On 6 August 1915 German troops besieging the Russian fortress of Osowiec, on the Bobr river in what is now Poland, released chlorine gas from thousands of cylinders against its forward Sosnya position and sent their Landwehr infantry in behind the cloud. Most of the forward defenders were poisoned, but companies of the 226th Zemlyansky Infantry Regiment counter-attacked with the bayonet and by late morning had retaken the lost trenches. Two of the fortress’s officers, writing in 1917, called it the famous gas assault, brilliantly beaten off; the German official history records only that the attempt brought no hoped-for success. The name by which it is known today, the attack of the dead men, came later.
Battle of Spicheren, 1870: the Red Hill and the road to Metz
6 August 1870 · 156 years ago
On the Spicheren heights south of Saarbrücken, the Prussian First Army attacked the entrenched French II Corps under Frossard in the Franco-Prussian War. The unplanned Prussian assault was costly, but the Germans won and the French withdrew toward the Moselle and Metz.
Read the full story of Battle of Spicheren, 1870: the Red Hill and the road to Metz ›Attack of the Dead Men
6 August 1915 · 111 years ago
A fortress in the marshes
Osowiec held a crossing of the Bobr, a river in what is now Poland. In a study published by the Russian General Staff in 1917, two of its senior officers explain its value: it lay on a marshy stretch of the river with no other crossings, where a railway and a road ran from East Prussia to the rail junction of Białystok. The authors were Lieutenant Colonel M. Svechnikov, acting chief of staff of the fortress, and Major General V. Bunyakovsky, who later commanded its 1st Defense Section.1
Their subject, in the words of their title, was the fortress’s "second, 6½-month siege". Having failed to take it by open force or to break the defenders by almost daily bombardment, at first even with their 42-centimeter guns, the Germans decided, the authors write, to poison the garrison.2
Thirteen days waiting for the wind
The study prints the date of the gas assault as "24 July". It counts nine companies on the Sosnya position, three of them militia; against the one and a half battalions holding its center and left, it says, the Germans massed about 12 battalions of the 11th Landwehr Division, with about six more in reserve according to prisoners.3
The study counts over 30 gas batteries holding several thousand cylinders. Sergei Khmelkov, another defender, whose book appeared in 1939, writes of 30 batteries with several thousand cylinders. Both put the release of the gas at 4 in the morning. Prisoners told the Russians that the batteries had stood ready for about 13 days while the Germans waited for the weather, the study says; Khmelkov writes of more than ten days.4
The study describes a dark greenish cloud, based on chlorine with some other admixture that strengthened its suffocating effect, which reached the Russian trenches within 5 to 10 minutes on a front at first no more than two versts wide. Every scout and outpost died; almost all the defenders of sectors 1, 2 and 4 and half of sector 3 were mortally poisoned, and half the men of the reserve were poisoned. The anti-gas bandages of the time, the authors write, gave little protection, but the cold, foggy morning and the wet marsh weakened the gas and saved the garrison from enormous losses.5
Kotlinsky’s company
Behind the cloud and a heavy barrage, the 18th Landwehr Regiment cut gaps in the wire on both sides of the railway and broke into the Russian trenches. To stop it, the commander of the 2nd Defense Section sent the 13th, 14th and 8th Companies of the 226th Zemlyansky Regiment forward to counter-attack.6
The 13th Company was commanded by Second Lieutenant Kotlinsky. According to the study, the company, the garrison of the Zarechny fort, had already lost 20 men to the gas, and Kotlinsky was poisoned too but stayed in the ranks. The company crossed a causeway about a verst long under shellfire, deployed along the railway, and from 500 paces Kotlinsky led it in a charge on the German lines. He was mortally wounded; a sapper officer who had volunteered to go with the company took over, and the study says the company drove the Germans with the bayonet out of the trenches of the 1st and 2nd sectors and took 16 prisoners. After concentrated fortress artillery fire on the Leonovo farm, the last German strongpoint there was taken by 10 a.m., and men of the 12th Company with half of the 14th cleared Sosnya village.7
The authors sum up the morning: "Такимъ образомъ, къ 11 часамъ утра, т. е. въ теченіе 7 часовъ произошелъ знаменитый газовый штурмъ, такъ блестяще и самоотверженно отбитый частями славнаго Землянскаго полка" ("Thus by 11 o’clock in the morning, that is, within 7 hours, the famous gas assault took place, so brilliantly and selflessly beaten off by units of the glorious Zemlyansky Regiment"; our translation).8
Without the hoped-for success
Under 6 August the German official history records only: "Ein bei der 8. Armee an diesem Tage unternommener Versuch, gegen Osowiec durch Abblasen von Gas vorwärtszukommen, blieb dagegen ohne den erhofften Erfolg" ("An attempt made by the Eighth Army on this day to advance against Osowiec by releasing gas, on the other hand, remained without the hoped-for success"; our translation).9
The sources print the date differently. The 1917 study has "24 July"; a Soviet strategic survey of 1922, compiled by A. Neznamov, records that "23 July (5 August)" at dawn the Germans released gas at Osowiec and took Sosnya village; the historian Gennady Mokshin gives "24 July (6 August)".10
German prisoners, the study says, told their captors that from the highest commanders down they had been sure no one in the garrison could survive, so sure that several companies had been detailed in advance to bury the dead and the wagon trains stood harnessed, ready to drive into Osowiec. The study gives no overall count of the dead. Mokshin writes that, by various accounts, the gas killed 200 to 600 of the fortress’s defenders, and that up to 900 more were put out of action as sick and wounded. The study reports that the 76th Landwehr Regiment lost about a thousand men killed by its own gas, which drifted west; Khmelkov also writes that the regiment ran into its own gas and suffered enormous losses.11
With the gas attack, the authors write, the fighting at the fortress essentially ended. Their chapter on the evacuation runs from 4 to 10 August, in the same dating that puts the gas assault on 24 July; at 11 p.m. on 9 August, after the works had been blown up, the garrison left the fortress. Mokshin dates the abandonment of the fortress "9 (22) August" 1915.12
Dead men, twenty-four years later
The 1917 study does use the word, in the form "мертвецамъ" (to the dead men), but for 36 dead Russians whose skulls, it says, the Germans smashed in Sosnya, not for the men who counter-attacked. Mokshin writes that the main source of the myth of the "attack of the dead men" was Khmelkov’s book of 1939, and that Khmelkov, a professor at the Red Army’s Military Engineering Academy and one of the fortress’s defenders, was the first to call the counter-attackers of 6 August 1915 "dead men". Khmelkov puts the phrase in the mouth of an eyewitness: this attack "of the dead men", the witness says, so struck the Germans that they fled.13
Later retellings added numbers. Mokshin quotes Vladimir Voronov’s newspaper article of 2009, in which just over 60 men of the 13th Company, wrapped in rags, put 7,000 German infantrymen to flight without a fight. These are late claims; the study’s own figures for the 13th Company are 20 men gassed before the charge and 16 prisoners taken. In the abstract of his article Mokshin writes that the so-called attack "к настоящему времени успела обрасти легендами и вымыслами" ("has by now become overgrown with legends and fictions"; our translation).14
Also on this day
1915: at Lone Pine on Gallipoli, the 1st Australian Brigade attacked the Turkish trenches in the late afternoon, parts of them roofed over, as Bean’s official history and the Australian War Memorial both record. Bean writes that this "demonstration" cost the 1st Australian Division over 2,000 men in the fighting of 6 to 9 August, and that the Turkish 16th Division was said to have lost 6,930 men in five days, the majority at Lone Pine. Seven Australians were awarded the Victoria Cross for the battle, according to the Memorial.15
