A History of War in 100 Battles

by Richard Overy

  The victory at Tacna did little to end the war, though it confirmed Chilean occupation of the three coastal provinces of Tacna, Tarapacá and Antofagasta and cut Bolivia off from the sea. After two years of frustrating occupation in Lima, fighting a growing Peruvian insurgency, a peace was finally signed at Ancón on 20 October 1883, ceding Tarapacá to Chile. Bolivia signed an indefinite truce with Chile in April 1884, on the assurance that Chilean occupation of Antofagasta would be only temporary. The slaughter experienced in the War of the Pacific prompted the Peruvian writer Manuel Prada to reflect a few years later on the primitive nature of combat: ‘When man leaves behind his atavistic ferociousness, war will be remembered as a prehistoric barbarity…’

  This photograph of the Chilean commander-in-chief, General Manuel Baquedano Gonzalez, was taken in 1891. Gonzalez was a tough and aggressive commander who insisted that his men at the Battle of Tacna charge head-on against the enemy guns.

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  No. 81 BATTLE OF VERDUN

  21 February – 15 December 1916

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  It is difficult to imagine a more horrific battle than that waged for control of a small fortified region to the east of the French town of Verdun during the height of the First World War. Unlike all the battles of earlier ages, this one lasted for almost a year and involved millions of soldiers from both the French and German sides. Yet it was clearly a ‘battle’, with the Germans pushing forward for months against stiff French resistance, then French troops pushing the other way for months until the Germans abandoned the field. To fight in conditions where the death rate was staggeringly high, the ground a mess of rotting bodies, shell fragments and eviscerated countryside, where the supply of food and water was irregular, was to fight with a raw, primal courage dredged from the depths of the human spirit. ‘Hell,’ wrote one French soldier, ‘cannot be this dreadful.’

  The French did not expect this battle. Verdun was surrounded by a network of eighteen defensive forts, but the French high command did not regard it as a critical part of the Western Front and the forts were undermanned and short of heavy artillery. The German army chief-of-staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn, decided to use the Verdun area for a major assault. His aim was to impose such a crippling attrition of French troops that it might push France out of the war. It was the only major German offensive between 1915 and 1918 and its strategic objectives were risky, since the French army had to respond to the challenge while German armies had no particular territorial goal to aim for.

  French troops fighting somewhere near Verdun during the long siege in 1916 use rocks to batter German soldiers in their trenches. The savage hand-to-hand fighting placed a severe strain on the troops of both sides. Almost 300,000 men died at Verdun.

  ‘Operation Gericht’ was planned to open in February 1916 and a rapid victory was expected. Concealing its movement as far as possible, the 140,000 men and 1,400 artillery pieces of the German 5th Army were brought into place. The artillery included giant 420-milimetre (16-inch) siege guns. Storm troopers carrying flamethrowers and clusters of grenades were to follow the bombardment, which was designed to punch holes in the French line and create panic among the defenders.

  The German assault was opposed by the French 2nd Army, which had just two divisions in this sector of the front compared with nine German. Warnings from local French commanders were ignored and only at the last minute did the French commander-in-chief, General Joseph Joffre, allow a limited number of additional troops and guns to strengthen the front. ‘Gericht’ was supposed to open on 12 February but a fierce blizzard forced postponement until the early morning of 21 February, when the huge siege guns began to fire shells over distances of 30 kilometres (20 miles), dropping so far behind the French front that soldiers in the forward forts and trenches did not realize the offensive had started. At 7 a.m. began the fiercest artillery barrage of the war so far. It churned the countryside into mud and waste, buried hundreds of French soldiers alive and left the survivors dazed and disorientated. German infantry stormed forward when the barrage ceased but to their surprise found French soldiers still able to man the surviving artillery and machine guns. In the first two days the German front moved forward up to 3 kilometres (2 miles) but soon met stiffening resistance as French reinforcements were rushed to the scene. Although Fort Douaumont, the most easterly of the major defences, was taken on 25 February without a shot fired, the French line did not collapse, though the army suffered 26,000 casualties in the first few days.

  The weakness of Falkenhayn’s plan was evident not just in the fanatical defence of the line in front of Verdun by the still disorganized and battered French army but in the fact that attrition was a two-way affair. By the end of February the German 5th Army had suffered 25,000 casualties and the further it moved forward, the harder it was to move up supplies by lorry or horse-drawn cart across a landscape of mud and craters.

  On 28 February General Philippe Pétain was made commander of the French army at Verdun. He immediately set out to establish a complex line of defensive fire using machine guns and the famous French 75-milimetre (4-inch) artillery. He saw that supply was critical, as indeed it was, and organized a remarkable single-track supply line between Bar-Le-Duc and Verdun that came to be known as the ‘Voie Sacrée’, the sacred way. This track, together with a single rail track, moved thousands of tons of supplies daily into the maelstrom of battle. The German offensive slowed down and the two sides battled in the mud, driven on by a mixture of desperation and fear as the constant thudding of shells and the staccato rattle of machine-gun fire signalled the death and mutilation of tens of thousands every week.

  How the two armies continued to fight under such conditions is hard to explain, but neither side would give way. They were men, as Henri Barbusse, the writer and front-line soldier put it, ‘carrying their own graves’. Battling in the mud it was difficult to tell friend from foe as uniform colours and insignia were swallowed up in the wet earth. Both sides fought surrounded by the decaying corpses of comrades and the enemy, while rats gorged themselves on the dead. In some encounters, soldiers ran forward over piles of swollen, decomposing bodies, their feet bursting the bloated flesh as they stumbled on. The battles were not entirely suicidal, but survival was simply a matter of luck. Troops were pulled back out of the line after a few weeks to rest, but more were sent in to feed the terrible machinery of death. By the end of the battle three-quarters of all French soldiers had served some time at Verdun.

  In early May, the German army renewed the offensive with no very clear purpose except to impose continuing losses on the army in front of it. In early June, the 600 defenders of Fort Vaux, many of them wounded, were subjected to a horrific bombardment but held firm. Under the command of Major Sylvain Raynal, the garrison retreated to the cellars where it was attacked by flamethrower and toxic smoke. Efforts to relieve the defenders were beaten back and in the early morning of 8 June, crippled by thirst and unable to escape, the defenders surrendered. They had suffered around 100 casualties, the German attackers 2,740. This imbalance of losses says much about the futility of Falkenhayn’s enterprise. Though the German 5th Army pushed forward against fierce counter-attacks through June, the opening of a major offensive on the Eastern Front on 4 June (the Russians’ Brusilov offensive) and the launch of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July by a combined Anglo–French force compelled the German high command to move reserves to stem these new threats. The Verdun offensive came to a halt and in August Falkenhayn was forced to resign. On 19 October it was the turn of the German side to experience devastating artillery fire as the French, determined to avenge the early months of battle, smashed German resistance in turn, using the new tactic of the creeping artillery barrage, with infantry following just behind. When the infantry assault began on 24 October the French recaptured in a day much of the ground it had taken the Germans months to occupy. Fort Douaumont was retaken that day, Fort Vaux on 2 November. By 15 December the battle came to a bitter conclusion, with almost
all the territory captured by the Germans once again in French hands.

  The cost of the battle was colossal. The French lost 156,000 dead and 195,000 wounded. The German side suffered attrition almost as severe, with 142,000 dead or missing and 187,000 other casualties. Like the later Battle of Stalingrad, Verdun has gone down in history as a monument to the courage, endurance and determination of men who were placed in circumstances of almost indescribable horror. ‘All these deaths at once crush the soul,’ wrote Barbusse in his novel Under Fire. ‘But we have a vague idea of the grandeur of these dead. They outdistanced life, and there is something superhuman and perfect in what they did.’

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  No. 82 FIRST DAY OF THE SOMME

  1 July 1916

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  There are few better symbols of desperate courage in the face of war’s futility than the experience of the British troops on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. That day, 1 July 1916, there were 57,470 casualties, 19,240 of them dead. This was the worst day of losses in the history of the British army. Most of the men had been mown down by accurate machine-gun and rifle fire as they slowly made their way, weighed down by 30 kilograms (70 pounds) of equipment, across open ground towards the enemy lines. How soldiers could heave themselves out of their trenches and dugouts, already under a hail of bullets, and march off to their deaths still challenges the modern imagination, not least because a better-executed and more tactically adept assault might have left many of those men still alive at the end of the day.

  The battle that took place north and south of the River Somme, between Gommecourt in the north and Dompierre in the south, was originally part of a general plan by the Allied powers – Britain, France, Russia and Italy – to undertake concerted offensives in 1916 against all enemy fronts. The German attack on Verdun, which began in February 1916, changed the options in the West. Instead of a general Franco–British offensive, the French commander-in-chief, General Joseph Joffre, asked the British army, now commanded by General Douglas Haig, to make an early offensive to relieve the pressure on the French. The plan was agreed in a meeting at Amiens on 31 May. The British 4th and 3rd Armies under Generals Henry Rawlinson and Edmund Allenby, with fourteen divisions and four in reserve, would attack the seven divisions of the German 2nd Army, commanded by General Fritz von Below. They would be supported by a more limited French offensive on the right of the British line using five divisions with six in reserve. The German defence was composed of three trench lines, well embedded in the wooded and hilly countryside. The chief advantage enjoyed by the Allies in this sector was a superiority in air power (386 aircraft compared with the German 129) and in artillery (2,981 guns against 844). Even this would make little difference to the infantry, however. Their task was to capture the bombarded German lines and create the conditions for a possible breakthrough.

  A grim roll-call of the 1st Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers, taken on the afternoon of 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, after the unit had attacked Beaumont Hamel during the morning. The battalion had suffered 163 deaths, including 7 officers, plus 323 wounded or missing.

  In recent years historians have been keen to show that the overall plan for the battle and the tactical instructions given to the front-line troops were considerably sounder than they seemed after the awful bloodletting of the first day. The problem was the gap between plan and reality. The battle began with a seven-day bombardment of the German lines, launching 12,000 tons of explosive. This already invited problems. A high proportion of the British shells were shrapnel, which had little effect on troops dug deep into bunkers, and at least a quarter of the shells proved to be duds. French artillery fire further south proved to be more accurate and effective. Though the front trenches were pulverized in places, the dense barbed wire barricade was not completely cut, nor were the German troops’ firing platforms eliminated. Worse still, a message sent en clair from Rawlinson to his men on the night of the attack wishing them good luck was intercepted by the Germans so that any element of surprise was eliminated.

  The soldiers who were ordered to clamber out of their trenches on the morning of 1 July were not supposed to be mown down in no-man’s land. The expectation was that the artillery barrage, the heaviest British barrage of the war so far, would have so disorientated the enemy that the infantry advance would seize the German trenches without difficulty. The idea was to use artillery to creep ahead of the troops, who would then move on to the next objective before the enemy soldiers had had time to recover. None of this worked except in the south, where the Germans had fewer divisions and guns. Here the British divisions fighting alongside the French 6th Army made greater progress and the ‘creeping barrage’ worked more effectively. The iconic images of British soldiers tramping across the killing-fields come from the main part of the British line, where infantry progress was so slow that the artillery barrage hit areas too far ahead, leaving the German troops plenty of opportunity to emerge from their trenches and foxholes, covered in mud and dirt, to man the machine guns. At 7.30 a.m. on 1 July, shortly after the explosion of massive mines laid below German positions by British engineers, officers blew their whistles to signal the advance. Men clambered over the parapets and into the field of fire.

  The whole northern line of the battle was a disaster. A diversionary attack on Gommecourt in the far north with two divisions suffered appalling casualties and was back in the British lines again two hours later. The attack by the ‘Pals Division’, composed of brigades drawn from a particular city or area, soon became suicidal. The men were instructed to march in line and only to break and run at the enemy 18 metres (60 feet) from the trench. According to all accounts, they kept a remarkable discipline even as the enemy artillery and machine guns swept the fields to leave a litter of shattered bodies and dying men. The attack uphill against the village of Serre proved impossible and the 31st Pals Division lost 3,600 men in the space of a few minutes. As each divisional attack failed, so the next division in line found its expected flank support evaporating, opening it up to a merciless fire. Somehow a handful of men made it through even to the German second trench line, but they were captured or killed in the attempt. In the famous assault on Beaumont Hamel, the 1st Newfoundland Regiment, the only Empire force committed that day, was a reserve force ordered forward from behind the British front line. So cluttered were the trenches that they were forced intothe open and were shot down even before they had left British lines. Somehow the survivors struggled forward across a no-man’s land already piled high with corpses and a handful reached the German trenches. The regiment was obliterated, suffering 91 per cent casualties.

  The disastrous results of the first day on the Somme must have reminded Haig of the day, eighteen years before, when, as a young captain, he had watched the Mahdist forces at Omdurman surge relentlessly towards the British Maxim guns. Half the forces sent in on that first day on the Somme were casualties, and three out of every four officers. The German troops were also given a terrible taste of modern war. The week-long artillery barrage was an experience likely to traumatize the hardiest soldier, and despite the ease with which infantry assaults were blunted, the cumulative effect was to impose more than 40,000 casualties on the German side in the first days of the offensive. The campaign went on for a further 150 days, leaving 620,000 Allied and 465,000 German casualties, a terrible bloodletting for a few kilometres of ground, though the campaign did ease the pressure on Verdun.

  Attrition warfare made terrible demands of the men on both sides. The capacity to absorb that damage and not to crack was testament to a remarkable degree of social discipline and self-sacrifice among men, many of whom, only months before, had been civilians. Despite the claim of some historians that the battle eventually achieved its purpose, the first day of the Somme was, as one eyewitness called it, ‘monotonous, mutual mass murder’. Another eyewitness, the soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon, caught the spirit of brave resignation that animated many soldiers that day in a poem writ
ten on 3 July, shortly before he was wounded: ‘Crouched among thistle tufts I’ve watched the glow/ Of a blurred orange sunset flare and fade;/ And I’m content. To-morrow we must go/To take some curséd Wood…’

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  No. 83 GUADALCANAL

  7 August 1942 – 8 February 1943

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  One of the longest and toughest battles the American army and navy had to fight in the Second World War was the struggle against the Japanese for control of the isolated, jungle-covered island of Guadalcanal in the British Solomon Islands. For months a small American beachhead had to be defended against wave after wave of Japanese attacks by air, sea and land. It was a harsh baptism of fire for the Americans. This was their first experience of combat against a Japanese army that had been fighting in China for years and had conquered Southeast Asia in a matter of weeks.

  The island represented one of the furthest points reached in the violent burst of Japanese expansion that followed the strike on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. The outer perimeter in the southwest Pacific ran through New Guinea and the Solomons. On Guadalcanal the Japanese decided to build an air base and a small port that would allow them to interrupt Allied supplies to Australia and act as a possible launch point for further aggression. The American high command decided to make the island the first point at which to pierce the Japanese perimeter and neutralize the threat to American shipping. A task force was assembled and 19,000 US marines, commanded by Major General Alexander Vandegrift, were disembarked on 7 August 1942 under cover of darkness. After a tough two-day fight they had control of the Japanese airfield at Lunga (renamed Henderson Field) and the small port at Tulagi. This was to prove only the start of a fierce battle that raged on the island for six long months.