The Making of the First World War

by Ian F W Beckett

  Rodzianko, who was in close touch with Ruzsky, now communicated the belief of the Provisional Government that the Tsar must abdicate. On 14 March, too, the imperial family itself had begun to break ranks. The Tsar's brother Michael, his uncle Grand Duke Paul, and his cousin Grand Duke Cyril all signed a declaration recognising the Provisional Government. As the Tsar slept, Alekseev contacted leading commanders, including Grand Duke Nicholas now commanding in the Caucasus, all of whom supported the decision. These replies came in during the morning of 15 March and were presented to Nicholas. He now realised that, without the military's support, he had little alternative. At 1500 hours on 15 March, therefore, and without visible emotion, Nicholas signed a document pre-prepared by Lukomsky. Initially, Nicholas abdicated in favour of his son but, having taken advice from one of his doctors that Aleksei was incurable and likely to die young, nominated his brother Michael, instead. Unaware of events at Pskov, Guchkov and Vasily Shulgin of the Progressists, representing the Provisional Government, arrived in the evening to try and persuade the Tsar to abdicate. Consequently, they oversaw a redraft of the abdication document favouring Michael, which the Tsar signed at 2340 hours, though it was agreed that it would bear the time of 1500 hours. Nicholas again displayed no reaction though he confided to his diary, ‘All around are treason, cowardice and deception.’ A telegram to Alexandra did not even mention the abdication.25

  Whether Nicholas had any legal authority to nominate Michael, who had married a divorced commoner and had been forced as a result to renounce any claim to the throne in 1913, was a moot point. In the discussions with Nicholas, indeed, Guchkov remarked that the Provisional Government had counted on Aleksei's accession ‘having a softening effect on the transfer of power’.26 It was soon clear from the demonstrations outside the Tauride Palace that Michael would be unacceptable in Petrograd. Kerensky pointedly told Michael that the government could not guarantee his safety. Deciding that he could only accept the throne if invited to do so by a proposed constituent assembly, Michael then also renounced the throne at 1800 hours on 16 March. On 21 March Nicholas was arrested at Mogilev, to which he had returned from Pskov. He was moved to Tsarkoe Selo to be reunited with Alexandra next day. The imperial family was transferred to Tobol'sk in August 1917.

  In March it still seemed that Russia would survive as a belligerent. The basic aspirations of workers and peasants alike, as expressed in resolutions of various workers and villagers’ committees, or soviets, which began to spring up in March 1917, were largely economic rather than political. Nationalist aspirations appeared a more serious threat to the state, particularly those emanating from the Baltic States and the Ukraine. In response, the Provisional Government recognised the principle of Polish independence and granted autonomy to Finland. Other reforms were also implemented, including freedom of the press and of association, the disestablishment of the Orthodox Church, the independence of the judiciary, and the replacement of the police with a militia. The new government erred, however, in not pushing land redistribution. Similarly, influenced by the opposition of industrialists to price controls and increased taxes, it mismanaged the economy. A division of authority soon emerged between the government on the one hand, which was backed by the generals, the bureaucrats, industrialists and the Duma, and the soviets on the other. Above all, the Provisional Government committed itself to a new military offensive in order to establish its military and diplomatic credibility with the Entente. It soon ground to a halt, with further disintegration in the army, and paralysing chaos within government.

  The Bolsheviks were the only group advocating peace at any cost, one reason why the German General Staff facilitated Lenin's return to Russia from Switzerland in April 1917. Most of the Bolshevik leadership had been in exile and the overthrow of the Tsar clearly took the party by surprise. The continuation of the war, however, enabled it to begin to gain ground, leading ultimately to its successful coup in Petrograd on 6–7 November 1917. The resulting civil war continued until 1921. Estimates of the deaths in Russia between 1917 and 1921 as a result of the civil war, and concomitant disease and starvation, range between 2.8 million and 6 million.

  In the short term, the democratic credentials of the Provisional Govern-ment benefited the Entente. Not least, this played well in the United States, which joined the war against Germany in April 1917. Initially, too, Russian pledges to its allies suggested continued effort on the Eastern Front: Russia had been rather more responsive to its partners’ military demands and needs since 1914 than Britain and France had been in return. In the medium term, the Provisional Government's collapse, and the peace treaty signed between Lenin and the Germans at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, freed German resources for a new offensive in the west. That provided a severe challenge to the Entente before substantial US forces could arrive in Europe. In the longer term, however, the overthrow of Tsarist Russia had its most dramatic impact with the emergence of communism.

  Communism claimed many victims. Several of those intimately connected with the events of March 1917 ultimately escaped Russia but Protopopov, Ruzsky and Beliaev were executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. Alekseev died of disease while fighting against them that same year. The imperial family was not spared. Grand Duke Paul was executed in January 1919. Michael was killed at Perm on 10 July 1918, supposedly while trying to escape from detention in what was almost certainly an attempt staged by the Bolsheviks themselves. Nicholas and his family were seized by local Bolsheviks at Tobol'sk in April 1918. Moved to Ekaterinburg in May, Nicholas and Alexandra, their five children, the family doctor, the cook, a footman, a maid and the pet dog were all slaughtered on 16/17 July 1918. The remains of all but Aleksei and Maria were discovered in 1979: remains of the two missing bodies were found subsequently in 2007. The remains of Nicholas and his family were reinterred in the St Peter and Paul Cathedral in St Petersburg in July 1998, just across the Neva from Dvortsovaya Square where that revealing photograph was taken eighty-four years previously.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE SHADOW OF THE BOMBER

  The First Gotha Air Raid on London, 13 June 1917

  THERE IS a number of ceramic plaques commemorating the heroism of ordinary Londoners in ‘Postman's Park’ off Aldersgate Street in the City, named for the nearby headquarters of the old General Post Office. Originally conceived by the artist and sculptor G. F. Watts in 1900, the ‘memorial to heroic self-sacrifice’ has 120 spaces for plaques. A total of forty-eight spaces had been filled by 1908. One more was added in June 1919, three in 1930, one in 1931, and the fifty-fourth only in 2009. That added in 1919 remembers Police Constable Alfred Smith ‘who was killed in an air raid while saving the lives of women and girls’. It bears the date of Wednesday, 13 June 1917. Smith was on duty in Central Street in Finsbury when he pushed women and girls from the Debenhams warehouse back inside a building. He closed the door on them just as a bomb exploded outside, killing him instantly. It was one of 72 bombs that fell across central London that day.

  The subsequent coroner's inquiry heard from the widow of thirty-seven-year old Smith that he had gone on duty at 0830 hours. He was feeling unwell but ‘he said that he “wanted to do his duty"’. One of the ‘large number’ of young women testified that they had tried to flee the building when the cry of ‘Bombs’ went up, because it seemed ‘natural’ to do so. It was also alleged that they had run into the street ‘from excitement and curiosity’. Smith's body was found in the porch some 41 feet from where the bomb fell, a doctor suggesting that he would have been able to take shelter ‘if he had not been keeping the young women in’. Having observed to one female witness that ‘I should have thought the best thing to do was to keep under shelter,’ the coroner concluded of Smith that ‘in helping to save lives he sacrificed his own’.1

  London had experienced raids since May 1915 but this was different in being in broad daylight, and by aircraft. Previous raids had been by Zeppelin airships, the threat of which had been largely neutralised by improving air defences and by
the technical deficiencies of the Zeppelins themselves. Only nine Zeppelin raids had actually reached central London, the largest on the night of 13/14 October 1915 involving just three airships. A total of 47 Londoners had been killed on that occasion and, in all, only 181 lives had been lost to date, with a further 504 injured. But the raid on 13 June 1917 by 14 of the new Gotha GIV heavy bombers killed 162 people in London, Essex and Kent, and injured a further 432: two of the dead and eighteen of the injured were from falling shrapnel from anti-aircraft guns. Among the dead were eighteen children from the Upper North Street School in Poplar, sixteen of them from the infant class aged between four and six. All the German aircraft returned safely to their bases despite ninety-two separate sorties by home defence fighter aircraft. Only five of the eleven pilots who got close enough to the Gothas to exchange fire claimed to have caused any damage, and one British air gunner was killed. On 7 July a further 21 Gothas appeared over London, killing another fifty-four people. It was a shocking demonstration of the potential of aerial bombing that shaped public attitudes to the coming of war in Britain and Europe in the 1930s.

  The psychological impact of new weapons may be far greater than their actual physical effect if the sheer novelty induces fear among the public. Fear may then lead to predictions about the future of warfare based on only limited operational experience: precisely this resulted from the Gotha raids. Zeppelins had seemed terrifying enough but the introduction of the Gotha caused near panic, not least around the War Cabinet table. A few months later, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William Robertson, took the British liaison officer at French General Headquarters, Sidney Clive, to a War Cabinet meeting. Clive expressed surprise at the unedifying wrangling. Robertson laconically observed, ‘They were very good today. You should see them after an air raid.’2 The raids led to riotous attacks on supposed German-owned property in the East End. They also persuaded King George V to change his dynastic name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor on 27 July 1917. A whole myth that ‘the bomber always gets through’ developed, partly due to the conclusions of a committee chaired by the South African statesman Jan Smuts in response to the raids. Yet, only 1,413 deaths and 3,408 injuries from air attack occurred in Britain throughout the entire war.

  Technically, aerial attack on non-military targets was prohibited by the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. Since Germany had not signed either, any prohibition was not operative, for it only applied to conflicts between signatories and only Britain, the United States, Belgium and Portugal had signed up to this particular prohibition. In any case, since the wording of the conventions was obscure with regard to aerial warfare, most states assumed bombing military targets would be legitimate once greater accuracy could be achieved. The 1899 Convention had applied to balloons, since Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin's first rigid airship flew for the first time only in July 1900, and the Wright brothers only made the first heavier than air flight in December 1903. A further attempt to codify the rules for aerial warfare in Paris in June 1911 was first adjourned until November, and then put off indefinitely.

  There had been some expectation of air attack since the 1890s, dramatic aerial bombardment being as much a part of pre-war popular literature as invasion or spy stories. Lord Northcliffe, proprietor of the Daily Mail, warned of Britain's vulnerability to air attack from 1906 onwards, while H. G. Wells also predicted aerial warfare in his influential The War in the Air in 1908. In July 1909 Louis Blériot flew across the English Channel, increasing anxieties. R. P. Hearne's Aerial Warfare of the same year then helped precipitate a so-called Zeppelin scare, as did Charles Urban's feature film, The Airship Destroyer. Anxiety increased steadily, climaxing in the appearance of the German passenger airship, Hansa, over Britain in February 1913. Once war broke out, however, the press tended to emphasise initially the difficulties the Zeppelins would encounter from wind and cloud over Britain. By 1914 the Germans had built 11 airships, 10 of them aluminium Zeppelins and one similar wooden Schütte Lanz model. The Deputy Chief of the German Naval Staff, Paul Behncke, urged their immediate use against London, but ten of the airships were army operated and, of these, seven were allocated to support land operations. There were not sufficient airships available, therefore, to undertake bombing raids on Britain until early 1915.

  On 22 September 1914 the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS), which had a wider view of the potential of offensive airpower than the army's Royal Flying Corps (RFC), carried out the first genuine strategic bombing mission against a military target. This was aimed at the Zeppelin sheds at Düsseldorf and Cologne. One aircraft scored a direct hit on a hanger at Düsseldorf but the bomb did not explode. In turn, Zeppelins undertook the first attack on ships at sea on 25 December 1914, ironically intercepting the British naval force launching the first seaborne air attack – by seaplanes – on the Zeppelin sheds at Cuxhaven. The first air raids on civilian targets were those by Zeppelins on French and Belgian Channel ports on 21 August 1914, followed by a raid on Paris on 30 August. Great Yarmouth became the first British town attacked by airship on the night of 19/20 January 1915. The German army-operated Zeppelin LZ 38 then attacked London for the first time on the night of 31 May/1 June 1915, 28 bombs and 91 incendiaries being dropped over East London in accordance with restrictions placed on the operation.

  Behncke certainly believed that aerial attack would have a significant psychological impact on civilian morale in Britain, in much the same way it was also assumed later that unrestricted submarine warfare would have a longer-term impact through the effects of starvation. It suggests perhaps more a calculation as to the general impact of such strategies on civilians than any specific belief about the nature of British society in particular. The Kaiser had resisted authorising an air attack on London, but agreed that the docks might be a legitimate target in February 1915. Similarly, he agreed to the bombing of areas to the east of the Tower of London on 5 May 1915. LZ 38, therefore, was governed by the limitation, 16 Alkham Road in Stoke Newington having the dubious privilege of being the first house in the capital to be hit: the inhabitants fortunately escaped injury though there were seven fatalities as a result of the raid as a whole. German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg finally agreed to attacks on central London on 9 July 1915. He stipulated, however, that they should take place between Saturday afternoon and Monday morning so as to minimise casualties, and that no historic buildings should be bombed. The former restriction took little account of the vagaries of the weather. The Kaiser removed most restrictions on 20 July except that forbidding the targeting of historic buildings, somewhat impracticably given the primitive nature of bombing. Trying deliberately to hit the Admiralty and War Office buildings on 14 October 1915, for example, the German navy's L15 dropped its bombs and incendiaries instead on the theatre district north of the Strand, the Inns of Court and the City. Its commander, Joachim Breithaup, later wrote that the scene was ‘indescribably beautiful – shrapnel bursting all around (though rather uncomfortably near us), our own bombs bursting and the flashes from the anti-aircraft batteries below. On either hand, the other airships, which, like us, were caught in the rays of the searchlights, were visible. And over us the starlit sky! Still, at such a moment one is inclined to be a little insensitive to the beauties of nature and to the feelings of the people below. It is only afterwards that all comes to one's consciousness.’3

  In one sense, the British public had already become aware of the likelihood of coming under attack. The first, brief, use of German unrestricted submarine warfare in 1915 was certainly an indirect means of attacking civilians by trying to starve Britain out. Direct attack, however, had also featured prior to the arrival of the Zeppelins. On 16 December 1914 the German High Seas Fleet bombarded West Hartlepool, Scarborough and Whitby in an attempt to lure the British Grand Fleet into a naval engagement. Over 1,500 shells were fired, causing 127 deaths – the majority in Hartlepool – and forcing thousands to flee temporarily. The youngest victim was six months old and the oldest eighty-six. The event wa
s so unprecedented that it was said over 10,000 visitors went to Scarborough to see the damage. Visiting the town herself over Christmas, Sylvia Pankhurst reported, ‘The big amusement “palaces” on the front were scarred and battered by shell-fire, iron columns twisted and broken, brickwork crumbling, windows gone. Yawning breaches disclosed the pictures and furnishings, riddled and rent by the firing, dimmed and discoloured by blustering winds and spray.’ There was a sense of panic: ‘People could not sleep now; many would not even go to bed. Everyone had a bundle made up in readiness for flight; but how little one could carry in a bundle! One could not afford to move's one's home; and one's living was here in Scarborough.’4 In fact, the Germans had actually opened fire on Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft on 3 November 1914 but at such a distance that few were aware of what had taken place. Naval bombardment of civilian targets was not repeated on a large scale, some twelve incidents taking place over the war as a whole.5 In an emotive phrase that was later to become commonplace in reference to bombing, Churchill sent a message to the town's mayor on 20 December referring to the ‘baby killers’ of Scarborough.6