After a year of dismal defeats, new men and old ideas are the future
As 1915 came to its melancholy close, the German auxiliary cruiser Möwe (Gull) slipped out of Wilhelmshaven on her first mission, to lay a minefield in the Pentland Firth near the Grand Fleet’s anchorage at Scapa Flow. A few days later the battleship King Edward VII struck one of the mines and sank.
It was a dramatic lesson in the asymmetry of the new sea warfare: a capital ship of the Royal Navy, named after the late king, sunk by a converted banana boat lately named the Pungo, while the two great fleets in their havens eyed each other warily across the North Sea. ‘We shall dig the rats out of their holes,’ Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, had said in September the year before; but it would be a full six months before the Hochseeflotte would accept battle with the Grand Fleet at Jutland. Meanwhile, with every other German surface warship sunk or incapacitated, Berlin’s war at sea would be waged increasingly by auxiliary vessels like the Möwe, and more worryingly by the U-boats. It was a mine laid by a U-boat off Scapa Flow that in June 1916 would claim the highest-ranking casualty of the war, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener himself, when the cruiser Hampshire taking him on a mission to Russia sank with virtually all hands.
In December 1915 the curtain was also coming down on the Dardanelles campaign, the attempt to use sea power to turn the strategic flank, take Constantinople, open warm-water lines of communication with Russia, and encourage Bulgaria and Romania to join the allies. After a personal reconnaissance by Kitchener the previous month, the war cabinet had taken the decision to withdraw from Gallipoli completely.
In all, the attempt to force an entry to the Black Sea had cost the allies – British, Indian, Commonwealth and French – a quarter of a million casualties (over 40,000 dead), and the Turks the same.
The Dardanelles campaign had been deeply flawed, revealing defects in the direction of strategy and operations in Whitehall, as well as in the capabilities of Kitchener’s newly raised battalions and some Commonwealth units and their commanders, who had been thrown into battle prematurely. Nor had it been the Royal Navy’s finest hour, notwithstanding the individual skill and bravery of many ships’ companies during the nearly twelve months of the campaign – and certainly not that of the first sea lord, Admiral Lord Fisher, who had first applauded the plans and then schemed against them, eventually just walking away from the Admiralty, prompting the prime minister to say that if he didn’t return he would send a policeman to arrest him.
The navy’s shining accomplishment, however, had been the achievement of its submarines. Having penetrated the Dardanelles Straits, with all the minefields, and the narrow, tricky waters of the Bosporus, even sinking Turkish warships in the harbour at Constantinople, for months British, French and Australian boats ranged widely in the Black Sea. By the time they were recalled in early January 1916, they had sunk some 50 per cent of Turkish merchant shipping.
The most spectacular casualty of the campaign was the navy minister himself, Churchill. When the original landings miscarried, and Asquith was forced to bring the Tories into a coalition government, Churchill was deprived of the Admiralty and given instead a non-departmental position to keep him in the cabinet. Despite the initial setbacks at Gallipoli he continued to press for an offensive there, championing the landings at Suvla Bay in August to break the deadlock, and even after these failed he advocated holding on and reinforcing. When General Sir Charles Monro, who in October replaced Sir Ian Hamilton, recommended complete evacuation, Churchill remarked bitterly: ‘He came, he saw, he capitulated.’ And once the war cabinet had made its decision, Churchill, who held the rank of major in the Oxfordshire Hussars (Territorial Force), saw no further place for himself in government and instead put on uniform and reported for duty in France.
Yet Clement Attlee, whose younger brother Laurence also served at Gallipoli, remained convinced that Churchill had been right. In his memoirs he declared: ‘I always held that the strategic concept was sound. The trouble was that it was not adequately supported. Unfortunately the military authorities were Western Front-minded.’
With the withdrawal from Gallipoli, attention would indeed turn back to the Western Front. Although the allies had taken the decision early in December to reinforce the Salonika front, Bulgaria having joined the Central Powers in a concerted effort against Serbia, and Italy had entered the war on the side of the Entente in May, opening up yet another theatre of operations, London and Paris regarded the Western Front as the only one on which the Germans could be decisively defeated. General Joseph Joffre, recently appointed commander-in-chief of all French armies in the field, intended keeping just enough troops in Salonika to prevent Greece from being over-run, and drawing troops of the Central Powers south and away from the Russian front, while mounting an early and decisive offensive in France. At the second inter-allied conference, held at Joffre’s headquarters at Chantilly, north of Paris, from 6 to 9 December, the British and French agreed on a major combined offensive on the Somme, while Italy and Russia would mount their own offensives to coincide, and all agreed that whenever one ally came under clear threat, the others would immediately launch diversionary attacks.
Herein lay the seeds of some of the worst blood-letting of the war, for the most expeditious way of mounting a diversion was simply to bring forward the start date of the next planned offensive. As the Germans were bound to attack somewhere in 1916, there was a good chance that they would do so first, in which case the counter-offensives would to varying degrees be premature, therefore less well prepared and in turn less likely to succeed.
The British offensive on the Somme would, however, be under new leadership. For many months it had been plain to Kitchener and the war cabinet that Sir John French could not continue as commander-in-chief of the BEF. The Loos offensive in October had been badly conceived and executed, failures for which he had tried to shift the blame. His official despatch, published in The Times on 2 November, contained many errors, especially touching on the part played in the battle by General Sir Douglas Haig, commanding one of the BEF’s three armies, and had seriously undermined his authority. French had also primed The Times’s military correspondent, Colonel Charles Repington, to write a supporting article suggesting that the battle might have gone better had French himself taken personal command rather than leaving things to Haig, whose 1st Army had taken the lead at Loos. Haig at once wrote to French asking for the despatch to be publicly corrected, which French refused to do. Thereafter Haig lost no opportunity to convey his view that French was not fit for command to anyone with influence – including the King through ‘back channels’, notably Lady Haig, a former lady-in-waiting to the Queen. ‘[French] is not only very ignorant of the principles of the higher leading of a large Army but is also lacking in the necessary temperament!’ he wrote to Leopold de Rothschild on 9 December. ‘He is so hot tempered and excitable – like a bottle of soda water in suddenness of explosion – that he is quite incapable of thinking over a serious situation and coming to a reasoned decision.’
The letter crossed with one from Asquith marked ‘Secret’, enclosed in three envelopes, which Haig received the following day at his headquarters at Hinges in the Pas de Calais: ‘Sir J. French has placed in my hands his resignation of the Office of Commander in Chief of the Forces in France. Subject to the King’s approval, I have the pleasure of proposing to you that you should be his successor.’
Kitchener had already told Haig what was afoot when he had been in London the week before, ostensibly taking a few days’ leave. ‘K’ had also told him that he was recalling Lieutenant-General Sir William ‘Wully’ Robertson, the BEF’s chief of staff, to be CIGS. This would provide Haig with a powerful ally in the War Office when the disastrous offensives of 1916 and 1917 began to give the cabinet second thoughts.
Kitchener also told Haig that Brigadier-General George Macdonogh, who until August 1914 had been head of the War Office intelligence division concerned with internal security (today’s MI5), and thereafter the BEF’s chief of intelligence, was to return to London as director of military intelligence. Macdonogh was brilliant. He and a fellow sapper – James Edmonds, who would become the official historian of the war – had gained such high marks in the staff college entrance exam in 1896 that the results, it was said, were adjusted to conceal the margin between them and their classmates (who included Robertson and Allenby). Macdonogh was a Catholic, however, Jesuit-educated, and deeply mistrusted by Haig and others. Although he would turn the intelligence directorate into a first-rate organization, his assessments would never be entirely accepted by GHQ in France. Haig preferred those of the man he appointed in Macdonogh’s place as BEF chief of intelligence, Brigadier-General John Charteris – ‘Haig’s evil counsellor’, as he became known – who increasingly fashioned his assessments to support his chief’s decisions rather than challenge the assumptions on which they were made (perhaps the original ‘dodgy dossiers’).
To make matters worse, ‘Wully’ Robertson’s replacement as the BEF’s chief of staff, Major-General Launcelot Kiggell, was, it seems, wholly unable to make any impression on Haig and thereby gained the nickname ‘the invisible man’.
The BEF was therefore to see in the new year with a most perilous team at its head, for while Haig himself lacked the imperfections he had complained of in Sir John French, he also lacked the qualities of humanity that had made French – at least until Loos – a well-regarded leader. After the war, Robertson would write of French, ‘the little field marshal’, that he doubted ‘if any other general in the army could have sustained in [the BEF] to the same extent the courage and resolution which they displayed during the trying circumstances of the first six months of the war’.
On 18 December, French and Haig had a frosty handover meeting, ‘in which Haig never for one moment unbent’, said one who witnessed it. The outgoing C-in-C asked that Churchill be given a brigade to command.
That evening ‘the little field marshal’ dined at the Ritz in Paris with his military secretary, and next day at Boulogne was cheered all the way up the gang-plank by his old regiment, the 19th Hussars. Once back across the Channel he was created Viscount French of Ypres and of High Lake in the County of Roscommon, and made Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces.
There would be one more momentous act before the month, and the year, were out. On 28 December the cabinet agreed to lay before parliament the Military Service Bill. Every male British subject who on 15 August 1915 was ordinarily resident in Great Britain (the bill did not extend to Ireland), who had attained the age of 19 but was not yet 41, and who was unmarried or a widower without dependent children, unless he met certain exceptions was deemed to have enlisted for general service.
The bill would be passed with little opposition on 27 January: the first time in history that there was to be general conscription in Britain. The manpower thus assured, the stage was now set for the terrible battles of attrition that would characterize the rest of the war.