The Eastern Front 1914-1917 Read Free

Austro-Hungarian army’s weakness) than the British and French combined. The idea that Germany had limitless possibilities in the east was a legend, however powerful its influence on Nazi thinking thereafter.
    At the same time, there was an equally powerful legend on the allies’ side: that Russia, had she received proper help from her western allies, could have contributed decisively to an overthrow of the German Empire quite early in the war. Lloyd George wrote forcefully in maintenance of this view; ‘half the shells and one-fifth the guns… wasted’ in the great western offensives could, he alleged, have contributed decisively to Russia’s performance. I am not so sure. In 1915, the Russian army certainly suffered from material shortages, but the allies could hardly make them up, because they had material shortages of their own; and in any case, to assume that guns and shell would have made any greater difference to the east than they did to the west was to mistake the importance of mere quantity. My study of the engagements of 1915 showed that shell-shortage was very often used as an excuse for blundering and disorganisation that were much more important, in causing Russia’s defeats of that year, than mere shortage of material. In any case, by 1916, the Russian’s own output of war-goods had reached generally satisfactory dimensions. On 1st January 1917, Russian superiority on the eastern front was in some ways comparable with the western Powers’ superiority eighteen months later in France. It would have taken much more than despatch of guns and shell to the eastern front to cause the defeat of Germany there.
    This was a discovery that came as a surprise to me, since I had always assumed, following Golovin and others, that the Russian army had lost battles because of crippling material shortages; and I had gone on, as other writers have done, to assume that this was an inevitable consequence of the economic backwardness of the Tsarist State. But when I consulted the figures for Russia’s output of war-goods, I soon found that the shortageshad been exaggerated, and sometimes invented after the event. It is not really accurate to say, for instance, that the Russian army was not ready for war, and that it plunged in before it was ready, in order to save the French. At the time, commanders asserted they were ready even four days before the army crossed the German border. But what they understood as readiness, was of course woefully at odds with war-time reality. They had had no idea what to expect. But ‘unreadiness’ was discovered subsequent to the battles, and was at bottom a hard-luck story. In 1914-1915, lack of war-goods was not a comment on Russia’s economic backwardness, but rather on the slowness with which her régime reacted to the needs of war. The politicians and the generals used shell-shortage as a ‘political’ football against the government and the war ministry, and their tales of shell-shortage were therefore treated with scepticism; the artillerymen wrote off infantrymen as stupid and alarmist; and, when the government did decide to do anything, it turned to foreign producers who failed to deliver on time. But once the government made up its quarrel with industrialists, the country proved able to produce war-goods in fair quantity. By 1916, it could produce aircraft, guns, gas-masks, hand-grenades, wireless-sets and the rest—if not in immense quantities, as in the Second World War, at least in quantities sufficient to win the war in the east if other things had been equal. By September 1916, for instance, Russia could produce 4,500,000 shells per month. This compares with German output of seven million, Austro-Hungarian of one million; and since the bulk of this quantity went elsewhere–to the western or Italian fronts—there was not much truth in the assertion that Russia lost the war because of crippling material weaknesses.
    It was the country’s inability to make use of its