by Peter Hart
Yet there was trouble in the wings for the Russian generals, too. On 14 March the Petrograd Soviet had been induced by an incursion of armed soldiers to pass ‘Order Number One’, a manifesto for military personnel allowing political representation, much expanded individual freedoms and a degree of Soviet control, all of which ran entirely contrary to any concept of military discipline. Although originally only directed to the Petrograd area, the order spread rapidly throughout the services, including the Army at the front. Soon Soviet-style committees were thriving almost everywhere. To try and sort out the continuing shortages of food and basic supplies it was decided to reduce the size of the army by releasing all men over forty-three years old. Even so, desertions continued to rise and soon the Russian Army was a rapidly shrinking force. In these circumstances, Alexeyev admitted that he would have to delay the promised May offensive.
It might be thought that the Germans would launch an offensive on the Eastern Front in order to try and capitalise on the state of chaos within the Russian Army. However, they took a more subtle course of action. A direct military assault ran the risk of triggering the underlying patriotism of the Russian troops; far better to let them tear themselves apart from within. As a result it was decided to facilitate the passage of the Communist-inspired Bolshevik party leader, Vladimir Lenin, in a special sealed train travelling from Switzerland through Germany, Sweden and Finland to Russia where, the Germans hoped, this experienced political agitator would act as a plague bacillus and destroy the host body. On his arrival in April 1917, Lenin duly called for an end to the war and a socialist redistribution of land.
The Provisional Government had continued on its more moderate course, calling for an expanded session of the Duma while reaffirming its intentions to continue the war. Among the most prominent delegates was Alexander Kerensky, an orator of considerable power who was appointed the new Minister of War on 16 May. Kerensky engaged in a well-publicised tour of the front, using all his presentational skills in proselytising for a new offensive, picturing the despotic German regime as the real enemy to long-term peace. A series of co-ordinated attacks on the North, West and South-West Fronts was planned, timed to commence in early July 1917. As Kerensky considered Alekseyev tainted by his former close links to the Tsar, he appointed General Alexei Brusilov as Commander in Chief with responsibility for carrying out the offensives. Wishing to seize the moment, Brusilov was obliged to forego some of the detailed preparations that had made his 1916 offensive so successful. He was at least facing a different opponent, as the death of the elderly Emperor Franz Josef in November 1916 had brought the far more liberal figure of Karl I to the throne of Austria-Hungary. Karl was not impressed with his Chief of General Staff Conrad’s performance in the war so far and in March 1917 replaced him with General Arthur Arz von Straussenburg. By this time, however, the main power in the Central Powers lay with the Germans and von Straussenburg had little independence of action.
After a two-day bombardment, the Second Brusilov Offensive attack began with a flourish, with the attack of the Russian Seventh and Eleventh Armies on the South-West Front. When the infantry went over the top on 1 July, early results were promising, but then everything started to go wrong. The best and most loyal units had been chosen as the assault troops, while the follow-up and reserve formations were far less committed; indeed, when it came to moving forwards, many regiments simply refused. The attack petered out in ignominy and further planned attacks were either cancelled or abandoned. Then a vigorous Austro-Hungarian counter-offensive was launched at Tarnopol in Galicia on 19 July. The Russians broke and retreated in chaos. This disaster triggered the replacement of Brusilov as Commander in Chief by General Lavr Kornilov on 1 August. The Russian Army was falling apart and such attacks as had been carried out only served to cull the few remaining loyalist units still willing actively to prosecute the war. The vast majority of Russian soldiers were now content to be passive observers at best; indeed, by the autumn it was estimated that some two million had deserted.
Behind the front line the ties that bound the Provisional Government and the Soviet councils were beginning to fray. On 15 July a minor revolt by the Bolsheviks at Kronstadt had been relatively easily suppressed and one of the ringleaders, Leon Trotsky, had been arrested, while Lenin had gone into hiding, both men having been denounced as ‘German agents’. Now Kerensky was sufficiently emboldened to try and seize more power, proclaiming himself Prime Minister and then declaring Russia a republic. But he would be hampered terribly in his attempts to gain control of Russia by his continued belief in the prosecution of the war, fearing as he did the abrupt withdrawal of British and French economic subsidies and support if he reneged on the Entente. The Bolsheviks, in sharp contrast, offered an outright opposition to the continuation of war. There was a further cause of tension when Kornilov determined to stamp out political influences within the Army and demanded the restoration of martial law, backed up by the death penalty for a multiplicity of offences including all forms of political agitation within the ranks. These moves triggered a political crisis in Petrograd, where the Soviets were already campaigning for the abolition of the death penalty altogether, while the more right-wing elements within the Provisional Government tended to support the hard-line Kornilov proposals.
It was at this very point that the Germans struck. The port of Riga in Latvia had long been a German objective situated as it was at the mouth of the Dvina River on the Baltic coast. The Russian defences ran along the eastern riverbank but with a substantial bridgehead on the western bank. The river at this point was about 450 yards in width, representing a formidable obstacle to the German Eighth Army, commanded by General Oskar von Hutier. Not only had the Germans amassed some 750 guns and a further 550 heavy mortars for the offensive, but von Hutier also intended to employ the sophisticated barrage techniques devised by his artillery adviser, Lieutenant Colonel Georg Bruchmüller. This brilliant officer had developed a system of short, intense bombardments which left the defending forces stunned and unable to respond when the main assault was launched. A heavy concentration of 75 per cent gas shells mixed with 25 per cent high explosive shells would be directed at the Russian batteries: the aim was not necessarily to destroy, but rather to saturate the area with gas, forcing the Russian gunners to don their gas masks, which vastly reduced their ability to carry out their tasks. Meanwhile, all the identified observation posts, command posts and communication centres would be pounded, with the intention of blinding the Russian commanders and preventing them from reacting as they became isolated from events.
The bombardment would move through distinct phases, like the movements of a musical symphony, culminating in ten minutes of mayhem as all batteries concentrated on pounding the Russian infantry positions, before finally a creeping barrage, the feuerwalze, would roll forward, preceding the infantry into attack. Under von Hutier’s guidance, specialist assault squads had also been trained in stormtrooper tactics, building on the operational experience and experimentation already extant within the German Army, but also taking note of the increasingly sophisticated infantry tactics of the Allies. The stormtroopers were generally armed with light machine guns, flamethrowers and hand grenades, while their tactics emphasised the importance of bypassing centres of resistance to break through to the vital gun batteries and headquarters. Isolated strongpoints could then be dealt with by the heavier weapons brought up by the follow-up troops.
At Riga everything would be complicated by the serious additional obstacle of the river, so the infantry assault units were carefully trained in amphibious operations, using boats to establish bridgeheads that would then allow for the rapid construction of pontoon bridges by specialist engineers. At 04.00 on 1 September the Bruchmüller bombardment began, to devastating effect, as hundreds of thousands of shells were fired in just a few hours. The Russian guns were silenced and the Russian infantry were pounded into submission, abandoning their posts in terror, so that the tricky river crossing which commenced at
08.30 encountered little serious opposition. As the German engineers completed the bridges behind the new bridgehead, the Russians fell back in disarray. The front line would only stabilise some twenty miles north-east of Riga after this, the fourth largest city in Russia, was over-run by the Germans with disturbing ease.
The loss of Riga was a huge blow for the Russians. Kornilov chose to present it not as a result of German military skill, but rather as the consequence of the undermining activities by the Bolshevik conspirators within the ranks. These trenchant and tactlessly expressed views brought him into conflict with Kerensky, who came to believe – with good reason – that Kornilov was about to launch a military counter-revolution. This belief seemed to be confirmed on 10 September, when Kornilov accused the Provisional Government and the Bolsheviks of being nothing more than the tools of the German High Command. This outlandish statement temporarily reunited the Provisional Government and the Soviets, who set up armed militias and prepared to repel a military intervention by Kornilov. In the end Kornilov could not generate sufficient support within the Army for his proposed counter-revolution and he was peremptorily dismissed by Kerensky, who took on the title of Commander in Chief himself and rehabilitated General Mikhail Alekseyev to act as his Chief of General Staff. But the dispute resulted in collateral damage to Kerensky’s reputation as well: denounced by the Bolsheviks to the left and threatened by the conservatives to the right, whether fairly or not, many came to believe that Kerensky was little better than the Tsar he had replaced.
During that autumn, Kerensky’s political position deteriorated still further in conjunction with the inexorable rise in popularity of the Bolsheviks, now seen as the only grouping that had consistently opposed the war, while their promises of the widespread redistribution of land had an obvious attraction to ordinary workers and soldiers. They were also well organised, with the recently released Trotsky engaged in creating a strong armed militia known as the Red Guard. A further problem was the hitherto buried nationalism within the Russian Empire which was beginning to express itself through popular independence movements in the Ukraine and Finland. Then came another sharp jab from the Germans: not enough to trigger a national tide of resistance but just enough to promote war-weariness and despair amidst the Russian ranks. On 12 October the Germans launched Operation Albion, a brilliantly conceived combined operation to seize the Estonian islands at the mouth of the Gulf of Riga, which they successfully completed by 21 October. The Germans were getting threateningly close to Petrograd.
It was then that Lenin and the Bolsheviks finally chose to make their move, breaking all their remaining links with the Provisional Government and launching the second Russian Revolution on 7 November 1917. The thin facade of Kerensky’s government was soon cracked as armed Bolsheviks seized government buildings and grabbed control of communications and key commercial institutions. The Winter Palace, the seat of the Provisional Government, was stormed and most of the delegates were swiftly arrested, although Kerensky himself managed to escape. Kerensky tried to arouse resistance to the Bolsheviks in the Army, but the response was lukewarm at best and the few units that answered his call were unable to over-throw the well-armed and highly motivated Red Guards. By mid-November Moscow too had fallen to the Bolsheviks. Kerensky fled the country, never to return, although he would survive until 1970.
Unsurprisingly, the Allied governments refused to recognise the new Bolshevik government headed by the Soviet of Peoples’ Commissars, fearing that it would make peace with the Germans. They were right to be concerned. The Germans, on the other hand, were delighted. Lenin had no choice but to deliver peace to his supporters, that was at the heart of his mass appeal. Immediate orders were issued encouraging elected representatives from front line units to undertake local negotiations with the Germans and Austro-Hungarians to secure early informal ceasefires, while more formal negotiations began at Brest-Litovsk on 2 December 1917. A provisional armistice was declared on 15 December and the Russian Army immediately began to demobilise en masse. The formal peace negotiations would drag on deep into 1918, dogged by the threat of independence movements and the sheer scale of planned German annexations. Attempts by the Soviet negotiating team led by Trotsky to break off negotiations were punished by a German resumption of military operations against the deserted Russian lines. As a result the Russians were forced to accept even more stringent German demands when peace was finally signed, under duress, on 3 March 1918. The vast expanses of the Ukraine became an independent state, as did Finland and Estonia. Lithuania and Poland were supposed to be independent, too, but in reality were still occupied by German forces. The economic consequences for Russia were exorbitant. At a stroke she lost most of her coal fields and industrial heartlands. There were also extensive concessions of foodstuffs, all of which had to be collected from an already starving populace. The Russians had no choice but to sign, although Lenin and Trotsky consoled themselves in their fervent belief that revolution was also nigh in Germany and that these humiliating concessions were therefore only temporary embarrassments. Shortly afterwards came the formal surrender of Rumania, now totally isolated, under the Treaty of Bucharest signed on 7 May 1918. For the Russians the war with the Central Powers was over, while the civil war between the Red Army and the conservative royalist factions of the White Army was only just beginning.
For the Central Powers the collapse of Russia was an absolute triumph. At a stroke the Austrians had spare divisions to transfer to the Italian Front, where they could hope to finally defeat the Italian Army. For the Germans, victory meant that the best of their battle-hardened Eastern Front divisions could be transferred to the Western Front, where they could make one final attempt to secure victory over the French and the British. Nevertheless, the widespread chaos caused by the punitive provisions of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, coupled with the need to occupy, protect and police their new gains, meant that there were still far more German divisions – almost a million men – retained in the east than had been the case back in 1914.
14
THE SEA WAR, 1917–18
‘Our losses in merchant ships, combined with the losses in neutral merchant ships, may, by the early summer of 1917, have such a serious effect upon the import of food and other necessaries into the Allied countries as to force us into accepting peace terms which the military position on the Continent would not justify.’1
First Sea Lord Admiral Sir John Jellicoe
THEY MAY STILL HAVE RULED THE WAVES outside of the North Sea, but the British were deeply unhappy with the outcome of the Jutland fighting. They had dreamed of a glorious triumph but although they had gained a strategic victory it had been at high cost and there was a nagging feeling that a great opportunity had been missed. This air of depression was augmented by the sense of loss as Kitchener became a belated victim of the Scheer submarine and mine trap intended for the Grand Fleet, when the ship on which he was travelling, the Hampshire, was mined and sunk on the night of 5 June off the coast of Orkney. Kitchener may have lost some of his lustre after two years of war, but he was still a hero of the Empire and he had died while in the care of the Royal Navy. Much of the angst over the Battle of Jutland was caused by unrealistic expectations rather than any real likelihood of destroying the High Seas Fleet during a confused encounter in low visibility with night looming. Nevertheless, there were anguished discussions as to what had gone wrong at Jutland with an undercurrent of murmurings as to who was to blame, centred on a degree of ill-informed criticism of Jellicoe by the acolytes of Beatty. In the event, Jellicoe did not retain his command much longer, as he was required to leave his beloved Grand Fleet to become First Sea Lord at the Admiralty in November 1916. He was replaced as Commander in Chief by Beatty but, interestingly, for all his bravado, Beatty would institute only minor adjustments to the cautious tactics enshrined in Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet Battle Orders.
After the first fleet action in the dreadnought age it is not surprising that there was a great number of technic
al and material considerations for the British to digest. One thing was evident: something had gone wrong with the battlecruisers and a full investigation into their explosive demise was begun, resulting in strict anti-flash precautions being implemented, plus additional armour protection for all those ships still under construction. But urgent improvements were also required in the design of British shells, which had shown a distinct tendency to break up on impact and hence not to cause the anticipated damage. Night fighting may still have been abhorred, but Jutland forced a belated recognition of the necessity for proper training and preparations. There was a general tightening of ship-to-ship identification procedures, coverable searchlights were fitted and night exercises were begun in earnest. The method of handling and disseminating naval intelligence was also improved to avoid the kind of errors which had dogged Jellicoe at Jutland. The British had certainly learnt some valuable lessons from their bitter disappointment.
Despite their protestations of victory the Germans were deeply chastened by some aspects of their Jutland experience. They knew they had done well, but they also knew how close they had come to annihilation. Whatever they would do next, it would not involve another fully fledged fleet confrontation. Scheer did seek to lure the Grand Fleet into a submarine trap again by using battlecruisers to bombard Sunderland on 19 August. The operations were inconclusive as although Jellicoe was once again forewarned of their arrival by Room 40, he adopted a cautious approach, fearing just such a trap as Scheer had laid. In the end there was no confrontation, and when Scheer realised that there had again been a theoretical chance of his being ambushed by the whole Grand Fleet, he lost all further enthusiasm for adventures in the North Sea. If the British would not take risks, then the High Seas Fleet had little to gain and a lot to lose by exposing itself to the possibility of defeat.
