Russia's Last Gasp: The Eastern Front 1916?17 (General Military) by Prit Buttar

Author:Prit Buttar [Buttar, Prit]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781472812780
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

KOVEL AND STANISLAU

The central sector of the Eastern Front was dominated by the Pripet Marshes, widely regarded as totally unsuitable terrain for warfare. Even by the standards of Eastern Europe, the road network of European Russia was poor; in the Pripet region, it was even worse. There were few metalled roads, and the rest rapidly degenerated if the weather turned wet. The network of rivers with wide areas of adjoining swamp made it almost impossible to conduct major troop movements away from the roads, and in any event there were no major objectives within reach. Most of the area lay in Russian hands, and as they looked west, the Russians could see that the city of Pinsk lay at the end of what amounted to a peninsula of firm ground pointing towards the heart of the marshes. If they could take Pinsk, the Russian Third Army could expect fairly firm ground extending towards the west.

The southwest part of the Pripet Marshes extended towards, but not as far as, Kovel. The original plan for Bezobrazov’s Guards Army had called for an attack towards Kovel from a point northeast of the city, but this would have necessitated an advance through the tongue of swampy ground extending southwest from the Pripet Marshes. Instead, Bezobrazov had requested successfully that his army should attack from west of Kovel, directly towards the city. Whilst this forced a further delay in operations, it was not without benefit. With the Guards Army moved somewhat further to the south, Kaledin’s Eighth Army was able to concentrate in a narrower segment of front, from where it would strike northwest towards Kovel and – with lesser emphasis – west towards Władimir Wołynsk. In 1915, there had come a point during Mackensen’s advance when geographic and other factors effectively dictated that the retreating Russian forces fell back on diverging axes, with Southwest Front pulling back due east while the rest of the army retreated to the northeast; in a similar manner, a Russian breakthrough at Kovel and Władimir Wołynsk would force the armies of the Central Powers to diverge.

Bezobrazov had received additional reinforcements. In addition to the Russian Guards, he was assigned I and XXX Corps, and V Cavalry Corps. As the Guards were now outnumbered by other formations, the army was assigned a new title. Every new army that had been created since the beginning of the war had been assigned a new number, one higher than the previously assigned numbers, so logically this rule should have turned the Guards Army into Thirteenth Army, but instead it was labelled Special Army. It is unlikely that this was due to any superstition – the relatively widespread western superstition about the number thirteen has never really prevailed in Russia – and was more probably due to unwillingness to have a force that contained the entire Russian Guards given such a low-ranking number; the name that was chosen recognised the ‘special’ status of at least some of the troops within the army.

Brusilov was

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.