Map of the Eastern Front, mid-July, 1915 from The Capture of Novo Georgievsk, Volume 8 of the Reichsarchive history Battles of the World War.
"The offensive was carried out at a time of year that could not have been less suitable if it had been chosen by the Germans. It opened on 18th March [1916]. The winter conditions had given way to those of early spring — alternating freezes and thaws that made the roads either an ice-rink or a morass. Shell would explode to little effect against ground that was either hard as iron or churned to a morass; gas was also ineffective in the cold. Supplies presented problems that the best-trained army would have found impossible to solve: the man-handling of boxes of heavy shell through slush that was a foot deep. The Russian rear was a scene of epic confusion — complicated by the astonishingly large masses of cavalry deployed there, to no effect whatsoever at the front. It was altogether an episode that suggests commanders had lost such wits as they still possessed."
The Battle of Lake Narotch was Russia's response to the French requests for offensives by its allies to draw German forces from the siege at Verdun. Russian industry, supplemented by imports from Japan and the United States, was finally able to produce weapons and materiel that could meet the demands of the war. The Russians were numerically superior to the German defenders. Historian Norman Stone calls the offensive the last of the old Russian army — an army commanded by old men fighting the wars of the last century, who had learned little during the current war, where dismissals for incompetence could be overridden by appeals to the Tsar, where artillery and infantry did not coordinate their efforts.
The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 by Norman Stone, page 228, copyright © 1975 Norman Stone, publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons, publication date: 1975
1916-03-18, 1916, March, Battle of Lake Narotch, Lake Narotch, Narotch
