Brusilov Offensive - Results

Results

Brusilov's operation achieved its original goal of forcing Germany to halt its attack on Verdun and transfer considerable forces to the East. It also broke the back of the Austro-Hungarian army, which suffered the majority of the casualties. The Austro-Hungarian army was never able to mount a successful attack alone after that. Instead, it had to rely on the German army for its military successes. The early success of the offensive convinced Romania to enter the war on the side of the Entente, though that turned out to be a bad decision since it led to the failure of the 1916 campaign. Russian casualties were considerable, numbering up to 1.5 million. The Brusilov Offensive is listed among the most lethal battles in world history.

The Brusilov Offensive was the high point of the Russian effort during World War I, and was a rare manifestation of good leadership and planning on the part of the Imperial Russian Army. After that, the effectiveness of the Russian army began to decline due to the deteriorating economic and political situation on the home front, which the army's heavy casualties certainly did nothing to alleviate, and also due to spectacular incompetence on the part of many of its generals. Even as the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians were being pushed back along their front line, at least 58,000 Russian troops deserted. This was an omen of the situation that developed when the tide of the war began to turn in Germany's favor.

The operation was marked by a considerable improvement in the quality of Russian tactics. Brusilov used smaller, specialized units to attack weak points in the Austro-Hungarian trench lines and blow open holes for the rest of the army to advance into. These were a remarkable departure from the "human wave" tactics that had dominated the strategy of all the major armies until that point during World War I. The irony was that the Russians themselves did not realize the potential of the tactics that Brusilov had devised. Similar tactics were beginning to be used on the Western Front by the French and Germans - who utilized "storm troopers" to great effect in the 1918 offensive - and slightly later the British, although given the higher force-space ratio in the west much greater concentration of artillery fire was needed to make progress. Shock tactics were later to play a large role in the early German blitzkrieg offensives of World War II and the later attacks by the Soviet Union and the Western Allies to defeat Germany, and continued until the Korean War and the First Indochinese War, which spelled the end of the era of mass trench warfare in all but a few nations, mostly in Africa.