School of War - Ep 37: Alexander Watson on WWI’s Siege of Przemysl and the Making of Europe’s Bloodlands

Episode Date: July 19, 2022

Alexander Watson, Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London, joins the show to talk about the Eastern Front in World War One, and how the events of 1914/15 foreshadowed tragedies to come and the crisis in Ukraine today.  ▪️ Times  • 01:43 Introduction • 02:40 WWI In The East • 05:29 Battlefield - Austria-Hungary  • 10:10 The Austro-Hungarian Army • 13:28 Coveted Galicia • 17:44 1914 - A Primordial Soup • 19:02 The Siege Begins • 26:27 Przemysl’s Defensive Plan • 29:50 The Russians Take A Direct Approach • 36:08 Inside A City Under Siege     • 40:19 Total Exhaustion  • 44:45 Military And Human Consequences • 50:00 Birthplace Of The Bloodlands • 55:09 Strange Ends Maps Courtesy of United States Military Academy West Point Eastern Europe, 1914 and Planned Army Concentration Areas in Central Europe, 1914  Operations on The Eastern Front to 20 September 1914

At the start of the First World War, as the German army was wheeling its way through Belgium and route to what would become the stalemate of the Western Front, vast campaigns of maneuver were also breaking out in the east between the armies of the Russian Empire and those of Austria-Hungary. Millions of men marched through the area that today forms the border of Poland and Ukraine, fighting in a series of bloody engagements that, in one sense, were the end of an era. siege warfare waged along centuries old lines of fortification conducted between states that would soon cease to exist, but also engagements which, in another sense, were the dawn of something new, fueled by ethnic resentment and religious bigotry, foreshadowing the coming decades of suffering in Europe's bloodlands. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in India. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale.

We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. Delighted to be joined today by Alexander Watson.

Alex is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London. It's the author of Ring of Steel, Germany and Austria, Hungary and World War I, which won the Wolfson History Prize and the Gugenheim-Lairman Prize in Military History, and Enduring the Great War, which he is the author of the Fortress, the Siege of Shemish and the Making of Europe's Bloodlands. Alex, thanks so much for joining the show. Thanks so much for the invitation. I also need, so two confessions for the audience here.

The first is Alex and I were classmates together in graduate school some years ago at Balliol College in the UK. And the second confession is Alex coached. me for about 60 seconds before we started recording about how to pronounce the name of the town now in Poland about which is his fascinating book that his book is about and I'm going to do my best. As with so many names in Eastern Europe, there's an alarming lack of vowels in the word. But Alex, what do we, I think it would be worthwhile to start sort of biggest possible picture. I'm going to make a guess that people listening to the episode when they think with the First World

War, they probably think of the Western Front and with a fairly good idea of what was going on there. Some may have read, you know, a farewell to arms and be aware that there was fighting down in Italy and there's sort of general awareness that the war started with an issue in the Balkans and there was stuff going on in the East, obviously there was the Russian revolution, which had to happen for some sort of reason. But what? Who are the players in the East in World War I? And fundamentally, what are they after? Then we will, we will zoom in. Okay. So the Eastern Europe in World War I looks very different from Eastern Europe today. In some ways the geography is a lot simple. You've got three big empires. In Central Europe, you've got

Germany to the north. You've got Austria-Hungary, which we'll be probably talking quite a lot about, to the south of Germany. In Austria-Hungary has 11 languages. It covers this vast wave of land stretching through Central Europe, from what today is northern Italy in the west, right through to what today is Western Ukraine in the East. So it's just massive. And then down south as well to compass Bosnia heads of governor and various other kind of Balkan regions. And then to the east you've got imperial. It's important to emphasize this is imperial Russia. This is not Russia. This is an empire. Russia today is much smaller than it has been for centuries. And in 1914, which is the time we're talking about, Russia extended right into the center of what today is Poland. That's how far

westwards Russia comes. It's simply, I mean, it already looks gigantic now, but it's even more humongous then. And in 1914, you have two coalitions. You've got Austria, Hungary and Germany against what we're called the Entente Paz, France and Britain in the west, and Russia in the east. And at the start of the World War I, most people who I talk to about these things tend to think about the beginnings of the war being characterized by a German attack West Sierra with the Schlieff and the idea that Germany was going to cut through Belgium and beat the French within six weeks. And that's kind of what's gone down in history books. But there's an even bigger front to the east, the eastern front. Eastern front is nearly twice the size of the Western Front.

There's millions of men arrayed on this front. And in August 1914, it's a Russian offensive front. The Russians launched two major offensives westwards, one in the north of the front against Germany and one in the south of the front against Austria-Hungary in order to attempt to punch through and invade Central Europe. Let's talk a bit about the military geography of Austria-Hungary. There is, you know, I think people have recently written books here in the United States

about how it presents sort of unique geo-problems from a strategic point of view as opposed to Russia, which obviously only faces its potential adversaries on one side. There's a lack of natural boundaries, right? So paint a picture of this empire and how it thought about defending itself. Okay. So Austria-Hungary was certainly, in my view, more responsible for the outbreak of war in 1914 than any other power. Its heir to the throne, Archute Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by Serbian domestic terrorists in June, 1914, 28th of June, the famous Sarajevo assassination. A desire to punish Serbia. Serbia has been a hostile, smaller power.

And Austria-Hungary has about 50 million people in it. Serbia, I think, has about 4 million. So there's a huge disparity here. In some ways, I think that the Austro-Hungarian elites vastly over-eastern elites vastly overestrian. to estimate the threat Serbia poses to their multi-ethnic realm. But the reason why they overestimated is because for them, Serbia isn't so much a military threat as an ideological one. Serbia is a nation state and Austria-Hungary is a multi-ethnic empire. And the worry is that if any ground is given to Serbia, then other powers around Austria-Hungary, particularly Romania and Russia will be seeking to carve up the empire as well. You know, this isn't

This is an era of imperialism. Austro-Hungarian select what other powers have been doing to the Ottoman Empire over the last few decades, and they're very worried about the rise of nationalism and the dissolution of their own empire. And they decide to go and launch an attack on Serbia as a punishment for this assassination of the heir to the throne. Serbia has a backer in the form of Russia, however, and the Austro-Hungarians are aware that they attack Serbia, there's a fairly decent chance that Russia will intervene on the side of Serbia.

And Russia's army is simply enormous, along with the empire. I mean, the Russians in peacetime, everyone has conscripted armies at this time. The peacetime Russian army is about 1.3 million people, which is more than the standing armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary combined. It's just simply huge. I mean, the military resource of these states are staggering in the kind of from the perspective of the 21st century. And the Austro-Hungarians know that if they're going to risk a conflict with Russia, then they

need to get Germany their longstanding ally on side. And so they're in conversations, there are agreements, Germany agrees to cover Austria-Hungary, and diplomatic crisis blows up, which leads to everyone in Europe pretty much going to war by early August 1914. In terms of the sort of military, the pure military challenges that Austria-Hungary has at the start of the First World War, there are two, and they screwing. them up really, really, really epically badly. One challenge is to defeat Serbia, and Serbia is difficult to defeat because part of its border is covered in mountains. The other, the northeastern

border of Austria-Hungary, which frontiers with Russia. And that border today is in a space which is occupied by southern, southeastern Poland and western Ukraine. And it's really, that border is really, really difficult to defend because it's a long border. It's about 750 kilometres long and there aren't any or there are very few obvious natural obstacles to protect it. No river lines, no mountains, running or hills even running or it's a very flat plain. So it's a big challenge. So in the case of a war with Russia, as quickly as humanly possible is get as much of their army mobilised and up on that northeastern border as soon as they can, adopting defensive positions may be launching a spoiling attack.

Some of not limiting spoiling attack. Instead of that, they send far too many of their troops down to the Serbian front. The emperor and some of the civilian officials say, but hang on a minute, we've got this huge Russian army concentrating on our northeastern border. Shouldn't you be sending more troops up there? To which the Chief of General Staff, he checks with his rail people and the rail people say, well, it's too late. We've started, you know, we've already started. We've started doing the mobilisation now.

So what the Austro-Hungarians end up doing is they end up sending much of their defensive for the northeast down through to the southeast. And then essentially what a significant part of the Austro-Hungarian army does in Augusta-Nioreen army does in Auguste-1914, instead of going directly to the battlefield, it takes this massively long two sides of a huge triangle down into the Balkans and then back up to what today is Western Ukraine. And as a result, a significant proportion of that defensive force arrives the late with disastrous results for the Austro-Hungarian. Tell us about this army. One would presume just hearing the situation you've described, you know, you have a vulnerable, difficult to defend patch of territory, other European states that find themselves in these circumstances if they don't want to just constantly suffer defeat.

You know, the tensions are who I'm thinking of here, develop a kind of totalistic military culture, a formidable fighting force, which the Austro-Hungarians have taken. Taken? Less so, quite a lot less so. The Austro-Hungarian force is permanently cash-strapped, saying that a lot of militaries today and in the West all of us have to deal with, and it has to make all sorts of compromises. Part of the problem is that it adapts its fighting doctrine to those compromises in an unsuitable way. So, for example, as I guess a lot of your listeners will know in the First World War artillery is really king. It's the king of the battlefield. Austro-Hungarian artillery, much of it is quite obsolete. They've got some really state-of-the-art very heavy guns,

but the field guns, the medium artillery is pretty old, and it needs renewing, but the force doesn't have the money to re-equip, and it also doesn't have the money to buy artillery in the scale that it needs to match its prospective opponents in the peacetime period. And the result of that, the way that that's dealt with is the doctrine, the fighting doctrine of the army is simply made to say, well, actually, artillery isn't that important. Infantry should, the key thing is willpower. Infantry can take the field alone. A determined infantry, even without the support of artillery, can charge in and can take it as subjectives. And of course, that proves to be misguided very, very, very quickly in 1914 in the most bloody way imaginable. The personnel of the army, you've got a professional officer corps, and like other European armies

at this time, it's a continental force. So a certain number of soldiers are trained every year, a proportion of 20-year-olds are trained every year, and they then go into a reserve, and the idea is that in an emergency, they can be called up very quickly, and the army can expand from a peacetime strength of about 450,000 men to a strength of around 2 million, very quick. quickly within about 15, 20 days on the outset of any war. And the army is composed of men with many, many different languages. This is, as I've said, is a multi-ethnic empire. The languages of the soldiers are German, Hungarian, Czech, Sloven, Slovak, Polish, Ukrainian,

Italian, Yiddish, Croat. You get the idea. I haven't named them all. There are more. Sure. And there's this question of how. do you manage an army of that diversity? And the way that the army does that is it has three languages. It has a language of command, which is German for most of the army, Hungarian for

part of it. It's got a second set of languages, which again is either German or Hungarian, then it's got regimental languages, which all the officers are meant to speak. And in any regiment, the officers are meant to speak the languages, any language that 20% or over of their men speak. And so in 1914, you find that Austro-Hungarian officers are quite often amazing linguists, but as fighters, they're perhaps often less successful. Tell us a bit about this swath of territory that is to be defended against Russia and the fortress town that's going to be at the center of this story. And I just have to say, I'll interject before you answer,

one of the things I really enjoyed about your book was, in addition to this presentation of history and sort of historical analysis, there's a running theme of the book of almost sort of of travelogue that I personally profited from. It sort of reminded me a bit of a Robert Kaplan book and the sort of local flavor that it gives you of the people and terrain of the time. But just tell us a bit about, I guess it's, is it Glicia? Is that the space we're talking about? Glissia. It's Glycia. Yeah, yeah. I just say, I mean, I wrote the book, I want to write the book because the episode around this city, this fortress city, Pshemish, is really decisive for the opening of the First World War.

It's really, really important. Without this city, without the resistance that this city fortress provided and its multi-ethnic garrison provided, we could have been looking at the Great War, not of 1914 to 18, but the Great War of 1914 to 15, with imperial Russia taking large swathes of territory and moving still further westward. So in terms of the course of the 20th century,

this is an important story. But the other reason why I wrote the book was actually for the challenge of writing. I want to see if I could write a book which read like a film. That was actually why I wanted to do it. That's what really appealed to me. And sieges have such powerful visual imagery, you know, menacing fortress walls, retreating armies straggling through city centres, desperate refugees. I mean, very, very powerful images.

But at the same time, they're pacing. They keep moving. And so that was the challenge with writing the button. And that was why I wanted to take on this subject. Galicia was one of the major battlefields, forgotten battlefield of the Eastern Front. And it's key in 1914 because your listeners might want to look at a map of what Eastern Europe looked like at this time.

But to invade Central Europe, Russia had to first take territory on north-plank, The front is around 1,000 kilometers long. And to invade Central Europe, to get to Berlin or get to Vienna, or even have a chance to, the Russians had to take territory on the flanks. They had to roll up the flanks in order to push then further into Central Europe. And one of those flanks is a place called East Prussia. That's up in the North Germany.

The other flank is this Austro-Hungarian province, Galicia. And as I've said, this province covers what today is southern, southeast in Poland and western Ukraine. So, of course, there are lots of Poles living there. There are lots of Ukrainians living there. Got to bear in mind that the population is very different nonetheless now from 100 years ago because this is also 30 years after the time that we're talking about, the epicenter of the Holocaust, and then the epicenter of ethnic cleansing directly after the First World, directly after the Second World War as well.

So there's huge population movements, there's ethnic cleansing, there's genocide in mid-century in this place. But Galizia has lots of Polish speakers, lots of Ukrainian speakers, lots of Jews, few Germans, and it's part of Austria-Hungary. For the Imperial Russians, Imperial Russians at this time, rather like today, don't acknowledge Ukrainians as separate nation, and the Imperial Russian elite see the eastern part of Galicia, including Pchenish, as what they often term primordial Russian land. They claim they have an ethnic claim to this land,

that this should be part of Russia. So there's a strong ideological objective to taking this land or rationale to taking this land as well as a military strategic one. And it's for that reason that this is such a hard-fought piece of territory in 1914, 1915. Yeah, and you know, one of the assertions you make in your book quite early on is that the story of the tragedy of this part of the world, which, as you point out, obviously, is one of the primary pieces of terrain across which the Holocaust. plays out, but you know, you can track back to the Russian Revolution, the sort of beginning of mass human suffering. But then you assert that actually the story begins in 1914, the sort of primordial forces that play out at sort of grander and grander scales as the years go on are unleashed that summer. All of the stuff that your listeners might think of

associate with the Second World War, brutal fighting, strategies of starvation, aerial bombing, epidemics, racial ideology, ethnic cleansing. This doesn't start, this doesn't come out of the blue in the, in the 40s or even with the rise of dictators in the late 20s and early 30s. Yeah, absolutely. 1914 is the ground zero of the 20th century. As soon as the First World War begins, all of this stuff is unleashed with really terrifying violence.

And I'm a chimished. Illustrates that. And that was key. Let's talk about the summer of 14 then. into 15, the core of your book. So how does fighting then coalesce around this fortress town? And it's been odd to have a fortress, isn't it? As late as 19 fortresses are, you know, things that matter a lot in 18th century warfare,

19th century warfare to an extent. You don't really associate it with the 21st century because, you know, just to keep it simple, the guns and the shells are a lot bigger and more powerful. But so what happens that summer and how does the siege begin? So what I listen to need to know is Shemesh is pretty much slap bang in the middle of this province. And the reason why it's built in the middle is there are two reasons. One is it's built on high ground, the first high ground away from the border. So it's defensible.

That's the first reason. The second reason is that it controls rail and road lengths. It controls the main east-west rail through Galicia, which any invading army is going to have to use. The main east-west highway through Galicia. and it also controls the carpet, it also controls the southern rail and road route down to the Carpathian passes. The Carpathian mountains,

which is really difficult to get through. And you first got to get through Chemish in order then to be able to get through them. So this city is really important as a transport node and to controlling those transport nodes. And in some ways, that actually gives it relevance today because you're, or maybe not relevance, about the kind of overtones of what's going on today.

sort of a continued relevance. It's true that fortress we tend to associate with the 17th century, but actually if you look at what's gone on with the Russian invasion of Ukraine today and the Russian reluctance to enter urban environments, not only is fighting against cities and fortified cities difficult, but also it's meant that the current Russian army isn't able to use those roads and rails that it is needed to push further into Ukraine. And the same applies in 1914 as well. Having those logistics of those transport links is really, really key. And that's why Pchemishv is built Slat Bang in the middle of the fortress, straddling this keep or point east, west and south. In 1914, when the war breaks out, the Austro-Hungarian army first, the Austro-Hungarian army is at a numerical disadvantage.

That's the first thing to say. By the end of August, the Russians have about 50, 51 divisions. Division is about 20,000 men at this time. The Austro-Hungarians have 37. and a half infantry divisions. So, you know, the Russians are a third stronger. And the Russians are completely surrounded the promise of Galicia. So to the north there are Russian armies, there are two Russian armies, and to the east there are another two Russian armies. And the Austro-Hungarians simply don't have the manpower to match all of them. How big is that I mean? Sorry, just to interject, you know, how many people are we talking about here? We're talking about two million. Just on the Russian side. Two million on the Russian side and about

1.5, something like that, on the Austro-Hungarian. Again, it's just that, it's just staggering numbers. And that was one of the things when again I was writing, so I should realize no one knows about this, you know? It's just crazy from the century of the 21st century how many soldiers these militaries can field. And of course, when you're fielding that many men, any war is going to have massive societal impacts as well.

And that's indeed, you mentioned the Russian Revolution. That's part of the story. The Russians have their armies array, their armies in the north and to the east. The Austro-Hungarian array, their main strength are north. They have much weaker strength in the east. The Austro-Hungarians try and launch a spoiling attack. They win tactical victory, but it doesn't really go anywhere. And then the Russian armies start closing in.

They start moving southward and westward. And in the east, where the Austro-Hungarians are weaker, this causes a crisis. And there's all sorts of complicated maneuvers, all armies. in 1914 are expecting a manoeuvre war. There's huge amounts of training that these soldiers go through on route marches to move as quickly as possible around manoeuvre. And that's what happens. I mean, despite the fact that these are mostly foot and horse-drawn armies

once they get beyond the railways, it's amazing how much is asked from these men in physical terms. All sorts of maneuvers, but ultimately the Austro-Hungarians aren't able to stop the Russians rolling in from the east-westwards. And in early September, the Russians take the province's capital, which is a place called, at that time, Levov. Now it's called Leviv. It's in Western Ukraine. There's further crisis. The casualties are horrendous. The Austro-Hungarians in the first two months of fighting lose about a third of their combat strength, around 250,000, 300,000 men.

And on the 11th of September, as the pressure gets too much, and it looks like the Russian armies from the north are going to cut behind. the Austro-Hungarians, the Austro-Hungarians order a general retreat and they roll backwards. And by this time, the army has already been to fall apart. They've lost so many men. They've lost weapons. They're exhausted because they've been in continuous action for six weeks. Logistics have broken down, so the men are hungry. They're running out of munitions in places.

There's an epidemic of cholera in the Russian army, which transfers to antiphas as well, which transfers to the Austro-Hungarians as well, so it's diseased. And in mid-September, this this army that's been in action for six weeks and lost so many soldiers and discipline is fraying and they're beaten just runs westwards through this central point of Shemish, this fortress point, desperately seeking some sort of refuge. It's kind of weird. When I wrote the book, the book came out in the UK in 2019, in the US in 2020. When I wrote the book, no one had heard of Shemish. No one could still pronounce it, but no one had heard of it at that time. Whereas now with the Russian invasion of Ukraine,

it's, Shemish has become one of the, it's become the major transit point for Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion into, into the European Union. And it was really weird on 24th, 25th, 26th of February, just watching the images beamed from, from Shemish train station, because the images were just like the descriptions of 1914.

trains crammed full with desperate people, women and children, trying to flee this, this, you know, this huge Russian army punching westwards. It was, it was really sort of weird, eerie deja vu. But that's, that's, that's what happened in early September 1914 and then, and then the Australian army came through as well. These are sort of the, the tragic places of the earth, are they not? I mean, it's, you have the famous Snyder name for, you know, Bloodlands for Eastern Europe. But there's really, I mean, there's a broader category into which it falls, which is just marches. I mean, these are the places that armies are always marching through typically to get somewhere else.

You know, Afghanistan, the English, Scottish borderlands. I mean, these are places of immense just suffering over the centuries. And it reoccurs, as you point out, in eerie ways. Sometimes they go quiet for a few centuries. Sometimes you get a lot. It happens in one century. But inevitably, this stuff seems to concentrate in the same sorts of places over. and over again. It's eerie, isn't it? I started it, but the first line of the book is,

what is it? Sometimes things we assume to be certain that we think of as solid, stable, and lasting can collapse with shocking suddenness. And yeah, I mean, it felt like that for people in 2014. And just seeing these refugees come through in February 2022, it was exactly that, the sort of unexpected. You can kind of see these things happening, but no one really believes that it can actually happen until it does. And as you say, there's certain geographical graphical areas which see it time and time and time again over the centuries. Yeah. So what is, how is the defense of Shamish organized?

You have these rather old fortifications as this is the backbone. They've been modernized a bit, updated. What is the scheme of defense here? So when we're thinking about a late 19th century fortress, which is what Shamish is, it's very important not to think about medieval castles. It's very, very different from that. Not an interesting you were, but just in case anyone was beginning to think like that. Something like that.

It's different. In part because these are huge fortifications. I mean, the ring of forts which surround the city is about 50 kilometres in circumference, saying like that. So huge, huge ring to be defended. The garrison is 130,000 men. It's certainly massive. And, of course, when you're sustaining a force which is larger than pretty much all Western European armies today,

then you need to have a city and its auxiliaries, you need to have bakeries, you need to have roads, logistical areas, you need to have hospitals, you need to have storage sites. Late 19th century fortress is essentially a civil military organism. The city is just as crucial a part of this fortress as that hard out of fortification ring is as well. There are about, from memory, I think 37, so in the book, anyway, 37 forts dotted in this sort of rough ring, it's an ellipse really, around the fortress. They're not linked up by trenches before the war breaks out because as I said, the Austro-Angarian army

is cash-strapped. So the first thing that the garrison's first experience of war is actually frantically digging to try and join this ring of forts around the city together to make an unbroken set of defences. And these forts are around sort of nine to 13 kilometres outside the city centre. So they're designed effectively in the late 19th century to protect the city centre from any bombardment. As you mentioned earlier in our conversation, technology changes though,

and particularly artillery technology in the late 19th century advances incredibly rapidly, both in the speed with which artillery pieces can fire and also in the range of these artillery pieces as well. And that makes quite a lot of this fortress obsolete, The walls aren't thick enough for the latest heavy artillery. The forts themselves are really sitting ducks. A third of the fort's guns date from the 1860s and use black powder.

So they've got half the range of what the Russian pieces have. So in mid-September, when the Austro-Hungarian army streams through this fortress, it's looking for refuge, and it's looking for this fortress to hold off the Russians long enough for it to be able to go further west and restore order and rest and re-equip and rebuild. But the fortress itself is not that promising as a last redoubt, a last hope of Austria-Hungary, precisely because those fortifications are out of date and also because the garrison is very much third-line soldiers as well. Yeah. So this siege then occurs in, I suppose, a couple broad phases, the first in the fall of 1914.

And the Russians take a rather direct approach. They try to seize the city by main force. What leads to that decision and how does it go? So the whole siege, Shemnich has the longest siege of the First World War, 181 days in total. That's how long it lasts. But you're right, it's kind of in two phases. And the first one, the first one is about three weeks.

And last from 23rd of September to the 9th of October. relatively brief, and it's in part brief because, as you say, the Russians try and storm the fortress. The guy in charge of the operation is the one Russian, Imperial Russian general, that anybody today has heard of, Brusilov, famous because he wins a big victory against the Austroongarians in 1916. And he sees taking the fortress as key to facilitating a Russian advance into central Europe. For the reasons that I described it earlier, this is a bubble, this is a transport, no point. So he puts a lot of, he puts a lot of pressure on his subordinate commanders to take this fortress quickly. And I guess the decision comes down to the fact that at this stage of the

war, you know, we kind of are inured to thinking about the first world war as a trench war, a long draw, drawn out, a tritional war. But everybody at the start is really keen to get this done as quickly as possible. Not least because as we talked about, these armies and millions of men, keeping them in the field and feeding them and supplying them and paying for them has major, major social and therefore political consequences. One reason why some theorists, experts before 1914 believe that war is impossible is because any war will be so enormous that it will inevitably lead to revolution. That's the argument.

And ultimately it does, but of course. Right and wrong at the same time. Yeah, that's right. They get the worst of all worlds, really. So yeah, so there's a big incentive to finish this quickly, and that is what the Russians attempt to do. They know that the garrison is ill-equipped. They know that they're third-line soldiers, and the Russians have well-trained professionals and relatively recent reserves called to the colors, and they believe they can take it quickly.

And so given all those factors, why do they fail? They fail for two reasons. The first is that the Imperial Russian Army, unlike the Russian Army today, the Russian army today is is bubble and artillery army, the Imperial Russian army of 1914's bubble maneuver army. They've got more artillery than anybody else as well, but it's mainly light and medium artillery. They've got very little heavy stuff. And the heavy stuff that they do have is old and it's stationed in their own fortresses, so it's not immediately available for a siege. And as a result, the guns they bring with them aren't heavy enough to crack the carapace. They can't, they can't crack the concrete of these forts. They do

some damage, but ultimately these old forts do prove more successful than anybody's expecting to keeping the garrison safe. The other reason why the Russians don't, and I should say also maybe, you know, the Russians aren't well equipped for a siege either. I mean, the units that go in, they're pretty well trained. They've got a healthier respect for firepower than I think any other army in 1914. The Russians, the Imperial Russian army tends to be underrated, but they've fought it. against Japan a decade before. They've seen the casualties that modern bolt-action rifles, machine guns, artillery can do.

They've introduced a new infantry doctrine in 1912, trying to absorb the lessons of that recent defeat. And the doctrine that they have is actually quite modern in a lot of ways. It's not about advancing in lines, like some of the armies. This is about fire and movement, infantry protecting each other, artillery coming in and providing suppressing fire. All of this is in the doctrine of the Russians of 1914. But as I said, they don't have the heavy guns.

And also they don't have the other siege equipment. I mean, each regiment that attacks the fortress when they go in in earlier October has 32 hand grenades. That's it. They've got eight bridges for getting over the fort ditches. They've got, I think, 32 cables, and scaling cables and scaling ladders. well. I mean, it gets quite a medieval, some of the equipment that they've got. So they're

under-equipped for the actual task that they're asked to do. But it's also, of course, down to the defence. And no one is expecting the defence to be that great either. Historians always kind of right about themselves. That's something that most historians don't ever admit, but they kind of always do. There's always a bit of me history in it. The other reason that attracted me to this story is that with the First World War, you know, the big war novels are all done by people who were in their early 20s during the war. You know, if we think about goodbye to all that by Robert Graves or all quite on the Western Front, Eric Maria and Mark, this is that generation. And the generation that defended Peshemish were in their 40s. They're in their late 30s and their

40s. They were at the very end of the conscription system. You could be, you had an obligation to serve in the Austro-Hungarian army up to the age of 42. And these men, the vast majority of the men in Pshamish who defend it are age between 37 and 42 years old. And I... That's a very important age range that a lot of virtue in our society is concentrated. I just want to I like to think that too. I think men in their 40s are underappreciative. And yeah, and I was just hitting my 40s around the time that this book came out,

and I wanted to write about these guys. And their training is decades in the past, and, of course, is obsolete in terms of how war has changed in the 20 years since they had that training. Their units are very badly equipped. They're lacking machine guns. They're lacking transport. Things like Field Kitchen. and communications, you know, they don't have the standard field, army field communications or logistical support that you would accept, or even medical support that you would expect.

And yet, nonetheless, these men stand firm. They're terrified. Let's not underestimate that they're terrified. There are all sorts of nervous breakdowns. But nonetheless, they do face off these much younger troops of the Russian army. And, yeah, I felt that was worth writing about it. It's part of the tapestry that makes. this story exciting. And whether it's this first sort of sharper siege or the second longer sort of strangulation

that occurs, what does it like to be besieged within this fortress, whether for the soldiers or for the, I guess, on the front end, the civilians? It depends very much what type of soldier you are. That would be the first thing, I would say. The officer's experience is very different from the experience of the other ranks. broadly though there's there's if you like an arc of emotions which starts off with fear and trepidation as the Russians approach followed by this this surge of impairment as they're seen off as this this first assault fails and the Russians are forced to withdraw some way away from the fortress and defiance I mean that that first victory makes given how difficult it is pronounced it's probably not fair to say that Schemich becomes a household name, a name on everybody's lips in the Austro-Hungarian, it becomes really famous.

The Austro-Hungarian army, there's massive, there's lots of examples of heroism in 1914, but very few examples of actual concrete victory. And for the population, for the morale of the empire, that's desperately needed. And in October 1914, after defeat, after defeat, after defeat, Shemish provides that. So you get this sense of defiance in the fortress, the first, when the, when the Russians return and the sieges and the sieges renewed. But over time, that becomes uncertainty, switching over into despair as the food begins to run out. And one of the arguments that I make

in the book is that 20th century warfare is, especially in the first half of the 20th century, is what history is called total war. It's characterized by this, this, this, this, well, total war has two characteristics. The first is the mobilisation of all human and material resources at the disposal of any state. That's one thing that defines total war. The second characteristic is there's this blurring between combatants and non-combatants. Civilians come into the firing line, and civilians are important for sustaining these armies. And in some ways, it's easy to think of the first and second world wars as massive wars of siege on continent-wide scales. And so it's not so surprising that phenomena that we see in the Second World War and that we already see in the

First World War across Central Europe in 1916 with mass casualties, as I said, epidemics, strategies of starvation, civilians being targeted. All of this starts with, all of this is preceded and begins, the roots of this begin around Shemish, around the First World War's first major and longest siege. Because in a besieged city, the same. The siege city, the civilians and the soldiers are dependent upon each other. All resources within the city are mobilised in order to try and sustain the resistance. There's all sorts of clever stuff that they do in order to keep people clothed in order to keep people warm. But it's very much Eastern Europe. So it doesn't just get cold, yeah, from November when the siege is resumed. It gets really, really, really cold.

And the question is, how do you, how do you clothe these guys who are equipped for the summer, August, August campaign. How do you feed people? Where are you going to get that? There's a lot of going out in no man's land between the lines late at night and digging up frozen sugar beet just in order to try and bring some sustenance into the population, into the city and into the garrison. Rumour is a big thing as well. There's not just a shortage of food, there's a shortage of news. Very difficult to know what you can trust, who you can trust. Civilians get very good at reading between the lines of official newspapers. And the suffering just gets completely overwhelming.

I mean, that was actually quite difficult to write about it because it's just so tragic. And just when you read these sources, the hopelessness just becomes totally overwhelming. It becomes quite literally claustrophobic. This city, this is an encircled city. And it kind of almost shrinks in on itself as the winter gets worse, the food runs out.

And the hope ends. That's what it's like. And how does it end? It ends in tragedy. And it ends through total exhaustion. That's how it ends. Just like the First World War ends through total exhaustion. The food runs out.

There are more and more drastic attempts to keep the garrison going. The garrison has 130,000 men, as I've said. But what I didn't say, but crucial part of the garrison is it also has 20,000 horses. Those horses are needed for transport. They're needed for moving guns around, which is really important if you don't want to get counter-battery fire. They're really important for bringing munitions and other stuff up from depots in the centre of the city up to the fighting front. They're important for messaging. Horses, you know, the early 20th century are central European societies are still horse-driven societies.

But they become really, really important in that second half of the siege because, they become the garrison's main food supply. The garrison ends up eating its own horses. And that's that something that struck me when I was writing the book, that, you know, it was really, really dangerous being a human being in Chemish. What's sometimes ignored is that it was even more dangerous being a horse. You know, about 10% of the garrison get killed in the siege, whereas the horse casualty rates because they end up being eaten 100%.

And everything, you know, horse becomes the garrison's major staple. It's horse paté is the main. And what they eat, the sausages are made of horse gristle. Even at the end of the siege, horse bone is ground up and used to adulterate the flour just to make it stretch that extra bit longer. And they run out of food. The garrison runs out of food. That is not just, that's why the siege ends.

But it doesn't end with a whimper. It ends with a bang because this is the late 19th century. This is the Habsburg Empire. This is a society in which honor is important, which. Showing you've done your utmost is important. So two days before the city finally capitulates, the garrison is also sent out on one last vain breakout attempt to break the Russian lines.

They know that it's not going to go. They know that these completely exhausted men, about a quarter of the garrison, are on their way to the morgue, are hospitalized because of severe nutritional deficit, because of starvation. They know that this garrison isn't really, really going to break out, but they feel that, you know, they need to do something to maintain

honor to create a heroic legend about this city. And they send these starving men out. And weirdly, they send them eastwards. It's a breakout attempt towards Kiev and Moscow, not towards Vienna and where they really need to get to. And it's a disaster. 10,000 casualties, something like that anyway, are lost in a matter of hours. And then the forts and the munitions depots, and the bridges which span the city in the last hours of resistance before the final surrender are all blown up. So the end of the siege

consists of this huge, but totally bane breakout attempt eastwards, which fails. And then at the last night, the guns of the fortress open up and they fire all their munitions off from 10 in the night through till about 5.30 in the morning. There's just continual firing along the front.

And then at six o'clock, there's this, this shard of light from the north. And that's Fort 12, I think, going up. It's been mined with explosives. And these four stations are blown up. And one by one, the forts are blown. Contemporaries who were there talk about it being like volcanoes erupting all around the city, a ring of volcanoes. And then the munitions depots are also sent up. And the bridges, there's a river, the river sand, which goes right through the middle of this fortress.

city and they two are blown up, smashing windows and bringing plaster down. I call that chapter Armageddon because it is like the end of the world for the people who were there. And then there's a silence and white flags are raised and the Russians march in. And that's that's how the fortress literally ends. So let's let's discuss both the military and the and the human consequences of this. You know, what follows then? Rapid exploitation, the Russians march on Vienna. And if not, why not? So the Russians, the Russians do try and march further. They don't get to Vienna.

They get as far as Krakow, the city now in the west of Poland. But of course, there's a huge amount of disruption to transport links, and that's difficult to rebuild. The Russians have also lost a lot of men, not simply seizing the city so much, but in order to try and relieve the city, the Austro-Hungarians through January to March have launched these huge offensives across the,

Carpathian Mountains, which are now between Slovakia and Poland. And these are offensives in midair in minus 22 degrees. The casualties are immense. They lose around 800,000 men. The Russians lose probably around 600,000. It's just the most awful fighting that I personally can possibly imagine. You know, up on mountains, depth of winter, there's no way they're going to get across. But these two imperial armies struggle and lose huge numbers of men in.

in doing so. And the Russians ultimately, in part down to German resistance as well, aren't able to push on, but not push through past Galizia into central Europe. So they stole. And in May 1915, there's a German-led attack called the Gourlitz-a-Tan of Offensive, where the German and the Austrongarian armies then launch this big attack and they advance eastwards and they liberate a lot of the territory that the Russians have taken. So Shemishly is taken by the Russians on 22nd in March, 1915. It's liberated in early June 1915. So the occupation isn't that long, but what's striking about it is just how much damage the Russians do and just how ambitious they are in that short space of time. The Russian army's approach is very racially and ethnically

driven, the Russian army, the Russian elites. See, this is Russian land. The Tsar himself says there is no Galicia. There is just a great Russia to the Carpathians. And he means that not just in terms of Russia to have political control, but actually he means it in ethnic or racial terms as well, that this land, to these Carpathian mountains, so spanning all of Ukraine should be Russian. There's really frightening continuities between this and what we're seeing today with Ukraine. And there is, there are programs of, if you like, ethnic reorganization, ethnic cleansing already launched at that time. Ukrainian national elites are imprisoned and arrested and deported. Ukrainian schools are closed down. The Russians plan to permit only Russian schooling for Ukrainian-speaking

children. There are attacks on the Greek Catholic Church, which is seen as a marker of Ukrainian national identity. The Russians want all Ukrainian speakers to be Russian orthodox. So there's a really huge attacks on Ukrainian national identity by the Russian army. Elites are imprisoned and replaced by pro-Russian Ukrainian speakers or by Russians. I mean, as I said, there's just, and if we look at what's going on in Mariopola today, for example, this is a script, the Russian occupation forces in Mariopola are following a script that is very much that of 1914. The worst victims, though, in this area of Jews, the Russian army is extraordinarily anti-Semitic. There's all sorts of persecutions, all sorts of violence during the invasion.

And in May 1915, during the occupation, the entire Jewish population of Shemish city and the surrounding, some 17,000 people are deported. They're cleansed. They're moved out physically eastwards. And one of the stories of this book was, as you mentioned before, is that, plans to reorganize this area, to racial utopias of this should be a German land, or this should be some other type of land, in this case a Russian land. This is not a product of the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin. This starts in 1914, and we see imperial Russia already attempting somewhat candidly in an only very short space of time, but nonetheless, attempting with severe violence to ethnically cleanse this land. And of course, this is the star of bigger cleansings and bigger genocise that we then see through the first half of the 20th century.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you'll be more familiar, of course, with the issues as a professional historian than I am. But I've always sort of been interested in this idea of the First World War, not as fundamentally different from the Second World War, but as a kind of warm-up rehearsal overture, down to the war aims of the belligerence. You know, this is this sort of Fritz Fischer, you know, pointing out that, you know, actually, the German empire of the First World War, while not the Nazis, in important respects, not the Nazis, nevertheless, had a vision for Central Europe that's not totally dissimilar from the totalitarian Nazi vision that comes a couple decades later. So in Ring of Steel, my other book, my earlier book, I argued that there was, there are some links

and some roots, but there's quite a lot of difference between what the Germans of the First War and the and the Germans, the First World War and what the Germans' Second World War do. And in some ways, actually, the bigger precursor of the Nazis is actually the Imperial Russian Army. They have that, it's not the same, but they have a racial ideology, they have an ethnic, they have a plan for ethnic cleansing. And what Tim Snyder calls the Bloodlands, this is the Russian's main war objective, or certainly one of the Russians' main war objectives. And it's a main, objective to, yeah, to change this land and to take it and to, as the Tsar said, make it a great Russia to the Carpathians. And we kind of see that it's not just the Second World War, as I've

kind of alluded to in our conversation, we see that still today. You know, Putin's Russia is, is laying on a, on a, not a communist playbook. It's to understand Putin's Russia, don't look to the Soviet Union, go back further. It's imperial Russia that we want to look to. That's where, that's where where this begins. Just to develop that point and take it sort of into strategic questions, is there anything about Russian military art that you have learned in your research here into the First World War that seems applicable or important today or is just so much change that there's just not much to learn?

So weirdly, I actually did a video on this for the Royal United Services Institute last week. And if anyone wants to look, it's on there where I talk about precedents and parallels between Ukraine today and Eastern Ukraine today, where the Dombas fighting is going on, and Western Ukraine in 1914. And yeah, in military terms, there are parallels. One of them is actually huge corruption. Huge corruption. The Russian army is, well, maybe I should roll back a bit.

First point is the Russian army is expected to deal with Ukrainians to defeat the Ukraine trains very, very quickly before February 2022. Just as in 1914, the Russian army is massively overrated, is expected to deal with the Austro-Hungarians pretty quickly. And that's in part because of its size, you know, it's just more massive than anything else. It's got more guns than anyone else. It's got an updated doctrine. It's got more recent experience of war than the Austro-Hungarians. And yet, although it has some successes in 1940, 1915, in pushing the Austro-Hungarians there. Ultimately, it fails. It can't maintain that. It can't defeat the Austro-Hungarians. So I was really interested in, why do we keep overestimating the Russian

army? And part of it is that it looks impressive, but corruption, just as it undermined the army of 2022, so it undermined the army of 1914, just like Putin's army before this war. There was a huge decade-long investment, revamp of structure, revamp of doctrine. So you get that as well between 1905 and 1914. Huge investment. But so much of that is filtered off by corrupt officials. In 1915, the Russian War Minister, who's been presided, who's Russian War Minister of five years for the Warfraiser, ends up being accused and tried of treason and corruption, because the Russian army's been eaten out by this. That would be one big parallel. There are other structural parallels as well. One of the things that experts today are talking about a lot is

failure of a weakness of lower command levels of the modern Russian army, particularly at the NCO base. And you get that in 1914 as well. The Germans have 12 professional NCOs per peacetime company. The French have six. The Austro-Hungarians have three. The Russians in 1914 only have two. They don't seem to have that lower, that constant, that weakness at the lower command levels, the field command is a constant right through the last hundred years. And I think to understand that, we need to think about the economic and social structure of Russia and, you know, the Russian people and the Russian economy and the levels of education in order to understand that. So, yeah, there are really interesting parallels between then and now. And if you want to know more, then,

yeah, it's on the Royal United Services Institute, it's on YouTube, take a look at Ukraine and the Eastern Front, 1914, precedence and parallels. I want to finish with, you. You, you want to finish with, you You've already sort of touched on the theme, but just coming back to the human consequences of the siege and its conclusion, you have this sort of series of vignettes throughout the book of the defenders of the fortress. And, you know, as you point out, these are sort of older men, middle-aged men. And there's this, I mean, I don't want to lay it on too thick. But I thought of, as I was reading your account of their lives before the war, I mean,

I couldn't help but think about Philip Larkin's 1914 because there's sort of a similar pathos to what you were describing. These are men who, you know, they've placed their bets in life. They have families. They're like us. They have families. They have careers. And they are living in a world which seems relatively sure, you know, relatively prosperous,

relatively stable. And then in a flash, it's all gone. And then some of the stories that you tell about what follows for these men, you know, their travels across these compelled compulsory travels across your Asia, the strange ends at which they arrive. Maybe I don't know if you want to pick a. story or two, but just what, what happens to the defeated defenders of the fortress? Yeah. So that, that, I mean, those personal stories again, yeah, they, they, they, they,

they drew me to the subject. And, and, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's what makes this story, I think, so frightening. It's a different story of the First World War about, you know, the, the, the, the, the, standard story of lost youth and the lost generation. As you say, these are, this is a story of older men who've made their, who've made their bets and then see. everything crumble before them. I can give you your listeners an example or two, maybe just the one, guy called Yan Vitt, who was a ethnically a Czech,

he was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, he served through the siege. He came from quite close to Prague. So already to get from Prague in today's Czech Republic to Demychle in the south-eastern corner of today's Poland is hundreds of kilometers, in the book, I say how many hundreds it is. I try and try and try and notch it out.

And he serves through this siege. He starves with his soldiers. He takes part in that last, frankly, irresponsible and disastrous attack outwards to the east. He leaves an amazing diary, which is how I know them. He had three children. He was a middle class. He was an engineer, socialized in bridge building before the war. And when he's taken prisoner, he's then moved.

to today's Kazakhstan, a lot of the prisoners end up deep, deep, deep within Imperial Russia in Kazakhstan and Turkestan, so thousands and thousands of kilometers away, where he stays through 19, through into 1917 and 1918. Czech prisoners had the option in this, after the Russian revolution of joining a formation called the Czech Legion, which ends up fighting the Bolsheviks and briefly controlling the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok. It's another amazing story there, and he's part of this story. And some Czechs joined it because they want to see an independent Czechoslovakia. Others joined it simply because it seemed to be the safest way and the quickest way

to get home in a Russia which was in revolutionary chaos. And he and his comrades managed to get to Vladivostok. So if you think, you know, starts off in Central Europe near Pshamish, through to what today is Eastern Poland, traveling then into the depths of the Russian Empire, through the Russian Empire to modern Kazakhstan, and then onwards right to Vladivostok on the eastern coast of Russia. He's able at the end of, I think, 1918 to, or 1990, maybe 1920,

I think 1990, to get a ship to Canada. That lands in Canada, maybe Vancouver, so like that, I forget. But I do know that he then has to cross Canada. I think ends up in the US, gets another ship, probably New York, And that ship then takes him across the Atlantic. So it's gone through the Pacific, to the Atlantic, down through into the Mediterranean, and up to Trieste, which had been a port in the Habsburg Empire. By the point he gets there in 1921, it's part of Italy.

The empire that he left has gone. It's disappeared. It's no longer there. And he finally makes it home in early 2021 to find that his wife has died in 1916 from Typhus, which ravaged central Europe, which was blockaded and suffered huge future, which is later in the war. His wife has died of typhus in those years. And he's back with his three children who he hasn't seen for six years. I mean, it's difficult to imagine how you build those relationships.

And that's his story. And it kind of encapsulates the way in which war, this war doesn't overturn states and nations. on a macro level, but it completely destroys and change that's put on different routes, individual lives as well. Other people that I look at, some of them end up being persecuted by the Nazis, others end up joining the Nazi party from Austria, a whole range of different destinies.

But that safety that they had in 1914, regardless of what routes they take, is gone. It's over. The world after this point is far, far darker. Two quick responses to that. The first is that that that story is on balance, not nearly as bad as it can get for the defenders to begin, of course, with death itself, but even with sort of personal suffering, you know, it's almost a kind of lucky story. And the second response is to make explicit, what I think is implicit in what you've just laid out is we would probably all do well to reflect on the fact that if you had asked this engineer who works for a firm that builds bridges in the spring of 1914, 14, what the rest of his life was going to, what the rest of his life was going to look like.

He would, of course, have anticipated none of that. Yeah, it feels very relevant now, doesn't it? Alexander Watson, author of The Fortress, the Siege of Bichamel, and the making of Europe's bloodlands. It's been an absolutely fascinating conversation. It's good to talk to you as well after it's pushing up on 15, 20 years, something like that. It's not far too long, and let's not let it be as long again this next time. That would be great. That'd be wonderful. That would be.

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