CHAPTER 8
The Business of Battle; Engagement
Wherever the interested and curious bystander looks and listens when the Great War is debated or explained there is an overwhelming sense that by some inversion of fact the responsibility for the commencement, destructive battles and losses were the responsibility of the Allied powers. On the Western Front this really means Britain and France. The plausible impression is created by the commentators that had it not been for these two nations all would have been well. Somehow the German’s aggressive invasion and occupation of Belgium and a substantial portion of North East France by an army equipped and under training for years to defeat the French Army, are never allowed to get in the way of castigating the Allied military leaders for their perceived, belligerence, shortcomings and consequent allied losses.
Let us be quite clear on one essential fact of this conflict. It was the German Army in all its manifestations, from the leadership of Kaiser Wilhelm II as ‘Supreme War Lord’, von Moltke, nephew of the eponymous victor of the Franco Prussian war of 1871, von Kluck, von Falkenhayn, Hindenburg and Ludendorff et al, to Corporal Adolf Hitler and his comrades in arms in the front line who organised and carried out the killing16 and injury16 of allied soldiers. British and French generals and subordinate commanders did not stand behind their troops with machine guns and open fire. The war itself, the losses and casualties suffered, were and remain to this day the responsibility of the German nation; a responsibility that can never be avoided, ever.
This reminder brings us neatly to look at the first precept of conflict, summarised neatly by Brigadier General Nathan Forrest in the American Civil War, you have to be “firstest with the mostest,” he said. The Staff College of the British Army reduced this homely language to more elegant terms; “The proper application of overwhelming force”. Education is a wonderful thing, don’t you think?
That was the precept applied by the Germans in August 1914: eighty divisions, more than a million soldiers on the Western Front alone. The problem for the Germans was the reluctance of the Allied forces to know when they are beaten. ‘No hoper’ Belgium defending her fortresses with grim determination against the odds. Not a thought given to the effect of the delays on the German’s immaculate Schifflein Plan, and, when this delay was being dealt with, another bunch of professional busy bodies arrived on the scene by cross channel ferry and got stuck into the scrap.
Delays to the meticulously programmed advance absorbed additional reserves of men and importantly supplies, time as well as the armies marched on and as a consequence ‘the rest is history’, as we now say. Murphy was of course lurking in the wings.
The second precept to be emphasised yet again is that the responsibility of commanders at all levels of the armed forces is to use their resources to secure the defeat of the enemy. Even if it was not the intention to get mixed up in the particular problem that leads to conflict, once committed, it is the absolute duty of commanders to deliver victory to the nation and its government. Second place will not do, ever. Only the Korean War (1950—52) can be counted as a drawn match and that particular piece of nastiness was overseen by the United Nations: say no more. As an example of the subordination of military commanders to the government of the day it is only necessary to recall the 1957 Suez Campaign. After the successful initial phase of assault and landing, the British combined forces were motoring off down the Suez Canal in fine style set to deliver the recapture of the canal from Egyptian control. Then, when the international political environment turned nasty for Britain, the army was stopped in its tracks and subsequently withdrawn in short order from Egyptian territory.
In the context of the second precept we have already noted a military defeat in the field does not of itself deliver a total victory to the enemy. Armies may retreat but if the government sets its face and continues the war, as did Belgium in 1914, clinging to a sliver of national territory or by using other resources, victory has not been gained, the nations remain at war. Act II, of the European tragedy which opened to rave reviews in September 1939, illustrates the point. Poland, Holland, Norway, Greece and other nations refused to accept that military defeat and the occupation of the country was justification for political surrender, ‘de Jure’ governments in exile, many making a temporary home in Britain, used whatever forces they could muster as part of an allied war effort, to their eternal credit; the Great Powers owe them no small debt, the occupying army became the ‘de facto’ government.
Clearing the air with the foregoing ramblings on what is to be done, now allows the discussion to move forward to review how the military go about their business. In the context of this tour this means the strategy and tactics of military life and how the circumstances of Flanders, northern France and the weapons of the day had to be applied to dominate the military ambitions of Germany.
If you analyse military textbooks, and with luck cut through the verbiage and portentous language, you will find it boils down very simply to this; ‘strategy’ is deciding which battles to fight and ‘tactics’ is how you fight the battles. This neat, glib statement invites the smart guy to pick holes in the proposition by reason of its generality. The counter to this is that by avoiding specifics it means the commanders can derive a variety of strategies and tactics and apply them on a mix and match basis. As a simple example after the initial tactical encounter battles of 1914 the Allies, France and Britain, had to develop an adequate defensive strategy to prevent further German incursions, including an invasion of Britain, whilst preparing offensive strategies that could be overlaid on the arrangements for defence. From this point the decisions could be made as to what battles should be fought and then, it follows, the tactics to be used in the individual engagements. There you are, I told you it would not be difficult to get to grips with the subject, let’s keep going!
The Grand Strategy is to decide where and by what means the enemy is to be fought, how the nation is to be defended and what campaigns must be fought to bring the main body of the enemy’s forces to battle and defeat them. Defeat them to such an extent that the political will of the enemy to continue the conflict is eliminated. Strategy is more cerebral than tactics, there is, in most circumstances, more time to weigh the arguments, consider the alternatives and measure the resources available. The down side is that once the die is cast the penalty for a bad decision can be defeat. Strategy is not limited to the physical arrangements to pursue the conflict, it is also a mind game, very much concerned with the need to dominate the thinking and attitudes of the enemy’s commanders and the political leaders of the opposing nation.
At the highest level of command generals have to impose their will on the leadership of the opposing armies. To achieve this difficult situation the enemy has to be denied victories, Nothing it is said, ‘succeeds like success’, and so it is in warfare, a victorious commander attracts an aura of invincibility that is inimical to the efforts of opposing armies. Napoleon was one such commander, whilst he was victorious all sorts of people wanted to ‘touch the hem of his robe’. Come the retreat from Moscow in 1812 and Nemesis was upon him. The first constituents of the task to deny success, is to be equipped mentally and materially, to exploit weakness, capitalise on the enemy’s mistakes and reinforce success. Field Marshal Montgomery used the term ‘balance’ and included this requirement to the conduct of his operations. In the campaigns he waged from 1942 to 1945 he devoted a significant amount of his efforts to making sure he was never surprised by the actions of the Axis armies and therefore caught off balance, which is not to say he was always able to forecast the dangers he and his forces faced. In the same way, Wellington in the Peninsula looked to his unconventional and elite reconnaissance officers to bring him the information he needed to appraise the enemy’s intentions. To Nosey, ‘what was on the other side of the hill’ was the essential knowledge he needed to keep his strategy and tactics balanced.
Field Marshal Haig knew all this; he had spent years in preparation for this challenge. Haig however failed in modern eyes for the simple reason he did not tell anyone that he knew what he was doing. He was a reluctant verbal communicator, belonging to a society that admired the reticence of the stiff upper lift. This style was probably reinforced by the habits of the wealthy portion of Scottish Presbyterian society to which he belonged. Only if you were Oscar Wilde were you allowed to be publicly self promoting and we all know what became of him. Montgomery, when he played out his role in Act II, told anyone and everyone how good he was at his job and how he would succeed. His reputation has not attracted the virulent criticism suffered by Field Marshal Haig. General (later Field Marshal and Viscount) Slim, again in Act II of the twentieth century tragedy, but fighting in the Far East, told the people who mattered most, his troops, and was admired for his honesty even by the Australians; a signal honour rarely awarded to whinging ‘Poms’.
At this point it has to be acknowledged that the strategic deployment of the Royal Navy, the blockade of the external trade of the Central Powers from overseas sources of food and raw material, was fundamental to the outcome of the Great War, part of the Grand Strategy. The navy was also represented in the land forces of the Western Front by 63rd (Royal Navy) Division. Their main role however, was where it should have been on the high seas. The pattern begins to emerge of the means by which the Great War was fought by the Allies. Germany had invaded and overrun Belgium and made a significant incursion with its armies into the industrial area of North East France. From these conquered territories the German Army must be forced to withdraw. The strategy was therefore to meet and defeat the enemy on the Western Front whilst blockading the Central Powers at sea and denying them access to raw materials and supplies from the rest of the world.
The argument that took place about the strategy of outflanking the Central Powers by an attack through Turkey was not a shining example of military and political thinking, in fact it was a dreadful mistake for which Lloyd George (LG) and Winston Churchill were responsible. To the very end of the war LG looked for the indirect approach seemingly unable or unwilling to grasp that the threat of defeat for the Allies was in France, nowhere else. Diverting attention and resources to a subsidiary campaign would invite a crushing response by the German Army on the Western Front with the possibility of at least a serious disruption of allied efforts in France or even a major defeat. But LG was a politician with an agenda all his own. Professor Norman Stone has good things to say about the indirect approach. But he like many others who make special pleadings, put a case with just too many ‘ifs’ plus the complication of a supply train of extraordinary length that would consume large resources just to keep it operating. The argument was not viable.
Churchill when the outcome of the Dardanelles was recognised, had the good grace to activate his reserve commission and command a Territorial battalion of the Royal Fusiliers in France for nearly a year before returning to political life. Winston knew precisely how to retrieve his reputation and had the physical courage to put himself in the firing line to do just that.
Now back to the business of battle and how commanders go about the task of winning. In the first place we need to recognise at an early stage that battles have variety, the encounter battle as two or more formations probe and manoeuvre to gain advantage, surprise the enemy, and capture important objectives; all the ingredients of the German invasion and allied response of 1914. To counter such an incursion, defenders have to move their forces to deflect progress, break lines of communication and supplies, defend essential tactical objectives such as railway junctions, bridges, river crossings, high ground. An essential axiom of an offensive battle is that when the fighting is completed, a military objective must have been secured or successfully defended. Ground, space by itself, is a liability to be occupied and controlled, both of which responsibilities consume resources.
The commander’s task is to apply the resources of men and materiel to maximum effect to initiate a momentum which will have the impact needed to overcome the enemy. As the war developed on the Western Front the concepts that had developed over the centuries had to be modified to achieve the required result. Previously the mounted cavalry had been used to create the shock effect that would create momentum and turn a battle into a success, usually after effective infantry actions. In the situation of 1914—18 it was realised very quickly that the weapon of choice for maximum effect was artillery, guns, the more the merrier. The problem for the British Army was it did not have enough and, worse still, even the limited number available given their own way, could fire off ammunition faster than it could be replaced. Hence the shell scandal of 1915, four rounds per gun per day. Furthermore when the territorial divisions arrived in France in 1915 the kindest description that could be applied to their guns was, obsolescent. The army therefore had to make do, until industry could catch up with the demands of this new type of warfare for bigger and better guns in large quantities, at once if not sooner.
The development of a style of conflict that used artillery to overwhelm the enemy before releasing infantry to occupy the positions presented a dilemma on the Western Front. The enemy positions were well disguised, well constructed and often positioned on reverse slopes, only visible to aerial observation/photography. The Allied commanders therefore had to rely on assumptions of artillery damage when planning their attack, most of which proved too optimistic. The job of the commanders was not helped by the inconsiderate way that their German equivalents ignored the problem created for the Allies. Surely the occupiers of these desirable fortifications could have organised, for a modest fee, Sunday afternoon excursions through their defence works with schnapps and sandwiches at the end. By this means the British would have known the extent of their problem. The reality was the German defence works were superb. Only when there was massive interference with the structure, as at Messines Ridge in 1917, when nineteen large mines packed with explosives were detonated, was the disruption sufficient to allow a subsequent coherent infantry advance the success it deserved.
The German command was equally aware of the need to deploy overwhelming artillery fire as a prelude to infantry action. Their expert, Lt. Col. Bruchmuller, designed the savage artillery barrage that preceded the offensive against the British Army in March 1918. The infantry advanced and advanced. The difficulty arose when the infantry advanced beyond the cover provided by the guns. The task of bringing the guns and ammunition forward over the old Somme battlefield and then the ground pounded by the German’s preparatory barrage, proved to be of such difficulty that resources needed to sustain the advance were drained, and a downward spiral of failure began. The attacks faltered and failed because the momentum could not be maintained, the force was dissipated and left exposed to the artillery of the British Army which by now had more guns than the Germans. So began the slide to defeat.
Moving on, there are defensive battles as the enemy tries to get the upper hand, deliberate ‘set piece’ battles, feints, withdrawals, rearguards. Then there is one of the oldest of warfare‘s encounters, the siege. Remember Joshua, he of the trumpets and the falling walls of Jericho, together with many others known from the accounts of campaigns through the ages to the bloody storming of Badajoz in 1812 and Delhi’s ‘Red Fort’ following the Indian Mutiny in 1858. Sieges are demanding to maintain and in most cases bloody to overcome, whether it is breaking in, or breaking out. Is this a factor to consider in this appreciation?
Following the retreat of the German Army after the first Battle of the Marne, then the subsequent ‘race for the sea’, both the Allies and the German Armies faced a continuous line of defensive positions from the Swiss border in the south to the North Sea in occupied Belgium. In the retreat to the defensive line the Germans behaved very badly, they took up their positions and dug themselves their very splendid fortifications on the high ground, all the best bits of real estate were used for their defensive line. Their positions included excellent open views of the badly drained lower ground of Flanders, which locations the Germans assigned to the Allied armies. As the armies of Germany retreated in the autumn of 1914, neither Britain nor France had the resources to contest the enemy’s choice of positions on the high ground. The German generals did their job with skill and determination and no amount of gainsaying or argument can deny their effectiveness.
The German High Command had achieved a notable advantage by this action which would force the French and British Armies to fight future battles on ground chosen by their enemy! The result however was not all good, for the Germans now faced a development never envisaged in the war plan. Germany was under siege, the biggest siege in history from which there was to be no escape. Practically as described above the Western Front battle line prevented access to the remainder of France; Spain, the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Holland, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries were neutral but the Royal Navy was blockading the sea passageways from and to the Baltic. In southern Europe, Austria Hungary was an ally but Italy and the Balkans were belligerent; Rumania was to be occupied but provided access only to the Black Sea and thence to the Mediterranean, a sea under the supervision of the British and French Navies. The Russian Bear was in possession of most of the rest of the boundary from the Black Sea to the Baltic.
In the appraisals and histories of the Great War that I have encountered I cannot recall any of the writers, military, historical or journalistic making this particular point. It seems improbable to me that more than ninety years after the event I should produce a dazzling original insight on this overwritten subject. The result was the very worst that could have occurred for both the Central Powers and the Allies. The cost of breaking a siege is always high, the chances for the success of the besieged in withstanding a determined besieger are poor.
There is a very worthwhile book written in the immediate aftermath of the war (1920), Storm of Steel, by Ernst Junger who served as a much decorated lieutenant and later captain in the 73rd (Hanoverian) Regiment, a German regiment that bore the battle honour ‘Gibraltar’, until the Armistice in November 1918. I cannot recall him using the term ‘siege’, but for certain he describes in detail the shortages, rationing and despair that is the outcome of a protracted blockade and the demands placed upon an army who know their enemy to be better supplied. The minds of the German commanders became dominated by the expedients to which they were forced to resort in order to maintain their operations! Junger was of course writing in the immediate aftermath of the conflict and has no problem of facing the huge losses sustained by the German nation. Even in defeat he gives no indication that the war was a monumental crime against humanity, he regrets only that Germany and her Allies were forced to concede defeat.
The practical effect of this development was that all the techniques and procedures developed over centuries to manoeuvre fighting units of any size into a favourable position for attack or defence were useless. Suddenly, turning the enemies flank, encirclement, pincer movements and so on were issues for the textbook. The armies of both the Allies and the Central Powers were in fixed lines that could only be changed by frontal assault. The axioms commanders had absorbed during their experience that offensive action needs to take place: on ground, with the weapons selected to match the task in hand and at a time of the commander’s choice, became severely limited in their application. The French Army had developed its military ethos on the Napoleonic concept of continuous offensive action. The requirements of trench warfare needed the French High Command to undertake a fundamental reappraisal of how the nation’s army was to fight; if it was done at all, it was not done well. The casualties of the French Army in the early stages of the war had a serious effect on its offensive capability.
In the same way the general principles on which engagements are fought became equally constrained. These principles of: define the objective, concentrate the resources, surprise, timing, control, speed and simplicity suddenly took on a whole new and much more limited meaning when the enemy could see what you were doing and the front line was knee deep in mud and other unpleasant by products of modern warfare. The feature of this new form of battle that was not resolved during the Great War was, control. For the first time army commanders could not see the full extent of the battle and deploy troops accordingly. The set piece scraps of 1914-18 had to be put in motion and soldiers left to get on with it. Communication from the fighting line was to all intents and purposes none existent, field telephones were disrupted by shell and mortar fire and mobile radio sets were still to be invented. Information on the progress of battles relied on the success or otherwise of messages scribbled by front line unit commanders as they progressed with the assigned action and relayed to battalion - and even sometimes to brigade HQs - by messengers (runners) who with no protection made their way back from the battle scene to the destination. It was not unknown for several of these later day ‘Mercuries’ to be killed or wounded before the information eventually reached the destination. Pigeons and dogs were also tried as alternatives, not surprisingly the poor animals proved equally vulnerable to the sustained nastiness of the Western Front.
It was a situation made for confusion, the fog of war suddenly got thicker. Senior commanders knew this, but were impotent. If they left their command posts to see what was going on they became unreachable and were limited to dealing with the troops in the immediate vicinity. Remaining at HQ left them badly informed. In one encounter in 1917 when tanks were deployed the brigade commander decided to lead from the front and took passage in one of the leading tanks. He found the scope of his command role was then limited to kicking the shoulders of his steersman, left shoulder go left, right shoulder go right, he soon had to abandon the experiment and get to position where at least he had a field telephone available.
A subsequent and common criticism by the armchair pundits is that generals sat in safety whilst others took the risk. The diary of the Irish Guards records that three officers acting as brigadier generals were killed in action during the Great War; three brigadier generals from one regiment sounds pretty risky when added to all the other officer losses, allowing for eighty regiments of the pre war army that comes to over 200 brigadier generals as casualties. The sixty divisions of the army in France in 1918 needed just about that number for command responsibilities alone. Richard Holmes in his substantive account of the war cites a figure of ‘more than 300 general officers’ as casualties. (Three major generals were killed by enemy action at the Battle of Loos alone in the spring of 1915.) During the 1939–45 war, three major generals died as a result of enemy action in all theatres of war17, over the five and a half years of the conflict. One only died in North West Europe.) Gordon Corrigan’s book Mud, Blood and Poppycock, quotes almost the same figure for casualties as general officers of all ranks in the Great War; a figure of fifty-seven killed in the Great War is the number commonly used by informed historians. Whilst in the great scheme of casualties from this war, numerically the loss does not seem too large, just recall for a moment, a brigade commander is responsible for a formation of more than 6,200 soldiers of all ranks.
The unpleasant issue that has to be faced is that senior officers should not become casualties. The more senior and experienced an officer the greater the damage to the command structure of the army concerned, British, French or any other nation. A front line soldier can be trained in about four months. A subaltern (second lieutenant) took about the same time to train under the conditions of 1914—18. Subalterns also became casualties in about the same time span, on average, as the men they led, six weeks. A senior officer has taken years to accumulate the knowledge needed by his appointment, the moment an officer of senior rank becomes a casualty the army’s resources of experience, ability and originality are reduced. Given the very limited size of the army prior to 1914 the loss of more than fifty generals and additionally the injury of more than 200 others, would have been a significant blow.
The digression above is meant to remind readers that nothing is as it seems in consideration of the Great War. There are so many issues all with interwoven strands that it is possible for any commentator to make his case, for or against some aspect of the conflict and its conduct and for the argument to have the appearance of reason and logic. I appreciate that I am doing the same thing, so what is the difference; I know I have a partiality and I am admitting it. The acid test of all the opinions comes back to the origins and the outcome of the war. When all the critics have had their say, which nations were invaded and wronged and by whom, and which nations won the military conflict?
Now we can revisit the proposition that Germany was under siege, the condition in which the Allied nations and the Central Powers found themselves when the encounter battles were completed and the battle lines set in the trenches of the Western Front by Christmas 1914. How was the siege to be broken? The Central Powers had to overcome one of their enemies; the question of course is which one to deal with first. In comments earlier in this appreciation the reader probably gathered from the text that Kaiser Wilhelm II did not achieve star status as either a strategist or a notable intellectual. For reasons that we can imply from events Willy went East. Why? Well, put in the simple terms of the appreciation I am undertaking he made one of the most basic of military mistakes; and his commanders let him, His Imperial Majesty, Emperor of Germany and Supreme War Lord, did not know what to do when Plan ‘A’ failed. He and his commanders seemed beguiled by the numerical losses inflicted on the Russian Army as well as the territorial advances achieved by the German and Austro Hungarian Armies. Perhaps also they were looking at the resources of the Ukraine on which they were casting envious eyes. Now the two things Russia had in abundance were territory and manpower, losses of land and manpower could be sustained without affecting either national sovereignty or the war effort. An advance of twenty miles in Russia was probably the equivalent of twenty yards on the Western Front. The maxim that offensive battles must have a worthwhile military objective has been stated elsewhere but it bears repetition as reinforcement of the error into which the German High Command was drawn. Put in simple terms it was the wrong battle. The armies capable of inflicting defeat on the Central Powers were those of Britain and France. Russia for all its size would not have the quality of resources needed to secure victory against the combined German and Austro/Hungarian Armies. The Eastern Front campaigns moreover, were not fought without cost to the armies of the Central Powers, an alliance under siege used valuable and increasingly scarce resources to no military advantage. By such mistakes were the seeds of eventual defeat sown with careless abandon.
The issue became in 1915, by what actions could the siege be broken. Now sieges have been recorded as the centrepiece of some campaigns for as long as armies have been going into battle. The previously mentioned siege by Joshua of the city of Jericho, you will remember, was one of the actions in a war fought to secure the ‘promised land’. By dint of carrying out the instructions of the Almighty to the letter and sending a band of trumpeters to march round outside the city walls blowing the odd fanfare or two at specified intervals, the walls came tumbling down and Joshua conquered Jericho. In reality what was really happening was some crafty excavations going on under the walls of the city. The trumpet band was initially a diversion and then the signal to burn away the timber props in the tunnels, the walls above crumbled then lo and behold the Hebrews won a victory for themselves and their God. There was also a siege if you recall that was broken by the tricky use of a wooden horse. The point being that the walls of the fortress, city, whatever, had to be breached or the gates released for the away team to gain a victory. This was the crux of the problem, the Allies to break in, or, the enemy to break out!
In 1812, just over a century prior to the Great War, our old friend the ‘Sepoy General’, Arthur Wellesley, was taking on the French in Spain and he dealt with two sieges to open the road for his advance into Spain and secure the province of Extremadura. The siege of Badajoz is the one to which our attention should be turned to make a comparison with the task faced by the Allied armies on the Western Front to achieve victory. An exhaustive review of the circumstances is not appropriate; it is the various parallels with circumstances a hundred years later. The political situation in London was far from certain in 1812. Lord Liverpool’s government had been ousted in 1811, the Whigs, parliamentary opposition of the day, did not like the war but liked Napoleon and his ambitions less, thus reluctantly agreeing to the continuation of the efforts of the army and navy to defeat Napoleon. Then to cap it all Lord Liverpool’s successor as Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, was assassinated in 1812 when he was shot in the lobby of the House of Commons by John Bellingham, a deranged and bankrupt business man from St. Neots in Cambridgeshire. Liverpool returned to power with Wellington’s brother as a member of the Cabinet. So far as the campaign was concerned, Wellington had spent a couple of years gathering resources and materials of war, winning, with mixed success, the support of Portuguese and Spanish politicians, generals and the leaders of the irregular armed bands of ‘guerrillas’ and building up the reserves of the British Army on which he would rely during the winters spent protected by the fortifications of ‘Torres Vedras’ close to Lisbon. Time would not wait on Wellington forever, the pressure was on, results were required and in the spring of 1812 that was the outcome. To the Allied forces an advantage, to the French a bloody nose. Cuidad Rodrigo and Badajoz besieged and captured in seven weeks, the road to Madrid was open.
The action to take Badajoz is one to concentrate the mind, a classic of siege warfare and nastiness. A citadel strongly held by experienced troops well supplied and commanded, an essential tactical point in the defence of the French controlled hinterland of Spain, Wellington must capture the fortress. The siege train was deployed, some of it captured from the French, the earthworks advanced by frantic digging, the artillery brought forward and a barrage commenced to open a breach in the walls. Slowly the gap was made, the walls began to crumble, the attacking forces gathered in battle formation with their equipment, ammunition and powder and on 6 April 1812 at 10.00 pm the ‘forlorn hope’ assaulted the breach and fought a bloody, bloody battle. The defenders were well prepared and had exploded mines, thrown ‘chevaux de frise’ and other improvised defence works into the breach whilst using musket and cannon to prevent the attackers advancing into the city. The action at the breach drew in reserves from both sides and the outcome was in the balance. The fortress was lost by the French forces as a consequence of the attacker’s secondary effort. The attack on the walls of the city incorporated a further action into the overall plan. An ‘escalade’, the use of scaling ladders, was made on the defences, well removed from the main point of battle. This second and smaller action was hard fought, but successful, the besieged had committed all their reserves to defending the main point of action; the attackers gained access, brought in a few additional troops and stormed the defenders of the breached walls in their rear. The city fell to Wellington. The defenders were surprised, their deployment unbalanced, the attackers exploited a weakness when the French were without available reserves to use against the second assault, the defenders lost control of the battle, a classic action of its type.
Badajoz was the Great War as it developed, in microcosm. Haig became Commander in Chief in December 1915, succeeding Sir John French at a time when territorial units from Britain had reached France as reinforcements, new contingents were arriving from the Empire and units of Kitchener’s ‘New Army’ were joining the BEF in increasing numbers. A parallel with Wellington’s two winters in the defended lines of Torres Vedras. As the new units were integrated into Britain’s Army in France with all the attendant complications of command and control, supplies and transport, the political situation in London was unsettled. The ‘scandal’ of the shell shortage of 1915 and the failure of the campaign in the Dardanelles brought uncertainty, a perilous condition during a major war. Asquith was elbowed aside; Lloyd George became Prime Minister in 1916. Then the Germans attacked the French fortress of Verdun in February 1916. The Allied leadership was badly off balance in both political and military terms.
By this circuitous route we return to the actual battles and conflicts of the Great War. There has been much time, acres of paper and rivers of ink devoted by historians and commentators to the high points of action in the years 1914—18. Most select for their attention some action, time period or specialised aspect of warfare, such as artillery or tank developments and develop a case to support an explanation for success or failure on arguments of limited scope. This is another difference I make in my appreciation. The Western Front during the Great War should not be broken down into discreet elements as a means to advance a particular opinion. It is an event of such magnitude that it has to be treated as a whole. Every attack, battle, bombardment, patrol and raiding party, all the weapons, devices, machines and equipment, every plan, order, battle drill and training course, all the officers, soldiers, nurses and non combatants were part of an enormous continuum of action for the whole fifty-one months of the conflict. Consider if you will, even for a brief moment, the story told by the battle honours of the regiments who sustained the conflict, look at the details of the honours awarded with their locations and dates defining actions large and small throughout the conflict. Some form part of a larger action, others are ‘stand alone’ events. Essentially the British Army did not rest and as it fought it developed its skills to fight ‘all arms’, co-ordinated actions. For their perseverance and courage the prize of victory came in November 1918.
To illustrate the point made above the list below identifies some but by no means all the major actions fought on the Western Front, following the encounter battles of Mons, Le Cateau, Ypres and the Marne during the late summer and autumn of 1914.
| Date. | Location. | Armies committed. (Attacker named first) | Comment. |
|---|---|---|---|
| March 1915 | Neuve Chapelle. | Brit/Indian v Ger. | N.C. captured. |
| April/May 1915 | 2nd Ypres. | Ger v Brit. | Poison gas used for first time. |
| May 1915 | 2nd Artois. | Fr v Ger. | Small Fr. gains. |
| May 1915 | Aubers Ridge. | Brit v Ger. | |
| May 1915 | Festubert. | Brit/Can v Ger. | |
| Sept 1915 | 3rd Artois. | Fr v Ger. | Small Fr. gains. |
| Sept 1915 | Loos. | Brit v Ger. | Town captured. |
| Feb 1915. | Verdun. | Ger v Fr. | Fortress retained by French. Six month battle. |
| July 1916. | Somme. | Brit & Imperial, and Fr v Ger. | Five month Battle. First use of tanks. |
| April 1917. | Aisne | Fr v Ger. | Attack failed Mutinies in 68 of 112 Fr Divisions. |
| June 1917. | Messines. | Brit v Ger. | 19 mines detonated prior to attack. |
| July 1917. | 3rd Ypres. Passchendale | Brit v Ger. | Five month battle. |
| March 1918. | Spring Offensive. | Ger v Brit/Imperial and French. | Significant advances into allied territory. |
| July/August 1918. | Summer Counter attack by allied armies. | Brit/Imperial, Fr, Bel US v Ger | Advance towards German border. |
| November 1918. | Central Powers sue for an Armistice. | ||
The list on Pg 154 deals only with the high and in some cases low points of the campaign on the Western Front. The British Army, including the contingents provided by the Empire, were never at a loss for something to do, by way of example a regiment such as the Northumberland Fusiliers (5th Foot) were awarded sixty-eight separate battle honours for the continuous commitment to battle on the Western Front during the months and years the war was fought, endured and eventually won.
There were two portions of the campaign in the list above that are crucial to a balanced conclusion on the conduct of the Great War. In 1916 the Germans attempted the capture of the iconic French fortress of Verdun. This attack pre empted the agreement of December 1915 by Britain and France, for an attack on the German lines in Flanders on the River Somme in a joint action where the armies of the two nations were adjacent in the summer of that year, 1916. The second crucial period was the months from April to November of 1917, dealing first with the actions at Verdun and on the Somme. The Germans went on the offensive on 21st February 1916 to capture Verdun. Some historians have put forward that von Falkenheim, recognising that the most dangerous component of the Allied forces in France was the British Army, decided that the way to deal with the situation was to use substantial portions of his armies and reserves to assault a French fortress, geographically well to the south of the British held section of the front line. Such a proposition breaks an essential precept of military planning, the one that abjures all soldiers to ‘keep the plan simple’. The German generals were many things but they were not insane. This is a proposition that cannot be taken seriously, what was serious was the scale and weight of the offensive against the fortress. The defence of Verdun absorbed more and more of the efforts and reserves of the French Army and nation, the army was being eviscerated by its efforts. The politicians in London and the senior British commanders knew it and understood that it was essential to support France. Likewise the Germans kept reinforcing the desperate struggle. The combined total of casualties, French and German, in twenty-one weeks and five days, exceeded 750,000
The offensive on the Somme had to go ahead as planned to relieve the pressure on the French nation and its army. What is more, the battle must be of such weight, consequence and duration that the German Army would have to divide what reserve forces remained to support their defences on the Somme, thus preventing any secondary deployment against the weakened French. Additionally Haig as the the Commander in Chief and his generals had to demonstrate that the rebuilt British Army, Kitchener’s new army, was a force to be taken seriously. The ‘new boy on the block’, had to be treated as an opponent of significance, the cost in casualties and material was high but the strategy succeeded. The French continued the war; the Germans were seriously damaged as a professional army by the simultaneous battles and their own policy of ‘no withdrawal’.
The second of the make or break periods in 1917 was, if anything, even more dangerous to the war aim of the Allies. The French campaign in April under General Nivelle not only failed it was bungled, French casualties, allowing for the extent and duration of the fighting were grievous, the morale of the ‘poliu’18, the French equivalent of Tommy Atkins, went into freefall and there were large scale mutinies in the army of France. Whole battalions and divisions ceased to be effective fighting units, overnight. How much the Germans knew of this is far from clear, eventually of course the Brits had to be let in on the secret and Haig needed to recast his strategic thinking to protect the Allied position on the Western Front. The planned battles by the British Army against tactical objectives had to be intensified and prolonged to occupy the attention of the Germans and so Passchendaele (3rd Ypres) was written into the history of the British Army and the myth of unnecessary slaughter reinforced.
Given the difficulties described above the inevitable question arises, how did the Western Allies secure victory; to this commentator the answer appears to have four components:
1. The German Army was able to transfer a substantial infantry force from the Eastern (Russian) Front during the winter of 1917/18 following the October revolution that overthrew the interim administration of Kerensky, who became head of the Russian government following the spring revolt that deposed the Tsar. The new government formed around the leadership of Lenin’s Communist Party and the associated Soviets withdrew from the war and this was formalised in the treaty of Brest Litovisk in February 1918.
2. The German Army now had significant reserves (the German Army fielded 208 divisions on the Western Front in March 1918 immediately prior to the opening attack on 21st March of ‘Kaiserschlacht’ which proved to be the last German effort to secure victory. (British and French forces amounted to 156 divisions.) The preparations were meticulous, morale was high in the front line and commanders were confident that with the newly devised tactics, using fire and movement tactics with concentrated artillery support, victory was within the grasp of Germany. It needed to be, German resources were by now seriously depleted. The outcome was the launching of the spring offensive on March 1918 aimed principally against the British Third and Fifth Armies positions. The British fell back in the face of the attack, withdrawing in all about forty miles. It was, though, a withdrawal, the defence line maintained its continuity, the enemy did not break through, no major communications centre was captured. It was a close run thing, forcing even Lloyd George to stop politicking and give serious attention to reinforcing the army in France with units that had been retained in Britain in case of invasion.
3. There were two significant military consequences for the German Army as a direct consequence of the failure to win a victory. First the German Army had relinquished some very strong defensive positions and now occupied some very ordinary trenches, just the sort of accommodation to which the British and French Allies had become accustomed from October 1914 onwards. The second issue was the extension of the supply line to the new German line with increasingly scarce supplies to be brought forward over the difficult terrain of the former Somme battlefields.
4. The artillery deployed by the British Army in 1918 was a thing of ‘wonderous’ power for its day. During the preceding months of fighting the Royal Artillery had mastered innovations and expansion for which scant credit is given. The regiment had expanded from the regular army’s 34,073 all ranks to 607,627 in 1918, almost an eighteen fold increase. Artillery pieces per division, of which there were six in 1914, was sixty-eight guns per division, a total of 410 guns; in 1918 the figure had risen to 100 guns per division a total of 6406 guns an increase of more than fifteen times the figure for 1914: infantry formations increased by a factor of twelve from five in 1914 to sixty-one divisions in March 1918. The gunners now understood and used new techniques of indirect fire; counter battery fire, defensive fire tasks, sound ranging and much more. The fire systems now used included creeping barrages, lifting barrages, box barrages, ‘Chinese’ barrages as well as good old fashioned area bombardment; the ammunition was improved and the fuses were reliable. The most significant advance was however that the infantry and the gunners had devised ways and means to coordinate their actions to act as a single battering ram against the siege wall created by the German trench system. The German advance of April and May had brought the enemy forward into a vulnerable position, a ‘killing ground’. Just as the German tactics in the spring had changed under the imperatives of war so the British took the offensive in August 1918 advancing under intense artillery covering fire, against the weakened trench system of the Germans, advancing only as far as the covering fire allowed. Reinforcements passed through as the guns came forward to cover the next stage of the advance and so it continued until the enemy conceded defeat on 11th November 1918.
The combination in the German Army of ‘battle fatigue’ and extended supply lines created a weakness comparable with the ‘escalade’ of Badajoz in 1812; there were no German reserves left. Haig, soldier and commander, read the situation and acted.
The attack launched by the British in August 1918 was the culmination of all the effort, learning, adaptation, reorganisation and experience of four years of war. The British launched an all arms, coordinated offensive at the unintentionally created breech in the German defensive wall. Effectively the German spring campaign had opened the breech in the defences for the Allies to exploit. The August offensive by the armies of Britain, France and the United States combined all the best aspects of military doctrin: surprise, timing, concentration of effort, coordination, reinforcement of success and ‘fighting through’ as the enemy retreated from their positions. The walls of the citadel came tumbling down; the opportunity for victory was seized.
For a moment consider how things might have been; what would have been the outcome if the Germans had prevailed against the French at Verdun in 1916 or after the mutinies in the French Army in 1917 and in either circumstance, France had sued for peace as in 1871. The British, at war with Germany could not continue the war on French territory, Germany had not invaded a scrap of British territory, other allies such as Belgium would fall like autumn leaves. Only a withdrawal to the embattled offshore island on whatever terms could be obtained was feasible. All the effort, casualties, expended wealth and grief would have been in vain. The next time anyone talks of ‘Butcher Haig’ ask the speaker to justify the alternative outcome and listen to the silence.
There certainly were mistakes of tactics; in fifty-one months of fighting it would have been miraculous if none had been made. The strategy pursued by Britain, whatever the dissenting opinions, delivered victory. This is the only perspective from which the decisions and events of the Great War have to be judged.
There are no prizes for noticing that the Allies, French and British, were more often on the attack than the Germans and that calls for some comment. First as a matter of record following the failure of the Schlieffen plan in 1914 the German commander, von Moltke, was replaced by General Erich von Falkenhayn. He regrouped the German Army following the reversals of the initial campaign, then when the spring offensives of 1915 went nowhere he resorted to a policy of attrition in an attempt to dislocate the build up of armies by the Allies that could meet and defeat the German Army in battle. Sounds to me like ‘Plan B3’, ‘don’t do anything and perhaps the problem will go away’. Falkenhayn himself was in due course replaced by the well known double act, Hindenberg and Ludendorff, they, it was soon apparent, did not ‘do comedy’ or it seems to me, original thinking, their recipe was more of the same, again and again.
On a more serious note there are two issues revealed by this policy, first ‘von F’ recognised a siege when he saw one and knew Germany was on the back foot; second, on the positive side, German forces were in occupation of almost all of Belgium and a sizable slice of northern France, with the German Army largely intact, that was about the best negotiating position possible, following the initial failure to accomplish the objectives of ‘Plan Schlieffen’. The Allied nations had to break the siege to win and that would be a formidable task, a costly process both in terms of casualties and material. Alternatively the Allies would have to sue for peace from a position of weakness. The inherent defect of this policy is that the initiative was lost, the German High Command did not dictate the conduct of Allied affairs, they responded to Allied initiatives, large and small. Represented best by the instruction to all German formation commanders that ground must be held to the last man against any attack and should any ground be lost it must be immediately recovered by counter attack. John Terraine, who is a leading authority on the whole war, has recorded that during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, the German forces were committed to more than 320 counter attacks on former front line positions captured by the British attacks. The totals of casualties for the British and German armies for the Somme campaign were very similar.
The policy adopted by the German Army produces double casualties; the first when attacked, the second when the counter attack is made. The effect of this policy was to provide for the Allies a major tactical advantage. The advantage is generated in the following way. When a commander plans an action he manipulates his forces to place his enemy between the ‘hammer’ of his attack and an ‘anvil’ which the enemy is unable to avoid. Conventionally this will be at the level of platoon and company actions and will usually be a barrier formed by machine gun fire from unit resources or obstacles such as trenches or barbed wire. At higher levels of operation, brigade and above, the barriers will be such things as sustained artillery fire, a secondary attack or fortification, a minefield, river, sea or mountainous terrain. The objective is to force the enemy to conform to your plans and dispositions. The policy of ‘no retreat’ adopted by the German High Command from 1915 onwards effectively created the anvil against which their armies in many circumstances took a double dose of casualties for the same action.
The issue for the Allies was that by undertaking the siege of the Central Powers they too had to conform to the dispositions made by the enemy. Their advantage was that there was no overt doctrine that ensured double casualties, commanders were expected to make judgements based on situational needs.
The Great War was, above all, fought by the infantry, a war with artillery dominating the battlefield as support for both attack and defence. The human cost was concentrated in the battalions of the regular army, then the volunteers who made up Kitchener’s armies and later the conscripts, reinforcements enlisted by the state that together combined to deliver final victory. The British Army never again faced such losses and casualties; other nations were not as diligent in the protection of their citizen soldiers, Russia, China and Japan used human life without compunction in the pursuit of victory in years to come. These countries were not democracies though, there was no public reckoning to bring them to account.
One of the enduring ‘myths’ of the Great War is the comment attributed to a member of the German command, perhaps von Falkenhayn, that the British were an army of ‘lions lead by donkeys’. So far as I have been able to establish during my reading no verifiable attribution for this accusation can be been found. There was significant press correspondence on the actual quotation following the publication of Alan Clarke’s historical account of the 1914—18 war. In a letter to the Daily Telegraph of 16 July 1963 a Mr. J. C. Clarke of Birmingham wrote that “despite enlisting the aid of the Librarian of the Imperial War Museum, London and the Library for Contemporary World War Literature in Stuttgart”, he had to report that no trace could be found in these extensive archives of the origins and more significantly the attribution for this prejudiced comment. The author, Alan Clark, failed to reveal his source! No one in their right mind denies that British generals did not make mistakes; equally it is a false premise to suggest that the generals of other armies, allied and enemy, were not capable of error and on the balance of the information adduced were even more culpable.
Inevitably at the conclusion of this section we need to recall Wellington’s maxim, ‘we make war as we must not as we would’. Remember if you will that on the Western Front all the armies took to trench warfare, the British did not invent this method of waging war. At the end of 1914 the Germans had about eighty divisions in the field, the French fifty-five or thereabouts and the British eight, mainly under strength. The French and German armies were not going to imitate the BEF, it was the British who conformed to both the defensive policies and the tactics adopted by the larger armies.
The question for the critics to answer remains as before, remembering that historically God exhibits a predisposition to favour the big battalions, what was the alternative?
Machine Guns and the Great War
A valuable analysis of numerous aspects of the introduction, deployment and tactical development of the machine gun was published in 2009. Paul Cornish, a senior curator at the Imperial War Museum specialising in firearms, does much in a volume of modest dimensions to explain without the use of purple prose the way allied armies used this weapon to significant and increasing effect in their own defence and eventual defeat of the German Army.
(Machine Guns and the Great War, Paul Cornish, Pen and Sword, ISBN 184884047-0)
Dedications
Albert Lucas, MM.
This dedication to Albert Lucas MM includes his companions, officers and men, who mobilised on 4th August 1914 as soldiers of 7th (City of Coventry) Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment (6th Foot); a Territorial battalion forming part of 48th (South Midland) Division. Albert and the division went to France in March 1915, he survived the war, was wounded in 1916, returned to his unit fighting in various actions, was wounded again in October 1917 at 3rd Ypres (Passchendaele) and was awarded the Military Medal. When he was discharged from hospital he did not return to the Western Front and completed his service repairing boots in Newcastle. During the war of 1939 –45 he served in the Home Guard and became lieutenant (QM) of his battalion, part of the war time organisation of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment.
Albert was father of the author’s wife; he died in his eighty-fourth year at our home in Dorridge, Warwickshire in 1976.
Frank Aldington
Frank Aldington enlisted first into the Army Service Corps as a driver (m/t) and at some point in his service he was re-mustered and joined the Rifle Corps. His death is recorded as occurring between 17th and 19thNovember 1917 as the battle of Passchendaele was drawing to its close. He has no known grave. His name though appears on the Tyne Cot memorial, Ypres, Belgium, his parents grave in the churchyard of Knowle, Warwickshire and the memorial in the village church of Packwood a couple of miles away in the countryside he knew so well.
Frank would have been Great Uncle to the author’s wife.