Battles East: A History of the Eastern Front of the First World War

Confident-Looking German Troops, Eastern Front 1915

Battles East: A History of the Eastern Front of the First World War

By G. Irving  Root

Publishamerica, 2007

This is a survey history of the vast Eastern Front, which extended for nearly 1,200 miles from the Baltic to the Black Sea across the Polish plains through the Pripet Marshes, the oil fields of Silesia, the Carpathian Mountains and the Iron Gates of the Danube and the Romanian Dobrudja. Nearly all the combatants on both sides were represented here: Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. Even the British and French had limited land and naval forces engaged by the end of the war.

Huge armies grappled in the east. The Germans alone had as many as two million men engaged at the height of the fighting, suffering over a million casualties over four years.  Austria-Hungary had over 44 divisions, half her army, deployed against Russia, which, in turn, deployed nearly half of her 294 divisions against the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. Casualty figures for Russia are unreliable but go as high as ten million military and civilian dead. Civilian losses, particularly among the hundreds of thousands of refugees (many of them Poles, Lithuanians, or Ukrainians) displaced in the deep Russian retreat of 1915, are impossible to determine. 

The author starts his survey with a review of the strategic position of the protagonists in 1914, moving through the overwhelming German 1914 victories at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, the 1915 battles in Galicia and the Carpathians, the Brusilov Offensive and the defeat of Romania in 1916, the disintegration of the Czarist army and government in 1917, to the post-1918 battles between the Red Army and the newly independent Polish state, the Romanian invasion of Hungary and the actions of German Frei Korps, in the Silesian Plebiscite War of 1921. Also covered in useful detail are command rivalries within the Imperial German and Russian Armies and between the German and Austro-Hungarian commands, as well as the various treaties (Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest) ending the conflict. 

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In all, this is a valuable and readable addition to the slim library of WWI Eastern Front histories and well worth reading. Weaknesses include the maps (which though plentiful and detailed are monochromatic and hard to decipher) and exclusive reliance on secondary sources. 

Source: Relevance, November 2008