by Gwynne Dyer
However, despite Currie’s success in his unending struggle to keep the Canadian Corps together and prevent it from being frittered away in small packets by the British High Command to plug weaknesses in various sectors of the front, he could exercise little control over the way the Corps as a whole was actually used. Nor was there any senior Canadian military voice in Ottawa to give Prime Minister Borden strategic advice from the point of view of Canada’s own interests: during the entire war the chief of staff of the Canadian army was a British officer, Major General Sir Willoughby Gwatkin. As in all Canada’s wars down to the present, the strategic thinking was being done elsewhere.
The victory at Vimy Ridge confirmed Borden’s belief that the Canadian army was the finest of the allied armies and made it even more difficult for him to contemplate reducing the Canadian commitment. However, no army could afford to go on taking such losses unless it received a steady flow of reinforcements, and voluntary enlistments were drying up. The prime minister had also been much affected by his visit to the front, where he was shocked by what he saw, and by the nerve-racking visits he insisted on paying to all the Canadian military hospitals. (He visited fifty-seven during his 1915 trip.)
On the one hand, I was inspired by the astonishing courage with which my fellow-countrymen bore their sufferings, inspired also by the warmth of their reception, by a smile of welcome, by the attempt to rise in their beds to greet me. In many cases it was difficult to restrain my tears when I knew that some poor boy, brave to the very last, could not recover.
On the other hand, the emotion aroused from these visits had an exhausting effect upon one’s nervous strength: and frequently I could not sleep after reflecting upon the scene through which I had passed.
Robert Borden, Memoirs, vol. 2
He felt a tremendous obligation to the troops in this army.… He thought that having “his boys” reinforced was necessary for Canada’s defence, which he regarded as being across the ocean.
On the other hand, he also, being the man he was, felt what a terrible disgrace it would be to Canada and the people of Canada if this wonderful army that had been built up, that had fought at the Somme, at Ypres and Vimy, and so forth, had to be disbanded, in effect, because of the terrible casualties which they had suffered.
Henry Borden (nephew of Robert Borden)
As much as Borden’s solicitude for “his boys,” the deteriorating military situation of the Allies in general was now pushing him very strongly toward conscription. He spent from the middle of February to early May 1917 in England attending the first Imperial War Cabinet meetings. He was appalled by what he learned. The Allies’ situation was growing worse: they might even be losing the war.
Astonishing news of the abdication of Czar and revolution in Russia. Evidently due to dark forces, the Monk Rasputin, the pro-German Court and bureaucratic influences, the meddling of the Empress, the weakness of the Czar, and his inability to realize or comprehend the forces of liberty and democracy working among the people.
Robert Borden, Memoirs, vol. 2
The early optimism that the Russian Revolution would improve matters soon turned to fears that Russia would withdraw from the war. If that happened the whole weight of the German army could be concentrated on the Western Front, and things were bad enough there already. The French offensive that had begun at the same time as Vimy Ridge in the spring of 1917 had pushed their army past the breaking point. One French regiment went to the front making bleating noises like lambs being led to slaughter, and when the offensive collapsed, fifty-four divisions—almost half the French army—mutinied. It took 100,000 courts martial to restore discipline, and even after that the French army seemed to be finished as an offensive weapon, perhaps for years.
Meanwhile, German submarines were sinking a million tons of Allied shipping a month, and the first sea lord, Admiral John Jellicoe, had concluded: “It is impossible for us to go on with the war if losses continue like this.” Only one bright spot loomed on the horizon: the German campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare, by sinking neutral shipping, was pushing the United States into the war on the side of the Allies. (Washington declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917.) But it would take almost a year before American troops reached Europe in large numbers, and meanwhile France, Britain and the colonies had to hold out somehow on the Western Front. There was only one solution, and Lloyd George put it very bluntly to the Imperial War Cabinet on March 20, 1917:
Let us look quite frankly at the position. [Germany] has more men in the field than ever she had.… She is in a very powerful military position.…
The Allies are depending more and more upon the British Empire.… We started with 100,000 men, we now have 3,000,000 in the field.… What is it necessary for us to do in order to achieve the very sublime purpose which we have set before us? The first thing is this: we must get more men.
Lloyd George’s “very sublime purpose,” of course, was to make sure that the British empire won the war—no matter what the cost to Britain or anybody else. By 1917 the first total war had brought a new breed of men to power in Britain, France and Germany: Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau and Erich Ludendorff owed their positions to promises that they would wage the war unrelentingly and uncompromisingly until total victory. In fact, there was probably no choice by 1917: it was not only in Russia that revolution was a danger. After so much sacrifice, any major European government that stopped the fighting short of victory now faced the risk of overthrow by an angry and disillusioned populace: only victory could make them safe. Even in Britain the cabinet was seriously worried about domestic political stability.
In Canada there was no danger of revolution, but the English-speaking majority would not forgive any government that failed to prosecute the war to the utmost, while the French-speaking minority would not forgive any government that resorted to compulsion. Four days after he returned to Ottawa from the Imperial War Cabinet meeting, Borden made his decision: he announced that the government would impose conscription.
EXCURSION 3
BREAKING THE STALEMATE
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 t
he 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.
CHAPTER 4
A COUNTRY DIVIDED
Bullets went through my main spar on the lower starboard wing and before I knew it I was in a steep dive but upside down, hanging onto the cowling openings beside the guns with both hands and my toes pressed up against the toe straps on my rudder bar for all I was worth. My seat belt had too much elasticity and did not hold me fast.
German machine guns were rat-tat-tatting away as the different pilots took turns shooting at me.
I went from 12,000 to 3,000 feet in this position, swearing at the Huns for shooting at me when I was obviously going to crash in a few minutes. I was panicky. At about 3,000 feet I went into heavy cloud, collected my panicked brains, reached up into the cockpit with one hand, caught the spade grip on the joystick, pressed the blip switch cutting the engine and slowly pulled back on the stick, coming out of the cloud right side up with no German pilots around.
I was over the German lines, did not want to be a prisoner, did not know whether the wing would stay together if I put the engine on or not but decided it was the only thing to do.… I put the engine on slowly, the wing held together, and with no one shooting at me from the air I stooged back home, a very thankful and less cocky fighter pilot.
Flight Sub-Lieutenant W.A. Curtis, Toronto, Ontario
THE ONE ASPECT OF THE WAR THAT STILL RETAINED SOME GLAMOUR for Canadians by 1917 was the war in the air. Once aerial warfare really got into high gear in 1916 and the British air services began to expand at a breakneck rate, Canadians flocked to join. Many young men already overseas wanted to escape the impersonal slaughter of the trenches, even if it just meant a lonelier death in a burning airplane a few months later, and many in Canada simply joined for the adventure. They were all slightly crazy.
A French squadron had its airfield not far from our hospital camp [in Macedonia, and] one o
r two of us had struck up an acquaintance with a young pilot of this French squadron.… On one visit … my friend was getting ready for a flight, and asked me if I would like to come along; there was room for one passenger. So I left my heart and courage on the ground and he took the rest of me up into the air.
After the first spasm of fear passed, I found that I liked flying.… My pilot friend may have sensed this, for he … gave me more flying than I expected, heading his machine, a Voisin monoplane, all canvas and string and wooden struts and a 90 hp engine, northwards to where the enemy were. When he indicated that he was going to do a little reconnoitring of the Bulgarian positions, my exhilaration diminished … [but] I have always claimed since that I was the only man in the history of military aviation whose first flight was over enemy territory.
Lester Pearson (who applied to join the Royal Flying Corps as soon as he landed), Mike: Memoirs, vol. 1
Ten of the top twenty-seven aces in the British forces were Canadians, and they included four of the twelve leading aces in the entire war. This extraordinarily high Canadian quotient was partly a reflection of the Canadians’ remarkable enthusiasm for flying: by the time the various British air services were amalgamated into the Royal Air Force on April 1, 1918, there were 22,000 Canadians serving in them. (Indeed, the main reason that a separate Canadian Air Force was not created until the closing months of the war was the British concern that hiving the Canadians off would decimate their own squadrons. “Thirty-five per cent of our total strength in pilots is Canadian,” remonstrated a British officer, Lieutenant Colonel R.C.M. Pink, in May 1918. “Under the Air Force Act every one of these can walk out of the door tomorrow and return to the Canadian service unless this service is definitely part of the Royal Air Force.”) But the pilots themselves mostly didn’t care what flag they saluted: they lived in an intense, closed world where the only thing that counted was the respect of their peers.
