#war #history #World War I

The year 1915 began with an intensification of military actions by the warring parties. Symbolizing the emergence of sinister new means of warfare, on January 19, German Zeppelins began raiding the east coast of England. Several people died in the ports of Norfolk, and several bombs fell near the royal house at Sandringham. On January 24, a short but fierce battle took place off Dogger Bank in the North Sea, during which the German cruiser Blücher was sunk and two battlecruisers were damaged. The British battlecruiser Lion was also seriously damaged.

Second Battle of Masuria

In February 1915, Germany began major offensive operations in East Prussia (Augustow and Prasnysz), which were called the Second Battle of Masuria. On February 7, 1915, the 8th (General von Below) and 10th (General Eichhorn) German armies went on the offensive from East Prussia. Their main blow fell in the area of ​​the Polish city of Augustow, where the 10th Russian Army (General Sievers) was located. Having created numerical superiority in this direction, the Germans attacked the flanks of Sievers’ army and tried to encircle it.

The second stage provides for a breakthrough of the entire North-Western Front. But due to the tenacity of the soldiers of the 10th Army, the Germans failed to completely capture it in pincers. Only the 20th Corps of General Bulgakov was surrounded. For 10 days, he valiantly repelled attacks by German units in the snowy forests near Augustus, preventing them from further advancing. Having used up all the ammunition, the remnants of the corps attacked the German positions in the hope of breaking through to their own. Having overthrown the German infantry in hand-to-hand combat, the Russian soldiers died heroically under the fire of German guns. “The attempt to break through was complete madness.

But this is holy madness, heroism, which showed the Russian warrior in his full light, which we know from the time of Skobelev, the times of the storming of Plevna, the battle in the Caucasus and the storming of Warsaw! The Russian soldier knows how to fight very well, he endures all sorts of hardships and is able to be persistent, even if certain death is inevitable!”, wrote the German war correspondent R. Brandt in those days. Thanks to this courageous resistance, the 10th Army was able to withdraw most of its forces from attack by mid-February and took up defense on the Kovno-Osovets line. The Northwestern Front held out and then managed to partially restore the lost

positions. The heroic defense of the Osovets fortress provided great assistance in stabilizing the front. Almost simultaneously, fighting broke out on another section of the East Prussian border, where the 12th Russian Army (General Plehve) was stationed. On February 20, in the area of ​​Prasnysz (Poland), it was attacked by units of the 8th German Army (General von Below). The city was defended by a detachment under the command of Colonel Barybin, who for several days heroically repelled the attacks of superior German forces. On February 24, 1915, Prasnysh fell. But its staunch defense gave the Russians time to bring up the necessary reserves, which were being prepared in accordance with the Russian plan for a winter offensive in East Prussia. On February 25, the 1st Siberian Corps of General Pleshkov approached Prasnysh and immediately attacked the Germans. In a two-day winter battle, the Siberians completely defeated the German formations and drove them out of the city. Soon, the entire 12th Army, replenished with reserves, went on a general offensive, which, after stubborn fighting, drove the Germans back to the borders of East Prussia; Meanwhile, the 10th Army also went on the offensive, clearing the Augustow Forest from the Germans. The front was restored, but the Russian troops could not achieve more. The Germans lost about 40 thousand people in this battle, the Russians - about 100 thousand. On February 12, the French launched a new offensive in Champagne. The losses were enormous, the French lost about 50 thousand people, having advanced almost 500 yards. This was followed by a British offensive on Neuschtal in March 1915 and a new French offensive in April in an easterly direction. However, these actions did not bring tangible results to the Allies.

In the east, on March 22, after a siege, Russian troops captured the Przemysl fortress, which dominated the bridgehead on the San River in Galicia. Over 100 thousand Austrians were captured, not counting the heavy losses suffered by Austria in unsuccessful attempts to lift the siege. Russia's strategy at the beginning of 1915 amounted to an offensive in the direction of Silesia and Hungary while securing reliable flanks. During this company, the capture of Przemysl was the main success of the Russian army (although it managed to hold this fortress only for two months). At the beginning of May 1915, a major offensive by the troops of the Central Powers in the East began. Gorlitsky breakthrough. The beginning of the Great Retreat Having failed to push back Russian troops at the borders of East Prussia and in the Carpathians, the German command decided to implement the third breakthrough option. It was supposed to be carried out between the Vistula and the Carpathians, in the Gorlitsa region. By that time, over half of the armed forces of the Austro-German bloc were concentrated against Russia. But, before launching an offensive in the Gorlitsa area, the German command undertook a series of offensive operations in

East Prussia and Poland against the troops of the Northwestern Front. Moreover, in the offensive against Russian troops near Warsaw on May 31, 1915, the Germans successfully used gases for the first time. More than nine thousand Russian soldiers were poisoned, of which 1,183 died. Russian troops did not use gas masks at that time. In the 35-kilometer section of the breakthrough at Gorlitsa, a strike group was created under the command of General Mackensen. It included the newly formed 11; the German army, consisting of three selected German corps and the 6th Austrian corps, which included Hungarians (the Hungarians were considered the best soldiers of the multi-tribal Austrian army). In addition, the 10th German Corps and the 4th Austrian Army were subordinated to Mackenzin. Mackenzin's group was superior to the Russian 3rd Army (General Radko-Dmitriev) stationed in this area in manpower - twice, in light artillery - three times, in heavy artillery - 40 times, in machine guns - two and a half times . On May 2, 1915, Mackensen’s group (357 thousand people) went on the offensive. The Russian command, knowing about the build-up of forces in this area, did not provide a timely counterattack. Large reinforcements were sent here late, were brought into battle piecemeal and quickly died in battles with superior enemy forces. The Gorlitsky breakthrough clearly revealed the problem of shortage of ammunition, especially shells.

The overwhelming superiority in heavy artillery was one of the main reasons for this, the largest German success on the Russian front. “Eleven days of the terrible roar of German heavy artillery, literally tearing down entire rows of trenches along with their defenders,” recalled General A. I. Denikin, a participant in those events. - We almost didn’t answer - we had nothing. The regiments, exhausted to the last degree, repulsed one attack after another - with bayonets or point-blank shooting, blood flowed, the ranks thinned, grave mounds grew... Two regiments were almost destroyed by one fire.” The Gorlitsky breakthrough created a threat of encirclement of Russian troops in the Carpathians. Other Austro-Hungarian armies, reinforced by German corps, also went on the offensive. The troops of the Southwestern Front began a widespread withdrawal. At the same time, the 48th division of General L.G. Kornilov found itself in a difficult situation, which fought out of encirclement, but Kornilov himself and his headquarters were captured. We also had to leave the cities conquered by the Russians with such great blood: Przemysl, Lvov, and others. By June 22, 1915, having lost 500 thousand people, Russian troops abandoned all of Galicia. The enemy lost a lot, only Mackensen’s group lost two-thirds of its personnel. Thanks to courageous resistance

Russian soldiers and Mackensen’s group were unable to quickly enter the operational space. In general, its offensive was reduced to “pushing through” the Russian front. It was seriously pushed back to the east, but not defeated. The strike forces of Field Marshal Mackensen's 11th German Army, supported by the 40th Austro-Hungarian Army, went on the offensive along a 20-mile front in Western Galicia. Russian troops were forced to leave Lvov and

Warsaw. In the summer, the German command broke through the Russian front near Gorlitsa. Soon the Germans launched an offensive in the Baltic states, and Russian troops lost Galicia, Poland, part of Latvia and Belarus. The enemy was preoccupied with the need to repel the impending attack on Serbia, as well as to return troops to the Western Front before the start of a new French offensive. During the four-month campaign, Russia lost 800 thousand soldiers alone as prisoners. However, the Russian command, switching to strategic defense, managed to withdraw its armies from the enemy’s attacks and stop his advance. Concerned and exhausted, the Austro-German armies went on the defensive along the entire front in October. Germany faced the need to continue a long war on two fronts. Russia bore the brunt of the struggle, which provided France and England with a respite to mobilize the economy for the needs of the war. On February 16, 1915, British and French warships began shelling Turkish defenses in the Dardanelles. With interruptions caused in part by bad weather, this naval operation continued for two months.

The Dardanelles operation was undertaken at the request of Russia to launch a diversionary attack on Turkey, which would relieve pressure on the Russians fighting the Turks in the Caucasus. In January, the Dardanelles Strait, about 40 miles long and 1 to 4 miles wide, connecting the Aegean Sea with the Marmara Sea, was chosen as a target. The operation to capture the Dardanelles, opening the way to an attack on Constantinople, figured in the Allied military plans before the war, but was rejected as too difficult. With Turkey's entry into the war, this plan was revised as possible, although risky. A purely naval operation was initially planned, but it immediately became clear that a combined naval and land operation had to be undertaken. This plan found active support from the English First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. The outcome of the operation, and if it was successful, the “back door” would have been opened for Russia, was questioned by the reluctance of the allies to immediately send sufficiently large forces and the choice mainly

outdated warships. At the beginning, Türkiye had only two divisions to defend the strait. At the time of the Allied landings, it had six divisions and outnumbered five Allied divisions, not counting the presence of magnificent natural fortifications. Early on the morning of April 25, 1915, Allied troops landed at two points on the Gallipoli Peninsula. The British landed at Cape Ilyas, at the southern tip of the peninsula, while the Australians and New Zealand units advanced along the Aegean coast about 15 miles to the north. At the same time, the French brigade launched a diversionary attack on Kumkala on the Anatolian coast. Despite barbed wire and heavy machine-gun fire, both groups managed to seize a bridgehead. However, the Turks controlled the heights, as a result of which the British, Australian and New Zealand troops were unable to advance.

As a result, as on the Western Front, there was a lull here. In August, British troops landed at Suvla Bay in an attempt to capture the central part of the peninsula opposite the pass. Although the landing in the Gulf was sudden, the command of the troops was unsatisfactory, and the opportunity for a breakthrough was lost. The offensive in the south also proved unsuccessful. The British government decided to withdraw troops. W. Churchill was forced to resign as First Lord of the Admiralty. On May 23, 1915, Italy declared war on Austria, signing a secret treaty with the Allies in London in April. The Triple Alliance, which linked Italy with the Central Powers, was denounced, although at this time it refused to declare war on Germany.

At the beginning of the war, Italy declared its neutrality on the grounds that the Triple Alliance did not oblige it to take part in a war of aggression. However, the main reason for Italy's actions was the desire to gain territorial gains at the expense of Austria. Austria was unwilling to make the concessions that Italy sought, such as giving up Trieste. Moreover, by 1915, public opinion began to swing in favor of the Allies, and both former pacifists and radical socialists, led by Mussolini, saw an opportunity to bring about a revolution in the face of the lack of stability in society during the war. In March, the Austrian government took steps to satisfy Italy's demands, however, it was already too late. Under the Treaty of London, the Italians got what they wanted, or most of what they wanted. Under this treaty, Italy was promised Trentino, South Tyrol, Trieste, Istria and other predominantly Italian-speaking regions. On May 30, the Italians began military operations against Austria with the launch of an offensive by the 2nd and 3rd armies under the overall command of General Cadorna in the northeast direction.

Italy had very limited capabilities for warfare; its army had low combat effectiveness, especially after the Libyan campaign. The Italian offensive floundered, and the fighting in 1915 took on a positional character.

Change of Supreme Commander-in-Chief During the Great Retreat, the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief moved from Baradovichi to Mogilev in mid-August 1915. Soon after the change in Headquarters, there was a change in the commander-in-chief. On September 5, 1915, this mission was undertaken by the sovereign himself, Nicholas II. He took command of the army during the most critical period of the struggle against an external enemy, thereby demonstrating a close bond of unity with his people and the Russian Imperial Army. Many tried to dissuade him, but the sovereign insisted on his own. Nikolai Alexandrovich was then 47 years old: By nature, he was a modest person, extremely delicate, easy to communicate with people. He loved his wife and children very much and was an impeccable family man.

He shunned pomp, flattery, and luxury, and almost never drank alcohol. He was also distinguished by his deep faith. Those around him often did not understand the king’s actions, but only because they themselves had lost the sincerity and purity of their faith. The Emperor managed to preserve it. He directly and directly perceived his calling as God's anointed and was guided by it in the way he understood. All his contemporaries noted his colossal restraint and self-control, and Nikolai Alexandrovich explained: “If you see that I am so calm, it is because I have a firm and decisive belief that the fate of Russia, my fate and the fate of my family is in the will of God who gave me this power. Whatever happens, I commit myself to His will, knowing that I can think of nothing else but serving the country He has entrusted to me.”

It was common in many states for the monarch to become commander-in-chief. But this was always done in anticipation of victorious laurels. Nicholas II took on a colossal burden at the most difficult moment of the war. Nikolai Nikolaevich was appointed commander of the Caucasian Front, but, concentrating rear affairs in his hands, he left the leadership of military operations to General Yudenich. The army took the change of supreme commander calmly. The soldiers already considered the king their highest superior. And the officers understood that the chief of staff would play an important role under the sovereign, and they heatedly discussed who would take this position. When they found out that it was General Alekseev, it made everyone happy. General Evert became the commander-in-chief of the Northwestern Front. The year 1916 began with the offensive of Russian troops in the Caucasus. On February 16, they took the Turkish fortress of Erzurum. Meanwhile, in England, parliament approved a law on universal conscription, which was strongly opposed by trade unions and Labor. Conservatives voted for the introduction of the law and

some liberals led by D. Lloyd George. And in the capital of Germany, a food riot broke out in Berlin; there was a catastrophic shortage of food. In the same year, the battles of Verdun and the Somme River ended.

These battles were the bloodiest of the war on the Western Front. They were distinguished by the massive use of artillery, aviation, infantry, and cavalry and did not bring success to either side. The main reason for this balance was the unconditional advantage of defensive methods of warfare over offensive methods. The Verdun Offensive signified the desire of the Chief of the German General Staff, Falkenhayn, to deliver a decisive blow on the Western Front, which was postponed in 1915 after the successes achieved in the East. Falkenhayn believed that Germany's main enemy was England, but at the same time he recognized that England could not be conquered, partly because an offensive in the English sector had little chance of success, and also because a military defeat in Europe would not England from the war. Submarine warfare was the best hope for realizing this possibility, and Falkenhayn saw his task as defeating the British allies in Europe.

Russia seemed already defeated, and the Austrians showed that they could cope with the Italians. That left France. Given the proven strength of the defenses in trench warfare, Falkenhayn abandoned the idea of ​​​​trying to break through the French lines. At Verdun, he chose a strategy of war of attrition. He planned a series of attacks to lure out the French reserves and destroy them with artillery. Verdun was chosen partly because it was on a salient and disrupted German communications, but also because of the important historical significance of this major fortress. As soon as the battle began, the Germans were determined to capture Verdun and the French to defend it. Falkenhayn was right in his assumption that the French would not give up Verdun easily. However, the task was complicated by the fact that Verdun was no longer a strong fortress and was practically deprived of artillery. And yet, forced to retreat, the French maintained their forts, while reinforcements filtered through a very narrow corridor that was not exposed to German artillery fire. By the time General Petain, commanding the Second Army, was sent to Verdun at the end of the month to lead its defense, the immediate threat had passed. The German crown prince, who commanded the army corps, scheduled the main offensive for March 4. After two days of shelling, the offensive began, but by March 9 it was stopped. However, Falkenhayn's strategy remained the same.

On June 7, the Germans captured Fort Vaux, which controlled the right flank of the French positions at Verdun. The next day they captured Fort Tiomon, which had already changed hands twice since the offensive began on June 1. It seemed that an immediate threat loomed over Verdun. In March, the Germans failed to achieve a quick victory at Verdun, but they continued their attacks with great persistence, which were carried out at short intervals. The French repulsed them and launched a series of counterattacks.

German troops continued their offensive. On 24 October, having taken over the 2nd Army after Pétain became commander-in-chief, General Nivelle launched a counter-offensive at Verdun. With the start of the Somme offensive in July, German reserves were no longer sent to Verdun. The French counterattack was covered by the "creeping artillery attack," a new invention in which infantry advanced behind a gradually moving wave of artillery fire according to a precisely timed schedule. As a result, the troops captured the initially set objectives and captured 6 thousand prisoners. The next offensive was hampered by bad weather at the end of November, but was resumed in December and became known as the Battle of Luvemen.

Almost 10 thousand prisoners were taken and more than 100 guns were captured. In December, the Battle of Verdun ended. About 120 divisions were ground in the Verdun meat grinder, including 69 French and 50 German. During the battle of Verdun, the Allies on July 1, 1916, after a week of artillery preparation, began an offensive on the Somme River. As a result of the exhaustion of the French troops near Verdun, the British units began the bulk of the offensive force, and England the leading Allied power on the Western Front. The Battle of the Somme was where tanks, a new type of weapon, first appeared on September 15. The effect of the British vehicles, which were initially called “landships,” was quite uncertain, but so was the number The number of tanks that took part in the battle was small.In the fall, the British advance was blocked by swamps.

The Battle of the Somme River, which lasted from July to the end of November 1916, did not bring success to either side. Their losses were enormous: 1 million 300 thousand people. The situation on the Eastern Front was more successful for the Entente. At the height of the battles near Verdun, the French command again turned to Russia for help. On June 4, the Russian 8th Army under the command of General Kaledin advanced into the Lutsk area, which was considered as a reconnaissance operation. To the surprise of the Russians, the Austrian defense line collapsed. And General Alexei Brusilov, who exercised overall command of the southern sector of the front, immediately intensified his offensive, bringing 3 armies into battle. The Austrians were soon put into panic flight. In three days, the Russians captured 200 thousand prisoners. The army of General Brusilov broke through the Austrian front on the Lutsk-Chernivtsi line. Russian troops again occupied most of

Galicia and Bukovina, putting Austria-Hungary on the brink of military defeat. And, although the offensive dried up by August 1916, the “Brusilovsky breakthrough” suspended the activity of the Austrians on the Italian front and greatly eased the position of the Anglo-French troops at Verdun and the Somme.

The war at sea came down to the question of whether Germany could successfully resist England's traditional superiority at sea. As on land, the presence of new types of weapons - aircraft, submarines, mines, torpedoes, and radio equipment - made defense easier than attack. The Germans, having a smaller fleet, believed that the British would seek to destroy it in a battle that they tried to avoid. However, the British strategy was aimed at achieving other goals. Having relocated the fleet to Scala Flow in the Orkney Islands at the beginning of the war and thereby establishing control over the North Sea, the British, wary of mines and torpedoes and the inaccessible coast of Germany, chose a long blockade, being constantly ready in case of an attempt to break through the German fleet. At the same time, being dependent on supplies by sea, they had to ensure security on ocean routes.

In August 1914, the Germans had relatively few battleships based abroad, although the cruisers Goeben and Breslau successfully reached Constantinople early in the war, and their presence contributed to Turkey's entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers. The most significant forces, including the battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, were destroyed during the fighting off the Falkland Islands, and by the end of 1914 the oceans were, at least on the surface, cleared of German raiders. The main danger to ocean trade routes was not combat squadrons, but submarines. As the war progressed, Germany's inferiority in capital ships forced her to increasingly concentrate her efforts on submarines, which the British, suffering heavy losses in the Atlantic, viewed as an illegal means of warfare. Ultimately, the policy of unrestricted submarine warfare boats, which turned out to be almost disastrous for England, indirectly brought death to Germany, since it was the direct reason for the entry of the United States of America into the war in 1917.

On May 7, 1915, the huge American liner Lusitania, on a voyage from New York to Liverpool, was sunk by a torpedo attack by a German submarine off the Irish coast. The steamer quickly sank, and with it, about 1,200 people, almost three-quarters of all those on board, went forever into the cold waters of the ocean. The sinking of the Lusitania, whose speed was thought to make it invulnerable to torpedoes, necessitated a response. The fact that the Germans gave a cautious warning to the Americans not to sail on this ship only confirmed that the attack on it was most likely pre-planned. It caused sharp anti-German protests in many countries, primarily in the USA. Among the dead were nearly 200 American citizens, including such famous figures as millionaire Alfred Vanderbilt.

This sinking had a major impact on President Woodrow Wilson's declared policy of strict neutrality, and from that time on, US entry into the war became a potential possibility. On July 18, 1915, the Italian cruiser Giuseppe Garibaldi sank after being torpedoed by an Austrian submarine. A few days earlier, the English cruiser Dublin was attacked in a similar way, however, she managed to escape despite serious damage. The French fleet, based in Malta, fell to the task of implementing a blockade in the Adriatic Sea. Austrian submarines were active, and after the loss of the battleship Jean Bart in December 1914, the French were wary of releasing their heavy ships, relying on cruisers and destroyers. German U-boats also entered the Mediterranean in the summer of 1915, and the Allies' position was complicated by the task of protecting numerous transports and supply ships making raids to and from the Gallipoli Peninsula and, later, to Thessaloniki. In September, an attempt was made to block the Strait of Otranto using nets, but German submarines managed to pass under them. Military operations in the Baltic intensified.

Russian sailors disabled a German minelayer, and a British submarine torpedoed the cruiser Prinz Adalbert. The Russian naval forces, supplemented by several British submarines, as a rule, successfully thwarted German plans to land troops in Courland and prevented the laying of mines. British submarines also tried to disrupt the supply of iron and steel from Sweden to Germany, later sinking 14 ships engaged in these shipments in 1915. But the British losses also grew. By the end of 1915, the total number of British merchant ships sunk by German submarines exceeded 250. The Battle of Jutland between the British and German fleets in the summer of 1916 led to large mutual losses, but in strategic terms it changed little. England retained naval superiority and the blockade of Germany continued. The Germans had to return to submarine warfare again. However, its effectiveness became less and less, especially after the United States entered the war.

First World War (January - May 1915). Actions on other fronts

French theater

On the Western Front, the last day of the battle at Ypres, November 23, 1914, ended the war of maneuver, and the Germans, due to the need to begin transferring troops to the Eastern Front (Lodz-Krakow operation), stopped their attempts to break through in the indicated area. The British, in the person of Lord Kitchener, were the first to recognize the impossibility of successfully continuing active operations against the Germans on the Western Front until there was a significant increase in artillery weapons. This decision coincided in time with their intention to undertake the Dardanelles expedition.

This opinion of Kitchener, however, was not shared by Joffre, who considered it necessary to immediately take advantage of the weakening of the Western German Front in connection with the beginning of the transfer of German troops (from their 6th Army) to the Eastern Front. The situation with the shells of the British was indeed alarming, as evidenced by the third volume of their official history of the war. Despite American orders, it was only in April 1915 that it was possible to supply 10-11 rounds per field gun daily to the theater of war in France. The reason for such slow production is explained by the organization of trade unions, which did not allow unskilled workers into their membership. The combat training of the new personnel was also bad at that moment.

On December 8, 1914, Joffre outlined a plan to break through the German position in two areas: in Artois near Arras and in Champagne near Reims. The combination of breakthroughs at Arras and Reims could have eliminated the “sack” of German positions at Noyon, which threatened Paris.

In mid-February, the French attacked the positions of the 3rd German Army in Champagne and the location of the 6th German Army north of Arras, in the area of ​​Loretto Heights. In the first half of March, the British launched an attack southwest of Lille. These were the battles at Neuve Chapelle. In order to level the “bag”, in the shape of which the German position protruded into the French front on the right bank of the river. Meuse, southeast of Verdun, the French attacked from April 5 to 14 at St. Miel, on the front of the 5th German Army. In all of these battles, the Allies achieved local successes that did not justify the losses and increasingly convinced the German command of the Allies’ powerlessness to undertake a solid offensive operation at the moment. At the same time, in all the spring actions, the qualitative superiority of the German troops, especially in comparison with the British, was clearly evident. At Neuve-Chapelle, the commander of the British 1st Army, Gen. Haig moved 48 battalions of the British Indian Corps to break through the position of 3 German battalions. The proportion of both sides was determined as 16:1; The preparation of the attack by the British was solid: 343 guns were in action, and a mass of English cavalry was concentrated behind to exploit the breakthrough. However, the breakthrough was limited only to the British capturing the village of Neuve Chapelle with the loss of 12 thousand people.

Following this battle, Haig’s army began to prepare a new breakthrough, but the Germans warned him with a counterattack on April 22 against the 2nd British Army northeast of Ypres, using a gas attack for the first time. This German attack was one of a number of demonstrations undertaken by the German High Command on various sectors of both fronts to divert attention from the main attack being prepared in Galicia. The tactical success of the Germans at Ypres was very significant, but it could not be developed due to the numerical weakness of the 4th German Army, the lack of reserves in the attack area and a number of mistakes by the German command.

All these battles in the French Theater, without achieving any operational results, had the consequence of revealing the indisputable importance of the wealth of artillery supplies in the breakthrough area. Kitchener firmly grasped the idea that the success of a breakthrough lay in ensuring the powerful work of artillery of large caliber and quantity, and from that moment on, the British military department began to strain all its efforts to develop its military industry.

Conclusion about the period

A study of operations in both European theaters of war in the first 4 months of 1915 leads to the following conclusions:

1. Under pressure to save an ally and in search of a speedy end to the war, Germany is transferring its main efforts to the East, and in the West is establishing a solid positional barrier along the entire front. This change in the line of main operations, however, is far from unanimously shared by its entire high command and entails fragmentation in the choice of directions in the Russian theater. In January, a strategic reserve is provided to Hindenburg to deeply envelop the Russian right flank, and since April, preparations have been underway for a breakthrough associated with an attempt to envelop the Russian left flank advanced into Galicia: the center of gravity of the attack is transferred from north to south. Serious doubt arises about the correctness of such a zigzag path of German creativity. The German high command gave the Entente a whole year, which was brilliantly used by the French and British governments to ensure their final victory.

2. On the side of the Russian high command there is no integrity of the strategic plan at all. The material condition of the Russian armies, certified by the beginning of the year by such authoritative persons as the commanders-in-chief of the fronts, dictates the urgency of an extremely restrained course of action, at least until the late spring of 1915. From the angle of this necessity, an operation is being conceived to capture East Prussia as a support area for future operations to Berlin, But nearby and as if completely independently, the idea of ​​​​invading Hungary through the Carpathians was blossoming, which obviously required the expenditure of large forces and material resources. The High Command alternately approves both plans and thus, instead of fulfilling the duty of the highest authority - to regulate and moderate the centrifugal aspirations of the fronts - it itself pushes them to expand their private tasks.

Gradually, the high command becomes infected with the seductiveness of a campaign against Hungary, carelessly squanders on it the meager funds accumulated in the winter in the form of the formation of a strategic reserve and a certain amount of artillery reserves, as a result, by the beginning of summer operations, when the widest deployment of the latter should have been expected, these funds are dispersed. By the time of the Gorlitsky breakthrough, there are almost no free reserves (except for the I Corps), and such a shortage of shells is discovered that the commander-in-chief of the Southwestern Front himself is forced to turn to an artillery distributor, who is personally in charge of the purpose of each artillery park.

3. The French front of the Entente willingly meets the decision of the German high command to stabilize the fight on this front. From the point of view of the interests of their theater of operations, the Anglo-French command acted absolutely correctly on the basis of the slogan uttered by Kitchener that the war was just beginning in 1915 and from now on the war, designed for attrition, would continue for at least 3 years. But a lack of understanding of the need for unity of action in the French and Russian theaters subsequently led to a radical change in the entire course of the struggle. The Russian armies bore the brunt of it from the very beginning of 1915 and, as we will see later, until the end. A direct consequence of the events of the summer campaign of 1915 in the Russian theater, with the Germans’ confidence in the passivity of the Anglo-French justified, was the premature withdrawal of Russian forces from the common struggle for the Entente in the future.

The events of the spring period of the 1915 campaign emphasized the fallacy of the fragmented leadership of the coalition forces, thanks to which the Germans achieved the most complete freedom of operational decisions.

4. The operations of the spring period logically predetermined the further development of the 1915 campaign. The Anglo-French refusal to take decisive action, the final withdrawal of the Russians from East Prussia, and Ivanov’s stillborn Carpathian venture helped the Germans use Mackensen’s Gorlitsky breakthrough for a crushing defeat of the entire Russian front by the fall of 1915.

Asian-Turkish Theater

In November 1914, as was said, Turkey took the side of the Central Powers, which caused military actions on the Caucasian front, on the Black Sea, in Syria, Arabia, near Suez, in Mesopotamia, in the Dardanelles and partly in Persia. The war with a new enemy distracted part of the Russian armed forces from the main theater of military operations. The war with Turkey corresponded to the aspirations of the tsarist government to obtain territorial acquisitions at the expense of Turkey at the conclusion of peace.

This condition gave the secondary Caucasian theater serious significance for the Russians, which was increased by the struggle with Germany for influence in Persia, the combination of the aggressive interests of Russian imperialism and its allies in the Asian possessions of Turkey, and the close interaction here in the operations of the allied armies. The war in the Asian Theater was fought by both sides under particularly unfavorable conditions of supply routes: mountainous terrain, poverty of communications, especially railways, which did not reach the area of ​​operations on Turkish territory for hundreds of kilometers. This revealed the great importance of the Black Sea.

Deployment of Turkish Armed Forces

The deployment of the Turkish armed forces took the following form.

The Turkish ground forces at the time of the declaration of war consisted of 40 infantry. active divisions - Nizam and 57 reserve infantry. divisions - redif. In addition, there was a militia - mustakhfiz, which served mainly to replenish the loss of strength in the active army. There were up to 40 cavalry regiments of the Nizam and 24 irregular regiments.

Divisions were organized into corps, mostly of three. Composed of infantry. divisions included: a) 3 infantry. a 3-battalion regiment with a machine gun company (4 machine guns); b) 3 artillery groups, 2 field companies and 1 mountain company (24 guns); c) 1 cavalry squadron, 1 sapper company and 1 manpower depot. The quality of the armament of the field troops was not inferior to that of the opponents, but it was not enough. Although the Turkish army's officer training was generally poor, the Turkish army was excellent in terms of discipline, courage and perseverance, especially during defense. The quartermaster unit was at a low level: the soldier lived on what the area in which he was located provided, and ate rice, boiled corn, black bread and beans. Nominally in wartime, Turkey could field up to 1,000 thousand bayonets and sabers.

The 7th, 2nd and 5th Armies, a total of 266 battalions, were concentrated in the Constantinople area on both sides of the straits, between Adrianople, Constantinople, Eregli, Smyrna and the Dardanelles.

The 3rd Army, about 100 battalions, is against the Caucasus and northern Persia from the Black Sea coast to Mossul, having almost all its forces on the left flank against the Russian Caucasian Front.

Mesopotamian Army (6th), 24 battalions, - between Baghdad and the Persian Gulf.

The Arabian army, 34 battalions, along the eastern shore of the Red Sea, from Medina to Aden.

4th Army, 23 battalions, along the Mediterranean coast, in Palestine and Syria.

Thus, 456 battalions out of 537 were concentrated in the north, along the straits and in the Caucasus, and as the war progressed, the Constantinople group represented an extensive reserve for all fronts. However, the almost complete absence of railways made it difficult to quickly transfer this reserve from one front to another.

Caucasian Front

Party plans and grouping

Despite the fact that most of the Russian troops were taken from the Caucasian Military District to the Austro-German Front, the Russian command decided to conduct active operations against the Turks, believing that only an offensive within Turkey could bring success and reliably protect Transcaucasia. According to the two main operational directions (Kars - Erzurum, and Erivan - Alashkert), the Caucasian army was concentrated in 2 groups. Most of the forces (about 6 divisions) were concentrated in the Kara direction, in the Olta-Sarykamysh region, and a smaller part (about 2 divisions, but with a larger number of cavalry) - in the Erivan direction, in the Igdyr region. In addition, small individual detachments, consisting of border guards, Cossacks and militia squads, were grouped on the flanks. On the right flank they covered convenient routes along the Black Sea coast to the Batumi fortress, and on the left they were supposed to prevent the formation of Kurdish units and counter the hostile influence of Germany and Turkey in Persian Azerbaijan. The Russian Caucasian Army was strongest in cavalry, and in total it had about 153 battalions, 175 hundreds and 350 guns. The Turks against the Russians had about 100 battalions, 35 squadrons, 244 guns, including the corps located as a reserve in the Samsun area. In addition, with the announcement of mobilization, the Turks began to form Kurdish irregular cavalry (formerly Hamidiye) in the border zone. The Turks also decided to act actively on the Russian front, delivering the main blow in the Kara direction and a secondary blow in the Batumi direction.

Opening of hostilities

The initial task of the Russian Caucasian Army was set as follows: the Sarykamysh and Oltinsky detachments (main group) - to attack Erzurum; The Erivan detachment - having passed the Agrydag border ridge, inaccessible with undeveloped passes, captured Bayazet, Alashkert and Karakilisa; the rest of the detachments are to cover the border. The most vulnerable places of the Russian Front were the Black Sea coast and the Azerbaijani border, since in the adjacent areas the Turks carried out strong agitation, which, by the way, was expressed in organizing a speech by the Adjarians in the Chorokhi region.

Military operations on the Caucasian front began immediately after the Turks declared war. The troops of the Sarykamysh detachment launched an energetic offensive, and by November 6 they captured the Kara-Derbent mountain pass, which serves as a connection between the Erzurum and Alashkert directions and the Kepri-Key position, which was located almost at the same distance between the Russian-Turkish border and Erzurum and lay in the junction paths before the last one. The Olta detachment, which provided the right flank of the Sarykamysh detachment and the path to the cr. Karsu, bypassing Sarykamysh, advanced to Ida, throwing back the Turkish division advancing here. In the Erivan direction, Russian troops crossed the Agrydag ridge in two columns and gradually captured Bayazet, Diadin, Alashkert and Karakilisa, and the cavalry advanced to Dutak, an important junction in the valley of the river. Euphrates (Murad Chaya). Thus, the Erivan detachment covered the left flank and rear of the Sarykamysh detachment, as well as the border area from the Kurdish invasion. At the same time, small Russian detachments, moved from Persian Azerbaijan, shot down the Turks in the area of ​​​​the Turkish-Persian border.

The advanced position of the main Russian forces threatened Erzerum, which was not yet ready for defense, which is why the Turks took the most energetic measures to collect reserves in order to push the Russians back. As a result of fierce fighting, the Sarykamysh detachment, which had advanced so far forward without sufficient preparation and by that time had already begun to suffer from supply shortages, retreated on November 13 to the Alakilisa-Ardos-Khorosan line, discovering a concentration of superior Turkish forces against itself. This caused the Russian side to strengthen troops in the Sarykamysh direction and prematurely exhaust the last army reserve. At the same time, Turkish operations in the coastal direction, which initially bore the character of border skirmishes, soon took on a threatening character. The Turks, having brought sufficient forces to Khopa, invaded the Transcaucasus on November 16 and, having received support from the rebel Adjarians who attacked the few Russian troops from the rear and flanks, occupied Ardanuch, Artvin, Borchkha, thus taking possession of the entire coastal region that made up bridgehead of the Batumi fortress. Such an immediate threat to Batumi forced the Russian command to take the most energetic measures, and from the end of November, the strengthened and reorganized coastal detachment, with the assistance of destroyers, began to gradually dislodge the Turks from the specified bridgehead, and the actions were carried out exclusively along the coast and were in the nature of skirmishes aimed at protecting Batumi from a surprise attack .

Sarykamysh operation

By December there was a lull in military operations in the main direction. The Russian Caucasian Army occupied a wide front from the Black Sea to Lake Urmia, stretching over 350 km in a straight line, and only its extreme right flank was on Russian territory, and then the front line ran through Turkish territory. In addition, minor detachments were located in Persian Azerbaijan and also covered the Russian-Persian border. The main forces of the army (Sarykamysh detachment), consisting of the I Caucasian and II Turkestan corps with attached units - a total of about 53.5 battalions, 138 guns and 40 hundreds, occupied the Maslagat - Khorosan - Delibaba line, having Oltinsky at Ida to secure its right flank a detachment consisting of an infantry brigade with artillery and 6 hundreds.

At this time, Enver Pasha, a graduate of the German Military Academy, arrived in Erzerum and decided to organize the Schlieffen “Cannes” at Sarykamysh. This decision was greatly facilitated by the forward position of almost 2/3 of the Russian forces between Sarykamysh and Kepri-Key, the presence of routes bypassing the right flank of this group leading to the Sarykamysh - Kars railway, the lack of an army reserve by the Russians, the occupation of southern Adjara with Artvin by the Turks and the transition of some Adjarian Muslims to the side of the Turks.

Enver Pasha decided: 1) with the XI Corps, he would launch a demonstrative attack on the Sarykamysh group of Russians from the front so that when the Russians attacked it, they would evade to the south and carry away their main forces; 2) The IX, as well as the X Corps advanced from the reserve, having shot down the Oltinsky detachment, deeply bypass the right flank of the Russians, - with the IX Corps occupy Sarykamysh, and with the X Corps intercept the railway to Kars to the north of it; 3) units of the I Constantinople Corps transferred to Adjara to support the entire operation on the left, for which it was necessary to occupy Ardahan. In carrying out this plan, the only road for the main Russian forces was cut off by 2 corps that had reached their rear, which would have forced them to hastily make their way in the roadless area to Kagyzman and would have subjected them to the fate of Samsonov’s 2nd Russian Army. The defeat of the Sarykamysh group would have forced the Erivan group to hastily leave through the snowy and still insufficiently developed Agrydag passes, and in this case, in the entire Caucasus, only weak detachments and a few garrisons of Kars and other points would have remained from the Russian army. The entire maneuver of the Turks was based on the speed and secrecy of the envelopment and the energetic demonstrative actions of the XI Corps; The IX and X Corps were moved with a poorly organized rear, counting on the Muslim population, which was supposed to bring them food.

The operation began on December 22 with a swift attack on the Oltinsky detachment; on December 23, Olty was occupied by the advanced units of the encircling column; on the same day, the attack of the Turkish XI Corps was easily repulsed, and on December 24, the assistant commander-in-chief, and in fact the commander-in-chief of the Caucasian Front, General Myshlaevsky and the chief of staff of the Caucasian Front, arrived at the headquarters of the Sarykamysh detachment from Tiflis. General Myshlaevsky organized the defense of Sarykamysh, but at the moment of the highest crisis of the operation, not believing in its success, he returned to Tiflis to form a new army. The chief of staff took temporary command of the II Turkestan Corps, and the leadership of the actions of the Sarykamysh detachment still remained in the hands of Berkhman, the commander of the I Caucasian Corps.

Meanwhile, the situation was truly becoming formidable: the outflanking columns of the Turks were quickly moving forward; On December 25, the IX Corps approached the Bardus Pass, the X Corps occupied Penyak, and the brigades of the I Constantinople Corps launched an offensive from Adjara and occupied Ardahan. Under such conditions, it was already too late to begin a retreat - it would have subjected the larger and better part of the Caucasian army, consisting of professional troops, to complete defeat among the snowy ridges of Saganluga. It was necessary to keep Sarykamysh in his hands at all costs. The units closest to it were immediately removed from the front and moved. At dawn on December 26, the 28th Turkish infantry approached from Bardus. The IX Corps division attacked Sarykamysh. Formed in a few hours from militias, warrant officers and border guards, a combined detachment under the command of one colonel who happened to be at the station and with 16 machine guns who happened to be in Sarykamysh repelled the attack of the Turks. On December 26, a Cossack regiment with 4 mounted guns, moving at a trot, approached Sarykamysh, and although part of the city was already in the hands of the Turks, the Cossacks managed to stop their further advance. On the night of the 27th, units began to arrive from both sides, and as they arrived they were drawn into the battle. And at the front, the remaining units repelled the attacks of the Turkish XI Corps. The attacks were carried out by the XI Corps insufficiently energetically, and this made it possible to remove more and more units from the front and send them to Sarykamysh. On December 29, the Russian front calmly retreated to the line of the Kabakh-tapa - Lorum-dag - Kanny-dag - Tody village mountains. All these days there were heavy battles with bayonet attacks near Sarykamysh. The Russian troops united here by General Przhevalsky sought to advance to the Bardus Pass.

The Russians, going on the offensive, sought to encircle the Turks in the Sarykamysh region: from the front of the Sarykamysh detachment, the Russians advanced with their right flank to the village of Bardus; in the rear - near Sarykamysh, Przhevalsky’s detachment led attacks on the Bardus Pass with the goal of also, reaching Bardus, bypassing the right flank of the IX Turkish Corps; to his right, units of General Baratov’s detachment were advancing, trying to encircle the left flank of the X Corps; even further to Ardagan - Olty the reinforced Olty detachment moved around. On January 2, 1915, Przhevalsky’s detachment occupied the Bardus Pass, and thus the retreat route of the IX Turkish Corps was cut off. On January 4, the Caucasian Army won a victory, which saved it and predetermined the further course of the war in the Asian Theater, namely: on this day the remnants of the IX Corps surrendered. But the battle continued until January 7, 1915, and the remnants of the defeated X Corps, having lost artillery, hastily made their way among the snowy gorges. The Turkish outflanking columns of the X Corps were saved from complete encirclement only by the fact that the Russian columns of the Oltinsky convoy and the convoy of General Baratov were late in going into pursuit.

Even at the beginning of these battles, a Siberian Cossack brigade was transferred from Tiflis. With the assistance of parts of the Oltinsky Otrad, she, having defeated the brigade of the I Turkish Corps, took back Ardahan on January 3, and then, reinforced by part of the Baratov Otrad, began to gradually push the Turks back to Olty and, in turn, threaten the retreat of the X Turkish Corps. Due to the delay in pursuit, units of the X Corps managed to avoid the fate of the IX Corps, and its small remnants escaped.

Following this, the Russians began pursuing the defeated 3rd Turkish Army, leveling the front and fighting the rebel population in Adjara. The Russians, pursuing the retreating Turkish XI Corps, generally reached the front by January 7, as in the Olta direction, which they occupied before the Sarykamysh operation. In the Erivan direction, during the Sarykamysh operation, Russian troops, without pressure from the Turks, cleared Dutak and retreated to the Alashkert-Garakilisa line. Politically, the Russian border with Persia and Persian Azerbaijan became important areas during the same period, where intensified German-Turkish agitation was carried out. The Turkish-Kurdish detachments initially had some success, ousted Russian troops from the Turkish-Persian border and even occupied Tabriz, but on January 30 they were driven out of there by a Russian detachment.

The Sarykamysh operation was very important not only for Russia, but also for the entire Entente:

1. Russia’s position in the Asian theater has strengthened; The influence of the Entente in Persia also increased.

2. There was a strengthening of Turkish troops directed against the Caucasian army, which facilitated the actions of the British in Mesopotamia and Syria.

3. A new strong front was formed, which, with successful development of actions on it, could lead not only to the conquest of the vast Asian Minor possessions of Turkey, but also to create a complete economic encirclement of the Central Powers.

4. The success of the Russians in the Caucasus alarmed the British; they already imagined the capture of Constantinople by the Russians, and in order to warn the Russians, the English Supreme Military Council decided to begin the Dardanelles operation on February 19.

5. In particular, for the Caucasian Army, the Sarykamysh operation entailed a reorganization of the highest command of the army and provided operational conclusions for the further conduct of the war.

From the point of view of military art, noteworthy is the chaotic start of the campaign by the Russians, which put them in a critical position near Sarykamysh, and the brilliant end of the operation.

On the part of the Turks, the following mistakes should be noted: conducting the main battle of the entire operation on the day of December 26 only with head units, i.e., groping the enemy instead of a strong blow; the “bias” of the plan and the sluggish actions of the XI Corps, thanks to which the Russian army correctly used the conditions of the mountain war; defending at the front with weak units, it managed to transfer significant forces to the rear and completely defeat the Turks who had already pinned it down. The Cannes was a complete disaster, and in this regard the operation described deserves special study.

The dangerous situation in the Caucasus during the Sarykamysh operation forced Headquarters to allocate some of the newly formed Cossack units here and to pour third-order divisions formed in the Caucasus into the Caucasian Army. Therefore, despite the sending of 2 divisions to the Austro-German front at the end of the Sarykamysh operation, the Caucasian Army strengthened somewhat and was able to again create an army reserve.

By April 1915, the Russian army was located between the Black and Caspian Seas on the Arhave - Olty - Khorosan - Karakilisa - Diadin - Kotur - Dilman - Tabriz front, with most of these forces still concentrated in the Oltinsky, Sarykamysh and Erivan directions. The Turks stood in front of the Russian front, having about 175 battalions and auxiliary detachments of Kurds; the largest part of these forces was also concentrated in the Erzurum and Bitlis directions with a reserve in Erzurum.

Mesopotamian Front

Simultaneously with the operations on the Caucasian front, military operations began in Mesopotamia. Immediately after the declaration of war on Turkey, Anglo-Indian troops, with the assistance of the fleet, occupied the Turkish fort of Fao at the mouth of the river. Shat al-Arab. On November 21, the Turks, under the threat of British ships entering the Shat al-Arab, left Basra, an important port located 70 miles from the mouth of the river, and on December 9, the British, moving all the time with the support of the fleet up the Shat al-Arab, occupied the city. Corna, located at the confluence of pp. Tigris and Euphrates. Thus, by the end of 1914 the British were firmly entrenched in the Persian Gulf and Lower Mesopotamia.

Actions at Suez

The importance of the Suez Canal is very great, as it is the center of Britain's imperial routes connecting England with India and Oceania, and the central oil-bearing region, supplying liquid fuel to the military and merchant fleet. Therefore, after Turkey entered the war, the latter, with the help of Germany, made an attempt to seize the Suez Canal in order to then invade Egypt.

In January 1915, an expeditionary army of Djemal Pasha with a force of about 20 thousand was sent from Birsheb to the Suez Canal, which was supposed to cross the canal, cross to Egypt and raise an uprising there. Despite a very difficult and insufficiently organized campaign through the waterless Sinai Desert, which weakened the Turkish troops, the Turks on February 2, during a strong sandstorm, almost captured the canal, the defense of which was entrusted to 2 British divisions. The Turkish attacks were eventually repulsed with the help of 3 warships, but the Turks still, having retreated from the canal with the loss of about 500 killed and wounded and over 700 people who had fled, held on to the peninsula, turning the city of El-Arish into a strongly fortified point, until the outbreak of action in the Dardanelles forced them to withdraw most of their forces there.

War at sea

On the North and Black Seas

The main naval forces belonged to Great Britain and Germany, and the tasks of the battle fleet of both opponents were connected with the North Sea area, at the extremities of which both fleets were waiting for the moment to strike each other. A large fleet of the British under the command of Adm. Jellicoe was stationed in the Scapa Flow roadstead off the northern coast of Scotland, 475 miles from the location of the German High Seas Fleet, in the Gulf of Heligoland at the mouth of the Elbe and Wilhelmshaven. By the beginning of 1915, the English fleet was weakened due to ship repairs and actually had 18 dreadnoughts against 17 German ones. Commander of the German fleet adm. Ingenohl decided, in order to bring his fleet out of long-term inactivity, to undertake a small operation in the Dogger Bank area (a section of the North Sea in its western half). For this purpose, the head of the cruising flotilla was ordered on January 23 to go out on reconnaissance in the direction of Dogger Bank and clear this area of ​​English scouts. This order was intercepted by radio by the British, and Jellicoe sent a cruiser squadron of Adm. in the same direction. Beatty. On January 24, a naval battle took place at Dogger Banks, in which 5 cruisers with a total displacement of 117,250 tons took part on the British side, and 4 cruisers on the German side - 88,700 tons. The English cruisers were stronger in design and caliber of their artillery. The battle lasted 4 hours and ended with the sinking of the German cruiser Blucher.

Dreadnought cruisers took part in this battle for the first time, and although success was on the side of the British, both sides were dissatisfied with the actions of their cruiser squadrons. Of course, in Germany the discontent was much stronger. Actions of the administrator Ingenohl was found completely unsatisfactory because he did not dare to go out with the main forces of the fleet to meet the cruisers and did not send submarines to support them; then the Blucher would have been saved. Ingenohl was removed and replaced by adm. Paul.

Meanwhile, at the end of 1914, the powerful combat capabilities of submarines emerged, and then, in November, the question of an underwater blockade of Great Britain and Ireland was raised to interrupt the supply of England and its communications with the French front, where reinforcements were pouring in in a continuous stream. Therefore, in search of a fight against the powerful fleet of England, Germany decided to turn to submarine warfare. England responded to this by outlawing German property and organizing sailing under a neutral flag.

On the Black Sea, the actions of the Russian Black Sea Fleet were in some way connected with the Anglo-French operations against the Dardanelles. A lot of projects for landing in 1-2 corps were developed. At first, independent landings were planned on the Bosporus during February or March; then landing plans were developed in the event of a successful crossing of the Dardanelles by the Anglo-French or in the event of a Bulgarian attack. In anticipation of these landings, the V Caucasian Corps, formed from units taken from the Caucasian Front at the end of the Sarykamysh operation, was transported to Odessa, but this corps was soon spent in the European theater, and the plans for the landing remained only in the draft. The combat activities of the Black Sea Fleet were reduced to the bombing of the Bosporus during the Dardanelles operation (the first time this bombing was carried out on March 28) and to the laying of barrage mines there. In addition, the Black Sea Fleet made searches along the Anatolian coast of Turkey to inspect and bombard coastal points and to destroy Turkish steamships and feluccas transporting coal from Zunguldak to Constantinople.

Actions in the Dardanelles

Having information in mid-February that the Anglo-French would try to cross the Dardanelles from the Aegean Sea, and the Russians, at the same time, were planning to break through from the Black Sea to the Bosporus, the Turks positioned their troops in the Dardanelles as follows.

1st Army Liman von Sanders - on the Southern Front, with III Army Corps of Essad Pasha on the Gallipoli Peninsula, XV Army Corps - on the Asian coast of the Dardanelles, XIV Army Corps - on the Princes' Islands (on the Sea of ​​Marmara) and VI Army Corps - in area of ​​San Stefano (near Constantinople). 2nd Army of Wehib Pasha - on the Northern Front, in the vicinity of the Bosphorus and Constantinople, to protect against attack from the Russians.

In total, the forces of these 2 armies reached 20 infantry. divisions. By this time, the Turks, taking advantage of the break in hostilities since November 3, had significantly strengthened the defense of the straits themselves. The defenses were concentrated in the central part of the straits, out of sight and out of range of enemy naval artillery fire from the Aegean Sea. The defense was reinforced with minefields; Special light field batteries were assigned to fight minesweepers; heavy batteries were tasked with fighting only the fleet. In its final form, the defense of the straits itself was strengthened by 78 guns and 400 underwater mines, and all the material that the Turks possessed was exhausted.

The British only began to discuss the project of a serious operation against the Dardanelles on November 25, 1914, since by this time they had become aware of the Turkish-German plans to invade Egypt through the Suez Canal. After much hesitation, it was decided to carry out a purely naval operation in the straits.

According to the plan of Carden, the commander of the fleet, it was envisaged: 1) the destruction of the forts covering the outer entrance to the straits, 2) mine sweeping, 3) actions inside the strait in order to destroy the batteries of the narrowest part of the strait, 4) forcing this narrowness and 5) transition to Constantinople .

This plan had to be completed within a month. It had many negative aspects; The British calculations were based on incorrect assumptions:

1) Firmly confident in the superiority of the fire of their naval artillery over the Turkish coastal artillery, they did not take into account either the possibility of strengthening the Turkish defense from November 3, under the leadership and with the help of the Germans, or the fact that in the fight of the fleet with coastal artillery all the advantages are on the side of the latter and that even weaker coastal artillery can successfully combat naval artillery.

2) Their expectation of destroying the Turkish batteries was wrong; most of the latter stood in closed positions; The British did not have proper surveillance and reconnaissance organized, and suppressing the flexible defense of mobile batteries in the absence of surveillance and reconnaissance is a difficult task.

3) Expecting to carry out the operation within a month, they did not provide means to prevent the Turks from correcting the damage they had suffered.

4) The activities of aviation, torpedo bombers and submarines were completely ignored.

5) Completely unreasonably, they considered the appearance of the Anglo-French fleet in front of Constantinople sufficient for the latter to fall, Turkey to capitulate, Germany to be isolated and communication with Russia to be restored.

On February 19, operations began according to the above plan. The first day of the bombing was inconclusive. The almost daily repetition of these bombings, until March 8, also did not lead to decisive success. After this, it was decided to cross the straits with open force. This attempt was made according to a carefully worked out plan on March 18th; but during its execution the fleet suffered such heavy losses that it had to abandon the continuation of this operation. All ships received major damage, and three ships were sunk. The Turks still had their minefields intact. Damage to the forts was minor. It is quite possible that such an operation, if it had been carried out unexpectedly, at the beginning of the war, would have been successful; but carried out in March, when the Germans had already managed to provide the Turks with impressive assistance both in terms of management and in the sense of supplying equipment, it was doomed to failure.

This failure shook the stability of the Balkan countries: Bulgaria almost clearly took the side of Germa

Science and life // Illustrations

Emperor Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra Feodorovna in Moscow, on the roof of the Grand Kremlin Palace. Photos of the first decade of the twentieth century.

Portrait of an unknown officer. 1915

At the Sormovo shipyard. 1915-1916.

Next to I. I. Sikorsky's airplane "Russian Knight". At that time it was the largest aircraft and the first multi-engine. Photo from 1913.

An infirmary located in one of the St. Petersburg palaces. Photos from 1914-1916.

Sister of Mercy.

Nicholas II inspects the destroyer Novik.

Having lost the hands of men, the village gradually became impoverished.

By the end of the winter of 1915, the Russian army was replenished again to its original level (4 million people), but it was already a different army. The privates and non-commissioned officers trained in peacetime were replaced by yesterday's peasants, officer positions were taken by cadets released ahead of schedule and mobilized students. Nevertheless, the spring offensive on the Austrian front developed successfully. However, the possibility of Austria-Hungary withdrawing from the fight forced the German General Staff to reconsider the original plans and concentrate additional forces against Russia.

PART II. UNDER THE BURDEN OF MILITARY FAILURES

Spring - summer 1915

The world was horrified by another “German atrocity”: on April 9, 1915, near the Belgian city of Ypres, the Germans used gas. The green smoke destroyed the French, creating a four-mile, undefended gap in their positions. But the attack did not follow - the operation near Ypres was supposed to divert attention from the impending offensive in the east. Here, on April 19, after intensive artillery bombardment, the Germans also released gas, and this time the infantry moved after the gas attack. A week later, the French and British launched an offensive in the west to weaken the German pressure on Russia, but the Russian front along the Carpathians was already crushed.

In the summer, all Russian border fortresses fell, including the previously mentioned Novogeorgievsk, disarmed in the pre-war years. Its reinforced concrete structures could only withstand shells from 6-inch guns, and the Russian command had no doubt that it was impossible to bring in larger caliber artillery. However, the Germans managed to do this. The garrison of Novogeorgievsk was assembled from the world piece by piece: in addition to 6,000 militia warriors and a hundred newly promoted warrant officers, General A. A. Brusilov allocated a combat division, but it was very worn out and numbered only 800 people. Lieutenant General de Witt, who had recently been appointed commander of this division and headed the fortress garrison, did not even have time to divide the people into regiments, battalions and companies. The motley crowd was disembarked from the carriages in Novogeorgievsk just at the moment when the Germans began attacking the fortress. On August 5, after a week of resistance, Novogeorgievsk fell.

By the end of summer, Poland, Galicia, most of Lithuania and part of Latvia are occupied by the enemy, but his further advance can be stopped. The front froze on a line from Riga, west of Dvinsk (Daugavpils), and almost in a straight line to Chernivtsi in Bukovina. “The Russian armies bought this temporary respite at a high price, and Russia’s Western allies did little to repay Russia for the sacrifices the latter made for them in 1914,” writes the English military historian B. Liddell-Hart.

Russian losses in the spring-summer operations of 1915 amounted to 1.4 million killed and wounded and about a million prisoners. Among the officers, the percentage of killed and wounded was especially high, and the remaining experienced combat soldiers were drawn into the swollen headquarters. There were five or six career officers per regiment; companies and often battalions were headed by second lieutenants and warrant officers who had undergone six months of training instead of the usual two years. At the beginning of the war, the War Department made a fundamental mistake by sending trained non-commissioned officers to the front as privates. They had been knocked out, and now the regimental training teams were hastily “baking” replacements for them. There were only a few privates per company of the old composition. “During the year of the war,” notes General Brusilov, “the trained regular army disappeared; it was replaced by an army consisting of ignoramuses.” There were not enough rifles, and teams of unarmed soldiers grew with each regiment. Only personal example and the self-sacrifice of commanders could still force such an army to fight.

Meanwhile, anarchy was growing in the country. It was often impossible to separate the front line from the rear, and army commanders issued a lot of orders without coordinating them even among themselves, not to mention the civilian authorities. The local population, confused, did not understand what was prohibited and what was allowed. “Heads of civil departments” with the rank of colonel and even “stage commandants” (lieutenants and warrant officers) commanded the civil administration and en masse requisitioned horse-drawn transport and food from the inhabitants, although the secret “Regulations on Field Administration” allowed requisitions only in the enemy country. There is a known fact when an ensign threatened to shoot the Livonian governor (!) for resisting requisitions.

Counterintelligence was rampant in the rear. It was recruited from combat soldiers and reserve soldiers who knew nothing about the search, or even simply from rogues who were not taken anywhere in peacetime, and now, for the sake of their careers, they famously cooked up phony cases of espionage. Counterintelligence officers, ignoring the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the gendarme corps, the civil administration and military authorities, tried to fight profiteering, high prices, political propaganda and even the labor movement, but with their inept actions they only provoked unrest and strikes. Any banker, worker or leader of the nobility could be expelled on an unproven charge or kept in prison for months.

For Nicholas II, the war gave him a reason to fulfill his cherished dream of popular sobriety. The production and consumption of any alcoholic beverages, including beer, was prohibited. The result: treasury revenues fell by a quarter, and secret distillation took on such proportions that excise officials were afraid to report them to the Minister of Finance, not to mention the sovereign. Premier I. G. Goremykin, to the reproaches of his predecessor V. N. Kokovtsov, answered light-heartedly: “So what, we’ll print more pieces of paper, people will willingly take them.” Thus began the collapse of finance, which reached its peak by 1917.

Looking for scapegoats

In the multinational Russian Empire, the war sharply aggravated the national problem.

A large number of Germans have lived in the country for a long time. Many of them occupied prominent positions in the civil service, army and navy. These were mostly Russian patriots, but naturally they retained their love for their historical homeland. Before the war, anti-German sentiments were equated with revolutionary sentiments. Brusilov later recalled: “If any commander in the army had decided to explain to his subordinates that our main enemy is the German, that he is going to attack us and that we must prepare with all our might to repel him, then this gentleman would have been immediately expelled from service, unless brought to trial. Even less could a schoolteacher preach to his pupils love for the Slavs and hatred of the Germans. He would be considered a dangerous pan-Slavist, an ardent revolutionary and exiled to the Turukhansk or Narym region."

With the beginning of the war, hostility towards the Germans spilled out. St. Petersburg was urgently renamed Petrograd. At Christmas 1914, the Synod, despite the protests of the Empress, banned Christmas trees, as was German custom. The music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms was deleted from orchestra programs. In May - June 1915, crowds destroyed about five hundred factories, shops and houses in Moscow that belonged to people with German surnames. Bakeries stood with broken windows, Bechstein and Bütner grand pianos were thrown out of a music store and burned. At the Marfo-Mariinsky Convent, the Empress's sister Elizaveta Feodorovna, a woman with a reputation as a saint and one of Rasputin's main opponents, almost became the victim of a raging crowd shouting: “Get out, German!”

The situation turned out to be especially difficult in the Baltic states, where the Germans constituted the top of society. Here there were signs in German, newspapers were published, and office work was conducted. When the first columns of German prisoners of war appeared, they were greeted with flowers. Today, the reader of post-Soviet Russia is not always able to discern the difference between pro-German sentiments and espionage in favor of Germany. But in those days, decent people distinguished between these two concepts, and mixing them seemed barbaric. Therefore, when, at the beginning of the war, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians rushed to write denunciations against their German fellow citizens, there were no mass arrests, fortunately only one out of a hundred denunciations had at least some real basis.

The Jews suffered even more than the Germans. In Germany and Austria-Hungary, unlike Russia, they enjoyed all civil rights, so they were widely suspected of sympathizing with the enemy. “When our troops retreated, the Jews were cheerful and sang songs,” noted one of the employees of the Council of Ministers, A. N. Yakhontov. In June 1915, the chief of staff of the Supreme High Command N.N. Yanushkevich, reporting on the increasing incidence of venereal diseases among the troops, connected this with the machinations of the Jews. The conclusion sounds like a joke: “There are instructions<согласно которым>the German-Jewish organization spends quite significant funds on the maintenance of women infected with syphilis, so that they lure officers to themselves and infect them." The counterintelligence department of the 2nd Army seriously checked the message that German agents, "primarily Jews", were digging a fifteen-verst tunnel near Warsaw and are going to throw bombs at the headquarters of the Northwestern Front.New boots and pointed lambskin hats were considered a special sign of German-Jewish spies.

Under the influence of such messages, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich ordered the expulsion as soon as possible from the western regions (that is, from the “Pale of Settlement”) of all Jews, without distinction of gender, age or position. The local administration in some places tried to resist the order: many Jews work as doctors in hospitals, and their supplies depend to a large extent on Jewish traders. Nevertheless, the order of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief was carried out. Where should the deportees go? The authorities did not know this, and people spent a long time at the stations. Where the deportation did not become universal, the most respected Jews, most often rabbis, were imprisoned as hostages.

Let me remind you: moderate opponents of the autocracy, under the influence of a patriotic upsurge, in July 1914 offered the government cooperation in waging the war. But now, a year later, everything has changed. Failures at the front, shortages of ammunition and equipment, and flaws in military and civil administration revived open hostility between the public and tsarism. Hardly experiencing military failures, the public meticulously and biasedly analyzed the degree of guilt of the army commanders Samsonov and Rennenkampf, the head of the Main Artillery Directorate of the General Staff Kuzmin-Karavaev and the inspector general of artillery of the Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich. The popularity of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich also fell. Most of all, they blamed the Minister of War Sukhomlinov, who was considered a puppet in the hands of Yanushkevich.

The oppositionists tried to win over the workers. Even before the war, Moscow industrialist A.I. Konovalov tried to organize an information committee with the participation of the entire opposition - from Octobrists to Social Democrats. Now he and Guchkov used their new creation, the Military-Industrial Committees, for similar purposes, creating within them “working groups” of defense workers. And if the defeatist socialists accused these groups of betraying the class interests of the proletariat, the government saw them as a breeding ground for revolutionary sentiments.

But despite opposition from left and right, in November 1915, at workers' meetings, ten workers led by Kuzma Gvozdev, a Menshevik from the Erikson plant, were elected and delegated to the Central Military-Industrial Committee (CMIC). Stating that an irresponsible government had brought the country to the brink of destruction, Gvozdev and his “comrades” promised to defend the interests of the workers, to fight for an eight-hour working day and for the convening of a Constituent Assembly.

The authorities were suspicious of the moderate Gvozdev (the police considered Gvozdev a secret defeatist), but open defeatists suffered much more severely. Some of them were arrested, some were forced to emigrate. Few continued the fight, hiding under false names and changing apartments (all defeatist organizations were swarming with police agents). In February 1915, Bolshevik Duma deputies were tried and expelled; The Bolsheviks' attempts to organize mass actions in their support were unsuccessful. But the case of S. N. Myasoedov caused a huge resonance in society. This gendarme colonel, a big man and a strong man with a scandalous reputation (A.I. Guchkov accused him of arms smuggling even before the war), through Sukhomlinov received a place in the 10th Army, which suffered a heavy defeat in January 1915. A certain G. Kolakovsky, who escaped from German captivity, confessed and said that he had been sent by the Germans to kill Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich and that Myasoedov was supposed to get in touch with him. And although Kolakovsky was confused in his testimony, on February 18, 1915, Myasoedov was arrested (at the same time his wife and two dozen people connected with him were arrested).

How justified the charges against Myasoedov were, historians still argue, but Yanushkevich wrote to Sukhomlinov that the evidence of guilt was clear and to calm public opinion, Myasoedov should be executed before Easter. On March 17, the colonel was tried according to a simplified wartime procedure, without a prosecutor or defense attorney, and was found guilty of espionage for Austria before the war, collecting and transmitting information to the enemy about the location of Russian troops in 1915, as well as looting on enemy territory. After hearing the verdict, Myasoedov tried to send telegrams to the Tsar and his family with assurances of innocence, but fainted, then tried to commit suicide. He was executed that same night.

Thus, Guchkov’s assertions about the presence of an extensive network of German spies received official confirmation. A wave of indignation also rose against Sukhomlinov. He swore that he had become a victim of “this scoundrel” (Myasoedov), complained that Guchkov was smearing this story. Meanwhile, Nikolai Nikolaevich and the chief manager of agriculture A.V. Krivoshein convinced the tsar to sacrifice the unpopular minister to public opinion. On June 12, 1915, Nicholas II, in a very warm letter, informed V.A. Sukhomlinov about his dismissal and expressed confidence that “impartial history will render its verdict, more lenient than the condemnation of his contemporaries.” The post of Minister of War was taken by Sukhomlinov’s former deputy, A. A. Polivanov, who had previously been dismissed for having too close relations with the Duma and Guchkov.

Ministers are going all-in

In the spring of 1915, a group formed within the government of I. L. Goremykin that considered it necessary to extend a hand to the moderate opposition. Its informal leader was the cunning Krivoshein - to some extent an analogue of Witte, but less harsh, more streamlined, who managed to maintain a reputation as a liberal and at the same time maintain excellent relations with the royal couple. Without entering into direct contacts with the Duma and Guchkov, the factionalist ministers regularly met in Krivoshein’s house to develop a common position. As a result, they presented Goremykin with a demand to remove extreme reactionaries from the Council of Ministers - Minister of Justice I. G. Shcheglovitov, Minister of Internal Affairs N. A. Maklakov and Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod V. K. Sabler. Otherwise, the rebels said, they would have no choice but to resign themselves.

Confident that Goremykin would not only fulfill their demands, but also resign in such a situation, the ministers underestimated the tactical abilities of their boss. At the beginning of July, the sovereign, on his recommendation, replaced N.A. Maklakov with Prince B.N. Shcherbatov, and appointed A.D. Samarin, whom the tsarina hated for his hostility to Rasputin, as chief prosecutor of the Synod. It would seem that the ministerial front has won! However, Goremykin remained at the head of the renewed Council of Ministers and even strengthened his position by replacing I. G. Shcheglovitov with his protege A. A. Khvostov (uncle of the famous reactionary A. N. Khvostov, Rasputin’s protégé).

At the end of the summer of 1915, fighting raged among the Russian political elite in Petrograd, no less fierce than a year before under Tannenberg. The accumulated irritation spilled out onto the podium of the State Duma, which resumed its meetings in July. And in the Council of Ministers, twitchy and at once aged under the weight of responsibility, A. A. Polivanov painted a picture of arrogance, confusion and incompetence of the Chief of Staff of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief N. N. Yanushkevich. On July 16, Polivanov declared: “The Fatherland is in danger!” Nervousness reached such a degree that the secretary of the meeting, Yahontov, was shaking and could not take minutes.

Later, Yakhontov wrote: “Everyone was gripped by some kind of excitement. There was not a debate in the Council of Ministers, but a chaotic cross-talk of excited, captivated Russian people. I will not forget this day and experiences for a century. Is everything really lost!” And further: “Polivanov does not inspire confidence in me. He always has a sense of premeditation, an afterthought, behind him is the shadow of Guchkov.” In general, in the Council of Ministers, Guchkov was constantly being reprimanded, accusing him of adventurism, exorbitant ambition, unscrupulousness in means and hatred of the regime, especially Emperor Nicholas II.

The attacks of Polivanov and Guchkov on Headquarters coincided with the efforts of Alisa, who sought the removal of “Nikolasha” (that is, the commander-in-chief - the Grand Duke), who spoke “against the man of God,” Rasputin. Goremykin tried to explain to his colleagues that the empress would take advantage of their attacks on Yanushkevich to remove Nikolai Nikolaevich, but such a development of events seemed impossible to them. However, already on August 6, Polivanov brought “terrible news”: Nicholas II was going to take over the supreme command. The agitated Rodzianko, appearing at the Council of Ministers, declared that he would personally dissuade the sovereign. Krivoshein avoided a conversation with Rodzianko, and Goremykin sharply opposed his intention. Rodzianko rushed out of the Mariinsky Palace, shouting that there was no government in Russia. The doorman ran after him to hand him the forgotten cane, but he shouted “To hell with the cane!” jumped into his carriage and drove off. The expansive Chairman of the Duma, in fact, both verbally and in writing, persuaded the Tsar “not to expose his sacred person to the dangers into which she could be placed by the consequences of the decision made,” but his clumsy attempts only strengthened Nicholas in his position.

In such a situation, the opposition faction of Krivoshein launched a new attack on Goremykin, seeking his resignation. No one dared to talk about such a sensitive issue with the sovereign, but in the Council of Ministers Krivoshein said on August 19: “We must either react with faith in our power, or openly take the path of winning moral trust for the authorities. We are not in either one or the other.” able". Translated from the bureaucratic bureaucracy into a generally understandable language, this meant: “The government must cooperate with the Duma, but Goremykin is preventing this, and he must be removed as soon as possible.”

The next day, at a meeting in Tsarskoe Selo, the same ministers who demanded changes in the government tried to dissuade the tsar from leading the army. Nikolai listened absentmindedly and said that he would not change his decision. The next day, eight ministers took an unprecedented step: they signed a collective petition to the sovereign, begging him not to assume supreme command. The same petition stated the impossibility of further work with Goremykin - in such conditions, the ministers threatened, they would “lose faith in the opportunity to serve the Tsar and the Motherland with a sense of benefit.”

The king ignored the ministers' petition. On August 23, 1915, in an order for the army and navy, he expressed his determination to take over leadership of the army.

Alexandra Fedorovna vigorously expressed joy in her letters: “My only and beloved, I cannot find words to express everything I want... I only passionately wish to hold you tightly in my arms and whisper words of love, courage, strength and countless blessings "You will win this great battle for your country and throne - alone, bravely and decisively... Our Friend's prayers for you rise day and night to heaven, and the Lord hears them." Meanwhile, in educated society, including the highest, the mood reigned almost apocalyptic. Princess Z.N. Yusupova, crying, told Rodzianko’s wife: “This is terrible! I feel that this is the beginning of death. He (Nikolai) will lead us to revolution.”

Opening of the "second front"

The attack of the ministers coincided with the most important event - the formation of the "progressive bloc". Whether this was a mere coincidence or whether Masonic connections played a role is unknown. Most likely, there was some kind of exchange of information. On August 25, the Duma factions of cadets, progressives, left Octobrists, Octobrist-Zemtsy, center and nationalist-progressives, as well as liberals from the State Council signed a common program. Its demands were the simplest, some did not even seem relevant: non-interference by state authorities in public affairs, and non-interference by military authorities in civil affairs, equal rights of peasants (this has already actually happened), the introduction of zemstvos at the lower (volost) level, autonomy of Poland (the issue generally academic, since all of Poland was occupied by the Germans). Heated debates arose only on the Jewish question, but even here it was possible to find a vague formulation (“entering the path of abolishing laws restrictive against Jews”), which the right accepted with difficulty.

The key requirement of the Progressive Bloc was the following: the formation of a homogeneous government of persons enjoying the country's confidence to carry out the bloc's program. On the part of the Cadets, who sought “a ministry responsible to the people’s representatives,” this meant a significant concession. The tsar was not required to give up control of the government; he only had to remove ministers whom the “public” considered reactionaries, replacing them with “persons enjoying the people’s trust.”

Krivoshein was one hundred percent satisfied with the bloc’s program. The government responsible to the Duma would be made up of Cadets and Octobrists, and in the “Ministry of Public Trust” it was Krivoshein who was the main candidate for prime minister. He seemed to consider G. E. Lvov his main rival, about whom he spoke with obvious irritation: “This prince is almost becoming the chairman of some government! At the front, they only talk about him, he is the savior of the situation, he supplies the army, feeds the hungry , treats the sick, arranges hairdressing salons for soldiers - in a word, is some kind of omnipresent Muir and Merilize (then famous Moscow department store. - Note A. A.). We must either end this or give all power into his hands."

On the evening of August 27, the rebellious ministers met with representatives of the “progressive bloc”. They agreed that “five-sixths” of the bloc’s program is quite acceptable, but the current government cannot implement it. The results of the negotiations were reported at the Council of Ministers on the 28th. Like Witte in 1905, Krivoshein proposed putting the tsar before a choice: an “iron hand” or a “government of people’s trust.” A new course requires new people. “What new people,” Goremykin shouted, “where do you see them?!” Krivoshein answered evasively: let the sovereign “invite a certain person (apparently, him. - Note A. A.) and will allow him to identify his future employees." “So,” Goremykin clarified venomously, “it is recognized as necessary to deliver an ultimatum to the Tsar?” Foreign Minister Sazonov was indignant: “We are not seditious, but the same loyal subjects of our sovereign, like Your Excellency! “However, after hesitating, the rebels agreed that this was precisely an ultimatum. In the end, they decided to negotiate with the leadership of the Duma on its dissolution and at the same time present to His Majesty a petition to change the Council of Ministers.

However, instead of carrying out this decision, Goremykin, without warning anyone, left for Headquarters. Returning a couple of days later, on September 2 he gathered the ministers and announced to them the tsar’s will: everyone should remain at their posts and the Duma sessions should be interrupted no later than September 3. Krivoshein attacked him with reproaches, but Goremykin firmly declared that he would fulfill his duty to the sovereign to the end. As soon as the situation at the front allows it, the Tsar will come and figure it out himself. “But it will be too late,” Sazonov exclaimed, “the streets will be filled with blood, and Russia will be thrown into the abyss!” Goremykin, however, stood his ground. He tried to close the meeting, but the ministers refused to disperse, and the prime minister himself left the Council.

Goremykin turned out to be right: on September 3, the Duma was dissolved for the autumn break, and this did not cause any unrest. Hopes for creating a “government of people's trust” evaporated, and members of the “progressive bloc” abruptly changed tactics. They had previously criticized the government for its mismanagement of the war. Now, on the eve of the opening of the all-Russian zemstvo and city congress in Moscow, at a meeting in the house of the Moscow mayor M.V. Chelnokov, it was stated that the government was not striving for victory, but was secretly preparing a conspiracy with the Germans. For Goremykin, a separate peace is beneficial, since it leads to the strengthening of autocracy, and the sovereign is captured by the pro-German “black bloc.”

Subsequently, no one has ever been able to confirm these accusations. After February 1917, the Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry of the Provisional Government, scrupulously investigating the activities of the fallen regime, discovered corruption, carelessness, incompetence, but did not find any traces of the “black bloc”, negotiations with the Germans or simply pro-German sentiments in the ruling elite. However, the accusations made in September 1915 came from the favorites of the public, and were directed against people who aroused general hatred. In such cases, evidence is not required.

The “revelations” made a stunning impression on the delegates of the congress, which opened on September 7, and they were believed unconditionally. Guchkov called for uniting and organizing to fight the external enemy, and even more so the internal enemy - “that anarchy that is caused by the activities of the real government.” However, no revolutionary slogans were heard. On the contrary, they decided to avoid internal turmoil, which only plays into the hands of the “black bloc” and delays victory in the war. The stated goals were the most moderate: to expose the plans of the “black bloc”, to achieve the resumption of Duma meetings and the creation of a “government of people's trust”. The Tsar refused to receive the delegates of the congress, and Prince Lvov wrote a letter to him in a high style on their behalf, calling on him to “renew the government” and place a heavy burden on those “strong in the country’s trust,” as well as “to restore the work of the people’s representatives.” There was no answer.

What means could people use who wanted to change the regime, but did not want to play into the hands of Germany and Austria? In Guchkov’s papers, a document was found, compiled by someone unknown, chaotic in style and content, entitled “Disposition No. 1.” It is dated September 8, 1915. Stating that the struggle is being waged on two fronts, that “to achieve complete victory over the external enemy is unthinkable without first defeating the internal enemy,” the “disposition” suggested that Guchkov take over “the supreme command, organized by the people in the struggle for their rights... Methods of struggle for rights people must be peaceful, but firm and skillful."

What are these methods? Strikes were excluded as harmful to the conduct of the war. The main weapon was to be “the refusal of fighters for the people’s cause to have any communication with a person whose removal from state or public functions was decreed by the high command.” The authors of the “disposition” proposed to scare their reactionary opponents like naughty children, publicly recording their dirty tricks “on a book” and promising to pay for everything after the end of the war.

On September 18, “Disposition No. 2” appears in Moscow, not inferior to the first in terms of effective expressions combined with toothlessness and vagueness. Condemning the “most naive” Kovalevskys, Milyukovs, Chelnokovs and Shingarevs for collaborating with the government (Kovalevsky is a progressive, Shingarev is a left-wing cadet and both are Masons), “mindlessly leading the country to internal aggravation,” the “disposition” proposed forming a “Russian Salvation Army” led by with A.I. Guchkov, A.F. Kerensky, P.P. Ryabushinsky, V.I. Gurko and G.E. Lvov - with Guchkov again taking precedence. The leaders of this unknown “army” should have immediately gathered in Moscow and taken measures to convene a new zemstvo and city congress on October 15. As methods of combating “internal enemies” (these included, among others, liberal ministers Shcherbatov and Samarin), they again proposed a public boycott and a completely incomprehensible “system of personal, social, economic and mental influence on the enemies of the people.”

It seems that the authors of the “dispositions”, who belonged to Guchkov’s circle, did not see the difference between Goremykin and his opponents within the cabinet. Meanwhile, the tsar summoned the offending ministers to Headquarters on September 16th. The day before, Alice reminded her husband in a letter: “Don’t forget to hold the icon in your hand and comb your hair several times.” his(Rasputin. - Note A. A.) with a comb before a meeting of the Council of Ministers." Did the absentee support of his wife help Nicholas, but the tsar remained calm. Sternly informing Krivoshein and his associates that he was extremely dissatisfied with their letter of August 21, Nicholas II asked what they had against Goremykin. Shcherbatov spoke in in a joking tone - it was as difficult for him to negotiate state affairs with Goremykin as it was to manage the estate together with his own father. Goremykin muttered that he, too, would prefer to deal with the senior prince Shcherbatov. The emperor called the behavior of the ministers boyish and said that he completely trusts To Ivan Loginovich (Goremykin).Then he turned the conversation into everyday life - they say, this is all an unhealthy Petrograd atmosphere, and invited the ministers who had made mistakes to dinner.

Peace seemed to be concluded. But two days later the tsar, returning to Petrograd, fired Shcherbatov and Samarin. Krivoshein realized that he had lost and resigned. The resumption of Duma meetings, planned for November 15, was postponed without announcing a new date.

So, in a warring country, an internal front has emerged, where the authorities and the “public” are seated in “trenches” opposite each other. The working class remained neutral. The peasants groaned, but obediently put on their greatcoats and went to fight the Germans and Austrians. There have been no casualties on the internal front yet, but the trouble has just begun...

Germany shifts the focus of military operations to the Eastern Front in order to take Russia out of the war.

The 1915 campaign was difficult for the Russian army. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and officers were killed, wounded and captured. The Russian army left. Galicia, Bukovina, Poland, part of the Baltic states, Belarus.

The Russian command entered 1915 with the firm intention of completing the victorious offensive of its troops in Galicia. There were stubborn battles for the capture of the Carpathian passes and the Carpathian ridge. On March 22, Przemysl capitulated after a six-month siege. with its 127,000-strong garrison of Austro-Hungarian troops (400 guns). But Russian troops failed to reach the Hungarian plain.

In 1915, Germany and its allies directed the main blow against Russia, hoping to defeat her and take her out of the war. There was a widespread belief in German military circles that with a series of strong blows it was possible to force Russia to a separate peace, and then concentrate troops for victory on the Western Front. By mid-April, the German command managed to transfer the best combat-ready corps from the Western Front, which, together with the Austro-Hungarian troops formed a new shock 11th Army under the command of the German General Mackensen. Concentrating the troops on the main direction of the counteroffensive, twice the strength of the Russian troops, bringing up artillery that outnumbered the Russians by 6 times, and by 40 times in heavy guns, On May 2, 1915, the Austro-German army broke through the front in the Gorlitsa area.

Gorlitsky operation, launched on May 2, 1915 at 10 a.m., became the first carefully prepared offensive of the German army on the Eastern Front, which for a time became the main theater of military operations for the German Headquarters. She was "artillery attack" - against 22 Russian batteries (105 guns), Mackensen had 143 batteries (624 guns, including 49 heavy batteries, of which 38 were heavy howitzers of 210 and 305 mm caliber). The Russians in the 3rd Army sector had only 4 heavy howitzers. In total, the superiority in artillery is 6 times, and in heavy artillery 40 times.

The Gorlitsky offensive operation lasted 52 days and became one of the largest defensive operations of the Russian army during the war years.

The breakthrough of the Russian front in the Carpathian region led to the “Great Retreat,” during which the Russian army retreated from the Carpathians and Galicia with heavy fighting, abandoned Przemysl at the end of May, and surrendered Lviv on June 22.

The command of the Central Powers also tried to oust the Russians from Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic states. In June, Austro-German troops reached the Lublin-Holm line, and after breaking out from Prussia and crossing the Narew River, they threatened the Russian armies in Poland from the rear. In the summer of 1915, Russian troops fought defensive battles, trying to escape attack in time and prevent encirclement. On July 5, the Headquarters decided to withdraw the armies to the east to straighten the front. However, the retreat continued throughout August. In the fall, the front was established along the line Western Dvina - Dvinsk - Baranovichi - Pinsk - Dubno - Tarnopol - r. Rod. By mid-September 1915, the offensive initiative of the German army was exhausted. The Russian army gained a foothold on the front line: Riga - Dvinsk - Lake Naroch - Pinsk - Ternopil - Chernivtsi, and by the end of 1915 the Eastern Front extended from the Baltic Sea to the Romanian border. Russia lost vast territory, but retained its strength.

The great retreat became a severe moral shock both for the soldiers and officers of the Russian army, and for public opinion in Petrograd. The atmosphere of despair and loss of mental strength that gripped the Russian army in 1915 was well conveyed by the general A. Denikin in his book of memoirs “Essays on Russian Troubles”:

“The spring of 1915 will remain in my memory forever. The great tragedy of the Russian army is the retreat from Galicia. No cartridges, no shells. Day after day there are bloody battles, day after day difficult marches, endless fatigue - physical and moral: now timid hopes, now hopeless horror...”

1915 brought the largest The loss of the Russian army during the war was about 2.5 million killed, wounded and prisoners. Enemy losses amounted to more than 1 million people . And still The enemy failed to solve its strategic objectives: to encircle the Russian army in the “Polish bag”, to put an end to the Eastern Front and to force Russia to withdraw from the war by concluding a separate peace. It is important to note that the success of German troops on the Eastern Front was facilitated by minimal Allied activity on the Western Front.

Video - "The Great Retreat"

Russian-Turkish Front 1915.

Since January, N.N. Yudenich took command of the Caucasian Front. In February-April 1915, the Russian and Turkish armies were reorganizing. The battles were local in nature. By the end of March, the Russian army cleared southern Adjara and the entire Batumi region of the Turks.

N. N. Yudenich

In July, Russian troops repelled the offensive of Turkish troops in the area of ​​Lake Van.

During the Alashkert operation (July-August 1915), Russian troops defeated the enemy, thwarted the offensive planned by the Turkish command in the Kara direction and facilitated the actions of British troops in Mesopotamia.

In the second half of the year, fighting spread to Persian territory.

In October-December 1915, the commander of the Caucasian Army, General Yudenich, carried out the successful Hamadan operation, which prevented Persia from entering the war on the side of Germany. On October 30, Russian troops landed in the port of Anzali (Persia), by the end of December they defeated pro-Turkish armed forces and took control of the territory of Northern Persia, securing the left flank of the Caucasian army.

Western Front

In 1915, both sides on the Western Front switched to strategic defense; no large-scale battles were fought. By the beginning of 1915 Anglo-Belgian troops were in the Artois region, partly on Belgian territory, main French forces were concentrated in the Champagne region. The Germans occupied part of the territory of France, advancing inland to the city of Noyon (Noyon salient).

IN February-March French organized an attack in Champagne, but advanced only 460 meters, losing 50 thousand people

On March 10, the offensive of British forces (four divisions) began in Artois to the village of Neuve Chapelle However, due to problems with supplies and communications, the development of the attack slowed down, and the Germans managed to organize a counterattack. On March 13, the offensive was stopped; the British managed to advance only two kilometers.

The Battle of Ypres took place on April 22-25. On the first day of the operation, after a two-day bombardment, On April 22, the Germans used chemical weapons on a large scale for the first time (chlorine). As a result of the gas attack, 15 thousand people were poisoned within a few minutes.

In January 1915, chemical weapons based on chlorine compounds were put into production in Germany. The point chosen for the attack was in the northeastern part of the Ypres salient, at the place where the French and English fronts converged. The command did not set the task of a wide offensive; the goal was only to test weapons. The liquid chlorine cylinders were buried on April 11. When the valve in the cylinder was opened, chlorine came out as a gas. Gas jets released simultaneously from balloon batteries formed a thick cloud. German soldiers were given bandages and bottles of hyposulfite solution, the use of which reduced the risk of injury from chlorine vapors.

Italy signed the secret Treaty of London with the Entente countries. For £50 million, Italy pledged to open a new front against the Central Powers

25 May – Italy declares war on Austria-Hungary. Austrian divisions blocked the Italian army in the river area. Asonzo and defeated them.

October 11 – Bulgaria entered the war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Defeat of the Serbian army in the Balkans.

In solving Russia's geopolitical problems, it was of great importance Dardanelles landing operation Entente (February 1915 - January 1916), carried out to divert Turkish troops from the Caucasian front. The overly active preparation of the British for the operation frightened Petrograd. This led to the formalization in March-April 1915 of a number of agreements, according to which England and France agreed to the transfer of Constantinople and its adjacent territory to Russia. However, both the naval part of the operation and the landing on the Galliopolis Peninsula were unsuccessful. As a result, Allied troops were transferred to the Thessaloniki front.

Results of 1915:

• Germany and its allies failed to eliminate the Eastern Front.
• Positional (“trench”) warfare on the Western Front.
• France and England strengthened their military potential.
• There was a military-economic superiority of the Entente countries.
• Failure of Germany's strategic plan to take Russia out of the war
• The war acquired a positional character on the Eastern Front as well.

Attack of the Dead

During small defense Osovets fortress, located on the territory of the presentBelarus , the small Russian garrison needed to hold out for only 48 hours. He defended himself for more than six months - 190 days!

The Germans used all the latest weapons technology, including aviation, against the defenders of the fortress. For each defender, there were several thousand bombs and shells dropped from airplanes and fired from dozens of guns from 17 batteries, which included two famous “Big Berthas” (which the Russians managed to knock out in the process).

The Germans bombed the fortress day and night. Month after month. The Russians defended themselves amid a hurricane of fire and iron until the last. There were very few of them, but offers of surrender always received the same answer. Then the Germans deployed 30 gas batteries against the fortress. Thousands of cylinders hit Russian positions 12-meter wave of chemical attack. There were no gas masks.

Every living thing on the territory of the fortress was poisoned. Even the grass turned black and withered. A thick, poisonous green layer of chlorine oxide coated the metal parts of the guns and shells. At the same time, the Germans began a massive shelling. Following him, over 7,000 infantrymen moved to storm Russian positions.

August 6 (July 24, old style) 1915. It seemed that the fortress was doomed and had already been taken. Thick, numerous German chains were getting closer and closer... And at that moment, from the poisonous green chlorine fog, a counterattack fell on them! There were a little more than sixty Russians. Remains of the 13th company of the 226th Zemlyansky regiment. For every counterattacker there were more than a hundred enemies!

The Russians walked at full speed. At bayonet point. Shaking with coughing, spitting out pieces of lungs through rags wrapped around their faces onto bloody tunics...

These warriors plunged the enemy into such horror that the Germans, not accepting the battle, rushed back. In a panic, trampling each other, getting tangled and hanging on their own barbed wire fences. And then, from the clouds of poisoned fog, seemingly dead Russian artillery struck them.

This battle will go down in history as "attack of the dead" . During it, several dozen half-dead Russian soldiers put 14 enemy battalions to flight!

The 13th company, under the command of Second Lieutenant Kotlinsky, counterattacked units of the 18th regiment along the railway and put them to flight. Continuing the attack, the company again captured the 1st and 2nd lines of defense. At this moment, Second Lieutenant Kotlinsky was mortally wounded and transferred command of the formation to Second Lieutenant of the 2nd Osovets Engineer Company Strezheminsky. From him, command passed to Ensign Radke, with whom the company fought to occupy Leonov's yard and thus completely eliminated the consequences of the German breakthrough in this sector of defense. At the same time, the 8th and 14th companies unblocked the central redoubt and, together with the soldiers of the 12th company, drove the enemy to their original positions. By 8 o'clock in the morning all the consequences of the German breakthrough had been eliminated. By 11 o'clock in the morning the shelling of the fortress stopped, which was the formal end of the failed assault.

The Russian defenders of Osovets never surrendered the fortress. She was left later. And by order of the command. When defense has lost its meaning. They left neither a cartridge nor a nail for the enemy. Everything that survived in the fortress from German fire and bombing was blown up by Russian sappers. The Germans decided to occupy the ruins only a few days later.

Sends a secret ultimatum China, the “21 Demands,” which demands that it be granted rights to exploit mineral resources and use the railway network on the Shandong Peninsula, as well as the lease of all of Manchuria.

the date is only according to the Gregorian calendar, and the date according to the Julian calendar is indicated in parentheses along with the description of the event. In chronological tables describing the periods before the introduction of the new style by Pope Gregory XIII (in the DATES column) Dates are based on the Julian calendar only.. At the same time, no translation is made to the Gregorian calendar, because it did not exist.

Read about the events of the year:

Spiridovich A.I. "The Great War and the February Revolution of 1914-1917" All-Slavic Publishing House, New York. 1-3 books. 1960, 1962

Vel. book Gabriel Konstantinovich. In the marble palace. From the chronicle of our family. NY. 1955:

Chapter thirty two. Autumn 1914 - winter 1915. At the Headquarters of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief in Baranovichi - In Petrograd - Trip to Ostashevo and Moscow - Prince Vladimir Paley.

Chapter Thirty Three. Spring 1915. Rumors of “betrayal” - Death at the front of Kostya Bagration.

Chapter thirty-four. Autumn 1915 - winter 1916. Trip to Crimea - Bad things at the front - Nicholas II assumes the post of Supreme Commander-in-Chief.