover, from the beginning of the Russian movement in Galicia, northern Bukovina had been in Russian hands.
Most serious of all, Dmitrieff had neglected to construct second and third lines to which he could retire in an emergency. Of the rivers that lay behind him the Wisloka, the Wistok, and the San the first would be useful to cover Brussilov's position at the western passes, but beyond that he could not retreat without imperiling the whole Carpathian right flank.
It was a peril to which the German prospects at Verdun and forebodings on the Somme were secondary considerations; and both the Western allies profited from Brussilov's campaign. One German corps was hurried from Verdun to Kovel in six days, and others followed at a less exhausting speed.
The Russian retreat to the Wisloka was a serious disaster for Dmitrieff; he had been caught napping, and had to pay dearly in men and guns for not having created a row of alternative positions. His force had been a cover for Brussilov's operations on both sides of the western passes as well as for the whole Russian line in the Carpathians.
Brussilov's army along the Carpathian foothills at Dukla had to beat a precipitate retreat and lost heavily; it was nearly severed from Dmitrieff's centre.
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