Ludendorff: The English soldiers fight like lions.
Hoffmann: True, but don’t we know that they are lions led by donkeys.
Falkenhayn: Memoirs
“LUDENDORFF” WAS GENERAL ERICH LUDENDORFF, EFFECTIVELY the supreme commander of the German army in 1917–18. “Hoffmann” was General Max Hoffmann, who was an old associate of Ludendorff’s and chief of staff on the Russian front for much of the war. “Falkenhayn” was General Erich von Falkenhayn, the chief of the German General Staff for the first two years of the war. The conversation is quoted at the beginning of The Donkeys, a book published by British military historian Alan Clark in 1961 which ruthlessly dissected and analyzed the shortcomings and failures of the British army’s senior officers in the battles of 1915.
Clark’s book set the fashion for blaming the slaughter of the First World War on arrogant, stupid and callous commanders that has largely dominated popular accounts and dramatizations of the war ever since. Indeed, The Donkeys was the principal inspiration for the satirical musical Oh, What a Lovely War!, which spread the fashion even more widely. (Clark, later a maverick Conservative Member of Parliament and cabinet member under Margaret Thatcher, even took the play’s authors to court in order to obtain proper credit and a share of the royalties.) So it’s a pity, really, that the whole conversation between the German generals that gave Clark his title never happened. Clark simply made it up.
It’s also a pity that the military profession is dismissed as hidebound and unimaginative in its conduct of the First World War, when in fact it responded quite quickly to the unprecedented tactical and strategic problem that had been presented to it by the continuous front. It took only three years, from January 1915 to late 1917, for the combatants to come up with the technologies and the techniques that would ultimately break the trench stalemate and restore mobility to the battlefield, although none of them had yet reached maturity when the war ended twelve months later.
In broad terms, only two things were necessary for an attacking army to achieve breakthroughs: surprise, and the ability to move faster than the defenders. The crux of the problem was that the attacker could never get through the lines of enemy trenches and out into open country before the defender brought up his reserves and created new defences behind them. But the defender wouldn’t bring his reserves up before the battle if the attack came as a complete surprise—and he wouldn’t have time to do so during the battle if the attacker could keep up his speed of advance through the enemy’s defences: as little as one kilometre an hour would probably do it. So various professional officers (and civilian engineers) began casting around for ways to achieve both surprise and speed.
Panic spread like an electric current, passing from man to man along the trench. As the churning tracks reared overhead the bravest men clambered above ground to launch suicidal counter-attacks, hurling grenades onto the tanks’ roofs or shooting and stabbing at any vision slit within reach. They were shot down or crushed, while others threw up their hands in terrified surrender or bolted down the communication trenches towards the second line.
German infantryman’s first encounter with a tank, 1916
No sooner had the obstacle of the trenches suddenly appeared in 1914 than the solution occurred to a British staff officer, Colonel E.D. Swinton of the Royal Engineers. What was needed, obviously, was a vehicle armoured against machine-gun bullets and carrying its own guns, which could roll over shell holes, barbed wire and trenches on caterpillar tracks. Against much opposition from military conservatives, the idea was adopted by Winston Churchill (even though he was then First Lord of the Admiralty, and not in charge of the army at all). The earliest production models of the “landships,” as they were first called, reached the Western Front in the autumn of 1916.
They were huge, primitive and horribly uncomfortable vehicles. The eight-man crew, stripped to their waists in the forty-degree heat, shared the interior with an exposed 105-horsepower Daimler engine. The fumes from the engine and from hot shell cases rolling around on the floor made the atmosphere inside almost unbreathable in combat. There were no springs in the suspension, the noise made voice communications impossible, and it was hard to see hand signals in the semi-darkness, as the only light came through the vision slits.
But the first time the tanks went into battle in really large numbers, at Cambrai in November 1917, where 476 were committed, they enabled the British army to advance ten kilometres in six hours, at a cost of just four thousand dead and wounded. Earlier the same year, at the Second Battle of Ypres, the British had taken three months to advance a similar distance, and they had lost a quarter of a million men doing it. But there was more to the success at Cambrai than just tanks. There was also, for the first time ever on the Western Front, a comprehensive plan for indirect artillery fire to engage the German defences simultaneously through the full depth of the defended zone, all the way back to the furthest reserve positions.
At Cambrai, there was no prolonged bombardment in the old style to destroy the wire and soften the defenders up. Indeed, to preserve secrecy and the possibility of surprise, the one thousand British guns that were deployed on a ten-kilometre front at Cambrai did not open fire, even to observe and adjust the fall of their shells, until the moment of the attack. It was the first large-scale use of “predicted fire,” relying on aerial reconnaissance, accurate mapping of the targets, equally accurate surveying of your own gun positions and ballistic calculations instead of on direct observation. With the help of the tanks, and the 289 aircraft used as artillery spotters, ground-attack aircraft and bombers, the attack almost broke through the German lines completely. Only a very rapid and ferocious German counterattack closed the breach, but that was unlikely to happen every time.
The old trench stalemate was over, for the Germans had just solved the breakthrough problem in the same way, although with less reliance on tanks. (Curiously, the Germans put far less effort into developing tanks than the British and the French, although they did develop the first effective anti-tank rifles.) Beginning with an offensive at Riga on the Russian front in September 1917, a German artillery officer named Colonel Georg Bruchmüller independently came up with the same formula for surprise and rapid penetration: massive amounts of indirect and predicted artillery fire that gave no warning beforehand, and infantry “storm-troops” who were instructed to bypass enemy strongpoints that were still resisting and just keep moving ever deeper into the defended zone, spreading confusion and dismay and ultimately driving the enemy into flight. He gained the nickname “Durchbruchmüller” (“breakthrough”-müller) for his successes, and can claim a significant amount of credit for the offensive that smashed what was left of the Russian army and triggered the Communist coup against the democratic government in St. Petersburg in November 1917.
Three years after the failure of the Schlieffen Plan, the Russian collapse seemed to be giving Germany an unexpected second chance to win the war, and Bruchmüller was promptly moved to the Western Front. His tactics worked well there, too, in the great German offensives of spring 1918, but not so well that the Allied armies collapsed. After a series of major retreats in the spring, the Allies returned to the offensive in mid-1918, using quite similar tactics. The French and British armies were almost as exhausted as the Germans, but freshly arrived American troops took point in the French part of the line and the Canadian Corps and the Australians spearheaded the attacks in the British sector. Like the Germans, they were now able to gain ground consistently with their attacks.
Tanks never did play a decisive role in these battles, but the plans for 1919, had the war continued, called for a force of several thousand tanks supported by aircraft to smash through the enemy’s front, with infantry following closely in armoured personnel carriers. Confronted with an unprecedented military problem, the soldiers of the First World War had solved the trench stalemate about as fast as you could reasonably ask. This begs the question of why anybody should ever be required to solve such a problem, of course, but from a professional point of view they did quite well.