Chapter 6
1916: The Big Battles
In This Chapter
Planning for the Big Push
Struggling for victory in Verdun
Battling for a breakthrough on the Somme
Breaking through in the east
You may be thinking, ‘1916. I’m about halfway through the war here, aren’t I?’ (though, of course, no one at the time knew that!). But as the new year dawned, generals on both sides were thinking along a very different line: they intended 1916 to be the last year of the war.
The Allied powers all agreed that 1915 had been a very bad year. They hadn’t been able to break through the German lines on the Western Front and the Gallipoli campaign had been a complete failure (check out Chapter 9 for details). The fighting had got even more vicious, with both sides making regular use of poison gas. But the year hadn’t been a success for the Germans either: they’d pushed the Russians back but Russia was still in the war, and it was starting to look as if America might enter the war on the Allied side as a consequence of the German U-boat campaign. So both sides went into 1916 determined to find the solution to winning the war before the end of the year. They both reached the same conclusion: attack – and attack big.
Just like 1914 and 1915, however, 1916 ultimately proved to be another disappointing year for both sides. The massive German attack at Verdun turned into a nightmare for both sides; the British-led attack on the Somme was a disaster; the long-awaited showdown between the British and German fleets produced an indecisive battle at Jutland (Chapter 8 has the details); and an offensive by the Russian General Brusilov, which started as a spectacular success, petered out. Even the Americans, who weren’t yet in the war, were disappointed by the way 1916 turned out. In this chapter, you find out why.
BIG Plans: BIG Push
By the time 1916 arrived, both sides felt that the time had come to get serious about winning the war. The Allies and the Central Powers would both have to raise their game and they were under no illusions: the enemy would be doing exactly the same. Both sides were heading, they reckoned, for the showdown. Or, to use the phrase they used at the time, the Big Push.
Woodrow Wilson – desperately seeking solutions
So far, the United States of America had remained firmly out of the war, and so it remained in 1916. But the German U-boat campaign (see Chapter 8) was systematically sinking American merchant ships, and the American public was growing increasingly angry about it. President Woodrow Wilson was keenly observing the war in Europe and considering what role, if any, America should play. He was a strongly idealistic man who didn’t see why the war had to carry on until one side had won completely and felt that it could be possible to get the two sides to agree to some sort of compromise settlement.
The United States was neutral in the war. In fact, many Americans were isolationist: they didn’t want to be entangled in any European wars. Wilson himself wasn’t against taking military action if it proved necessary – he was deeply angered by the German U-boat campaign – but many people in the US didn’t share his feelings and remained opposed to intervention on either side.
To Wilson it seemed that reaching some sort of peace deal in 1916 was a no-brainer. Did the Europeans want to keep losing thousands of their young men? He gave the task of negotiating a settlement to Colonel Edward House, his special adviser and envoy on foreign affairs. Colonel House wrote to the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, and together they worked out peace terms that would be broadly acceptable to the Allies:
- Germany to hand back Alsace-Lorraine to France
- Germany to get some colonial land in Africa or Asia as compensation for losing Alsace-Lorraine
- Russia to be allowed to send its warships through the Dardanelles
Wilson planned to table these proposals at a peace conference. If Germany refused to attend, or if the Germans were so stubborn that the conference broke down, then the United States would declare war. However, his plan came to nothing. The British and French expected to win the war soon, so the British weren’t as committed to the conference idea as Wilson was and the French weren’t interested at all, so the proposal was never put forward to the Germans. In any case, since the Germans wanted land in Europe more than compensation in the colonies, they would almost certainly have turned Wilson’s proposals down.
Later in 1916, Wilson tried again to achieve a negotiated peace. President Theodore Roosevelt had negotiated a peace deal between the Russians and Japanese back in 1905, and Wilson attempted to do the same thing with the warring Europeans. The British and French gave a not-very-precise response. The Germans didn’t respond at all. Wilson was trying to stay neutral, but it was becoming clear that his sympathies lay with the Allies. This was bad news for the Germans but mixed news for the Allies. They wanted to win the war on their terms: they didn’t want to have to accept terms laid down by the American President, which seemed likely if America did come into the war. All the more reason, they thought, to get a quick victory before the United States got involved.
Chantilly – leaders and lace
In December 1915 the Allied leaders met at the spectacular Chateau de Chantilly, home of a famous race track for horses and of the celebrated Chantilly lace. The plans they drew up for 1916 ultimately proved to be full of holes too.
The Allied leaders decided to stage a series of massive co-ordinated attacks on the Central Powers in the spring of 1916, in the west, the east, Italy and Salonika. These offensives would be the biggest yet seen: the leaders agreed that the reason the attacks in 1915 hadn’t worked was because they hadn’t been anything like big enough. The Allies decided that they needed to blast the enemy with the sheer scale of their forces: vast armies in both the east and west and artillery bombardments so big the mind could hardly take it in. The Russians would attack the Austro-Hungarians in the east, and the French and British would hit the Germans near the River Somme in the west. In particular, the Somme attack would be so big, they thought, that the Germans wouldn’t know what had hit them.
In many ways the Chantilly agreement was a very good plan. It was just a pity the Germans had their own ideas.
Falkenhayn rains on the Allies’ parade
While the Allied leaders were meeting in comfort at Chantilly to plan the following year’s campaigns, the German commander, Falkenhayn, was drawing up his own plan for 1916 and it didn’t involve sitting around waiting for the Allies to attack him.
Nineteen fifteen had been a frustrating year for Falkenhayn. He’d had great success against Russia in the east, but he hadn’t broken through in the west, where he reckoned Germany’s real enemies lay (if you’re not sure about all this, see Chapter 5). The Germans hadn’t come up with a solution to the problem of breaking through the trenches of the Western Front any more than the Allies had. So Falkenhayn decided to play for big stakes: to launch a high-profile attack that might not break through the enemy line, but would be so costly in human life it would break a whole enemy country’s will to carry on the war. The enemy country he had in his sights was France. His target: Verdun.
Historians disagree about Falkenhayn’s plans for Verdun. After the battle, Falkenhayn said that he’d wanted to bleed France white, killing as many of the French as possible, so that Verdun would become a sort of mincing machine, crushing the youth of France. That is certainly what happened (though of course it drained the German army too), but was it really what he wanted? After all, the Germans didn’t just try to kill French soldiers: they also tried very hard to break through the French line. Some historians think Falkenhayn was only trying to divert the French from their own planned attack on the German lines at the Somme and to force them to fight on ground of his choosing. Whatever his real intention, Falkenhayn thought the French were bound to fight hard for Verdun for their sense of prestige – and he was right.
A Struggle for Life and Death: The Battle of Verdun
The French were rather proud of their historic tradition of building military fortifications, and in 1916 Verdun – a medieval town, important in French history back to the days of Charlemagne – was defended by a number of huge concrete fortresses. Fortresses looked strong, but the campaigns in Belgium at the start of the war (see Chapter 4) had shown that really heavy artillery could blast even the strongest concrete fortresses to pieces. For this reason, most military commanders now thought the days of great fortresses were over and the French had started pulling their men out of the Verdun forts. At the start of 1916 the whole area was more lightly defended than usual. The local commander appealed to General Joffre for more men, but Joffre was more interested in the big Allied offensive planned for the Somme. He didn’t reckon that a battle was likely at Verdun. He was wrong.
The German assault
First World War offensives usually began with a huge artillery barrage and Verdun was no exception: the Germans fired a million shells at the French positions. The Germans were going to pound the French into the dust.
The Germans’ first targets were the forts that were supposed to protect Verdun but that were more vulnerable than they looked. They opened up with their heavy guns to pound the fortresses to pieces, while German infantry advanced across no-man’s-land towards the French lines. On 25 February 1916 a German patrol was very cautiously approaching the mighty French Fort Douaumont when a German shell exploded nearby and their sergeant was blown into Fort Douaumont’s moat. He decided he might as well have a closer look at the fort, so he found a way in and to his surprise, he found it deserted. He wandered up and down the empty corridors until he eventually stumbled upon a group of French soldiers. They were so surprised to see him that they surrendered the fort there and then!
The fall of Fort Douaumont was a terrible shock to the French – especially the way it fell – and they soon started fighting back. Even so, the Battle of Verdun had started so badly for the French that General Joffre decided to send in a tough new commander to take charge: General Philippe Pétain.
They shall not pass!
Right from the start it was clear that Verdun was going to be much bigger and more fiercely fought than other battles. Not only was it the flagship German offensive for 1916, but Verdun was in a large salient (that is, a bulge) in the French line. This meant the Germans could bombard the French – and their vulnerable forts – from three sides.
Perhaps the main reason that Verdun was destined to be such a huge battle was that it wasn’t really about gaining military advantage: it was a political battle. Militarily, the French would’ve been sensible to let the Germans take Verdun and fall back to a much stronger position in the rear, where the Germans wouldn’t be able to shell them from three sides. But the French hated the idea that the Germans had invaded their country and they didn’t like the idea of giving up another inch of French soil. The French Prime Minister, Aristide Briand, knew that letting the Germans take Verdun would be politically disastrous. It might even spark off a revolution (the French had known military defeat to do this before in their history). So he instructed Pétain to hold Verdun at all costs. Pétain’s battle cry was, ‘Ils ne passeront pas!’ – ‘They shall not pass!’ It might not have made military sense, but it was the only message France’s politicians and generals wanted to hear.
Although the French had determination by the bucketload at Verdun, the Germans seemed to have all the practical advantages. They had a whole railway network that they could use for moving their troops up to the front line. The French, meanwhile, had to use a single road for all their troops, supplies, wounded, messages and everything else they needed. It became known as the ‘Sacred Way’, partly because it was such a vital lifeline to the troops but mainly because so many soldiers followed it to their deaths (see Figure 6-1).
© Imperial War Museums (Q 23760)
Figure 6-1: A dead French soldier lies in the mud next to a German soldier at Verdun.
Pétain operated a system of rotating troops on two-week placements at Verdun, so that just about every unit and every soldier in the French army came up the Sacred Way and served at Verdun at some point. In that way Verdun really did become a sort of national epic: all of France was fighting there and all of France was determined to win.
Bleeding France white
The Battle of Verdun was terrible, probably the worst battle of the war on any front so far. It became an exercise in attrition – fighting so as to kill as many of the enemy as possible. The Germans hurled men and shells at the French, killing thousands. The Germans also used a new type of poison gas: phosgene. They reckoned it was more effective at killing people than the chlorine gas they’d been using so far. Here’s why:
- Chlorine gas made men vomit and gag, so they knew to get their gas masks on a.s.a.p. If you were too slow, you’d probably die, but those who got their gas masks on before they’d breathed in too much chlorine gas were usually all right.
Phosgene gas wasn’t as noticeable as chlorine, so it was less likely to cause coughing or vomiting. That meant men could breathe a lot more of it in before they even realised the gas was in the air. Phosgene could also kill with delayed action – men could die from phosgene poisoning a day or more after a gas attack.
The French certainly inflicted heavy losses on the Germans, but Falkenhayn’s tactics still gave the Germans the upper hand for most of the battle. Historians can’t know how close the French came to losing, though it certainly looked at points as if the Germans were about to break through the French lines. More forts fell to the Germans (though after putting up a huge resistance, unlike Fort Douaumont – see ‘The German assault’, earlier in the chapter), so now the French were determined to take them back, which meant the battle dragged on still further. Casualties on both sides were mounting higher and higher. How long could either side possibly keep the battle going?
The fighting at Verdun was so costly to the French that Joffre had to completely change his war plans for the rest of 1916. The Allies had agreed the previous year to launch a big French and British attack on the German positions along the River Somme (see the earlier section ‘Chantilly – leaders and lace’). With the battle still raging at Verdun, however, it would be impossible for the French to send so many troops for the attack on the Somme. The British would have to take it over.
At the end of June, the British launched their own massive artillery attack on the German lines on the Somme (see ‘Britain’s End of Innocence: The Battle of the Somme’, later in the chapter). Falkenhayn knew this Allied Big Push was coming, so he stopped sending reinforcements to Verdun and started strengthening his defences against the British farther north. The French retook the Verdun forts, and shortly before Christmas the Battle of Verdun finally petered out. It had lasted almost the whole year.
It is impossible to overstate the impact that the horror of Verdun had on the French: it was almost as if the country had been crucified. Not only did the losses severely weaken the French army, but the conditions had been so terrible that at times the French soldiers came close to breaking point. They were pleased that they’d stopped the Germans, but their morale wouldn’t take too much more.
Farewell, Falkenhayn. Hello, Hindenburg!
Falkenhayn had enemies in politics and at court, and he knew that many in the German government would prefer to see Hindenburg in charge. He’d staked a lot on winning at Verdun, and was hoping that a victory in France would see off his critics, but Pétain defeated that plan. Then, in the summer, the Russians launched their own very successful offensive that completely broke through the Austro-Hungarian lines in the east. It looked as if Falkenhayn’s plans had failed and his enemies closed in. On 29 August he bowed to the inevitable and resigned as Chief of the German General Staff. His arch-rival Hindenburg took over.
Britain’s End of Innocence: The Battle of the Somme
To this day, the attack on the Somme, which began on 1 July 1916, remains one of the most controversial battles in British military history. Like Verdun, the Battle of the Somme is important for its symbolism as much as for its military value. People accuse the British generals of this battle of being butchers, throwing away their men’s lives for no gain.
The overall British commander was General Sir Douglas Haig. It was he who agreed to take over responsibility for the Somme offensive when Joffre announced that, thanks to the German attack at Verdun, the French would no longer be able to lead it (see the earlier section, ‘Bleeding France white’). A contingent of French troops still took part in the battle (and did very well), and the Allied lines also included troops from Newfoundland, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, but the bulk of the Allied offensive was to be made up of those keen, excited British volunteers who’d responded to Kitchener’s famous appeal for men back in 1914 (see Chapter 4 for details).
The Big Push begins
Recapturing the spirit of innocent excitement in which British soldiers went off to fight in the First World War isn’t easy nowadays. Many of them thought of war as the sort of thrilling adventure they’d read about in the popular children’s magazine, The Boys’ Own Paper. They firmly believed that Britons were worth more than people of other countries and that all it needed was for plucky British lads to pull together in one ‘Big Push’ and the whole German war machine would come crashing down. The Biggest Push of all was to be the huge British attack on the Somme that, the British soldiers firmly believed, would soon wipe the smile off the Kaiser’s face. From the generals in charge down to the ordinary Tommies in the army, everyone just knew that the battle would be a huge success. The idea that it might not be just didn’t seem possible.
Kitchener’s Army is on its way
By the time of the attack on the Somme, Britain’s army had grown dramatically in numbers as a result of volunteers coming forward in response to Lord Kitchener’s recruitment campaign (see Chapters 4 and 12). Many of these volunteers would still be going through their training in 1915, but by 1916 the men of this New Army, as it was called, were trained and ready to ‘have a crack at the Hun’.
The soldiers of the New Army had tremendous enthusiasm. They came from all social classes, and many of them had enrolled with their friends and colleagues from work in what were known as Pals’ Battalions (you can find more details about them in Chapter 4). Many of them had enjoyed their training, which was like a longer-than-usual gym class at school. Now they were looking forward to showing the Germans, and the world, just what good, stout-hearted Britons could do.
From their generals’ point of view, however, the trouble with the New Army was that it was almost entirely inexperienced. Some professional units were stationed in the battle line, and a couple of experienced French units were on the extreme right wing, but otherwise almost the entire British line consisted of men going into battle for the very first time. That was a major headache for the British high command, because inexperienced troops were notorious for losing discipline on the battlefield: either they got overexcited and started running ahead of their units or, worse, they got scared and panicked. The best way to deal with this problem was to have a balance of old and new units, so the old timers could help steady the nerves of the rookies. But, unfortunately, the attack on the Somme was going to consist almost entirely of rookies. Taking this fact into account called for some very careful planning.
The best laid plans go awry: Heading for disaster
The British commander in charge of planning the attack on the Somme was General Sir Henry Rawlinson. Rawlinson originally wanted to launch a relatively small attack on a narrow front, but Haig insisted on a much bigger assault. It was going to be the biggest attack in the history of the British army.
Haig’s insistence on launching such a huge attack wasn’t necessarily a bad idea (the Russians did exactly the same later in the year and their attack worked very well indeed) but it created problems. It would mean co-ordinating attacks taking place over a very large area, and it also meant that, in order to break through such a long section of the German defences, the Allies would need many more shells and heavy guns than Haig had first realised.
Haig and Rawlinson seemed to have thought of everything for the attack on the Somme:
- Artillery bombardment: The British would flatten the German trenches with a massive artillery bombardment lasting a whole week. No one would be able to survive it: the Germans would all be dead long before the attack came.
- Shrapnel: The artillery would fire thousands of shrapnel shells that would cut the German barbed wire into shreds.
- Mines: The British would explode huge mines under the German lines just as the attack started, to kill any Germans who might have survived the bombardment.
- Walk, don’t run: To guard against New Army troops getting too excited and running ahead, all troops would walk at a steady pace towards the German lines. This would be quite safe because the Germans would all be dead.
What, the British wondered, could possibly go wrong? Well, these things for a start:
- The artillery bombardment was devastating, but it couldn’t destroy the very deepest German dugouts. Moreover, vast though it was (the sound of the big guns – see Figure 6-2 – could be heard as far away as London), it wasn’t big enough for the huge area the Allies were attacking. In addition, because the British were shelling the German trenches, they didn’t aim their shells at the German guns, so they would be ready and waiting to fire at the British as soon as the attack started.
© Imperial War Museums (Q 37)
Figure 6-2: A British 15-inch howitzer ready for action on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Howitzers fired shells high, so they were ideal for bombarding enemy positions.
- Artillery, even firing shrapnel, can’t destroy barbed wire. Shrapnel can tangle up barbed wire even more, however, making it totally impenetrable. On the morning of the attack the British would find the German wire thick and uncut, and they hadn’t prepared any way of dealing with that.
- The massive artillery bombardment was a very good way of announcing to the Germans that the British were about to attack and showing them exactly where. This attack might be a Big Push but it could hardly claim to be a surprise attack!
- The artillery bombardment even told the Germans the exact time of the attack. When the guns stopped, the Germans knew the attack would start soon afterwards, so that was when the Germans ran into position. One of the huge underground mines provided another clue: the British exploded it ten minutes before the attack so it could be filmed for the newsreels. The Germans had ten minutes to get ready.
- When the Germans took to their deepest dugouts during the bombardment, they had their machine guns with them. These machine guns survived the bombardment and would be ready and waiting for the British when the attack came.
The blackest day of the British army
The first day of the Battle of the Somme was a disaster and a tragedy. The British had massively miscalculated: the bombardment hadn’t destroyed the Germans at all. As the British climbed out of their trenches and started to walk towards the German lines, the Germans got their machine guns into position and opened fire. The British, who were walking in long, stretched-out lines, just started falling like flies. The Germans couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing. But they kept firing. The British were being cut down before they got anywhere near the German lines. Opposite the village of Beaumont Hamel, the Newfoundlanders were so keen to get into action they climbed out of their trenches even before they’d reached the British front line. The Germans machine-gunned them even before they made it into no-man’s-land.
Some Allied troops did reach their objectives that day. The British Regulars (that is, the professional soldiers) on the Allied right wing managed to take German trenches, and the French took all their objectives. The South Africans managed to take and hold on to Delville Wood, despite being heavily outgunned by the Germans and suffering appalling casualties. One of the most heroic actions of the day came from the Ulster division, which took a formidable German position called the Schwaben Redoubt. This success could have turned the day into a victory, but the British commanders stuck rigidly to the original plan and didn’t send any reinforcements, so the Germans counter-attacked and took the position back again.
The Allied successes were too small to outweigh the appalling losses the British suffered across the rest of the battlefield. By the end of that first day, the British had suffered 60,000 casualties, including some 20,000 killed. The first day of the Battle of the Somme still remains the blackest day in the history of the British army.
Learning the lessons
Despite the immense tragedy of the first day of the battle, Haig couldn’t call the attack off: the French still desperately needed it to take some of the pressure off them at Verdun. However, some of the follow-up attacks were almost as disastrous as the 1 July attack. Later in July, British and Australian troops attacked farther north, opposite the town of Fromelles, to take the pressure off the Somme and, ideally, break through the German lines (you might be spotting a theme here) and head towards the city of Lille. The attack didn’t break through and didn’t get anywhere near Lille, but it still cost the Australians 5,500 men in just two days.
However, the British did start learning lessons from these disastrous attacks. In September, British troops launched a much more successful attack on the German lines and took the village of Thiepval, one of the original objectives of the 1 July attack. The British were applying some of the lessons they’d learned with so much difficulty in the summer:
- Use artillery to fire a creeping barrage ahead of the men so they can advance safely against the German lines (a creeping barrage was a line of shell burst carefully aimed to stay just ahead of the advancing infantry).
- Give more authority to the officers at the front; don’t make them wait for orders from generals behind the lines.
- Use aircraft to keep commanders informed of how the attack is progressing.
These new tactics proved very successful, and the British would apply them in future battles too.
Fighting a war of attrition
Taking Thiepval was a major success for the British, but it still meant that, three months into the battle, they were only just taking the positions they’d been supposed to seize on the first day. Moreover, as the British took the German positions, the Germans just fell back to stronger positions they’d prepared. Instead of a Big Push that would break the German army, the British were losing thousands of lives just so they could capture a few hundred yards of land. So the generals started talking about the battle in a new way: as a battle of attrition.
If you’ve read ‘A Struggle for Life and Death: The Battle of Verdun’, earlier in the chapter, you’ve met this word attrition before. It was a new idea about how to fight a war. Instead of performing clever feats on the battlefield, outflanking the enemy or surrounding him and cutting him off from his base (you know, the sort of phrases you find in military history books), with attrition the idea was simply to kill as many of the enemy as possible. Inflicting the highest casualty rates usually meant shelling the enemy positions as heavily and unceasingly as possible. So the guns kept firing, until men on both sides began to go mad with the never-ending noise.
Up to a certain level, in wartime people accept heavy losses as the price they have to pay for victory. But at some point the losses get so great that the civilians, the politicians and even the generals start asking whether winning the war is worth losing so many men. When one side loses the will to win, it usually loses. Attrition was about trying to break the enemy’s will to win. But it didn’t work at Verdun and it didn’t work on the Somme either.
Blood and mud
On 15 September 1916 the Germans on the Somme must have thought their worst nightmares had come true. Heading straight towards them were enormous monsters, crushing everything in their path and firing machine guns at the Germans. Two and a half months into the battle, the British desperately needed something to help them gain the upper hand, so they introduced the world to the tank. Unfortunately, they also introduced the world to the mechanical fault: although they helped in the successful attack on Thiepval (see the earlier section, ‘Learning the lessons’ above) most of the tanks broke down and made easy targets for German artillery. The first tank assault in history was a failure, but others would undoubtedly follow.
The idea for tanks came from the caterpillar tracks that American farmers used on their tractors to help them deal with muddy and uneven ground. Winston Churchill took up the idea and commissioned a fleet of what he called ‘land ships’ (he was First Lord of the Admiralty, so he thought in naval terms at this point). The word tanks, as in water tanks, was used to keep the new weapon secret, though it became the word that was eventually used for them. The earliest tanks had machine guns and small cannons at their sides, they sometimes carried large bundles of rods to fill any really deep ditches, and they could reach a top speed – on a good day – of about 7 miles per hour. Although their first outing, on the Somme, was a failure, the British soon learned to use them properly, in force and in full working order, and the Germans were quick to copy with tanks of their own.
By the autumn of 1916 the British and French had moved the German line back about five miles, but they still hadn’t taken the towns like Bapaume and Peronne that they’d originally hoped to re-take on the first day in July, and so the battle continued. And then, in the autumn, it rained. The ground was already so thickly churned up by the shelling that the terrain quickly turned to thick, liquid mud, deep enough to drown in. But still the British kept launching attacks, gaining no more than a few hundred yards here or there, until finally, in November, with snow on the way, the battle petered out. The attacks stopped and the sector finally fell quiet. The Allies had succeeded in pushing the Germans back some 7 miles but at a fearsome cost. By the time the battle ended, the British had lost 400,000 men, the French 200,000 and the Germans at least 500,000.
Some historians argue that the British never really recovered from the shock of the Somme. It wasn’t just that the losses on the first day were so appalling: the British began to lose faith in the leaders and even in the society that had sent them into such a nightmare in the first place. It could even be said that Victorian Britain died on the Somme and a more cynical, less idealistic modern Britain was born there.
In the more immediate term, though, the losses on the Somme showed that the British rethink of their army recruitment and training procedures had been necessary. Recruiting men from the same communities to form Pals’ Battalions (see Chapter 7) might have seemed a good idea at first, but it had a terrible effect on the communities at home when they learned that all their young men had been killed in one disastrous attack. In March 1916 Britain had finally bitten the bullet and introduced conscription for the first time in British history: New Zealand did the same and Australia only just decided against it. The Germans had some rethinking to do, too – the battle had cost them huge numbers of experienced men that they needed to train and lead their new recruits.
The Eastern Front: Hopes Raised, then Dashed
If the Allies’ plans in the west were coming unstuck, the picture looked much more hopeful for them on the Eastern Front. The Russians launched a huge and very successful attack and another country – Romania – joined the Allied side. But the Germans struck back and by the end of the year the situation on the Eastern Front was even worse for the Allies than the situation in the west.
The Russians’ last hurrah
Contrary to all expectations, of all the big attacks planned back in Chantilly for 1916, the only one that achieved all its aims was launched by the Russians (see Figure 4 in the insert section). In June 1916 General Alexei Brusilov (see Figure 6-3) launched a huge attack on the Austro-Hungarian army in the Carpathian Mountains that achieved the seemingly impossible: it broke through the enemy’s trenches and out into the countryside beyond.
Brusilov’s thinking was simple. He knew that most offensives are launched on a narrow front, so as to ‘punch’ through the enemy line, but they fail for two reasons:
- The artillery bombardment before an attack rather gives the game away.
- The enemy can rush fresh reinforcements up to where they’re needed just when the attackers are at their most exhausted.
So Brusilov reasoned that his attack should
- Hit the enemy over a wide area, not a narrow one, so the reinforcements didn’t know where to go.
- Dispense with the preliminary bombardment – just run at the enemy lines.
© Imperial War Museums (Q 54534)
Figure 6-3: General Alexei Brusilov – one of the best generals of the war.
Brusilov’s plan worked brilliantly: it was one of the most successful attacks of the war (the most successful when it was launched). The Austro-Hungarians were left reeling and their humiliation encouraged the different peoples of their empire to start planning to overthrow their Habsburg masters and set up their own states. Unfortunately, the Russian supply system simply couldn’t keep up with Brusilov’s advance and the attack petered out. So in the end, even a successful offensive achieved nothing – and cost both sides about half a million men.
Romania joins in – and gets crushed
The successful Brusilov offensive persuaded Romania to enter the war on the Allied side. The Romanians had their own ‘Alsace-Lorraine’ situation: Hungary had taken over Transylvania and the Romanians wanted it for themselves. Unfortunately for them, the Romanian army simply wasn’t equipped or in any way ready for the storm that descended on them.
In the winter of 1916, the Germans, Austrians, Hungarians and Bulgarians – with Falkenhayn in command (see Figure 6-4), alongside von Mackensen, one of Germany’s most successful generals – attacked Romania from all directions. By 6 December Bucharest, Romania’s capital, fell to the Germans: apart from some sporadic fighting, Romania was out of the war. The one consolation for the Allies was that the British had managed to destroy many of Romania’s oil wells before the Germans and Austro-Hungarians got hold of them.
© Imperial War Museums (Q 24008)
Figure 6-4: General von Falkenhayn on his way to the front line on the Romanian front.