At dawn on 6 August 1915 German troops besieging the Russian fortress of Osowiec, on the Biebrza marshes in what is now north-eastern Poland, released clouds of chlorine gas over its forward positions and sent in their infantry. The defenders had almost no protection and lost heavily, but survivors of the 226th Zemlyansky Infantry Regiment and reserves from the fortress counterattacked with the bayonet and drove the Germans back. The episode is remembered as the attack of the dead men. Osowiec was never taken by storm; the Russians abandoned it later that month during their great retreat.
A fortress in the marshes
Osowiec was built by the Russian Empire from the 1880s on marshy ground beside the Biebrza, to hold one of the few crossings between East Prussia and the Russian interior. Marek Gajewski, a curator at the Army Museum in Białystok, told the Polish Press Agency that the fortress held out from the first days of August 1914 until August 1915 and withstood a heavy artillery bombardment as well as the gas attack. Sylvester Tkachenko's study of the sieges of Przemyśl and Osowiec, written at Karazin University in Kharkiv, counts the attack of August 1915 as the third German assault on the fortress, as does The Moscow Times.1
The gas cloud
The attack began early on 6 August. Gajewski put the scale at 3,000 cylinders of chlorine; Tkachenko, drawing on Russian studies, writes that the Germans had waited thirteen days for a favorable wind, that the gas began to flow at 4 a.m. and that the cloud of chlorine and bromine covered a front of up to 10 km. The defenders of the forward Sosnya position had no gas masks, only rags soaked in liquid, and Tkachenko reports that about half the men in the worst-hit companies died almost at once. Behind the gas came the infantry of the German 11th Landwehr Division.2
The attackers suffered too. According to Tkachenko, the gas lingered in the low, marshy ground and in the captured trenches, slowing the German advance, while the fortress artillery and machine guns, less affected, kept firing.3
The attack of the dead men
As the German infantry pushed along the railway toward the fortress, men of the 8th, 13th and 14th companies of the 226th Zemlyansky Regiment went over to the attack with the bayonet. Tkachenko names the commander of the 13th company as Sub-lieutenant Vladimir Kotlinsky, with little more than 60 men left, and notes that much of the force came from reserves that had suffered less from the gas. The Moscow Times describes the Germans, who believed no one could have survived, being driven out by the badly injured defenders. By late morning, Tkachenko writes, the Germans had been pushed back off the positions they had taken.4
The losses are uncertain. Gajewski said more than 1,500 Russian soldiers were killed by the gas; Tkachenko cites a Russian General Staff study of 1917 for about 3,000 Russian dead and 5,000 German losses in the whole assault. Neither figure can be confirmed from German records here, and the dramatic details of the story owe much to later retelling.5
Abandoned, not taken
There was no further German assault. But the Russian front was falling back across Poland, and Osowiec was evacuated and blown up in the second half of August; Gajewski dates the evacuation to 22 August 1915, and the Germans entered only afterward. Today part of the old fortress is still used by the Polish army.6
Also on this day
- 1870: Battle of Spicheren. On the Spicheren heights south of Saarbrücken, the Prussian First Army attacked the entrenched French II Corps under Frossard in the Franco-Prussian War.
