The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  Central to Robertson’s thinking about the exhaustion of the German army was the nature of the intelligence that the War Office in London received. Most of it concerned train movements across Europe, showing the deployment of German divisions between east and west, and enabling him to build up a clear order of battle for the German army and its reserves. For Robertson, as a classically trained staff officer, the Germans were operating on ‘interior lines’, able to shift their troops across short chords to meet different threats with rapidity. The allies, by contrast, were ranged round the Central Powers and had to move greater distances and on ‘exterior lines’, often by sea and certainly slowly. His belief that Britain’s principal contribution should be on the western front did not prevent him realising that each of the allied fronts had the potential to support the others if only their efforts could be concentrated in time. If the Central Powers were attacked simultaneously in the west and in the east, and also in Italy, the Germans would not be able to shuttle their reserves along the chords to the circumference.

  VERDUN AND THE SOMME

  That was exactly the point Joffre had made in the summer, and it formed the broad outlines of an allied strategy agreed at a conference at Chantilly on 6-8 December 1915. The British representatives were the commander-in-chief, then still Sir John French, and Robertson’s predecessor, Sir Archibald Murray. They and their allied colleagues agreed that ‘Decisive results will only be obtained if the offensives of the allied armies are delivered simultaneously or at least on dates that are close enough to prevent the enemy from transporting his reserves from one front to another’.27 That, they reckoned, meant attacks within one month of each other. Combined attacks should be launched as soon as possible, and in the interval local attacks should continue in order to wear out the enemy. The Chantilly conference specified neither a time nor a place for the Anglo-French offensive on the western front in 1916. From the British perspective the Ypres salient was the more obvious sector from which to attack, not least because it was closest to the Channel ports and the British Expeditionary Force’s supply lines. But militarily Britain was the junior partner of the coalition. French’s replacement by Haig promised an improvement in Anglo-French relations, and when Haig met Joffre on 14 February 1916 he readily agreed that the attack should be in Picardy, astride the River Somme, where the two armies met. The sector lacked the roads and railways of Flanders but its chalky, undulating terrain was less likely to become waterlogged, particularly given the preferred start date of around 1 July. Rawlinson, now commanding the 4th Army, which was to take the brunt of the British effort, declared it was ‘capital country in which to undertake an offensive’.28 The crucial point, however, was that the British role would be a supporting one; the main attack would be in the hands of the thirty-nine divi-sions and 1,700 heavy guns that Joffre promised Ferdinand Foch, commanding the French on their right.

  The embodiment of the defence of la patrie, a poilu (hairy one) literally as well as in name His lined features testify to the army’s reliance on its middle-aged reservists On his chest, he wears the Croix de Guerre

  On 21 February, one week after Haig’s meeting with Joffre, at 7.12 a.m., a German 38cm long-barrelled gun signalled the opening of a bombardment by 1,220 guns on a 20-km front straddling the two sides of the River Meuse north of Verdun. In the Bois de Ville, at the apex of the French front line, forty heavy shells fell every minute. Within an hour almost all telephone links between the forward positions and brigade headquarters were cut, and the long-range German guns raised their elevation to seek out the network of fortifications that protected the city of Verdun itself, symbol of France’s resistance since 1914. The German field guns and trench mortars continued firing on the French forward positions. ‘The trees are mown like straw; individual shells disengage themselves from the smoke; the dust produced by the earth that is thrown up forms a fog which prevents us seeing very far’, reported G. Champeaux, an artillery liaison officer with the 164th Regiment of Infantry at Herbebois, on the right of the Bois de Ville. ‘All day, we hunch our backs ... We have to abandon our shelter and go to ground in a large crater; we are surrounded by wounded and dying whom we cannot even help.’29 At 4 p.m., as the light was fading, the German infantry patrols left their trenches, probing for the soft spots in the French defences, and identifying where there was still resistance. That night and into the following morning, amid falling snow, the German artillery renewed its bombardment. On the afternoon of 22 February six divisions attacked on the east bank of the Meuse only, on a front almost half that on which the artillery had opened up. Again patrols preceded the main assault formations, establishing where the artillery had not done its work and where it had. The latter points were hit by groups of storm-troopers, selected infantrymen, equipped with grenades and flamethrowers, and trained to re-establish the links between fire and movement which trench warfare had sundered. The principles had been developed in the front line by Captain Willy Rohr in 1915 and were disseminated throughout the army on Falkenhayn’s instructions: a clear case of tactics being developed from the bottom up. Behind the storm-troopers came reserve sections carrying the equipment to consolidate the ground won. By 25 February, the French 51st and 72nd Divisions, holding the line from Herbebois west to the banks of the Meuse, had suffered over 60 per cent casualties. Lack of artillery support was undermining the morale of the infantry: 150 km of wire were needed for telephone repairs on 21 February alone, and communication failures prevented both the infantry from calling up fire support and the gunners from demanding more shells. At 3.30 pm on the 25th, Fort Douaumont, the heart of the Verdun defensive system, fell without a shot being fired. A German breakthrough seemed imminent.

  As the Verdun battle ebbed and flowed, soldiers on both sides increasingly used shell holes as defensive positions rather than the mapped and conspicuous lines of trenches French reinforcements are moving along the communication trench in the bottom right corner, 17 September 1916.

  On the evening of 21 February, Konstantin Schmidt von Knobelsdorff, chief of staff to the German 5th Army, had ordered the two attacking corps ‘to advance as far as possible’.30 When Falkenhayn issued his orders for the attack he had spoken of ‘an offensive in the Meuse area in the direction of Verdun’, and Crown Prince Wilhelm, the 5th Army’s commander and the Kaiser’s son, had declared that the objective was ‘to capture the fortress of Verdun by precipitate methods’.31 The sector was the best suited of any on the western front for an attempted breakthrough by the German army. Because of their commitments on the eastern front, the Germans lacked the reserves to be able to mount an attack on a broad front. The Verdun salient, forming a bulge in the line and executing a right-angle turn close to German territory, could be deemed a narrow one. During 1915 the French had begun to treat it as a quiet area, stripping the fortresses of their artillery, and ignoring intelligence of an impending German attack. The main railway line from Paris to the town lay behind German lines, so that the Germans could feed the battle more effectively than the French. Troops and shells were brought up by night and hidden in underground galleries. Overhead the Germans concentrated 168 aeroplanes to establish aerial supremacy, and French reconnaissance was further impeded by the bad weather and short days of January, so enhancing the Germans’ chances of maintaining secrecy and achieving surprise. If the 5th Army could gain the heights of the Meuse, the town of Verdun would lie at the mercy of its heavy artillery.

  The strategic context into which the battle fell was clear enough. Throughout 1915 Falkenhayn had seen the western front as the decisive theatre of the war. He now assumed that the Austrians would guard his back against a severely weakened Russia, while he concentrated Germany’s efforts against France. The fact that he did so in the very month when his relationship with Conrad von Hötzendorff reached its nadir meant that his decision was not coordinated with his principal ally. Conrad overran Montenegro and then readied his army for an operation much more to Austrian liking, an attack on Italy in the Trent
ino. The pressure on Russia eased. Falkenhayn also miscalculated with regard to Britain. He saw it as the hub of the Entente, but hoped that, while the German army defeated its principal European ally, the navy would engage its economic might with submarine warfare. It did not.

  The fact that Falkenhayn’s strategy did not join up was largely outside his control, but its assumptions were logical enough. Much more perplexing are Falkenhayn’s proposals for turning these ideas into operational practice. After the war, in his memoirs, he claimed to have written a memorandum at Christmas 1915, in which he said that he intended not to take Verdun but to suck the French army into the defence of the city and so bleed it to death. This was a different conception of attrition from that advanced by Rawlinson. It elevated the exhaustion of the enemy from a means to an end. But as the orders emanating from the 5th Army make clear, there is little evidence of the logic of ‘bite and hold’ in what it proposed to do at the time. It was not seeking limited objectives and aiming to maximise French losses while minimising German. Instead, it advanced as far and as fast as it could, and as a result by 25 February it had suffered almost as many casualties as the French. That remained true for the battle as a whole. By the time it closed down in December German losses had mounted to 337,000, of whom 143,000 died, to France’s 377,231, including 162,440 dead. Not until mid-March did Falkenhayn regularly use the vocabulary of attrition to explain the purposes of the Verdun battle. It was a way for Falkenhayn to rationalise the failure to achieve a breakthrough, but it was a thin one. France had allies in the west, Germany did not; and Germany, unlike France, was heavily committed elsewhere. The absolute numbers may have been in Germany’s favour, but the relative loss was not. Moreover, the battle of Verdun redefined both France’s commitment to the war, and the symbiosis between France and the Third Republic. ’They know that they are saving France‘, a censor reported of the soldiers in July, ’but also that they are going to die on the spot.‘32

  What turned Verdun from a breakthrough battle to an attritional one was France’s resolve not to abandon the town. At midnight on 25-26 February 1916, Philippe Pétain, commanding the French 2nd Army, took over the Verdun sector. As a brigadier about to go on the retired list in 1914, Pétain had seen the evolution of trench warfare from the perspective of a front-line commander rather than from the rear. In 1915 he had concluded, as Rawlinson had done, that it was impossible ‘to carry in one bound the successive positions of the enemy’.33 In a memorandum written after the autumn battle in Champagne, he had recommended limited offensives, to go no further than artillery support could reach: material should substitute for manpower. Only after the enemy had been exhausted could a series of breakthrough operations be launched and manoeuvre warfare restored. His defence of Verdun was the corollary of such conclusions. Permanent fortifications built of reinforced concrete had been downgraded in the minds of field commanders by the fall of the Belgian forts in 1914, but Pétain made the inner ring of forts at Verdun the spine of his tactical scheme. He called it a ‘barrage position’, with its artillery being used to counter German preparations for the attack. By 27 February thirteen heavy batteries were assembled on the west bank to deliver ‘bursts of concentrated fire which really constituted independent operations’,34 striking the Germans in the flank as they advanced along the east bank. On 6 March Falkenhayn was forced to attack on the west bank of the Meuse as well, so confirming the effectiveness of the French guns. ‘All [the infantry] are doing’, Lieutenant Raymond Jubert wrote in May, ‘is to act as a standard-bearer marking the zone of superiority established by the artillery.’35 With the infantry holding shell holes and craters rather than trench lines, the guns frequently hit their own men. To improve observation, the French regained the initiative in the air by grouping fighter aircraft in squadrons and so overwhelming German reconnaissance efforts. On the ground shell supply was maintained by a light railway, constructed during the battle, and by lorry. By June 12,000 vehicles, one every fourteen seconds, were passing up the road from Bar-le-Duc, ‘la voie sacrée’, as it was dubbed by Maurice Barrès in April.

  What made the way sacred was not its cargo of shells and supplies but its human burden and its connotations of Christ-like sacrifice. By 1 May forty French divisions had been through the ‘mill on the Meuse’. Pétain’s policy was to rotate units in and out of the battle fast enough to prevent its physical and psychological toll destroying their fighting effectiveness. Joffre, on the other hand, was determined to contain the fighting at Verdun in order to minimise the consequences of Falkenhayn’s action for his own plans. As the battle lengthened and its demands on French manpower multiplied, Joffre came to regret his selection of commander, but he could not avoid scaling back the French contribution to the Somme offensive. By 26 April the French planned to attack on a 25-km, not 40-km, front with thirty divisions, not thirty-nine, and 312 heavy guns, not 1,700. In the event, on 1 July the French attacked on a 15-km front with twelve divisions but with 688 heavy guns.

  Britain therefore found itself moving from a limited liability on the Continent to taking the principal burden in the major Entente offensive in the west in 1916. It did not do so primarily to relieve the French at Verdun. That particular task was accomplished by the Russians. Their principal contribution to the allied joint plan was to have been an attack in the north, near Vilna, but it was usurped by the diversion that preceded it. Mounted by Brusilov in Galicia, it employed principles for the achievement of breakthrough similar to those in the west: careful preparations, a broad front but one within the compass of the artillery, and reserves well up to exploit the initial success. In two days, by 6 June, the Russians had broken the Austro-Hungarian 4th Army, and advanced 75 km on a front of 20. They took 200,000 prisoners within a week, and captured so few guns only because the bulk of the Austro-Hungarian heavy artillery had been redeployed to Italy. Conrad’s offensive in the Trentino, which had overrun the Asiago plateau in the second half of May, was already losing its impetus. Now he had to close it down as he shuttled divisions back to the north-east.

  On 15 June Conrad told Falkenhayn that they faced the biggest crisis of the war. Falkenhayn was taken completely by surprise. Although by May he recognised full well that the 5th Army was unlikely to achieve a breakthrough, he believed German intelligence estimates which suggested that French casualties at Verdun had now reached 800,000, and was encouraged by the pacifism of French radical socialists to believe that France might seek a separate peace. Signs of British preparations on the Somme were also used to reinforce the logic of the Verdun battle: it was forcing Britain to react elsewhere on the western front and so might trigger the opportunity for a German counter-stroke. He therefore played for time, urging Conrad to recover the situation by withdrawing troops from Italy and looking to Hindenburg to provide Germans from the northern section of the eastern front. None the less he had to release four divisions from the west. Although he was able to attack at Verdun on 23 June, the advance was on too narrow a front and the French were able to counterattack. On 24 June the allied artillery bombardment opened on the Somme.

  If it had followed the logic embraced by Rawlinson and reflected in the British heavy-artillery programme, the battle of the Somme would have pursued limited objectives and eschewed any hope of rapid breakthrough. That in-deed was what Rawlinson favoured: the frontage and the depth to be tackled would reflect what the artillery could do, and its long, methodical bombardment would be designed to kill Germans, not to enable the infantry to gain ground. Haig, however, decided that Verdun had fulfilled the function of the wearing-out battle and that he now had the opportunity to break through. He wanted a hurricane bombardment and a deeper and faster advance: ’D. H. is for breaking the line and gambling on rushing the third line on top of a panic,‘ Rawlinson wrote in his diary on 1 April.36 To this end he created a Reserve Army behind Rawlinson’s 4th Army and commanded by a cavalryman, Hubert Gough.

  The 120mm and 155mm guns were vital to French success on the Somme in July 1916,
although French heavy artillery was not fully modernised until 1917 The gunners take a rest to eat.

  The first cause of the British failure on the first day of the Somme, therefore, was that its planning was the result of compromise. Rawlinson went along with his chief’s desires but retained features reflecting his own. The accusation to be levelled against Haig was not so much that he was wrong to seek a breakthrough, for there were moments in the course of the battle when such opportunities beckoned, but that he failed to impose his vision on his subordinate commanders.

  The second cause was that the battle was one for which the British artillery was not ready. The 4th Army had over 1,437 guns available to it, more even than the Germans had had at Verdun; it had a gun for every 17 yards of front, and they fired over 1.5 million shells in the preliminary bombardment. However, the Somme front was twice as long as that of Verdun, reflecting Haig’s determination to avoid flanking fire. The effect was scattered, especially as only 182 of the 4th Army’s guns were heavy. Bad weather spread what had been designed as a five-day bombardment over seven days, further diluting its effect. The principal targets were the enemy wire and dug-outs, but that left the German artillery free of counter-battery fire, and so able to concentrate on the attacking infantry as it formed up to go over the top. Some of the gunnery problems were technical, others were issues of command and training. Britain was improvising a mass army in the middle of a war, and the preparation and equipment of a scientific arm like the artillery took longer than those of the infantry. For the gunners, the Somme had come a year too soon.