Welcome to today's Deep Dive. I am so glad you
are here with us. We have a really fascinating
mission today. We are taking a hefty stack of
primary source notes, historical accounts, and
deep dive analyses to try and distill a massive
yet honestly entirely overlooked historical event.
It really is. We're looking at a battle that
historians have dubbed Austria -Hungary's Stalingrad.
It is a phenomenal topic to dig into. It is one
of those moments in history where the sheer scale
of the event almost defies comprehension. When
we talk about the Eastern Front of the First
World War, the narrative usually gets swallowed
up by the Western Front's trench warfare, you
know? Right, exactly. But the scale of what happened
here was just unprecedented. It was. And our
hook for you today is the Siege of Presigniel.
For those studying the Eastern Front, you already
know this fortress town on the River San was
the linchpin of the region. This was the longest
siege in Europe during the entirety of the First
World War. The longest one. Yeah. And in fact,
it was the second largest siege in the entire
global conflict, sitting only behind the siege
of Medina. So set the scene for us. Where exactly
are we in the strategic timeline of 1914? Let's
wind the clock back to August of 1914. The guns
of August have just fired. The war has kicked
off and the Russian armies are advancing. They
launched these massive offenses against both
Germany, East Prussia and Galicia. OK. Now the
Russian advance into Germany gets famously halted
at Tannenberg, but their Galician campaign. The
Russian general Nikolai Ivanov completely overwhelms
the Austro -Hungarian forces. This forces the
entire Habsburg front to collapse and fall back,
over 160 kilometers, retreating all the way back
to the Carpathian Mountains. So the entire line
just buckles. Exactly, the whole thing. But there
was one massive fortified exception left behind.
By September 28th, 1914, the fortress at Kvalkenal
is the solitary Austro -Hungarian post still
holding out. It is completely surrounded, stranded
deep behind Russian lines. Which brings us to
the strategic... stakes for you the listener.
Why does this specific fortress matter so much
to both empires? Because Presimil was geographically
the shield protecting the vital German industrial
region of Silesia. The industry. Right. If the
Russians bypass or capture Presimil, they are
in a prime position to pour through the gap and
directly threaten the industrial heart of the
German war machine. That made holding this fortress
an absolute top priority for the Austro -Hungarians,
and by extension, their German allies. OK, let's
unpack this. Because the Russians couldn't just
bypass it and they couldn't just walk in. And
when looking through our sources on the engineering
here, the numbers are almost surreal. They really
are. The Austro -Hungarians had spent decades
turning the city into a modern military behemoth.
We are looking at 50 kilometers of reinforced
trenches dug into the earth, fortified by heavy
artillery and concrete readouts. In the barbed
wire, our notes mention 1 ,000 kilometers of
barbed wire? Yes. 1 ,000 kilometers, they used
that wire to construct seven distinct massive
lines of defense, completely circling the perimeter
of the town. The logistics of just manning that
perimeter required a staggering amount of manpower.
Just to stand on the line. Exactly. Inside this
ring, you had a military garrison of 127 ,000
troops alongside 18 ,000 civilians. And sitting
right outside those seven defense lines, six
entire Russian divisions waiting for the order
to move. But the garrison itself wasn't just
a unified block of soldiers, was it? The internal
makeup of the fortress seems like a complete
logistical nightmare. What's fascinating here
is how the fortress of Presimio perfectly reflected
the incredibly fractured nature of the Austro
-Hungarian Empire itself. It was an absolute
tower of Babel. A tower of Babel. Because the
Habsburg Empire was so vast and multiethnic,
the daily military orders in the fortress had
to be issued in 15 different languages just to
be understood by the rank and file. 15 languages
just to issue basic daily orders. That level
of friction in the chain of command must have
been paralyzing. paralyzing and highly combustible.
You had Austrians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews and
Ruthenians all crammed together. Under normal
peacetime conditions, the empire struggled to
manage these ethnic tensions. Now imagine putting
all of those different language groups carrying
all their historical grievances into a besieged
cage while artillery shells rained down on them.
Which brings us to September 24th, 1914 and the
start of the first siege. The Russian Third Army
has the city surrounded. But their commander,
General Radko Dimitriev, decides he doesn't want
to wait around for a protracted siege. Dimitriev
makes a remarkably arrogant and ultimately fatal
tactical decision. Despite lacking sufficient
heavy siege artillery, he orders a brief largely
ineffective bombardment, and then sends his infantry
in for a full -scale brute -force frontal assault.
He attacks the fortress commander, Hermann Kuzminik
von Brüngestätten, head -on. But wait, if he
doesn't have the heavy artillery to cut the wire
or smash the concrete readouts, he's just sending
infantry into a lot thousand kilometers of unbroken
barbed wire. That seems incredibly reckless,
even by the standards of 1914. It was reckless,
but it was symptomatic of early World War I military
doctrine. Many commanders were still trying to
fight a 19th century war of movement and Elon
against 20th century industrialized defenses.
Dmitriyev throws his men at those seven lines
of defense for three consecutive days. Just wave
after wave. The result is absolute slaughter.
The Russians accomplish absolutely nothing strategically,
but the cost is staggering. 40 ,000 Russian casualties
in just those three days. 40 ,000 casualties
just to hit a brick wall. But while Dimitri is
bleeding his army dry against the wire, the Austro
-Hungarians aren't just sitting idle in the mountains,
are they? No, the Austro -Hungarian High Command
recognizes the urgency. A relief force led by
Svetozar Borovich von Bojna launches a counteroffensive
and advances toward the fortress. With this relief
force bearing down on their rear, the Russians
are forced to call off the assaults by early
October. They actually retreat. They do. Between
October 9th and 12th, Borovich's forces actually
break through the Russian lines and enter the
besieged fortress. I have to imagine that was
a massive morale boost for the garrison. They
probably thought the worst was behind them. The
Russian army had been repelled and the siege
was totally over. Time to go home. It was celebrated
as a monumental triumph. But the reality was
that the strategic situation across the broader
eastern front was deteriorating rapidly for the
central powers. The relief was incredibly short
lived. By the end of October, Paul von Hindenburg's
German forces suffer reversals at the Battle
of the Vistula River, forcing the Austro -Hungarian
armies to retreat westward again to maintain
the line. Leaving Prisial exposed all over again.
Exactly. On November 4th, the military command
orders civilians to leave Prisial if they can,
recognizing what is about to happen. And just
a few days later on November 10th, the Russian
army returns. The trap snaps shut once more and
the second siege begins. But Dimitri's failure
totally shifts the Russian playbook, doesn't
it? Here's where it gets really interesting because
the Russians bring in a new commander for the
11th Army General Andrei Solovanov, and he has
a completely different philosophy on how to take
this city. Solovanov looks at the 40 ,000 Russian
bodies left on the wire from the first siege
and immediately bans any further frontal assaults.
His strategy is chillingly modern and pragmatic.
He's going to starve the garrison into submission.
Just wait them out. He establishes a tight blockade,
sits his army out of range of the fortress guns
and waits. By mid -December, as winter sets in,
he brings up his heavy artillery and starts pounding
the fortress, continuously letting hunger and
high explosives do the work that his infantry
couldn't. It's a terrifying waiting game. But
while Solovanov is starving the city, the real
horror of this campaign wasn't just happening
inside the fortress walls. The sources point
to an absolute catastrophe happening in the mountains
to the south. You are referring to the Carpathian
Winter War. While the garrisons slowly starved,
the Austro -Hungarian Chief of Staff Conrad von
Herzendorf became obsessed with relieving Prismule.
During the brutal winter of 1914 to 1915, he
ordered his armies to fight their way through
the frozen passes of the Carpathian Mountains.
But launching a mountain offensive in the dead
of winter, the logistical requirements for that
must have been impossible for the Austro -Hungarian
military at that stage. It was a logistical nightmare
that bordered on criminal negligence. We are
talking about poorly supplied, outgunned imperial
forces, many in summer uniforms, ordered to launch
offensive after offensive into freezing mountain
passes covered in meters of snow. Train lines
froze, supply lines broke down entirely, and
men were freezing to death in their sleep. That
is just bleak. The official casualties reported
for these relief efforts between January and
April 1915 were a mind -boggling 800 ,000 men.
800 ,000 casualties. And most of those weren't
even from Russian bullets, were they? No. The
vast majority of those losses were from frostbite
avalanches, exposure and disease. Nature was
a far deadlier enemy than the Russian army in
those mountains. Entire regiments were swallowed
by the snow. And despite that unimaginable sacrifice,
the Habsburg forces completely failed to break
through to the garrison. To really grasp the
gravity of this deep dive, I think we have to
zoom back into the fortress itself. While 800
,000 men are freezing in the mountains, what
is the day -to -day reality for the 145 ,000
people trapped inside the wire? The primary sources
are invaluable here. The surviving diaries and
new books give us an unvarnished look at a society
collapsing under pressure. One of the most striking
accounts comes from the diary of Joseph Tolman,
an Austrian who was conscripted as a junior military
doctor. Tolman's diary is incredibly dark. We
often have this romanticized noble view of the
imperial officer class in early World War I,
but Tolman's account completely shatters that.
It does. Tolman documented the horrific behavior
of the Garrison officers as the situation deteriorated.
He wrote extensively about how the military hospitals
were recruiting local teenage girls to work as
nurses. The incentive was 120 crowns a month
and crucially free daily meals. In a starving
city, that was an offer families couldn't refuse.
But Tolman noted they weren't primarily being
used as nurses at all. He documented that they
were being exploited to satisfy the officers
and even the senior medical staff. Correct. Toman's
diary is filled with disgust. He noted how these
senior officers were coming into his clinics
almost daily with horrific venereal diseases
like syphilis, gonorrhea, soft chonker. He wrote
with visceral anger about how these young girls
were being manipulated by these pestilent pigs
in their spotless uniforms. It paints a picture
of intense moral decay at the top of the command
structure while the rank -and -file were eating
their horses to survive. And that moral decay
wasn't just limited to the military command.
The societal cracks among the civilians were
widening rapidly too. We see this clearly in
the diary of Helena Jablonska, a wealthy Polish
civilian living in the town. Shabloska's diary
is a direct window into the extreme class and
ethnic resentments of the era. As food became
scarce and inflation skyrocketed, she wrote with
intense bitterness. Now, as we look at her primary
source text, we must be objective and note that
her entries are heavily steeped in the anti -Semitism
of the time, documenting how the Jewish population
became the primary scapegoat for the starvation.
She writes about Jewish women in the basements,
supposedly ripping people off, and notes that
as the siege neared its end in March 19... in
1915, Jewish shop owners were desperately hurrying
to take their signs down so the invading army
couldn't tell who owned what. Exactly. It shows
how starvation accelerates existing societal
fractures. The civilian population was turning
on itself. And Jablonska's observation about
the shop signs was incredibly prescient because
it sets the stage for a horrific climax. When
the Imperial Russian Army finally does capture
the city, the Tsarist soldiers, specifically
the Cossack units, unleash a violent pogrom against
the Jewish population. are brutal. Just plain
brutal. Jablonska recorded that the Cossacks
intentionally waited until the Jewish population
set off to the synagogue for their prayers. Once
they were gathered, the soldiers attacked them
with whips in the streets. She described the
lamenting and despair, noting that people tried
to hide in cellars, but she knew the soldiers
would hunt them down there too. It's a stark
reminder that in these grand military sieges,
the civilian populations, particularly marginalized
communities, absorb the most catastrophic consequences.
It is incredibly heavy. But looking through the
source material, there is a logistical detail
that stands out as a bizarre contrast to all
this suffering on the ground. When you have an
entire city cut off from the world for months,
how did they communicate with the high command
in Vienna? The answer involves some of the earliest,
most ingenious methods of military aviation.
They used airmail. Think about the primitive
state of aviation in 1914 and 1915. You have
these flimsy biplanes flying out of a besieged,
starving city right over the Russian artillery
lines. Our sources note there were 27 separate
airmail flights out of Preziul during the sieges.
It was incredibly dangerous work. And it wasn't
always successful. The records detail one specific
flight that suffered engine trouble and was forced
to land behind Russian lines. The Russians captured
the pilots, confiscated the bags of mail, and
incredibly, instead of just destroying it, they
shipped the entire haul all the way to St. Petersburg,
just so it could be officially processed by Tsarist
postal sensors before onward transmission. The
sheer bureaucracy of sending starving soldiers'
mail to St. Petersburg to be censored is mind
-boggling. And when the planes couldn't fly,
they resorted to even older methods. Manned paper
balloons, unmanned balloons carrying bundles
of letters and even pigeon mail. It creates this
surreal, almost cinematic image of paper balloons
floating up from this freezing, bombarded hellscape,
hoping the wind carries them over the Russian
lines. It highlights the desperation of the garrison.
But by early spring, no amount of ingenuity or
communication could change the reality on the
ground. Right. Let's narrate the end of the line.
By late February of 1915, it becomes crystal
clear that Conrad von Hutzendorf's massive relief
efforts in the Carpathians have entirely failed.
The Austro -Hungarian High Command essentially
radios Commander Kuzmanek and tells him, you
are on your own. Meanwhile, General Sullivan
finally gets his shipment of heavy siege artillery,
and the Russians just start systematically dismantling
the concrete defenses. By March 13th, the Russians
finally breach the northern defense lines. Kuzmennik
knows the situation is completely untenable.
He orders his men to hold an improvised inner
line just long enough to destroy anything in
the city that could be useful to the Russian
war machine. They blow up the bridges, the remaining
artillery, and the munitions dumps. And then
he attempts one final breakout on March 19th.
He does. He attempts a desperate sally to break
through the Russian encirclement, but his troops
are severely malnourished, exhausted, and outgunned.
They are easily repulsed and forced back into
the rubble of the fortress. With literally no
options left, the white flag goes up. On March
22nd, 1915, the surrender takes place. And the
sheer number of prisoners the Russians take is
astounding. We were talking about 117 ,000 Austro
-Hungarian troops marching into captivity. The
officer count alone was staggering. The Russians
captured nine generals, 93 senior staff officers,
and over 2 ,500 junior officers. Notably among
the captured was the famous Hungarian war poet
Gézé Gyony, who ultimately died in a Russian
prisoner of war camp. If we connect this massive
surrender to the bigger picture. What does this
do to the Austro -Hungarian Empire? If we connect
this to the bigger picture, the macro results
were absolutely devastating. Remember, this fortress
was originally designed to hold a garrison of
maybe 50 ,000 men, yet when it fell over, 110
,000 surrendered. When you combine that capture
with the 800 ,000 men lost in the Carpathian
relief efforts, the Habsburg military apparatus
suffered over a million casualties just for this
one city. One million casualties. That is a structural
blow you don't recover from. And they didn't.
The Hadsburg Army was effectively hollowed out.
From that moment forward in 1915, Austria -Hungary
ceased to be an independent military power. They
were forced to rely entirely on German assistance,
German troops, German commanders, German logistics
to prop up their lines for the rest of the war.
Pridgen broke their independence. So what does
this all mean? We started with a single fortress
in Galicia. that managed to tie down massive
Russian armies for months. It triggered a catastrophic
winter relief effort that resulted in a million
casualties largely to frostbite and disease.
And ultimately its fall shackled the Austro -Hungarian
military to Germany for the duration of the war.
It was a profound strategic pivot point, but
I want to leave you with a different angle to
mull over looking at the very nature of the fortress
itself. We have talked extensively about how
this siege broke the Austro -Hungarian army,
but consider the internal dynamics. The fortress
of Praegion required daily military orders to
be translated into 15 different languages just
to function. Just to get by day to day. Exactly.
When we look at the mutual distrust, the ethnic
tensions, the sheer logistical impossibility
of keeping that garrison united under pressure,
we have to ask a broader question. Was the fall
of Preshchil truly a military defeat caused by
Russian starvation tactics, or was this fortress
simply a microcosm of the Austro -Hungarian Empire
itself, a fractured entity that was always destined
to collapse from the inside out the moment it
was put under severe siege? That is a phenomenal
point to end on. a fortress that mirrors the
fatal flaws of the empire that built it. Thank
you so much for joining us on this deep dive
into the source material. We hope it gave you
a new lens through which to view a monumental
piece of history. Keep questioning the Exincensus,
keep digging into the primary sources, and above
all, stay insanely curious. We will catch you
in the next deep dive.