by Norman Stone
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There was a further non-battle at this time, decisive in much the same way. The Tirpitz navy and the British Grand Fleet had become book-ends, one in Bremen and the other in Scapa Flow, at the northern edge of Scotland, both more or less immobilized by threats of mines and submarines. Before the war, that this would happen had been clear enough, and the British had tried to drill it into German heads: both sides wasted enormous amounts of money on ships that would never do anything. On 31 May, in the context of Verdun, the Germans sailed forth, the intention being to destroy the fast British battle-cruisers, which deterred attacks on the cross-Channel troop-traffic or the sending of commerce raiders into the wider ocean. Through intelligence work, the British were not taken by surprise. The two fleets had to move with much caution, for fear of mines and torpedoes, and since the newest British battleships were diesel-powered and had enormous guns, the range was such that the ships hardly even needed to see each other (though the accuracy of shooting was low, and most rounds missed). In a sense this was the same story as on the Western Front – enormous weight but a hopelessly limited capacity of control. The British were dependent on old-fashioned signal flags: it was difficult simply to know what was going on, and the British commander, Jellicoe, behaved with great caution, knowing that, if an action went wrong, he could lose the war in an afternoon. This battle of Jutland lasted only a few hours, with 150 ships on the British side, 100 on the German. Losses were 14 to 11, before the Germans prudently retired. They had obviously had the better of the day, British ships being less well armoured and having fewer watertight bulkheads: but the Germans reckoned that they had had a narrow escape, and that there was no way of eliminating the British naval superiority by fleet action. Their Admiralty now proposed submarines instead, and the High Seas Fleet remained in port, indeed becoming a ‘risk fleet’ in the sense that the German empire itself was at risk, realized two and a half years later, of being overthrown by the resentful and drunken sailors.
The British had not expected to have to produce a land army, and at first the authorities had been overwhelmed by the great numbers of men who volunteered. However, they were now in a position to do something with their ‘new armies’ (as they were called) and the French emergency gave some urgency to this. Chantilly had agreed that there was to be a Franco-British effort, the French, originally, to have taken the lead. The new British commander, Douglas Haig, would have preferred an attack in Flanders, which might at least clear the Belgian coast, but the simple fact was that the French and British armies adjoined around Amiens, the chief place in Picardy, astride the river Somme – an area where poppies grow in profusion. They have become the symbol of the British war dead.
There was no particular strategic significance for an attack on the Somme. True, Haig still imagined that the German line could be breached and cavalry could pour through the gap, but it could have been poured more effectively elsewhere, in so far as it could be poured at all. As the German line solidified in 1914, it had done so along ridges, not substantial in absolute terms but certainly substantial in relative terms, which allowed their guns a greater advantage, and also gave them the benefit of earth less likely to turn into mud, because further from the water-table. The most that Haig could do would be to take those ridges. However, the British war industry was now able to make thousands of guns and millions of shells and so, as in other armies, the general idea was to launch an enormous bombardment, with an attack on twenty miles of front (long enough for the advancing troops not to be enfiladed).
Haig did not trust his men’s capacity, and therefore relied on crushing bombardment. True, for any pre-war soldier, the quantities of mateáriel available seemed enormous, but that was not really the case, given the scale of the task. There were other problems – firstly that a considerable number of the shells were ‘duds’ or fell short, and secondly that the artillery were not adequately trained for their task. One war-winner was the ‘creeping barrage’, a curtain of fire that advanced steadily some fifty yards ahead of the infantry, forcing the defenders to keep their heads well and truly down. However, that meant a degree of communication and control quite beyond the British army’s capacity at this time. Telephone and radio were liable to break down, carrier pigeons were inadequate, and the barrage had to be directed by an observation officer, perched, a very obvious target, in a tree or on a tall building. But the army’s learning curve was in any case still in its early stages. Haig’s artillery expert was moved in at the last minute, expected to share his office with two other men, and allowed no reference manuals, let alone any of the foreign literature on the subject. The British manual gave the game away when it grandly stated that ‘accuracy is a new demand in this war’. But the infantry themselves were also hardly trained, and (as with the French in 1914) were expected only to perform the simplest of tactics – advancing in rigid long lines, officers striding out front. A final problem lay with the ministry of munitions: it still produced shrapnel, which exploded in the air above a defensive position, scattering projectiles, maybe useful for cutting barbed wire but not against the deep dug-outs that the Germans were now constructing as a matter of course. There was not enough high-explosive shell, which exploded on or just after impact (special fuses could delay the explosion for some seconds as the shell buried itself, which did real damage to barbed wire). A further problem was amateurishness in managing trains: a jam, eighteen miles long, between Amiens and Abbeville, was not sorted out until the usual peppery Scotsman arrived and sacked everyone responsible.
The British bombardment began on 24 June, just as the last German effort at Verdun was ebbing away, and went on for a week: the expectation being that everything would be wrecked. But 400 heavy guns and 1,000 field guns were not enough to deal with a defensive system of three miles’ depth and twenty miles’ length. The fact of its start gave the Germans ample warning of an attack, and it churned the front line into mud that was often quite impassable. The Germans on their ridges had dug very deeply, lining the defences with concrete, and these systems were not knocked out at all: the artillery was still active, and there were lines of machine guns to deal with the ‘waves’ of infantry that emerged from the British trenches on 1 July, the officers sometimes kicking footballs to inspire confidence. The names on the war memorials of Eton and Oxford and Cambridge and Edinburgh go on and on (to the credit of New College, Oxford, and Trinity, Cambridge, they include German and Hungarian names). On that day, there were 20,000 British dead, the worst disaster in the whole of British military history. There were 37,000 other casualties, and there was almost no gain at all – on the right, at Mametz, a section of the German front line was taken, but elsewhere, nothing. The French, to the south-east, overran the entire front line and advanced towards the second line, but they employed many more guns per mile of front, and their tactics had been learned in the hard school of Verdun.
The fact was that breakthrough, as imagined by Haig, was not possible, short of utterly crushing artillery weight, and even then there were severe limits. Between early July and November, necessity sometimes imposed itself on Haig, and when it did he confined himself to well-prepared local actions, with a very limited objective. Accordingly, there were small successes now and then. Thus on 14 July there was a well-managed advance on a limited front by the South Africans, but then cavalry came up and got nowhere. In the first phase, in July and August, there were narrow-front, uncoordinated operations attracting enemy gunnery – losses higher than on the first day, and not much more to show for it. There was, it is true, much worry on the German side, because of the strength of British artillery – seven million shells were fired between 2 July and mid September, and German regimental histories reveal the strain of this Materialschlacht. In the middle period of the battle, the Germans were ordered to regain every piece of ground lost, regardless of its tactical value. In this way the defence was costlier to the Germans than it needed to be.
By mid September Haig was prepared for a new effort, and
one involving a new weapon, the tank. It was spectacular enough – a monster of metal, moving on caterpillar tracks and immune from small-arms fire; many inventors claimed credit for it, and H. G. Wells had imagined it. ‘Tank’ had been its code-name when experiments went ahead – in the Admiralty, thanks to Churchill, rather than in the War Office, which had other things on its mind (as did its German equivalent). Tanks developed a certain mythology, but they had their limits. The internal combustion engine had not really developed far enough to take thirty tons of weight, and the tanks easily broke down; they also moved very slowly, and, though the armour was thick, they could be put out of action by a well-aimed shell. In effect, they needed to be combined with other arms, aircraft and infantry. But the real queen of the battlefield remained artillery, and here the British were learning: they understood the importance of the ‘creeping barrage’. In mid September, not seeing how tanks and infantry might cooperate, Haig did not use it, fearing that tanks would be hit, and in their first appearance on the battlefield, tanks did not flourish, while, as ever, cavalry clogged the rear areas, waiting for a breakthrough that never came. But then, in the latter part of September, the creeping bombardment was adopted and part of the German front line was taken. It no longer mattered much, except in the sense that episodes such as this – modest successes – caused
Haig to think that he might gain a great victory if only he kept on. And he kept on, and on: the Somme petering out only in November, in mud and rain. The justification advanced for the whole business was that it had damaged German morale, and the official historians took Haig’s part, even pronouncing that 600,000 Germans had been knocked out, as against 400,000 British and French – a reversal of the usual pattern of losses in an offensive. C. S. Forrester wrote a novel, The General, in an attempt to understand the senior military mind that had made such affairs possible. He remarked that the western-front generals were trying to hammer in a screw and, when it resisted, trying to hammer it harder. Necessity in the event showed how such battles should be fought, but the learning process was long and bloody.
There was only one senior man in this period who had an early understanding of it – a Russian, A. A. Brusilov. He commanded the South-western front against the Austrians. After Lake Narotch, the other front commanders, elderly and nervous, had more or less given up hope: the Germans were unbeatable, they thought. Late in May, appeals came from Italy for some diversionary attack, and these generals shook their heads, on the grounds that their forces did not have the unimaginable amounts of heavy shell that they thought necessary. Brusilov caused still more head-shaking when he volunteered to attack. But he had thought things through.
The problem with this war was that various solutions ruled each other out. If you tried to break through, it meant bringing up an enormous number of men and great quantities of supplies: there would therefore be no surprise, and the huge initial bombardment would make this certain. The enemy would have reserves to hand. Now, sheer weight might indeed produce a breakthrough, in the sense that everything ahead would have been obliterated. The troops would then advance on foot. They would do so at about two miles per hour – less, if fired upon – because each man had to carry what he needed for survival, including an entrenching tool, water, and so on. Meanwhile, the enemy would be constructing a new line, bringing up reserves either by train or by lorry (or, in France, London buses). There would be further attacks by tired men, supported by guns wearisomely hauled forward through the mud by teams of perhaps hungry horses and not registered for the new targets. The result would be as in the French Champagne offensive of September 1915, or the British effort on the Somme. The key therefore must be disruption of the enemy reserves. That would mean attacking in several places at once, so that the reserves would not know where to proceed. It would also mean a short bombardment. Each attack should be launched on a relatively wide front, so that local reserves, too, would be bewildered (and the problem of enfilading fire, as at Verdun, overcome). It was all very bold, and required well-trained troops and officers. Brusilov’s headquarters stood out for their quality – not overburdened by ceremonial, orders short and to the point. His leadership qualities were shown in the care with which the troops managed the preparation – constructing huge underground hiding places, the guns registering unobtrusively. Brusilov had four separate armies and each was to attack.
On the Austro-Hungarian side, all was serenity: Archduke Joseph Ferdinand, commanding the Fourth Army in the northern part of the line, enjoyed himself boating on the river Styr with his cronies, and talked of ‘our formidable positions’ (some of the dug-outs even had glass windows). Surprise was almost total when, on 4 June, Brusilov’s northernmost army began, with a four-hour bombardment. The weather had dried out the Austrian positions, and they crumbled quickly, releasing a huge cloud of dust, which hid the attacking Russians. Austrian local reserves were thrown in, and vanished; troops, cut off, gave up all too easily, and Brusilov had also worked out sensible tactics against such strong points as held out – he simply ignored them, pushing his men forward as far as they could go, to disrupt the enemy command system. By the end of the day, the Austrian Fourth Army was near dissolution – a telegram went off to Vienna saying that it ‘has been captured’. In this situation, reserves should have arrived to seal off the gap. But here again Brusilov had found the answer, because his other armies also attacked. There was a further crisis far to the south, on the Romanian border, where the Austrian Seventh Army (commanded by a good general, Pflanzer-Baltin, and using Hungarian troops, whose loyalty was not in question) found that its retreat, on both sides of the river Pruth, led to muddle, and the central two Russian armies, though not doing as spectacularly as the others, also made respectable progress. Where were the defenders’ reserves to go? They moved first towards the Fourth Army, then the order was countermanded, then it was reinstated – all of this on hot, dusty roads, or very slow-moving trains. In the event they were not thrown in at all, or were thrown in in little packets. Brusilov had advanced sixty miles along the front, and took 350,000 prisoners. Hardly surprisingly, the morale of Austria-Hungary’s Czech and Ruthene soldiery now did indeed make for problems, and it would need stiffening from ruthless Prussian NCOs for them to be overcome. There were demands, now, for an incorporation of the Austro-Hungarian army into the German, as the price for survival, and soon thereafter Hindenburg and Ludendorff were effectively its commanders. The mixing of troops sometimes went down to battalion level, and it would have been very difficult for Austria-Hungary to withdraw from the war with a separate army.
But Brusilov had in any event missed out the final element of his winning formula: knowing when to stop. All of Russia was wild with enthusiasm, and the Allies expected great things. His men were therefore pushed forward, exhausting themselves in the summer heat and facing the usual supply problems, especially with regard to water, as the streams dried up. In the meantime, Austrian troops from the Italian front, and Germans taken from the northern side of the eastern front and even from the threatened western one, arrived and set up a new line close to the railway heads at Kovel and Vladimir Volynsk. Russian cavalry proved, as ever, ineffective, and fodder for it made the supply problem all the worse. Russian attacks were of diminishing effectiveness, and the bulk of Russia’s reserves were on the German part of the line. The Russian generals there were prodded into offensive action, early in July, in the wooded area of Baranowicze, which in 1914 had been the site of the high command. The attack went more or less as other such attacks had gone – frontal charges, after an ineffective and wasteful bombardment – and the generals of course pointed to such results as an excuse for doing nothing further. The reserves were then sent south to Brusilov. The chief element was an entirely new ‘Special Army’, made up mainly of the Imperial Guard’s two infantry and one cavalry corps – the best men in the old army. These were trained, not in modern warfare, but in tactics that would have suited the generation before, and the commander, Bezobrazov, was an elder
ly crony of the Tsar’s, with corps commanders to match. From mid July, at fortnightly intervals, this Guard Army charged across the marshes around the town of Kovel, where a breakthrough might have cut a German lateral railway. Fighting, said the German general involved, von der Marwitz, had come to resemble conditions in the West, and Russian corpses heaped up. Bezobrazov asked for a truce to clear the bodies, and was refused: there could be no greater deterrent to future attacks. They petered out in August.
