Detail from Cram's 1903 Railway Map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire showing Galicia and Bukovina.
Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.
"At dawn on 4 June [1916] Brusilov launched his four field armies against the enemy units opposite him around Lutsk in the Bukovina. Artillery fire and infantry assaults were coordinated, a rare phenomenon in the Russian Army. Reserves were concentrated (and hidden) at each of the major points of attack, ready to exploit any breakthroughs. Outnumbered by almost 132 000 men at the critical centre of the front, Conrad's position at Ocna crumbled like a pastry shell. By the evening of 4 June, the Russians had overrun the first three lines of trenches and punched a gaping hole 20 miles wide and 5 miles deep into the front of Archduke Joseph Ferdinand's Fourth Army. In 3 days Brusilov took 200 000 prisoners, enough to man two armies."
At the Chantilly Conference in December, 1915, the Allies had agreed coordinated offensives in the summer of 1916. The French and British were planning an offensive on the Somme River when German Commander Erich von Falkenhayn began the battle of Verdun on February 21, 1916, requiring continuous French reinforcements in the sector, an extension of the British line to relieve the French, and the delay of the Allied offensive. On May 15, Chief of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff Conrad von Hötzendorf launched his Asiago Offensive which threatened to break through Italian defenses to reach the country's northeastern plain and cut off the Italian Army. Preparing for a July attack, Russian General Aleksei Brusilov was willing and able to respond to urgent Italian requests for an offensive against Austria-Hungary by advancing the date of his Brusilov Offensive, one of the war's most successful. The Bukovina, in Austria-Hungary, was one of the primary battlegrounds for Russian and Austro-Hungarian forces.
The First World War: Germany and Austria Hungary 1914-1918 by Holger H. Herwig, page 209, copyright © 1997 Holger H. Herwig, publisher: Arnold, publication date: 1997
1916-06-04, 1916, June, Brusilov, Brusilov Offensive, Bukovina
