by G. J. Meyer
Air combat followed as the fliers on both sides began trying to knock each other out of the sky. French and German pilots (often enlisted men at first—mere chauffeurs) went aloft carrying passengers who fired at each other with rifles and shotguns. Somebody got the idea of mounting a Hotchkiss light machine gun at the front of France’s Morane Saulnier monoplane, which with a top speed of a hundred miles per hour was the best of the war’s first aircraft. Another innovation soon followed: steel plating on the back side of the propeller blades, to spare pilots the indignity of shooting themselves down. So armed, the French began destroying their adversaries in numbers that mattered. The Germans, who until then had been spending most of their aviation budget on massive lighter-than-air Zeppelin dirigibles, again had to scramble to catch up. There began a game of technological leapfrog that continued through the war, with first one side and then the other gaining temporary advantage. The rudimentary technology of the time made the game a fast one. As the British aviation pioneer T.O.M. Sopwith said, “We literally thought of and designed and flew the airplanes in a space of about six or eight weeks.”
A major advance came in the form of a new German biplane (a term indicating that it had two main wings, one above the other) designed by the Dutch engineer Anthony Fokker. In most respects this Fokker Eindecker, introduced in 1915, was little more than a copy of a captured Morane Saulnier. But in one respect it was revolutionary: Fokker equipped it with an interrupter gear (an idea he got from a Swiss engineer) that permitted its two machine guns to fire through the propeller without hitting the blades. This innovation completed the integration of piloting and killing. It turned airplanes into true weapons—flying gun platforms built for attack. With it the Germans dominated the air by late 1915. They were able to establish a virtually impenetrable umbrella over Verdun, keeping their preparations for the attack there a secret from the French. Even so, the Eindeckers needed half an hour to climb to ten thousand feet and had a top speed of only eighty-seven miles per hour.
The French and British regained the lead with three new and distinctly superior models: the Nieuport and Spad biplanes, and a Sopwith triplane that was a marvel of climbing power and maneuverability. The Entente armies assembled hundreds of these aircraft in preparation for their offensive on the Somme. The Germans, inevitably, responded with even more potent new aircraft that were ready for service by the fall of 1916. The race would go on from there.
The war’s great fighter aces have since become romantic legends—the Red Baron and his kind, knights on flying horses—but there was more to air combat than chivalry. Before the war was a month old, the Germans were dropping bombs on Antwerp from their Zeppelins. In 1915 Zeppelin raids over southern England became almost commonplace, killing and wounding hundreds. As airplanes became more capable, they also became specialized: scout planes, fighters, and aircraft equipped for strafing troops on the ground. The vulnerable Zeppelins were replaced with increasingly heavy bombers, making the war terrible in a wider variety of ways. February 1916 brought the first sinking of a ship, a British merchantman, by bombardment from the air. In July a French raid on the city of Karlsruhe inadvertently bombed a circus, killing 154 children.
The tank, unlike the airplane, came out of nowhere. In fact there was no such thing as a tank when the war began; only a few obscure visionaries had even imagined such a weapon, and none might have been built by the war’s end if not for Winston Churchill. As early as 1914, impressed by the effectiveness of armed and armored cars in the early weeks of fighting (they would become useless as soon as the war of mobility ended), Churchill was asking the naval designers at the Admiralty to see if they could turn such vehicles into some kind of “trench-spanning” machine. Such a machine proved impracticable, there being no way to drive wheeled vehicles across trenches, but by January 1915 Churchill had found a different approach. Convinced that human flesh and bone were never going to be a match for artillery and machine guns, and encouraged by military engineers, Churchill sent a memorandum to Prime Minister Asquith proposing the development of “steam tractors with small armored shelters, in which men and machine guns could be placed, which would be bulletproof” and would “enable trenches to be crossed quite easily.” Asquith passed the suggestion along to Kitchener, who was not enthusiastic but ordered that design work should begin. After another month, dissatisfied with the pace at which the war ministry was proceeding, Churchill assembled his own design team and funded it out of the Royal Navy’s budget. By the time he was replaced as First Lord of the Admiralty, contracts had been let for the construction of eighteen prototype “landships.”
The project slowed down drastically after Churchill was dismissed, and it probably would have died if he had not intervened to persuade his successor of its potential. In January 1916 a first working prototype—it would be nicknamed “Mother”—was ready for testing. It was a mother indeed, thirty-three feet long and eight feet wide and high. It carried a crew of eight with two machine guns and two cannon firing six-pound shells. It weighed twenty-eight tons and under optimum conditions could achieve a top speed of four miles per hour. It moved not on wheels but on caterpillar-type steel tracks capable of crossing trenches and crushing any barbed-wire barricades in its path.
As the first of the new vehicles came off the production line, the project was shrouded in deepest secrecy. Anticipating the questions that would be provoked by huge, strangely shaped objects concealed under tarpaulins, officials at the war office decided to say that they were special water carriers—mobile tanks—bound for Russia. That was the name that stuck. Among the names rejected were landship (too descriptive), reservoir, and cistern.
In the summer of 1916, when Churchill learned that Britain’s (and the world’s) first forty-nine tanks were being sent to France for use on the Somme, he was horrified. He thought it essential that the new weapon be kept out of action and unknown to the Germans until sufficient numbers could be assembled to produce a decisive breakthrough. He appealed first to Lloyd George and then to the prime minister. Asquith agreed that delay seemed advisable, but when he suggested it to Haig, he was politely ignored.
Chapter 22
Maelstrom
“These were the happiest days of my life, and my joy was shared by all of Russia.”
—GENERAL ALEXEI BRUSILOV
By the end of April casualties at Verdun totaled one hundred and thirty-three thousand for the French, one hundred and twenty thousand for the Germans. And the slaughter continued. The Germans were still doing most of the attacking, forcing their way onto the slopes of Le Mort Homme, taking part of the crest at one point but unable to hold on. General Max von Gallwitz, a skillful artillery commander and a veteran of the conquest of Serbia, arrived to take command on the west bank. Upon getting a look at the situation he declared that Le Mort Homme must indeed be taken, but that it never would be until the guns protecting it were cleared from an adjacent ridge called Côte 304. To that purpose he assembled more than five hundred heavy guns along a single mile of front, an even greater concentration of firepower than the Germans had mustered for their earlier attacks, and on May 3 he opened fire. The idea was the usual one—to blow the French away, so that the infantry could then move forward almost unopposed. As usual it didn’t quite work.
Gallwitz’s barrage continued through all the first day and all of the night that followed and another entire day beyond that. But though it reduced thousands of the defenders to body parts and buried many others alive, and though neither food nor water could be got through to the French troops cowering in the depths of their ruined bunkers and trenches, those troops were not annihilated and the ones who survived did not run. (The mystery of how men could hold their ground under such circumstances is explained in part by what awaited them in the rear: their own sergeants and junior officers, ready to shoot them on the spot if they tried to escape.)
The Germans captured Côte 304 in the end, taking possession of ten thousand rotting French corpses with it (the victors
got double rations of tobacco as an escape from the smell), but they had needed three terrible days of fighting at close quarters to do so. They had broken off another important piece of the Verdun defensive system, taking another step toward gaining control of the west bank, but they had paid dearly for their success. What was worse, Le Mort Homme still stood unconquered in front of them, its guns still in action. But again the attackers were ordered to push on.
The Germans’ nightmare deepened on May 8, before anyone had an opportunity to celebrate the conquest of Côte 304, when Fort Douaumont suddenly blew up. No one lived to explain what had happened, but there had been complaints that ammunition was not being handled properly as it was moved into and out of the fort. The prevailing theory, based on evidence collected after the disaster, is that it began when a group of Bavarian soldiers sheltering inside Douaumont opened a hand grenade to get a few thimblefuls of explosive for use in heating coffee. The resulting fire is believed to have ignited a cache of grenades, which in turn set off some flamethrower fuel tanks, which in turn started a chain reaction among stacked artillery shells. Whatever the cause, some six hundred and fifty German soldiers were killed. The few survivors, emerging from the depths of the fort with faces blackened by the blast, were immediately shot by German troops who had no idea what had happened inside and assumed that the fort had been overrun by French colonial units from Africa.
Spirits were not high, understandably, when the staff of the German Fifth Army met at the crown prince’s headquarters on May 13 to discuss an east bank offensive that had been repeatedly delayed because of weather, the disruptive though otherwise unsuccessful attacks being launched repeatedly by Nivelle and Mangin, and ongoing artillery fire from Le Mort Homme. The crown prince, having given up on Verdun, was urging both Falkenhayn and the kaiser to call off not only the new offensive but the entire campaign. In doing so he was putting himself at odds with Knobelsdorf, who before the war had been his tutor in tactics, since August 1914 had been his chief of staff and mentor, and remained convinced that Verdun could be taken. He and Falkenhayn were encouraged by the false belief (mirrored by equally wrong French estimates of German casualties) that their enemies had by now lost well over two hundred thousand men.
A surprising unanimity emerged. Even Knobelsdorf conceded that enough was enough. He promised, in fact, to visit Falkenhayn that same day and try to persuade him to bring Verdun to an end. What happened next has never been explained. When he reached Falkenhayn’s headquarters, Knobelsdorf did the opposite of what he had promised. He told Falkenhayn that the French guns at Le Mort Homme would soon be silenced and that the east bank offensive could then be safely resumed. Getting agreement from Falkenhayn, who by now had staked his place in history on Verdun, is not likely to have been difficult. No doubt Falkenhayn was mindful of the fact that the leading pessimists—the crown prince, Gallwitz, and others—all had opposed his elevation to commander in chief after the fall of Moltke. The crown prince, when he learned of Knobelsdorf’s betrayal, could do nothing. Though heir to the imperial throne, he had been treated with disdain by the kaiser all his life. Even now, after a year and a half as an increasingly competent and serious-minded army commander, during which time he had gradually acquired the confidence to stand up to the iron-willed Knobelsdorf, he was kept at a distance from his father.
And so the carnage would continue. It would be accelerated, in fact, as Knobelsdorf hurried with Falkenhayn’s encouragement to complete the capture of Verdun before Joffre and the British were ready with the offensive that they were obviously preparing along the Somme. The crown prince could only complain that “if Main Headquarters order it, I must not disobey, but I will not do it on my own responsibility.”
The hopes of the optimists were about to be upended by the man who supposedly was their one great military ally, the Austrian Conrad. In the course of his career Conrad had been obliged to watch the new Kingdom of Italy encroach on the Austro-Hungarian territories to its north, and he had developed a nearly pathological hatred and contempt for the Italians. (“Dago dogs,” he called them.) Since late 1915 he had been badgering Falkenhayn for help in mounting an offensive southward out of the Alps, a campaign that would destroy Italy’s ability to wage war and restore Vienna to possession of the north Italian plain. Falkenhayn, his armies outnumbered on every front and his attention focused on Verdun, had brushed these appeals aside. He pointed out that while conquests in Italy might bring pleasure to Vienna, they could contribute little to the winning of the war. He had done so with unnecessary brusqueness. An outwardly cold figure, Falkenhayn had no close friends even among his fellow Junkers, and he disliked and distrusted Conrad. He demolished whatever possibility remained of a constructive working relationship with Conrad by keeping him in the dark. The Verdun offensive had come as more of a surprise to the Austrians than to the French. And though Falkenhayn’s secretiveness had not been directed exclusively at Conrad (for valid reasons he had drawn such a curtain of security over his preparations that not even the commanders of the German armies west and south of Verdun knew exactly what was coming), the Austrian was deeply offended. He decided not only to proceed with an Italian campaign but to tell the Germans nothing of what he was doing.
His plan was to attack not at the Isonzo, already the scene of four battles and still the place where the Italians were concentrating most of their forces, but farther west, in the mountainous Trentino region northeast of Lake Garda. He began by sending more than a dozen of his best remaining divisions to an assembly point just north of the passes leading into Italy. From there they would be able to descend upon the farmlands and cities of Lombardy, lands and cities that in Conrad’s view rightfully belonged to Vienna. Once in open country, the Austrians could wheel around and take the Italians on the Isonzo in the rear. Not for the first time and not for the last, Conrad smelled triumph. Six of the divisions committed to the Trentino were taken from Galicia, where he saw no possibility of trouble. The Russians had been thoroughly thrashed in Galicia in late 1915 (though mainly by German troops that Falkenhayn had since sent to Verdun), and their numerical advantage was smaller there than at any other point on the Eastern Front. If Conrad was even aware of the appointment of Alexei Brusilov as commander of Russia’s southwestern front, he could not have regarded it as significant. He secured pro forma approval of his plan from the Hapsburg archduke who was his official commander in chief and assumed personal command of operations in Italy.
Conrad consistently asked his troops to do things that were beyond their capacity. If he was the strategic genius that some historians have called him, he was also less than a realist. He would venture forth not just to meet and fight his enemies but to crush them, to destroy them even when he was terribly outnumbered. And there was a pattern to his campaigns. They would begin thrillingly, with spectacular gains, and they never failed to end in disaster except when the Germans came to his rescue. Their cumulative result, by early 1916, was the loss of so many troops (more than two million casualties in 1915 alone, including seven hundred and seventy thousand men taken prisoner) that the Austro-Hungarian military was at the end of its ability to mount independent operations. Perhaps this accounts for Conrad’s eagerness to invade Italy. Perhaps even he had lost confidence in his ability to accomplish anything on the more challenging Russian front.
In taking charge of the Trentino campaign, Conrad did not move his headquarters to or even near the places where the invasion force was being assembled. He did not even pay them a visit. He remained in Silesia, six hundred miles to the north, where he had happily settled with a new wife and all the comforts of prewar aristocratic life. He perfected his isolation by keeping all communications on a one-way basis, and by sending out detailed instructions as to exactly what the Austrian divisions in the Trentino were to do, and when and where, while ignoring questions and suggestions. He drew marks on maps showing which objectives each division was supposed to reach each day, and as far as he was concerned that was that. If followin
g his instructions required the troops to climb through deep snow over a mountain crest when they could have reached the same objective by moving downhill through a valley, that too was that. No discussion was wanted or tolerated. When the chief of staff of the army group being formed in the Trentino requested permission to travel to Silesia and confer with Conrad, he was refused.
Conrad had wanted his offensive to begin almost immediately, in April, but on this point he had to bend to reality. Neither his troops nor their supply trains could get into position that quickly at that time of year, though hundreds froze to death or were buried in avalanches in the attempt. When the Austrians finally attacked on May 15, they were one hundred and fifty-seven thousand strong. The one hundred and seventeen thousand Italians standing in their path were rather easily pushed back. True to the Conrad pattern, the Austrians made progress for three weeks, sweeping southward on a broad front. By the end of May they had captured four thousand prisoners and 380 guns. The tsar, accustomed by now to urgent appeals from Joffre, found himself being begged for assistance by the King of Italy as well.
There were good reasons for Nicholas to pay heed, and they went beyond Verdun and the Austrian invasion of Italy. Everything seemed to be working in favor of the Central Powers. North of Paris, a German attack intended mainly to disrupt French and British preparations for their summer offensive had shocked Joffre by driving the British out of positions from which they had been preparing to take Vimy Ridge, an immense strongpoint dominating the plain of Artois to the west. The French had sacrificed mightily in establishing those positions, and had regarded them as secure when, in March, they handed them over to the British. Haig, though humiliated by the loss, was unable to organize a counterattack because so many of his resources were now being concentrated at the Somme.
