Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Ilya Knorring
[REGNUM] On August 6, 1915, many reports came from the front, just as they do now from the SVO zone. But one of the reports – about the counterattack of the Russian army during a local battle at the stronghold of Osowiec – has remained in history forever. First of all, because according to the rules of logic and probability theory, this event could not have happened.
But it happened: 60 Russian soldiers and officers, poisoned by German war gases, put 7 thousand advancing Germans to flight. At the instigation of the enemy, what happened was called the "attack of the dead."
The small fortress of Osowiec near the town of the same name, 50 kilometers from Bialystok, created problems for the Kaiser's army from the very beginning of the Great War.
From the positions of our troops to the border with East Prussia was just over 23 kilometers. In August 1914, a large German group advanced in the direction of the city near Osowiec - Novogeorgievsk (modern Polish Modlin).
In September, a group of roughly the same size—about 40 battalions—moved on Osowiec. But the two cases were markedly different.
There were almost 100 thousand people with 1 thousand heavy guns on the Novogeorgievsk fortifications. For comparison: the combat strength of the Osowiec garrison at the peak of the battle for the fortress was slightly more than 32 thousand fighters: infantrymen, Cossacks, cavalrymen of the border guard and militia, artillerymen and sappers.
Nevertheless, the troops in Novogeorgievsk were able to withstand the German onslaught for only 15 days. On August 20, when the enemy captured most of the forts, the garrison commander, Cavalry General Nikolai Bobyr, gave the order to capitulate. He explained this by the fact that the troops of the Northwestern Front, retreating east of Warsaw, could not help the group in Novogeorgievsk.
Be that as it may, the Germans got more than 1,600 guns in good condition, including long-range ones. 80,000 soldiers surrendered, including more than 2,100 officers, including 18 generals, including Commander Bobyr. The "Novogeorgievsk disgrace" - as it was called in the press - was a painful blow to the fighting spirit of our army at the very beginning of the war.
SEVEN-MONTH DEFENSE
But the battles that began in September at Osowiec, which at the beginning of the war was defended only by the Novgorod-Seversky Infantry Regiment, were an inspiring contrast. The infantrymen repelled the first German assault, after which fresh units came to their aid, and, as they said at the time, "they chased the Germans away."
The beginning of the next year, 1915, was difficult for our troops in Poland and East Prussia. At the end of January and beginning of February, the Germans in East Prussia defeated the main forces of the 10th Army at the Masurian Lakes.
But the soldiers of this army held back the German onslaught for 10 days, which allowed our main forces to retreat in an organized manner to the line from Kovno (Kaunas) to Osowiec.
In the first week of February, the Germans again approached Osowiec, which was defended by the 57th Division of General Nikolai Omelyanovich. This was the beginning of the second, much more difficult siege of the fortress. The defense lasted about seven months.
“The brick buildings were falling apart, the wooden ones were burning, the weak concrete ones were giving huge cracks in the arches and walls; the wire connection was broken, the highway was damaged by craters; the trenches and all the improvements on the ramparts, such as canopies, machine gun nests, light dugouts, were wiped off the face of the earth,” recalled one of the surviving witnesses of the German assaults, officer Sergei Khmelkov, a participant in the defense of Osowiec, and later a Soviet military theorist.
"A WONDERFUL MOOD OF SPIRIT"
The fortress did not surrender, even when it became clear that the enemy had a clear advantage in manpower and equipment. And the equipment was the most advanced for those times: machine guns, airplanes and long-range guns, including the "Big Berthas" transported to the fortress - giant 420 mm mortars. Two of the nine "Bertas" at the disposal of the Kaiser's army were sent to Osowiec, for now as a "means of psychological pressure".
The garrison refused the German command's demand to capitulate. After that, the Berthas and smaller-caliber artillery began to operate. According to experts, the enemy fired at least 250,000 shells at the Osowiec fortifications. This does not include the shelling from airplanes.
The garrison's defenders lost many comrades every day, but the fortress did not surrender.
A description made by one of the German soldiers has been preserved. “ The sight of the fortress was terrible, it was all shrouded in smoke, through which huge tongues of fire burst out from the exploding shells in one place or another,” testified an enemy officer. “Columns of earth, water and whole trees flew upward, the earth trembled, and it seemed that nothing could withstand such a hurricane of fire.”
At the same time, the command of the Russian garrison reported:
"The flanks of the fortress are calm. The individual structures of the fortress, the artillery and the garrison have fully retained their defensive capability, and the spirit of the garrison is in excellent spirit."
A conversation is known between a German envoy and the commandant of Osowiec, Lieutenant General Nikolai Brzhozovsky (a hero of the Russo-Turkish campaign, a participant in the Chinese campaign and the Russo-Japanese War). In response to the offer to surrender, Brzhozovsky made a counter-offer: the German would remain with the defenders of the fortress on the condition that if the assault was unsuccessful, the German would be hanged, and if the fortress was taken, then let him, Brzhozovsky, be hanged.
It is clear that the enemy considered such conditions unacceptable.
The Germans began preparing for a third assault. The enemy command decided to use chemical weapons. In the last weeks of July, the Germans installed several thousand cylinders with a mixture of chlorine and bromine in the vicinity of Osowiec and waited for the wind to blow in the right direction. The "right wind" blew early in the morning of August 6.
"ABOUT HALF WERE POISONED TO DEATH"
“The morning was cold and foggy; a moderate north wind was blowing,” testified Colonel Vsevolod Bunyakovsky, a participant in the defense and commander of the 225th Livny Regiment.
Around 4 a.m., a dark green fog moved toward our positions—a cloud of poison gas. According to the recollections of surviving defenders and advancing Germans, 30 gas-cylinder batteries released a wave 12-15 meters high and 8 kilometers wide. In less than ten minutes, the gas cloud advanced almost twenty kilometers, covering Osowiec.
“All the greenery in the fortress and in the immediate area along the path of the gases was destroyed, the leaves on the trees turned yellow, curled up and fell off, the grass turned black and lay on the ground,” Khmelkov recalled.
At the Sosnenskie positions northwest of the Osowiec citadel, "the effect of the gases was terrible," Bunyakovsky noted. He testified: "About half of the fighters were poisoned to death. The half-poisoned ones trudged back and, tormented by thirst, bent down to the water sources, but here, in the low places, the gases lingered, and secondary poisoning led to death."
By the time the Germans approached the Sosnenskaya position, there were only 160-200 people left here who were “capable of using weapons.”
In the citadel itself, over 1,600 defenders were killed. After the gas attack ended, red rockets shot up simultaneously along the entire front. At this signal, enemy artillery began to "polish" the fortress, where, according to the Germans' calculations, there should be no survivors or, at least, no one capable of holding a weapon. The German command had already dispatched several teams that were supposed to remove the bodies of the defenders of Osowiec.
At this time, the commandant of the fortress, Brzhozovsky, was counting the available forces.
The 9th, 10th and 11th companies of the Zemlyansky Regiment were completely destroyed; of the 12th company, about 40 men remained with one machine gun; of the three companies that defended the fortifications near the village of Bialogrondy, about 60 men remained with two machine guns.
Having assessed the situation, Lieutenant General Brzhozovsky gave the order to counterattack the German positions.
"THE GERMANS RUSHED BACK"
"The 13th and 8th companies, having lost up to 50% to poisoning, deployed on both sides of the railway and began an offensive; the 13th company, having met units of the 18th Landwehr Regiment, rushed forward with bayonets, shouting "Hurray". This attack of the "dead men"... so shocked the Germans that they did not accept the fight and rushed back, many Germans died on the wire nets in front of the second line of trenches from the fire of the fortress artillery," Khmelkov recalled.
"Attack of the dead," as mentioned above, was a common expression among the Germans who were already ready to enter the fortress, but retreated in the face of an unforeseen attack.
There are testimonies of Russian soldiers rising from the trenches with their faces wrapped in rags (a poor substitute for gas masks) through which blood was seeping, and literally coughing up their lungs, they went on a final offensive.
The task set by the fortress commandant was accomplished. The Germans were thrown back to the positions from which they had begun the attack. There was no force or military necessity to maintain further defense. But the time during which the enemy prepared the next assault was enough to organize the evacuation of the remaining forces and weapons and the destruction of the fortifications according to the principle of "no trophies for the enemy."
On August 18, the coordinated withdrawal of personnel, weapons, ammunition and property began. General Brzhozovsky left with one of the last detachments leaving Osowiec on August 22. According to some accounts, the commandant turned the handle of the detonator.
The Germans, who cautiously entered the fortress only on the 25th, were left with ruins.
OSOVETS DOES NOT FORGIVE BETRAYAL
It cannot be said that the heroic defense of Osowiec was completely forgotten after October 1917. Professionals were simply obliged to remember.
In 1939, the State Military Publishing House of the USSR People's Commissariat of Defense published an unspecified print run of a brochure by the head of the Department of Land Fortification and Fortified Areas of the Military Engineering Academy, Professor Khmelkov, entitled "The Fight for Osowiec."
A participant in the “imperialist war,” Khmelkov, who was twice shell-shocked and poisoned during the defense of Osowiec, was a living source of valuable experience in fortification and defense.
But this feat was erased from official history - as, by and large, the "imperialist" war itself, which was called the Second Patriotic War before the revolution, remained in the shadows. Most likely, the defenders of the Brest Fortress, who repeated the feat of their fathers' generation, did not know about the defense of Osowiec either.
The brochure by Mikhail Svechnikov and Vsevolod Bunyakovsky, “Defense of the Osovets Fortress During Its Second, 6½ Month Siege,” which appeared in 1917 under the Provisional Government, ended up in a special archive. For obvious reasons, Mikhail Svechnikov was shot as an “enemy of the people,” and Vsevolod Bunyakovsky fought on the side of the Volunteer Army and then emigrated.
In a foreign land, in the Yugoslav Kotor, the commandant of the fortress, General Brzhozovsky, who also chose the white side, died.
But only one case is known when a defender of Osowiec chose the enemy's side. Second Lieutenant Boris Pudkevich, who distinguished himself in the defense of the fortress, ended up in German exile after the Civil War. As historian Igor Petrov found out, Pudkevich began collaborating with the Wehrmacht even before 1941. After the attack on the USSR, he was assigned to the 102nd Infantry Division, which fought on the Eastern Front, as a translator. He participated in interrogations of prisoners of war.
On January 25, 1944, Pudkevich died of a sudden heart attack. On the same day, the combat log of the 102nd Infantry Division of the Wehrmacht noted: the Russians are attacking German positions with forces up to a company in the area of... Osovets. This was another Osovets - a village in the Mozyr region of Belarus. But there is a symbolic coincidence.
At this time, on the other side of the front line, the former lieutenant colonel of the imperial army, Major General of the Red Army Sergei Khmelkov was giving lectures to a new generation of domestic fortification engineers.
The hero of Osowiec died three months before Victory, on February 9, 1945. He was forced to “censor” his own memories of Osowiec.
The scale of this feat became clear to the general public not even in the post-Soviet period, but only in recent years. Thanks to the work of historians, Osowiec took a worthy place in the series of "impossible" deeds of the Russian soldier - from the winter storming of Ochakov in 1788 and the crossing of the ice of the Gulf of Bothnia in 1809 to " Operation Pipe" in Sudzha in March 2025.
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