WWI's Stalingrad: The Siege of Przemyśl

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2:02In the 20th century, few regions experience violence on the scale, on the cadence of East Central Europe. I'm talking about the land stretching across today's Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic. we often associate that violence that devastation with the with the 1930s and 40s when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union murdered millions but its descent into barbarity in fact began earlier with the outbreak of the first world war from 1914 onwards enormous armies clashed across the Eastern Front, bringing with them not only industrial warfare, but persecution, forced displacement, and ambitious imperial visions of conquest.

2:58It was the start of a chapter that, until recently, we believed might have been closed, but now apparently continues. During the First World War, one of the most dramatic flashpoints was the mighty fortress city, Pšemšl, the eastern bulwark of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Sitting in the contested province of Galicia, a land claimed by the Russian Empire as primordial Russian territory, Pšemšl became the focal point of a brutal struggle. Surrounded by a vast ring of forts and defended by 130 ,000 soldiers, the city was besieged between 1914 and 1915 in one of the longest and largest sieges of the First World War.

3:43For months, the fortress and its civilians endured the horrors of both ancient siege warfare and the emerging realities of modern total war. There was starvation and disease, but there was also some of the earliest aerial bombardments in history. Outside the city, desperate Austro-Hungarian attempts to relieve the siege turned the nearby Carpathian mountains into a frozen battlefield where hundreds of thousands of soldiers perished. By the time the fortress fell in March 1915, the siege had become a symbol of suffering and imperial ambition. It also revealed something darker, that the patterns of genocidal violence and ethnic persecution that would later define the region in the Second World War were already beginning to take shape.

4:28In today's episode, we explore the siege of Shemshah, how it unfolded, why it mattered, and how this single fortress city became a window into the brutal transformation of warfare in the 20th century. I'm really glad to say that joining us is Alex Watson. He's a professor of history at Goldsmiths University of London, an expert in 19th and 20th century East Central European history, and prize-winning author of The Fortress, the great siege of Shemshel. Let's get into it.

5:11Alexander, great to see you. Thanks for coming back on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, right. Well, we're going to talk... Now, this is... People talk about the Western Front. This is the decisive theatre of the First World War. That's what you're here to tell me today, honey. What's going on in the East in 14 and 15? Yeah, so everyone remembers the West. But actually, if you want to understand the 20th century, the rest of it. It's actually, the East is where it's happening. This is where the Russian revolution happens. This is where massive battles happen. And this is actually where the war could have ended in 1915, rather than going all the way to 1918.

5:38So the Eastern front is the one that people want to look out for. And the other thing is, this is where it all starts, right? This great clash between Russia, Serbia, and then Germany, Austria-Hungary. This is sort of the, and many of the policymakers would have thought in those countries, this is the decisive front, would they, Ford? Yeah, this is the cradle of where it begins. In some ways, the First World War is centred on Ukraine, is centred on Poland. This is absolutely about which empires are going to rule the 20th century, for sure. Amazing. Well, let's get into it. What is the plan? So in 1914, the autumn and into the winter of 1914, the Russians get absolutely trounced by the Germans as they invade Germany, but they have more success against Austro-Igarians, don't they?

6:23Just give me a sense, build me up, what's been going on in the year up to this point? Okay, so everybody at the start of the First World War believes that attack is the way forward. You've got to push the enemy back, you need a quick victory, you don't want battle on your own territory. And so the Germans go west, 80 % of their army is situated on the western border, going through Belgium, France. The Russians, though, have been told by the French and have agreed with the French, you have to attack early. Because of course the French know that the Germans are going to go for them. And they're desperate to divert as many resources, enemy resources as well as possible.

7:00So the Russians have, they divide their army into two parts. A northern part, which goes for what was called East Prussia. It's now in Poland, Missouri. And that ends very badly. If anybody knows anything about the First World War on the Eastern Front, Tannenberg is the thing they may know about. This is the big battle. Crushing German victory. Russian-German victory. But actually, the major front on the Eastern Front is not up north, but the place where the Russians put most of their soldiers is against Austria-Hungary down in the south. Because the Austro-Hungarians are the enemy that the Russians think that they can probably knock out quickest.

7:36That's one reason. But the second reason is that the Imperial Russian government's major war aims, their major ambitions, all centre around Austro-Hungarian territory too. There's this place called Galicia, this province called Galicia, which today covers what today is Western Ukraine and Southern Poland. And the Russians see, at least the eastern part of this particularly, as primordial Russian land, land which belongs to them or which should belong to them. Interesting, Alexander. So you're saying that the Russians thought that this part of Ukraine was eternally Russian and should be under their control.

8:15Fascinating stuff. They absolutely thought that. They didn't even say the Russians didn't use the term Ukrainian. They talked about Ukrainians as little Russians. And these were little Russian people who allegedly desperately needed imperial Russian liberation. They needed liberation, reincorporation into Mother Russia. As the invasion went on, that was the message that was given out. Okay, so it goes wrong in the north, but how does this big southern strike go? Is this still in the autumn, the fall of 1914. So this starts pretty much immediately. The first Russian troops enter Austria-Hungary in the middle of August.

8:50Okay, so just a few weeks in. And then the big invasion starts at the end of August. And the Imperial Russian Army has a massive numerical superiority. I mean, this is what people forget. You know, it's always the German army. It's meant to be the strongest, the best trained, probably is the best trained in fairness. But the Russians have the biggest military machine on the face of the planet in 1914. Nothing is bigger. And also, unlike the Germans, unlike the Austro-Hungarians, unlike the French, they've been at war just nine years earlier, 1905, against the Japanese. They've redone their doctrine.

9:26They have an understanding of what modern war is that actually most of their enemies don't have. So this is a dangerous force. And how does it perform? Well, in Austria-Hungary, it performs pretty well. It gets to the gates of Krakow. So it covers, it advances very quickly through August and the first half of September, right across western Ukraine, right across southern Poland. Krakow is right over in the west of this province. And it looks really dangerous. It looks like the Russians, the Russians have options. They can go southwards, head to Hungary, or they can keep going westwards and head toward Vienna and Berlin.

10:07it's a real hinge point of the war and what happens? do you want me to tell you now this early in the podcast? okay spoiler surely so no so winter of 1914 they're in this threatening position yes and they've got so the big decision is what to do in 1915 what are they going to do where's that main thrust going to take place? well so really actually the key point is in the autumn of 1914 okay to roll back a bit and we also need to think about the Austro-Hungarians because of course as wars in our own time show the enemy gets a vote. Austria-Hungary never used its vote terribly well on this one. I mean, the Austrian-Hungarians make a hash of virtually everything.

10:45They've got their major general, their major commander is a guy called Franz Conrad von Hutzendorf. Don't talk to him about that clown. Okay, fine. He's an absolute disaster, isn't he? He ends up moving the army in the wrong direction. So he's got two war plans, one to fight Serbia, one to fight Russia, and he implements the Serbian one. And by the time he's thinking, actually the Russians are coming in their way bigger than us. Loads of these troops are heading down towards the Balkans and they've got to do this weird triangle going all the way down to the Balkans and then all the way up back to what is now Western Ukraine, which of course takes ages.

11:21It takes forever. And by the time these troops come in, they're just in time to participate in this massive defeat. The Russians overwhelm the much smaller Austro-Hungarian force in Western Ukraine and in the east of the Habsburg province on the eastern border. And they just come in crushing everything in their path. The Austro-Hungarian army loses hundreds of thousands of men in those first weeks of war. They're in action the entire time. And it's a military disaster. You read the accounts and this is a military which is fraying, falling apart. People are running, dropping their weapons. And the whole force, which also gets infected by cholera and dysentery and typhus, which is spreading across the front at this time, starts heading westwards in disordered retreat.

12:08And it's a real moment of crisis, just a month and a half into the war. Are the Austro-Hungarians actually going to be able to see this through in any way, or is this it? Just to pull back here, what dramatic months, they're just fighting in France, the fate of Paris is in the balance. You've got hundreds, thousands of men being killed, wounded, brutalised, millions of men on all these different fronts. War as we've never seen in history before. And also, these are multi-ethnic armies. We talk about the Russian army, but actually it's the Imperial Russian army. So you've got Ukrainians, Kazakhstanis, you know, Belarusians, Lithuanians, all in this.

12:47And on the Austro-Hungarian side, and this is an empire with 11 official languages, just in terms of trying to coordinate and organise these guys. The way they do it in part is, Every Habsburg soldier has to learn 80 German or Hungarian words. They have tea towels, yeah, with these words printed on them. So when they're doing... Advance, fire... I don't know if retreat is that. No, I was going to say, probably not. Probably not, probably not. Orderly withdrawal. Bits of the rifle, you know, all this. So that's one of the ways in which they do it. They teach some basic German to these guys. So the Austro-Hungarians are crushed in this great Russian offensive.

13:25They're absolutely crushed. The field army goes reeling backwards, like I said, right over to Western Poland. I mean, the only idea comes to get them as far away from Russians as possible in order to give the men a chance to rest, give them a chance for the panic to subside, restore discipline, and then they'll be able to go forward. because it's not that the Austro-Hungarians are out of men. It's that they're out of energy, they've got a lack of sleep, and they're out of courage at this point. They need to get things back together again. So the army goes back partly because that's just the way everybody is headed, but it also goes back because they need a fire break, a pause, a chance simply to get their stuff together again.

14:12And where do they go back to? They go back to around, well, just in front of Krakow at this time in September. They then push back later. But they're able to get some miles, tens of miles apart from the Russians, largely due to this place that we're going to talk about, this fortress, Przemysl, having a garrisoned, protected fortification, huge fortification, in front of them, which controls the logistical routes, controls the supply lines, the railways, gives them that break they need, that pause they need, and slows the Russians down just enough for the Austro-Hungarians to get themselves together and go forward and for the entire empire not to collapse.

14:57So the fate of the empire almost now resting on the walls of this fortress. Tell me how powerful is this fortress? People might be thinking of a medieval castle with high walls. Is this very modern, spread out, low-lying, big defensive guns, barbed wire? Tell me about it. Okay, so we need to move away from the whole castle type concept, okay? Because in the 20th century, civilians and cities are just as important for the outcomes of battle as soldiers are, because soldiers rely on having continual supply. Soldiers need to eat, they need to drink. you need a populated base in order to be able to operate out of.

15:38So what this is, it's a kind of civilian-military hybrid. A soft inner core, which has the supplies, the bakeries, swimming pools, training facilities, everything that the army needs. Workshops, things like that, yeah. Absolutely, exactly. All of those things. And then a hard outer edge of 35 forts. And these forts are what were called at the time artillery forts. They're kind of squat and low. Either the more modern ones, they've got these, you know, like battleships have turrets with guns on them. So they've got kind of those types of turrets, but they're mounted on big concrete, thick buildings.

16:20Or the older ones, because a lot of this fort, unfortunately for the Austro-Hungarians, is obsolete. They simply have artillery stationed on the roofs of the fort. If listeners want to Google this, or even better still, go to Przemysl, it's just an amazing place to be. You can walk around the Fortress Ring. The Fortress Ring is about 30 miles in circumference. It's a big, big area. And these forts were supposed to be able to be kind of self-contained. If they got surrounded by an enemy, they should be able to fight themselves. They had food, they had hospital rooms, they had enough munitions to keep themselves going for a couple of weeks.

16:58but above all, their job was to operate together and to keep the enemy out of this city. And the reason why that was important was that Shemesh, this city, was a rail hub. It's where the major east-west roads go backwards and forwards in this area. And this area doesn't have great roads, so that's important. But even more crucial, it's where the railway goes. And all armies in 1914... It's a railway war. Exactly, yeah. And so if the Russians had been able to walk into that city and keep going through it, there was nothing, I mean, the field army would just kept retreating. This is a sort of, this is a hard line of defence that the Austrians have pre-prepared and there's kind of nothing much beyond it.

17:39That's exactly it. That's exactly it. Yeah. The Austro-Hungarians, they imagined, as everybody did, this was going to be a manoeuvre war. If you look back at Austro-Hungarians' training, the major emphasis is on getting soldiers to march fast and quickly. Marching about, Well, charging towards the enemy. Yeah, so they hadn't actually invested that much in this fortress in the last 10, 15 years before the war because the whole emphasis was we're going to manoeuvre war, we're going to march around the enemy, we're going to take them in the flank. But of course, these are conscript armies. They're massive armies of millions of men.

18:14And that means that you don't just recruit the young and the fit 20-year-olds. You recruit people who are in their... Exactly. That's such a delicate way of putting it. Prime of life. in many ways. Intellectually, I think. Intellectually, yeah. And, you know, we're obviously not going to be doing tens of miles marches a day. So these guys, their job is simply to sit in this place and hold it. And the garrison is aged usually between, yeah, between 35 and 42. The vast majority of soldiers are in their middle age. They're not terribly fit. And the other thing as well that these armies know about middle-aged people, especially people with families, is unlike the younger guys, these are not people inclined to take risk.

18:57Once the fire starts coming over, generally you find them in prayer rather than going over the top. So it doesn't sound like it's going to be a massive problem for the Russians. What happens? So the Russians arrive, do they surround it? Is there a siege that we might call it, try and cut it off? What's the plan? So the war gets going, as we talked about, in August 1914 in the East. And it's pretty clear, certainly by the end of the month, that things are not going well for the Austro-Hungarians. The fortress has to be prepared because this will sound familiar as well in our own age. The Austro-Hungarian military is chronically short of funds in peacetime.

19:39It's not prepared for this war. And one of the ways this manifests itself in the fortress is you've got this fortress ring, you've got these 35 forts around, but there's gaps between them. There's holes between them. It's true in Belgium actually in the West as well. The Germans, there's a huge fortress that the Germans desperately need to capture at the Belgian city of Liège. And the forts are hard but there are gaps between them. And Ludendorff, a big Russian general who becomes important later in the world, simply walks between the forts and demands surrender. And the also Hungarians see this and there's a panic so they start frantically digging trenches between the forts to try and fill those holes.

20:17And so there's this frantic preparation. By the 20th, the field army passes through the fortress in disorder in early September, early and mid-September, mid-September really. And 23rd of September, the fortress is cut off. It's completely surrounded by the Russians. And are they bombarded? Is that they sort of hope to starve it out and wait and see what happens? Or do they quite actively try and take down these defences? Well, conveniently for our story, the one Russian general that people may have heard of from the First World War in charge of this sector is a guy called Alexander Brusilov. Famous for the Brusilov offensive.

20:55And he really stands out among the Russian generals. If you look at Russian generals in 1914, they're all kind of big, stocky, rather unimaginative looking men. And Brusilov is this thin, flighty, fit, kind of energetic guy, crackling with energy. And he's determined to get to Vienna. You know, he's not going to mess around. And he says, we have to take this place. We've got to go for this. If we go for this, we control the rail routes right across Galizia. If we control the rail routes right through Galizia, that will then help an advance to the north. And we can punch through Silesia, which is kind of an eastern industrial part of Germany.

21:36Very rich industrial part of Germany. Exactly. And keep going to Berlin. But we need to have this railway down the south in order to help do that. This is our role. But Shemish is standing in our way. So he tells his subordinates, you've got to go for this. You've got to get ready and you need to assault. The fortress is obsolete. We've already had a clash with the garrison and we've seen how old and incompetent they are. This should take you a few days. Here's some artillery. You've got a few elite units, go for it. And they take a week and a half or so to prepare, but the attack proper starts on the 5th of October 1914.

22:18And I mean, the defending side, even when you're a bit old and a bit podgy and a bit scared, the defenders have great advantages in the First World War, don't they? They have massive advantages. At this particular point. Absolutely. Especially with with the dominance of artillery. If you are underground or behind thick walls, you are relatively safe. But as soon as you're out in the open as attackers go, then you're in danger. But historians underestimate the Russians. They've seen this in the 1905 war against Japan. And what the Russians do is actually quite modern this time. The way that they advance toward the fortress is they get their soldiers together, that's squads of soldiers and a few of the soldiers will go forward bit of the way, undercover and then they'll start digging and as they dig a big enough hole others will follow to that hole and they jump from hole to hole run, dig, run, dig, run, dig Given on the western front the French and the Germans are advancing towards each other in neat lines and get a machine gun that's pretty impressive It looks remarkably modern So the Russians through the 5th of October are able to get very close to the fortress walls and in a position to storm it.

23:33Oh my God. Okay, so what happens? Well, on the 6th, they attack the fortress from three directions, from the north, from the south, and from the southeast. They screw up the timing. The north and the south are meant to be faint attacks to draw off the Austro-Hungarian reserves. But it's in the southeast, the forts, most of which are now in Ukraine, actually, just on the other side of the border from Poland. because Przemysk today is just in the southeastern corner of Poland, but these outer forts in the southeast are just over in a Ukrainian military area now. But it's that southeastern corner that is the place that the Russians have decided to break through.

24:14They've got their biggest guns there, they've got their best units there, and they throw shell after shell after shell into the forts. And then at 2am, the order for the general advance comes into force. and they creep towards these outer forts ready to take them. And I've said they're modern, in the way that they're thinking about this, they're modern, but in technological terms, they're not very well prepared. These huge artillery pieces that dominate the Western Front in 1916, the Russians don't have them. Hand grenades, again, very, very few. In some ways, it gets quite medieval. These Russian troops go forward under cover of darkness, carrying siege ladders with them.

24:59This is what's so great about this point in history. You've got this weird mix of the very old and the extraordinary new. So not many man-portable machine guns, for example, at this point. No, no, no. I mean, machine guns for sure, but the big heavy ones, nothing light. But they go forward with seed ladders and with gun cotton, with explosives. and the idea is because the artillery that they've got isn't powerful enough to actually punch holes. Yes, crack open the concrete fortifications. Exactly. What they're going to do is they're going to get to the fort and they're going to drop this gun cotton down ventilation tubes and around the doors and they're going to blow it open.

25:42Right, okay. Two o 'clock, the attack goes off. They creep forward. At 3am, sentries on one of the outer forts. Here's something. They've got sentries posted outside, but they're not that worried. They know they've got listening posts whose throats by this point have been cut. They come forward. And before the Austro-Hungarian defenders know, this is this one particular fort where the Russians get closest, Fort 11 it's called. The Russians are on top of them. And this fort is really, really interesting because it's got a classic imperial garrison. It's got infantrymen from Hungary and Slovakia, and it's got artillerymen because they've got a kind of combined force from Vienna.

26:19Yeah, German, Austrian Germans. And these guys don't talk to each other, in part because they can't talk to each other, but also because there's this kind of sniffiness, you know, the Viennese artillerymen who are kind of technologically trained and all the rest of it, they kind of see these Slovakian peasants from the back of beyond. Well, even in a modern military, it's not easy for the different arms of the, you know, the armed force to talk to each other. So that's just times a million when it comes to the Habsburgs. So this is exactly it. And the Russians, anyway, they get on top of this fort.

26:50They manage to beat the infantry. The infantry retreats inside and locks the door and stays there quivering. But the Russians can't get in. And the reason the Russians can't get in is that they've braved the barbed wire in front. They've got up the glasses, the slope. They've punched through the infantry defences. But it's a wet night and the explosives they've got have become damp. Oh my goodness. And when they put them around the doors and set them alight, they fizzle. but they don't explode. And that could be a turning point in the First World War. It probably is a turning point in the First World War.

27:24That's one of those, you know, for want of a nail, the knight couldn't go to the battle. It's exactly like, they're just missing that one crucial thing that they need to break a hole in this fortress line. Because it sounds to me like, had they taken that fort that night and pushed on beyond, I think for morale as much as anything else, the rest of the fortress might have just gone, hang on a second, we're not going to hold it here, are we? Yeah, morale is key in a nutritional war. It's key right through the war. You know, Hindenburg, general who leads the Germans from 16 to 18, he says, he who has the strongest nerves will win this war.

28:00And it's true in 1914. And just as you say, you know, you think about what the Habsburg army has been through already. This massive defeat, this traumatic retreat, these fathers, I mean, this is a dad's army essentially garrisoning this war, have seen this diseased force go back behind them. it looks like they're done for. And Imperial Russia is intimidating to fight. So yeah, I think if the Russians punch a hole in it... On the first night. On the first night, everything, there is the possibility everything could collapse. But they hold out. But they do, which I think says something good about people in their mid-40s.

28:32I know, I think we're tougher than... I'm not hoping to be tested in that respect. No, no, no, let's keep it theoretical. Yeah, exactly. They hold out, and presumably when daylight comes up, Austrian artillery are able to bring down fire on those Russians and sort of make life a bit uncomfortable for them? Well, this is the Austro-Hungarian army, isn't it? Okay, okay. So what the Austro-Hungarian army do is they send reinforcements. They send a counter-attack force. Their best troops, Hungarians, who are contemptuous of everybody else. And these Hungarians go in and they see the standoff at the fort with the garrison quivering inside and the Russians on the roof but unable to get in.

29:06And they loop round and they start attacking the Russians who begin to surrender. But just at that point, the Austro-Hungarian artillery and the Russian artillery both start to fire on them because the Russians are trying to, the Russian observers see this Austro-Hungarian counterforce come in and trying to beat them off and the Austro-Hungarian instinct the fort has been captured. And so they too put their strength. So at this point, both sides, both sets of infantrymen stop fighting because it's just, you know, it's an atmosphere of steel balls flying everywhere. They drop the fight And infantrymen in green, the Russians' infantrymen in blue, the Austrian Germans, they start hammering on the door and swearing and shouting, let us in, let us in.

29:51And the garrison, who have done a great job, but at the same time are not willing to take any chances already, they hang around a bit. When they've decided, OK, there is German we can hear, they do open the doors. And everybody kind of clambers into this fortress and the Russians are taken prisoner. They're then moved back. When the bombardment subsides, about 100 Russians are captured. They're then moved back. They're then brought back to behind the lines, at which point the second kind of line of the defences sees this horde of Russians coming towards them. They're prisoners, but it doesn't realise that.

30:27And there's a massive panic and a flight to the rear of the second Austro-Hungarian line. But they are prisoners, so order is restored. But that does go with our theory. that had the Russians stormed that fort that night, it could have precipitated quite a general collapse in the Austrian position, the Austro-Hangarian position. Yeah, they're not feeling confident. Interesting. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We'll be back after this break.

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34:03So the Austro-Hungarians have clung on by the skin of their teeth. The road to Vienna and everywhere else has been barred. So that's a turning point. Do the Russians push home those attacks or is winter coming and they have to lick their wounds and think about next year? So they retreat, but then they come back again in November. And I think that there's kind of two things that are important here. The first is, just as you say, for the Austro-Hungarians, this is a massive victory, which can be seen as a turning point in the war. This stops an early Russian win over Austria-Hungary in, let's say, by the end of 1915.

34:40So that's one thing. Second thing, though, is that the Austro-Hungarians desperately talked a bit about morale. They desperately need this victory. And weirdly, given how difficult it is to pronounce, Przemysl becomes a household name. everybody is talking about it. But the problem is when the Russians come back in November, the Austro-Hungarian army retreats again. And the second time, the first time it retreats back in September, they desperately need the fortress to hold the Russians so they've got a chance to reconstitute, to restore discipline, so and so forth. In November, the retreat is a much more organised one.

35:09It's done for operational reasons. It's necessary, but it's organised. And what they should have done is taken the garrison back with them and left the fortress be. It's not necessary at any point. It doesn't have enough food to hold out for a long siege. But the problem is, is that it's become such a symbol. That's the problem. Yeah. You've turned it into a Stalingrad or Tobruk. This is the Stalingrad of Austria-Hungary's First World War. So they attempt to hold it again. They attempt to hold it again. And it results in some of the most awful, the attempts to relieve it through the winter of 1914-15 result in some of the most awful battles that I think the 20th century sees.

35:48And that's up against some British death competition. It is, it is. And, you know, Somme, Verdun, Ypres. But what we're talking about is we're talking about battles over the Carpathian Mountains in minus 20 degrees Celsius by armies which are not in any way equipped for winter warfare. You know, casualties are extraordinary. Million and a half, two million combined on both sides. and no one talks about this anymore. No, totally. It's forgotten. They're forgotten. I think, I mean, here, because the Western Front is more, is so vivid in national memory, but even actually in Poland or Ukraine, you know, the greater horrors of the Second World War have kind of covered over that earlier history.

36:34But if we want to understand why this area of Europe becomes the epicentre of bloodshed through the 20th century, certainly through the first half of the 20th century, You know, 1914 to 1950. We can't do that without just thinking about the extraordinary violence that it sees in 1450 and afterwards. The norms that are broken, the dehumanisation. It's just the most remarkable, most awful period to live through. And one of the worst places to be in that wider picture would have been presumably trapped in the city itself. I think it's one of the worst places to be in the entire of the first half of the 20th century.

37:18You know, we tend to separate, you know, First World War, Second World War, but actually there is, you can also talk about a continuum of horror, which starts in 1914. The problem is once you unleash war, all of the norms and the rules and the standards that have gone before get swept away spectacularly quickly. And they don't, once things are broken, they don't come back. What was it like through that winter for the defending force? Well, for both sides, but for the defending forces, because you say there's not enough food, so there's no food shortage of disease. Yeah, well, this is one of the places, one of the many places in which the experience of this city and these people kind of spans epochs, because in some ways this is a siege, so in some ways it's almost like medieval warfare.

38:00You can draw links between this and much older sieges, but at the same time, the nature of modern war, whether we're talking about World War I, World War II, Ukraine war today is attritional. It's about grinding down economically, but also psychologically. And one of the key characteristics of that is that war becomes total. Everything is mobilized in the course of the war. And as I've said, the norms and the standards and the rules break down. And I think one of the most powerful signs of this is that food itself becomes a weapon, denying food not just to soldiers but also to civilians becomes a strategy of food becomes weaponized and we see that in 1914 15 at pshemish and we see it that that acts as a precursor for the rest of the first world war where a british blockade france in the west russia in the east creates what I've called in one of my books a ring of steel which which creates the entire of central Europe into this besieged zone where everything begins to run short food the resources for for weapons building and ultimately resilience and hope and and Przemysh kind of encompasses that you know sometimes you can understand that if you just look at a small community.

39:25But it's also important to recognise that it reverberates, this type of war reverberates and grows bigger and eventually expands the entirety of a continent in 16 to 18. Yeah, a whole of that central core is under siege. Yeah. And, you know, that type of trauma, that type of sacrifice, even when the guns stop in 1918, that doesn't go away. Mentalities are changed. The violence in the head still continues. So, for the winter, savage fighting in those mountains. Are Austro-Hungans trying to break through, relieve that fortress? Yeah, so you've got savage fighting in the mountains to try and break through and relieve the fortress.

40:08In the city itself, you've got starvation. The city has about 30 ,000 civilians still living in it. It's meant to have fewer, but so many people hid and refused to go that there, they're still there. There's about 130 ,000 soldiers. There's also 21 ,000 horses. Actually, that's something that always makes me reflect about how we write history. Because most of us, me included, write history because of interest in human beings. Human beings are fascinating. And especially in war, war is fascinating for me anyway, because you get those extremes of the human condition in war. It really brings that out.

40:43But it's we're thinking about how war affects the natural world and the non-human world as well. And, you know, ultimately in Chemish, a fifth of the garrison are hospitalised due to malnutrition and starvation. Civilian death rates double. This is an awful, awful place to be as a man or woman or child. But it's a particularly bad place to be if you're a horse. Because the horses are used for, or, well, this is to a great extent still a pre-internal combustion age. There are lorries and cars, but mainly horsepower is literally what is used to get stuff around. They're hauling the shells and...

41:25Absolutely, all of this, yeah. And then, as things get more desperate, those horses are eaten. Partly because what they want is to move over the fodder that they're feeding the horses to give it to humans, but also because, of course, it opens up another food supply. And yeah, I mean, you know, maybe one in ten, something like that, of soldiers die from the garrison in Przemysl. If you're a horse, the lethality rate is pretty much 100 % by the end of the siege in March 1915. Okay, take me to March 1915. What happens? The climax. Okay, so the siege has been going on since September. There's been a brief break in October.

42:05There's a relief of the fortress. The Austro-Hungarian army does come back briefly, then retreats again. So the siege starts up again, 8th of November. And for those months, from 8th of November until mid-March, this goes on. The fortress doesn't have enough food. It's got far too many people in it. And it doesn't have the strength either. The garrison doesn't have the strength to break out. There is an attempt to break out, a really extraordinarily heroic attempt, actually, to punch through Russian lines, through desperation, through determination. So sort of abandon the city, but the garrison try and march out to safety, to their own lives.

42:42To get back to the field army, exactly, and to link up with them. And again, I mean, yeah, listeners, don't underestimate men in their 40s. If there's one takeaway message... Especially when they're trying to get home. Absolutely, exactly. Especially when they're trying to get home. A square meal. What these guys do to actually punch their way out the fortress and nearly link up with the field army and it's so agonizingly close and then it fails and in march 1918 the fort is not much 1915 the fortress is out of food and the the commander guy called herman kusmanek has to decide what to do uh and he he he decides that they will have one last attack for honour, which weirdly goes eastwards.

43:34He doesn't attack back homewards. They're heading towards Kiev and St. Petersburg and Moscow. The reason for that is really simple. The territory in the west of the fortress is quite difficult and these guys are starved. There is no way that they're going to be able to go forward in any meaningful way except over a very, very flat land, which is what the East has. So that's why he chooses that. That said, it's a criminal decision to get this star garrison heading in. To satisfy his sense of honour. To satisfy his sense of honour, that's exactly. And to create a legend. And he does it, and it inevitably results in a disaster.

44:20There's an immediate collapse of the attacking force. It's over in a night. and then they the garrison command accepts the inevitable and they orders go out to destroy everything or anything of military use is is destroyed the horses are shot the remaining horses are shot and the order goes out to to place explosive charges in this ring of forts all around the city these 35 forts all around the city and also on the bridges of course they want to make sure that when the Russians do get in, they still can't advance. We've talked about how this is a key logistical hub, a key supply hub. But Przemysh is a city which has a river going right through it.

45:06The bridges of the city are the lifeblood of the city. So when you destroy those bridges, it's not just that you're doing something military, you're destroying the links that bind this city together as well. And the evening before the surrender, there is it's one of noise one of total noise as these big guns fire off the last of their artillery shells and the accounts of the there's dairies of civilians and soldiers who are in there and they just talk about a wall of noise through the night that goes on and on and on sometimes you get the deep boom of the heavy artillery sometimes it's the quick whine of machine gun bullets being fired.

45:51But there is constant noise through this night, which never seems to stop until shortly before six, when finally at last these guns fall silent. And the police go round the city shouting, get out, get out. You need to leave your homes. You need to leave your houses. They're going to blow the forts. They're going to blow the bridges. and people are herded into sort of open spaces because as I said, the bridges, the forts, also the explosive depots, the munitions depots of the fortress, they've all been mined and ready to go off. Again, it's difficult to talk about this without kind of keeping one foot in the modern world and one foot in the past.

46:33People talk about this as almost being like at Herculaneum or at Pompeii. at six o 'clock on the dock there is this flash of light from the north as the first explosive in in in one of the forts goes up and it rises high above and of course because light travels quicker than sound everybody first sees this this this this like laser beam like going up this flare going up and then there is enormous kaboom as it comes into the city and that's followed by another and another and another. And they say it was like having a series of volcanoes going off all around the city. The last plane out of Przemysl, they had aircraft which took mail back.

47:19One of the ways in which this is a modern siege is it's the first time that a powered aircraft, an airmail service is set up in history. That's how the garrison communicate with their families during this long siege. Last aircraft out of Shemesh, pilot and observer with mail and whatever else they can carry, takes off and they're over these forts as these explosions start going. And the pilot left an account of that as well about it, rocked in the air and again seeing, he too, just like people on the ground, he says, it was like Pompeii. It was like Pompeii must have been. And when the bridges in the middle of the city go up as well, of course, windows are smashed for miles around.

48:07And then the Russians march in. And that's the end of the siege. That's the end of the resistance. You're listening to Dan Snow's history. We'll be back after this break.

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50:11What was it like? I mean, was it much relief for the people after that? Or what was the rustification process like? So, there's certainly some relief among it. the citizens simply because it's been so hard and so awful and they're so close to starvation or in some cases actually starving that having the prospect of some sort of food and some sort of normality is the wrong word but at least at least peace return gives gives some people some hope the city and chemist today has pretty much an entire entirely polish population in terms of the lie of the land in terms of the population of this whole area you know it's very different today because of the bloodletting and the deportations and the horrors of of the second world war in the aftermath hitler murdered the jews it's the epicenter of the holocaust from 41 onwards and then in the immediate at the end of the war in the immediate aftermath stalin is deporting Ukrainians and Poles and moving people around.

51:14So-called Germans or... Absolutely. Well, Germans to some extent, but also Poles are violently shifted westwards and Ukrainians are violently shifted eastwards. And Przemysl is part of that story. In 1914, about half the population identifies as Polish, about 30 % as Jewish and about 20 % as Ukrainian. Oh, okay. Yeah, so it's mixed. And the Russians come in and the plan is that this should be the capital of a new governorship in Russia. Russia is divided into governorships and the hope is that this area of what was then Eastern Galicia, what is now Western Ukraine, would become an integral part of Russia.

52:00And this is where things really get, I mean, it's not quite where things get disturbed, know the whole story is disturbing but it gets even more disturbing because often there's a sense of the imperial russian army and the imperial russian state is kind of old-fashioned you know it's a monarchy it's the romanovs they're old autocrats they're they've got a court with all these traditions but actually by 1914 the romanovs claim to keep on ruling russia which of course has been heavily challenged there's a failed revolution in 1905 and there's going to be a revolution another revolution in 1917. The Romanov's claim to rule Russia is in part based on nationalism and on an idea of Russia as the imperial master of the Slavic world.

52:53And in particular, the Russian elites see Ukrainians as part of the Russian people. I mean, to understand this, we've got to go back to the early medieval period and think about how both the modern Russian state and the modern Ukrainian state trace back their heritage to Kiev, to a medieval kingdom based in Kiev. So there are these close links. But the Russians, of course, have an ideological imperative and incentive to claim that there isn't any such thing as Ukrainian people. These are just a branch of the Russian people, not least because, and Putin knows this today, Russia can't be a great power, a major power, without control of Ukraine.

53:40Ukraine was the Imperial Russian Army's breadbasket. It's where a lot of the early industrialization of the Russian Empire is. And so Ukrainian nationalism was always incredibly threatening back in the 19th century, in the early 20th century, still today, to nationalist Russian elites. And snuffing that out was crucial. And what we get in 1914 is a very modern plan of population engineering. This isn't a world, this isn't the 18th century world where you have monarchs who simply want land because they want the land. And tolerate the various ethnic minorities. Yeah, that's fine, no one cares, exactly.

54:22This is the 20th century world in which if the population doesn't fit your ideological view of what this land should be, then that population has to be changed. And that's the program that the Russians start on when they occupy this territory. So we can use the word ethnic cleansing, effectively. We can absolutely use the word ethnic cleansing and different varieties of ethnic cleansing. So there are all of the three nationalities, Poles, Ukrainians, and the Jews who occupy this, who live in this part of the world, all suffer, but in different ways. The Poles, they suffer because in this part of eastern Galicia, western Ukraine today, they're the masters in this area.

55:08Conservative, Polish nobility have run this for ages. And so one of the first things the Imperial Russian Army does is arrest these people and disempower them. Ukrainians are also impacted, but in a different way. The Russians are determined to believe that Ukrainians aren't Ukrainians at all, they're Russians. And they're hopeful that the Ukrainian population will welcome them. And rather disappointed when they really don't. There's a neat line, actually, in one of the Polish reports of this invasion about what it was like. It says, when the Russians came into this area, they announced themselves as the liberators of the Slavic peoples against the German yoke.

55:55And then they marched in and death and destruction was in their trail. all they brought was misery, barbarism, the collapse of civilization. It's really felt on a visceral level, rape and pillage. And for Ukrainians, and this part of the world, because the Habsburg Empire is very open to allowing national feelings within its borders, This in many ways is Ukrainian nationalist heartland. And when the Russians realise that, they arrest and remove Ukrainian intellectuals, teachers, lawyers, doctors, anyone who will say, no, I'm not Russian, I am a Ukrainian. and anyone who has the organisational skills to be able to be an opinion former and to mobilise some sort of resistance against what's happening.

56:53Ukrainian schools, which have been allowed to teach quite happily in Ukrainian before the war, are closed down and only allowed to reopen if they teach in Russian. Ukrainian language textbooks are thrown away, they're burned, Ukrainian libraries are closed down and Russian books replace them. Ukrainian newspapers, again, you know, Ukrainian language not allowed to publish in it. Even the word Ukrainian is banned. These people have to be referred to as little Russians. So Ukrainians are ethnically cleansed in some cases among elites in a violent way, but there's a cultural ethnic cleansing going on.

57:33And of course, this isn't the first time in history that that's going to happen. And then there's the Jews. And the Russian Empire is the most anti-Semitic part of Europe. The Romanian state gives it a run for its money in fairness. But in 1914, the Russian Empire is deeply anti-Semitic. There have been pogroms in the Russian Empire in the early 1880s and again in 1903-6. There are pogroms in 1914 as the Russian army mobilises. Soldiers attack Jews living in the west of the Russian Empire. And Jews really suffer horribly under Russian occupation. What the Russians do is they discriminate against them.

58:16They dismiss Jewish officials. But ultimately they start deporting people. And the entire population of Przemysh and the surrounding area, around 17 ,000 people, gets a notice. This notice goes out at the end of April 1915 that they are going to have to leave and move eastwards. And overall, perhaps about 100 ,000 Jews in this area, probably the vast majority of the population that's left, given so many others have fled westwards, are forced out and deported. And that is because, firstly, the Russian army doesn't trust them, but secondly, because this is about reshaping the population to fit this idea of the land that the Russians have as primordial Russian land.

59:00So massive deportation of Jewish people to the east did not start with Hitler's Holocaust? No, no. And we can't, I don't think we can understand Hitler's Holocaust, or for that matter what Stalin does. Stalin deports huge numbers of people without actually knowing that this isn't anything new in this area. People have seen this. It's been done, there is precedence. Militaries have experience of doing this. And of course, in 1941, when, well, I should say rather than 1939, when the Nazis and Stalin's Soviet Union invade Poland at the start of the Second World War, both these evil empires invade Poland, the border runs, the border between them, runs right through Przemysl.

59:47Przemysh is actually torn in half by concrete and barbed wire, with the Nazis on one side and the Soviets on the other. And these whole processes, they repeat. The Russian army is finally the gateway to Central Europe is open. They've conquered this city. Did they keep advancing to the west? They did keep advancing for a bit after the Fortress Falls in 22nd March 1915. but they've kind of already blown it. If they managed that in September, October of the year before, at that point the Germans have most of their units in the West. The Austro-Hungarians are on their own. By this point, the Germans, the whole situation has changed.

1:00:36The Germans are giving the Austro-Hungarians more support and no, they don't actually get much further. They've missed that key window in the autumn of 1914. And there's a big German-led offensive called the Battle of Gorlitz-Tarnow. So the Germans sort of switch the defensive on the Western Front, bring all these guns and troops back and they can try and sort the situation out in the East. Exactly. And actually, again, you know, people, listeners, eschew the Second World War. If you want to understand where modern combat operations comes from, the modern world comes from, then actually it's World War I you need to be looking at.

1:01:11And Gorlitz-Tarnow is really interesting. There's one of, you can see it as almost one of the first modern battles. The Germans are beginning to get now really good at coordinating artillery and infantry and planning their battles in order to move forward at really alarming rates. They smash into the Russians and they send the Russians reeling. They capture Przemysl by June 1915 and they keep on going and they actually take over much of Eastern Europe. We started off the podcast talking about how it's in, you know, forget the West, it's in the East that it happens, if you want to understand the 20th century.

1:01:47And if you want to understand why the state of Poland becomes a thing again, after 120 years of being partitioned between Russia, Austria, and Prussia, Germany, if you want to understand the rise of the modern Ukrainian state, the rise of the Baltic states, obviously the Soviet Union and the later Cold War, actually the huge German advance of the summer of 1915, which retakes Przemysl and beats its way into Poland and into the Baltic, this sets up the preconditions that's needed to have these states that are on all of our maps today. So yeah, you know, they're creating future geography here and the future power constellations as well, which are going to dominate the rest of the 20th century.

1:02:36And establishing precedence for the barbarism, the dystopian, the genocide, the upheavals that will follow sadly in the next decades. Yeah, there's a great book by Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands, who talks a lot about this barbarism that Hitler and Stalin perpetrate. It's a wonderful book, but it starts in 1928 with Stalin. And we could perhaps go back even further and think of 1914 as the year zero. of this. And Przemysh, and understanding what happens at Przemysh, really opens a weather vane, shows a weather vane for which way the winds of the 20th century are going to blow. And imagine that, imagine if the Russians had been able to advance that city in the autumn, the fall of 1914.

1:03:25History could have been very different indeed. History would have been very different indeed. Alexander, thank you very much for coming on. Tell everyone what your award-winning book is called. so the book about this uh this this siege and and and the bloodlands of east central europe is is called is called the fortress the great siege of bshemish and it was published by penguin well go and get it everyone thank you so much car on the podcast thank you so much for having me well what a story thank you so much alexander for joining us he really is just obviously the expert on this particular topic and indeed so many others great friend of the show always a pleasure and he's gonna be back guys so watch this space the siege of Przemysl is about much more just the fall of a fortress it's just it's a window into a time and a place where massive empires collided and where the staggering violence of the mid-20th century first began to take shape those same lands that saw imperial armies clash in around that fort would later experience occupation deportation genocide at the hands of the nazis and the soviets on an even more devastating scale.

1:04:28And I think the siege and the fighting around it had broken taboos, had brutalised people, had normalised bloodshed in such a way that later totalitarian regimes could sweep in and simply deepen and expand what the First World War had begun. Thanks for listening, folks.

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