Brusilov Offensive

Under the terms of their Chantilly Agreement of December 1915, Russia, France, Britain and Italy committed to simultaneous attacks against the Central Powers in the summer of 1916. Russia felt obliged to lend troops to fight in France and Salonika (against her own wishes), and to attack on the Eastern Front, in the hope of obtaining munitions from Britain and France.[8]

In March 1916 the Russians initiated the disastrous Lake Naroch Offensive in the Vilnius area, during which the Germans suffered only one-fifth as many casualties as the Russians. This offensive took place at French request - General Joseph Joffre had hoped that the Germans would transfer more units to the East after the Battle of Verdun began in February 1916.[9]

General Aleksei Brusilov presented a plan to the Stavka (the Russian high command), proposing a massive offensive by his Southwestern Front against the Austro-Hungarian forces in Galicia. Brusilov's plan aimed to take some of the pressure off French and British armies in France and the Italian Army along the Isonzo Front and, if possible, to knock Austria-Hungary out of the war. As the Austrian army was heavily engaged in Italy, the Russian army enjoyed a significant numerical advantage in the Galician sector.

On 4 June 1916, the Russians opened the offensive with a massive, accurate but brief artillery barrage against the Austro-Hungarian lines, with the key factor of this effective bombardment being its brevity and accuracy. This was in contrast to the usual, protracted barrages at the time that gave the defenders time to bring up reserves and evacuate forward trenches while damaging the battlefield so badly that it was hard for attackers to advance. The initial attack was successful, and the Austro-Hungarian lines were broken, enabling three of Brusilov's four armies to advance on a wide front (see: Battle of Kostiuchnówka).

The success of the breakthrough was helped in large part by Brusilov's innovation to attack weak points along the Austrian lines to effect a breakthrough, which the main Russian army could then exploit.

Attack of Russian cavalry (1916)

On 8 June forces of the Southwestern Front took Lutsk. The Austrian commander, Archduke Josef Ferdinand, barely escaped the city before the Russians entered, a testament to the speed of the Russian advance. By now the Austrians were in full retreat and the Russians had taken over 200,000 prisoners. Brusilov's forces were becoming overextended and he made it clear that further success of the operation depended on Evert launching his part of the offensive. Evert, however, continued to delay, which gave the German high command time to send reinforcements to the Eastern Front.

In a meeting held on the same day Lutsk fell, German Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn persuaded his Austrian counterpart Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf to pull troops away from the Italian Front to counter the Russians in Galicia. Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, Germany's commander in the East (Oberkommando-Ost), was again able to capitalize on good railroads to bring German reinforcements to the front.

On 11 June, while pursuing the Austro-Hungarian Army in Bukovina, Russian forces inadvertently crossed into Romanian territory, where they overwhelmed the border guard at Mamornița and had a cavalry patrol disarmed and interned at Herța. Having no intention to force the hand of the Romanian Government, the Russians quickly left Romanian territory.[11][12]

Finally, on 18 June a weak and poorly prepared offensive commenced under Evert. On 24 July Alexander von Linsingen counterattacked the Russians south of Kovel and temporarily checked them. On 28 July Brusilov resumed his own offensive, and although his armies were short on supplies he reached the Carpathian Mountains by 20 September. The Russian high command started transferring troops from Evert's front to reinforce Brusilov, a transfer Brusilov strongly opposed because more troops only served to clutter his front.

• 
  Blue and red lines: Eastern front 1916. Brusilov offensive takes place in lower right corner.

• 
  Left: Plan of May. Right: Frontline at the end of Brusilov offensive in September 1916.

From 27 June to 3 July 1916, Brusilov carried out, on his own initiative, the deportation of 13,000 German civilians from the Volhynian areas that had been conquered during the offensive.[14]

Russian infantry

Brusilov's operation achieved its original goal of forcing Germany to halt its attack on Verdun and transfer considerable forces to the East. It also broke the back of the Austro-Hungarian Army, which suffered the majority of the casualties. Afterward, the Austro-Hungarian army increasingly had to rely on the support of the German army for its military successes. On the other hand, the German army did not suffer much from the operation and retained most of its offensive power afterward.

The early success of the offensive convinced Romania to enter the war on the side of the Entente, though that turned out to be a bad decision since it led to the failure of the 1916 campaign. Russian casualties were considerable, numbering between 500,000[1] and 1,000,000.[15] Austria-Hungary and Germany lost 616,000[16] and 148,000[17], respectively, making a total of 764,000 casualties. The Brusilov Offensive is considered as one of the most lethal offensives in world history.

The Brusilov Offensive was the high point of the Russian effort during World War I, and was a manifestation of good leadership and planning on the part of the Imperial Russian Army coupled with great skill of the lower ranks. According to John Keegan, "the Brusilov Offensive was, on the scale by which success was measured in the foot-by-foot fighting of the First World War, the greatest victory seen on any front since the trench lines had been dug on the Aisne two years before".[18]

The Brusilov offensive commanded by Brusilov himself went very well, but the overall campaign, for which Brusilov's part was only supposed to be a distraction, because of Evert's failures, became tremendously costly for the Imperial army, and after the offensive, it was no longer able to launch another on the same scale. Many historians contend that the casualties that the Russian army suffered in this campaign contributed significantly to its collapse the following year.[19]

The operation was marked by a considerable improvement in the quality of Russian tactics. Brusilov used smaller, specialized units to attack weak points in the Austro-Hungarian trench lines and blow open holes for the rest of the army to advance into. These were a remarkable departure from the human wave attacks that had dominated the strategy of all the major armies until that point during World War I. Evert used conventional tactics that were to prove costly and indecisive, thereby costing Russia its chance for a victory in 1916.

The irony was that other Russian commanders did not realize the potential of the tactics that Brusilov had devised. Similar tactics were proposed separately by French, Germans, and British on the Western Front, and employed at the Battle of Verdun earlier in the year, and would henceforth be used to an even greater degree by the Germans, who utilized stormtroopers and infiltration tactics to great effect in the 1918 Spring Offensive.[20]

Breakthrough tactics were later to play a large role in the early German blitzkrieg offensives of World War II and the later attacks by the Soviet Union and the Western Allies to defeat Germany, and evolved into modern armoured warfare.[21][22]

• Keegan, John (2000). The First World War. Toronto: Vintage Canada. ISBN 0-676-97224-1.
• Lohr, Eric (2003). Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I. London: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-01041-8.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Stone, Norman (1998) [1975]. The Eastern Front 1914–1917. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-026725-5.

• Washburn, Stanley (1917). The Russian offensive, being the third volume of "Field notes from the Russian front," embracing the period from June 5th to Sept. 1st, 1916. London: Constable.
• Harrision, William W. "THE DEVELOPMENT OF RUSSIAN-SOVIET OPERATIONAL ART, 1904-1937, AND THE IMPERIAL LEGACY IN SOVIET MILITARY THOUGHT." (n.d.): n. pag. King's Research Portal. William W. Harrison, May 1994. Web. June 21, 2017 <https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/2928872/319513_.pdf>.
• Clodfelter, Micheal. Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Encyclopedia of Casualty and Other Figures, 1492-2015. 4th ed. Jefferson, page 412, North Carolina: Micheal Clodfelter, 2017. Google Books. Micheal Clodfelter, 2017. Web. 21 June 2017
• Liddell Hart, B.H. (1930). The Real War: 1914–18. pp. 224–227.
• Schindler J. "Steamrollered in Galicia: The Austro-Hungarian Army and the Brusilov Offensive, 1916", War in History, Vol. 10, No. 1. (2003), pp. 27–59.
• Stone, David (2015). The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914–1917. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. ISBN 9780700620951.
• Tucker, Spencer The Great War: 1914–18 (1998) ISBN 978-0-253-21171-2
• Sergei Sergeyev-Tsensky, [1943]. Brusilov's Break-Through: A Novel of the First World War, translated into English by Helen Altschuler, Hutchinson & Co, London, 1945.
• B. P. Utkin Brusilovskij proryv (2001) (in Russian)
• Операция русского Юго-Западного фронта летом 1916 года (in Russian)
• Jukes, Geoffrey (2003). The First World War (I); The Eastern Front 1914–1918. Minneapolis: Osprey Publishing. ISBN 0-415-96841-0.
• Neiberg, Michael; Jordan, David (2003). History of World War I; The Eastern Front 1914–1920. London: Amber Books. ISBN 0-415-96841-0.

https://www.awm.gov.au/exhibitions/1918/battles/hamel/ Australian commander's offensive: Origins of the "Blitzkrieg" warfare.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Brusilov Offensive.

• Primary Documents: Alexei Brusilov on the Brusilov Offensive, June 1916
• 4 June 1916 - The Brusilov Offensive on Trenches on the Web
• http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/battles_kovel_stanislav.html
• Map of Europe during the Brusilov Offensive at omniatlas.com