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Nathaniel Collins
4th June in military history:
1615 – Siege of Osaka: Forces under Tokugawa Ieyasu take Osaka Castle in Japan. 1745 – Battle of Hohenfriedberg: Frederick the Great's Prussian army decisively defeated an Austrian army under Prince Charles Alexander of Lorraine during the War of the Austrian Succession. 1794 – British troops capture Port-au-Prince in Haiti. 1855 – Major Henry C. Wayne departs New York aboard the USS Supply to procure camels to establish the U.S. Camel Corps. 1859 – Italian Independence wars: In the Battle of Magenta, the French army, under Louis-Napoleon, defeat the Austrian army. 1862 – American Civil War: Confederate troops evacuate Fort Pillow on the Mississippi River, leaving the way clear for Union troops to take Memphis, Tennessee. 1916 – World War I: Russia opens the Brusilov Offensive with an artillery barrage of Austro-Hungarian lines in Galicia. 1940 – World War II: The Dunkirk evacuation ends: British forces complete evacuation of 338,000 troops from Dunkirk in France. To rally the morale of the country, Winston Churchill delivers, only to the House of Commons, his famous "We shall fight on the beaches" speech. 1942 – World War II: The Battle of Midway begins. The Japanese Admiral Chūichi Nagumo orders a strike on Midway Island by much of the Imperial Japanese Navy. 1943 – A military coup in Argentina ousts Ramón Castillo. 1944 – World War II: A hunter-killer group of the United States Navy captures the German submarine U-505: The first time a U.S. Navy vessel had captured an enemy vessel at sea since the 19th century. 1944 – World War II: Rome falls to the Allies, the first Axis capital to fall. 1989 – The Tiananmen Square protests are violently ended in Beijing by the People's Liberation Army, with at least 241 dead.
Luke Jackson
June 4th marks the centennary of the Brusilov Offensive, also known as the "June Advance". This was the Russian Empire's greatest feat of arms during World War I, and among the most lethal offensives in world history. It was the worst crisis of World War I for Austria-Hungary and one of the Triple Entente's greatest victories, but it came at a tremendous loss of life.
The offensive involved a major Russian attack against the armies of the Central Powers on the Eastern Front, launched on June 4, 1916, and lasting until late September. It took place in an area of present-day western Ukraine, in the general vicinity of the towns of Lviv, Kovel, and Lutsk. The offensive was named after the commander in charge of the Southwestern Front of the Imperial Russian Army, General Aleksei Brusilov.
Under the terms of the Chantilly Agreement of December 1915, Russia, France, Britain and Italy committed to simultaneous attacks against the Central Powers in the summer of 1916. Russia felt obliged to lend troops to fight in France and Salonika (against her own wishes), and to attack on the Eastern Front, in the hope of obtaining munitions from Britain and France.
The Russians also initiated the disastrous Lake Naroch Offensive in the Vilno area, during which the Germans suffered only one-fifth as many casualties as the Russians. This offensive took place at French request, in the hope that the Germans would transfer more units to the East after their attack on Verdun.
Brusilov presented his plan to the Stavka, proposing a massive offensive by his Southwestern Front against the Austro-Hungarian forces in Galicia. It aimed to take some of the pressure off French and British armies in France and the Italian Army along the Isonzo Front and, if possible, to knock Austria-Hungary out of the war. As the Austrian army was heavily engaged in Italy, the Russian army enjoyed a significant numerical advantage on the Galician front.
Jason Flores
Mounting pressure from the western Allies caused the Russians to hurry their preparations. Brusilov amassed four armies totaling 40 infantry divisions and 15 cavalry divisions. He faced 39 Austrian infantry divisions and 10 cavalry divisions, formed in a row of three defensive lines, although later German reinforcements were brought up. Brusilov, knowing he would not receive significant reinforcements, moved his reserves up to the front line. He prepared for a surprise assault along 480 kilometres (300 mi) of front. The Stavka urged Brusilov to considerably shorten his attacking front to allow for a much heavier concentration of Russian troops. Brusilov insisted on his plan and the Stavka relented, although they denied his request for supporting offensives by neighboring fronts.
On June 4 the Russians opened the offensive with a massive, accurate but brief artillery barrage against the Austro-Hungarian lines, with the key factor of this effective bombardment being its brevity and accuracy. This was in contrast to the customary, protracted barrages at the time that gave the defenders time to bring up reserves and evacuate forward trenches, while damaging the battlefield so badly that it was hard for attackers to advance. The initial attack was successful and the Austro-Hungarian lines were broken, enabling three of Brusilov's four armies to advance on a wide front.
The success of the breakthrough was helped in large part by Brusilov's use of shock troops to attack weak points along the Austrian lines to effect a breakthrough, which the main Russian army could then exploit. Brusilov's tactical innovations laid the foundation for the German infiltration tactics used later in the Western Front.
Isaac Williams
On June 8 forces of the Southwestern Front took Lutsk. The Austrian commander, Archduke Josef Ferdinand, barely managed to escape the city before the Russians entered, a testament to the speed of the Russian advance. By now the Austrians were in full retreat and the Russians had taken over 200,000 prisoners. Brusilov's forces were becoming overextended and he made it clear that further success of the operation depended on Evert launching his part of the offensive. Evert, however, continued to delay, which gave the German high command time to send reinforcements to the Eastern Front.
In a meeting held on the same day Lutsk fell, German Chief of Staff von Falkenhayn persuaded his Austrian counterpart von Hötzendorf to pull troops away from the Italian Front to counter the Russians in Galicia. Field Marshal von Hindenburg, Germany's commander in the East, was again able to capitalize on good railroads to bring German reinforcements to the front.
Finally, on June 18 a weak and poorly prepared offensive commenced under Evert. On July 24 von Linsingen counterattacked the Russians south of Kovel and temporarily checked them. On July 28 Brusilov resumed his own offensive, and although his armies were short on supplies he reached the Carpathian Mountains by September 20. The Russian high command started transferring troops from Evert's front to reinforce Brusilov, a transfer Brusilov strongly opposed because more troops only served to clutter his front.
Brusilov's operation achieved its original goal of forcing Germany to halt its attack on Verdun and transfer considerable forces to the East. It also broke the back of the Austro-Hungarian army, which suffered the majority of the casualties. Afterward, the Austro-Hungarian army increasingly had to rely on the support of the German army for its military successes. On the other hand, the German army did not suffer much from the operation and retained most of its offensive power afterward.
Bentley Collins
The early success of the offensive convinced Romania to enter the war on the side of the Entente, though that turned out to be a bad decision since it led to the failure of the 1916 campaign. Russian casualties were considerable, numbering up to half a million, but enemy casualties were almost triple. The offensive is listed among the most lethal in world history.
The Brusilov Offensive was the high point of the Russian effort during World War I, and was a manifestation of good leadership and planning on the part of the Imperial Russian Army coupled with great skill of the lower ranks. The offensive commanded by Brusilov himself went very well, but the overall campaign, for which Brusilov's part was only supposed to be a distraction, because of Evert's failures, became tremendously costly for the Imperial army, and after the offensive, it was no longer able to launch another on the same scale. Many historians contend that the casualties that the Russian army suffered in this campaign contributed significantly to its collapse the following year.
This operation provides a chance for strategic wargaming on a major scale, in a more obscure period of WWI history. The use of Russian shock troops and the exotic mix of the Austro-Hungarian forces provide a lot of colour and uniqueness to it.
