The Brusilov Offensive, 4 June – 20 September 1916:

General Alexei Brusilov was a brilliant general, commander of the Russian forces in the south-west of the Eastern Front. He formulated tactics that combined rapid movement with concentrated support fire allowing soldiers to advance quickly while avoiding heavily defended positions.

In the east, where there were fewer troops per mile of front than in the west, and their abilities were more variable, a war of movement was still possible. The Germans could always break through the Russian line if they wanted to and the Russians could punch a hole in the Austro-Hungarian front. On 4 June, Brusilov did just that.

Under pressure from Austro-Hungarian forces on the Italian Front, Italy asked for assistance from its allies, and in addition to the French and British offensives on the Western Front, the Russians advanced across a 300-mile-wide front, quickly pushing back Austrian and German divisions. Brusilov was rewarded with a progressive collapse of the Austro-Hungarian armies in his sector, producing one of the most spectacular victories of the war.

Czech and Slovene units had always performed erratically on the Russian front; now they simply threw away their weapons and ran. The Russians took a quarter of a million of them prisoner in the course of an advance that carried on across the eastern half of Galicia. He captured 350,000 men in total during the offensive, and relieved the pressure in the west and in Italy. Brusilov’s drive then petered out, but before doing so it had had important political consequences. Romania was induced by the advance into Galicia to throw in its lot with the entente powers. Like the Italians, the Romanians hoped to gain territory from Austria-Hungary, but also like the Italians, they proved so incompetent militarily that they proved to be as much a burden as a boon to their new allies.

The Germans moved troops from Verdun to bolster their allies and then fought back to regain lost territory. The failure at Verdun weakened Falkenhayn’s position as commander of the Triple Alliance forces, and after the Brusilov offensive he was forced to resign. The Austro-Hungarian armies were thereafter unable to launch their own offensives. Ludendorff became the new chief commander, with Hindenburg as his number two. Ludendorff quickly restored the Central Powers’ position in the east, stiffening the Austro-Hungarian units with German officers and NCOs. He then sent enough reinforcements to Hungary and Bulgaria to spearhead a counter-offensive against Romania. They had optimistically invaded Hungary, but a German-Bulgarian army entering the Dobruja took them in the rear, and a German-Austrian army threw them back over the Carpathians. Given Romania’s geography, it was easy to arrange for converging attacks to cut off the southern two-thirds of the country. Caught between ‘two fires’ the Romanians had to abandon their capital, Bucharest, and the greater part of their country. The Romanian army hid behind the Russian relief force in Moldavia, while the Germans methodically drained the conquered part of Romania of its invaluable supplies of cattle, wheat and oil.

Welcome as this new source of supply was, however, it wasn’t enough. The British blockade naval blockade of the Central Powers was beginning to hurt by mid-1916, particularly when the German navy failed to break out at the Battle of Jutland just before the Brusilov Offensive began. The queues for food in Germany were getting longer and their behaviour less orderly. There had been serious riots in the major industrial centres in the Spring. The situation was even worse in Austria-Hungary.

While the Brusilov Offensive was initially one of the war’s most successful campaigns, it came at a huge cost: the Central Powers lost 1.5 million men and the Russians 0.5 million. Altogether, Russia had lost a million troops by the autumn of 1916. This was her last major effort in support of her allies. Those who remained were utterly exhausted and sick of the sacrifice. These heavy casualties led to further discontent in Russia.

Other major events in the course of the war in the east in 1916 included a Russian advance in the Caucasus and Germany’s creation of a Polish kingdom out of territory conquered from the Russians, though this did not include any part of German Poland, nor did the Poles get a king. Also in the summer of 1916, the Greek government was forced to accept allied direction.

The Olympic Games Cancelled:

The 1916 Olympic Games were due to be held in Berlin but were cancelled. The 1920 games took place in Antwerp in honour of the suffering of the people of Belgium in the war. It was there that the flag featuring the five rings was raised for the first time. Berlin next hosted the Games in 1936.

Sources:

Colin McEvedy (1982): The Penguin Atlas of Recent History (Europe since 1815). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Richards, Goodson & Morris (1938): A Sketch-Map History of the Great War and After, 1914-35. London: Harrap.

Norman Ferguson (2014): The First World War: A Miscellany. Chichester: Summersdale.