Battle of Łódź, 1914: the forgotten Polish Verdun

In the autumn of 1914 the plains around Łódź, an industrial city in Russian Poland, saw one of the largest battles of maneuver of World War I. For nearly four weeks armies attacked, encircled and were encircled in turn, in a struggle that Paul von Hindenburg, the German commander in the East, called the most confusing picture on both sides, and fiercer than any battle fought on the Eastern Front before it. The British attaché Alfred Knox, who followed it from the Russian side, thought it would probably prove the most interesting operation of the war from a military and psychological point of view. In Poland today it is often called the forgotten battle, or the Polish Verdun.²

Background: the race for Silesia

In October 1914 Hindenburg's first offensive into Poland had stalled before Warsaw, and the German Ninth Army fell back to the frontier. The Russians followed and began to gather their armies in the bend of the Vistula for an invasion of Germany through Silesia toward Berlin, the offensive remembered as the Russian steamroller.³

On 1 November Hindenburg was made commander-in-chief of the German forces in the East, with Erich Ludendorff as his chief of staff, and General August von Mackensen took over the Ninth Army. The Germans could not hope to stop the Russians head-on. Their answer, settled at Częstochowa on 3 November, was to move the Ninth Army by rail to the area of Thorn (Toruń) and send it south along the Vistula into the exposed northern flank of the Russian mass, toward Łódź.⁴ › Battle of Tannenberg, 1914

The Germans also knew when the Russians meant to move. Hindenburg writes that an intercepted Russian wireless message gave away that the armies of the North-West Front would start their invasion on 14 November; Polish accounts add that the Russian cipher had been broken. By 10 November the Ninth Army was ready, and on 11 November it set off, three days ahead of the Russians.⁵

Armies and commanders

Mackensen's Ninth Army had been built up to about five and a half army corps and five cavalry divisions, with the fortress corps from Breslau and Posen on its southern wing. Austro-Hungarian troops fought in the battle as well.⁶

Against them stood the Russian North-West Front of General Nikolai Ruzsky with three armies: the First under General Rennenkampf, the Second under General Scheidemann and the Fifth under General Plehve. Knox drew a sharp contrast between the two commanders who would decide the battle: Rennenkampf the dashing cavalryman, an anachronism in a twentieth-century army, and Plehve, small, old and bent, but with a logical mind and an iron will.⁷

How many men fought is uncertain. Polish estimates of the total range from about 570,000 or more than 600,000 in the reports of the Polish Press Agency to more than 700,000 in the work of the ethnologist Andrzej Daszyński. Many of them were Poles, conscripted by all three partitioning powers, so that Poles fought Poles; the names on the gravestones show it.⁸

The battle in phases

The blow from Thorn, 11 to 16 November. Mackensen's advance took the Russians by surprise. There was heavy fighting from the first days around Włocławek and Kutno, and the Russians lost Włocławek, Kutno and Łęczyca as the Germans fell in overwhelming strength on the junction of the Russian First and Second Armies. Rickard describes the First Army as crushed; Knox writes that about half of the two armies was defeated in detail before they could concentrate, and that the Germans pushed them apart.⁹

The ring around Łódź, 17 to 22 November. The Russian Second Army was driven back on Łódź. German corps pressed it from the north and west, while an enveloping group, the XXV Reserve Corps under General Scheffer-Boyadel with the 3rd Guard Division and cavalry, swung around its eastern flank, through Brzeziny east of the city, and pushed far to the south behind the Russian lines. By 22 November the Germans had almost closed a ring around Łódź, from the west, north and east, but they no longer had the strength to finish it.¹⁰

The rescue march. The Russians saved the Second Army with counterattacks, above all by the Fifth Army. Ordered north to its aid, Plehve's corps turned round and marched almost without rest; Rickard puts the effort at seventy miles in forty-eight hours, and Knox at thirty-three miles in one march and thirty-seven in the next for the XIX Corps alone. Their counterattacks south and west of Łódź took the German wing by surprise and relieved the pressure on the Second Army.¹¹

Turning point: the hunters become the hunted

Hindenburg summed up the battle as rapid changes from attack to defense, from enveloping to being enveloped. Nowhere was that truer than at Brzeziny. The German enveloping group lost touch with the corps to its north, the Russians pushed in between them, and Russian forces rallied west of Warsaw advanced from Skierniewice to Brzeziny behind it, while Plehve's troops attacked it from the south. The hunters were cut off.¹²

The Russians expected a great haul of prisoners and had trains made ready to carry them away; Ludendorff, following their wireless messages from Posen, feared nothing less than a lost campaign. Instead the surrounded Germans broke out to the north on 24 November and rejoined the Ninth Army, bringing prisoners and captured guns with them: 10,000 prisoners by Ludendorff's count, 16,000 and 64 guns by the German claim that Knox reports. Knox, no friend of the German cause, called the escape remarkable proof of the efficiency, bold leadership and endurance of the troops concerned, and blamed the Russian failure on confused orders, poor reconnaissance and commanders who hesitated to help one another.¹³

The man the Germans would remember from these days was General Karl Litzmann, who commanded the 3rd Guard Division in the encircling group. Polish accounts tell how he took Brzeziny, and Daszyński adds that he did so against orders, an act of insubordination that made him a hero. He was hailed as the Lion of Brzeziny.¹⁴

Aftermath

The German Ninth Army formed a continuous front again and received reinforcements from the West. The Russians, worn down, could not hold their ground. They evacuated Łódź, and on 6 December 1914 German troops marched into the city. The Russian armies fell back to the line of the Bzura, Rawka, Pilica and Nida rivers, where the front settled for the winter.¹⁵

Who won? Polish historians answer that the Russians won tactically, because they did not let their forces be surrounded at Łódź, and the Germans strategically, because they stopped the offensive toward Berlin. Rickard agrees: technically a Russian victory, but the Germans achieved their aim, and the Russians never again came so close to German soil. For Hindenburg, Silesia was saved and the immediate purpose achieved, but the great decision he hoped for did not come. Knox thought Mackensen's initial success failed because the German attack farther south was too weak and too late to stop Plehve from marching north.¹⁶

The cost was enormous. By the estimates used in Poland about 200,000 soldiers died, about 110,000 of them Russian and 90,000 German and Austro-Hungarian. Comparisons with Verdun follow from those figures: Daszyński counts about 9,500 dead a day at Łódź against 3,800 at Verdun, while the historian Mieczysław Różański, quoted by the Polish Press Agency, puts the Łódź figure at 10,000 a day. These are estimates, not counts, and they should be read as such.¹⁷ › The Battle of Verdun, 1916

Legacy and memory

For decades the battle was all but forgotten. Daszyński gives three reasons. In Soviet Russia the deeds of the tsar's army were dangerous to remember. In Germany the battle was taken up by the Nazis: in 1940 they renamed Łódź Litzmannstadt in honor of the Lion of Brzeziny, by then a member of the Nazi party, and after 1945 the whole episode became an embarrassment. In Poland it was long treated as a foreign war between the partitioning powers.¹⁸

The graves suffered with the memory. The war cemeteries around Łódź were laid out by the German authorities during the war, with German and Russian dead buried side by side. Under communist rule they fell into neglect, and many were damaged or destroyed. Only in the 1990s did restoration begin, and with it a slow return of the battle to Polish memory.¹⁹ › The Battles That Won Polish Independence

Visiting the battlefield today

Some 176 war cemeteries and graves from 1914 to 1918 survive in the Łódź region, most of them from the battle, and new burials of soldiers are still found from time to time. One of the most striking is at Gadka Stara near Rzgów, laid out in 1915 around a stone mound with the inscription PRO PATRIA and a German dedication to 2,000 brave warriors who rest there, with Russian graves among the German ones.²⁰

The region has marked trails of the Eastern Front of World War I, part of a project to make these fields as visible as the Western Front's, and one of the routes runs from Łódź through Stryków to Brzeziny, along the line of the German breakthrough.²¹