The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  It was the infantry who paid the penalty. ‘At 7.30 we went up the ladders, doubled through the gaps in the wire, and lay down, waiting for the line to form up on each side of us. When it was ready, we went forward, not doubling, but at a walk. For we had 900 yards of rough ground to the trench which was our first objective.’ R. H. Tawney was in the 7th Division, near Fricourt. Most divisions did not have so far to go. Some went out into no man’s land before zero hour, and were on the enemy trenches before the German infantry could emerge from their dug-outs and man their machine-guns. Like Rawlinson himself, corps and divisional commanders were left to develop their own ideas. One or two adopted creeping barrages, allowing the infantry to follow up close behind the fall of their own gunfire, but this was a new, experimental idea. Progress was greatest in the south, nearest the river. But Tawney found that his unit’s advance could not keep up with the artillery as it lifted onto more distant targets. He was wounded. ‘What I felt was that I had been hit by a tremendous iron hammer and then twisted with a sickening sort of wrench so that my back banged on the ground, and my feet struggled as though they did not belong to me.’37 Tawney survived to become a famous historian, but of the 57,470 British casualties that day 19,240 did not. Nowhere had the advance reached its objectives.

  The pattern continued over the next ten days, when Rawlinson abandoned the logic of his own approach, which required progress in the centre and north, for that of Haig, which required the exploitation of the gains in the south. A total of forty-six separate attacks were launched by individual corps but without coordination and with a further 25,000 casualties. A night attack at Longueval on 14 July, orchestrated according to Rawlinson’s principles, succeeded but left its author pondering the missed opportunity for a breakthrough.

  The Somme battle continued until mid-November, with its purpose oscillating between attrition and breakthrough according to the nature of the latest success or the audience to whom reports were directed. Between mid-July and mid-September Haig convinced himself that the Germans were ‘off balance’ and about to collapse. Many of the ninety attacks launched in this period were small affairs: ill-coordinated, hurried and launched on narrow fronts, they gained under three square miles of ground for 82,000 casualties. Haig rationalised his failure to achieve breakthrough by saying that his purpose was now attrition. Having dissipated his own strength, he planned a major offensive for mid-September, declaring that it was ’to be planned and carried out in such a way that it may be possible for our troops to achieve a decision if such a result is at all realizable‘.38 The attack at Flers on 15 September, when tanks were used for the first time, like the Longueval night attack, fleetingly raised hopes of breakthrough. But thereafter, as the weather worsened and the mud hampered operations, the battle was again explained in terms of attrition. In truth it should have been closed down. The learning process which the British army’s high command was passing through did pay dividends in 1918, but its route there need not have been so sanguinary.

  South of the river the French had much greater initial success. They did so because they had 688 heavy guns on a much smaller front. But the momentum was not sustained. Foch was as divided as Falkenhayn and Haig as to whether his objective was breakthrough or attrition, and like them tried both. As early as 12 July General Fayolle, commanding the French 6th Army astride the Somme itself, concluded: This battle has ... always been a battle without an objective. There is no question of breaking through. And if a battle is not for breaking through, what is its purpose?‘39 Almost as many divisions, thirty-nine, were rotated through the Somme battle in seven weeks as through the Verdun battle in six months, and by September the censors’ reports suggested that French soldiers regarded the former with greater foreboding than the latter.

  That response was not irrational. On 19 April 1916, Joffre had resolved his frustration with Pétain by promoting him to the command of an army group, and introducing Robert Nivelle as his replacement at Verdun. Nivelle orchestrated a series of counterattacks in the autumn which resulted in the recapture of Forts Douaumont and Vaux. He found that the emphasis on method could be counter-productive when the enemy held improvised positions which he had just captured. Nivelle therefore stressed speed in the attack. On the Somme Fayolle, too, reacted against the influence of Pétain, when he reminded the soldiers of the 6th Army that they could not expect the artillery to do everything for them: the role of the infantry was not just to occupy ground neutralised by shellfire but to fight. On 16 December the French army was told to aim its attacks as deep as possible, up to and including the German gun line; it was warned not to be ‘surprised by a success that one had not believed would be so easy’.40

  Local and particular experiences on the Somme and at Verdun had been hardened into a general doctrine. A month previously the allied generals had once again met at Chantilly to coordinate their plans for 1917. The broad strategy was to be unchanged from 1916: simultaneous attacks on all fronts to prevent the Germans switching resources from one to another. The offensive should begin in February to prevent a repeat performance of 1916, and no operation was to be delayed for more than three weeks beyond the start date. The Anglo-French plan for the western front was to take out the salient bounded by the River Aisne to the south and the Somme battlefield to the north.

  The kilt was not the most sensible garment for trench war, uncomfortable when wet and leaving too much flesh exposed to mustard gas But the Germans regarded Scottish regiments as particularly bloodthirsty enemies. The Cameron Highlanders pause to eat at Contalmaison on the Somme, September 1916

  The assumption that underpinned these calculations was that the German army was beginning to crack. By the battle’s end two-thirds of the German divisions serving on the front had passed through it. Total German losses on the Somme are the subject of dispute, and range from 465,000 to 650,000, depending on whether the lightly wounded are included. The latter figure is significant because of the profit-and-loss accounting generated by attrition: allied casualties reached 614,000, 420,000 of them British. But throughout October Haig and his director of military intelligence, John Charteris, had stressed how close to breaking point was German, not British, morale. Robertson, receiving information from different sources, was not convinced: in the same month he told the cabinet that Germany ‘was fighting with undiminished vigour’.41

  Plenty of evidence suggested that he was right. At the end of August the Brusilov offensive had at last persuaded Romania to throw in its lot with the Entente, the price being Hungarian-held Transylvania and Bukovina. The blow to German expectations toppled Falkenhayn, who ironically went off to the Romanian front and - together with Mackensen - had overrun most of it by Christmas. Hindenburg and Ludendorff became chief of the general staff and first quartermaster-general respectively. On 6 September Ludendorff made his first visit to the western front for two years. The comparison between the eastern front and what he saw on the battlefields of Verdun and, especially, the Somme appalled him. But neither he nor Hindenburg considered giving up the struggle. Instead, they responded in kind. Hindenburg declared, with more rhetorical flourish than economic sophistication, that Germany should double its output of shells and triple its production of machine-guns and artillery by May 1917. In October, although the effect was often to duplicate the functions of the existing Prussian War Ministry, the two created a new office to supervise the war economy. And in December the War Office steered through the Reichstag a law conscripting all males aged seventeen to sixty for the purposes of war production.

  At the front itself, Hindenburg and Ludendorff put in hand the construction of a series of defensive positions in the west, of which the most important was the Siegfried position (known to the British as the Hindenburg line). By cutting the very salient that the Entente had decided to make the focus of its 1917 offensive, the Germans released thirteen infantry divisions, fifty batteries of heavy artillery and a comparable number of field guns. In February 1917 the Germans fell back, leaving a waste
land of poisoned wells, razed villages and felled orchards. They reckoned that they had gained an eight-week respite before the British and French could resume their attacks. They were right. But they had done more: by retreating without a fight they had created uncertainty in allied counsels, and left the planned allied blow aiming at thin air. Those who wished for evidence to vindicate the attrition of the Somme found it - with some reason - in the German decision to fall back. However, the German response revealed a deeper difficulty. Attritional battles fought over terrain without significant objectives could simply be negated by the refusal to fight. Attrition and breakthrough were not alternatives but two sides of the same coin, and it was for precisely this reason that so much of the thinking on the topic had proved either confused or vague. Battles on the western front did and would wear out the enemy, but only where he could not afford to give ground.

  German soldiers join their landlords and the local priest for coffee in their billet Although posed, this photograph, like the small, fair children left behind when the Germans withdrew to the Hindenburg line in February 1917, showed a side of occupation which alarmed the French

  7

  BLOCKADE

  THE NORTH SEA

  Britain was the financier and armourer of the Entente; Germany was the military mainstay of the Central Powers. By 1916 both were, to varying degrees, the principal props of their allies. If it was a principle of strategy that mass should be concentrated on the decisive point, one needed to knock out the other in order to win the war. Thus the Anglo-German antagonism became the pivot of the conflict. The polarity was best expressed in competing ideologies: liberalism and individualism against militarism and collectivism, the pursuit of mammon against the spirit of heroism. However, the bitterness of the rhetoric could not be easily converted into strategy. When the war broke out, neither had a coherent plan for dealing with the other.

  Britain was principally a sea power, Germany a land power. At one level, therefore, this lack of preparedness was not surprising. At another it was: for a decade before the war, the building programmes of the two navies had been shaped principally by the arms race between the two sides. But that rivalry had not precipitated the conflict. Furthermore, once the war was declared, the Royal Navy had no strategic interest in fighting a major action against the German navy. As the world’s greatest sea power, Britain already enjoyed maritime supremacy. Its task was to defend what it had. ‘Tomorrow is Trafalgar Day’, Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty wrote to his wife on 20 October 1914. ‘The powers that be have forgotten it. Ye shades of Nelson that we should be in the hands of such is past enduring but one is powerless to do anything but wait day after day.’1

  Beatty was the embodiment of the fighting sailor. In 1898 he had won a DSO commanding gunboats on the River Nile in Kitchener’s reconquest of the Sudan, and in 1900 he had been seriously wounded in the Boxer Rising. Still only forty-three, he now led the Battle Cruiser Squadron based at Rosyth. He owed his rapid promotion in part to another combative veteran of the Sudan campaign, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Beatty had been Churchill’s naval secretary before the war, and in 1912 had spelt out for his political master the geographical realities that were to shape Britain’s conduct of the war at sea: ‘The British Isles form a great breakwater across German waters thereby limiting the passage of vessels to the outer seas to two exits, the one on the South, narrow, easily blocked and contained, and the other on the North of such a width (155 miles) that with the forces at our disposal it could be easily commanded so as to preclude the possibility of the passing of any hostile force without our knowledge and without being brought to action by a superior force.’2

  The 3rd Battle Squadron of the German High Seas Fleet at sea. 31 May 1916, from aboard Scheer’s flagship, Friedrich der Grosse Her main armament, of 12-inch guns, was inferior to the 13 5-inch guns on Jellicoe’s flagship, The Iron Duke

  Britain would bottle up the German navy in the North Sea. The legacy of Trafalgar encouraged British naval officers to hope that the Germans would seek a battle to break the blockade - that the latter would be the means to an end, not an end in itself. Their expectations were reasonable in so far as Germany had to attack if it was to change the balance of power at sea. But that was not the Kaiser’s intention at the war’s outset. Tirpitz had created the fleet to be a deterrent - to support the idea of Weltpolitik, and to persuade the British that Germany was to be taken seriously, either as an ally or as a potential enemy. The logic that underpinned that view did not change during the war itself. For the Kaiser, the ultimate purpose of the fleet’s capital ships was to give Germany leverage at the peace negotiations. In August 1914 Germany had eighteen battleships and battle cruisers to Britain’s twenty-nine. If its High Seas Fleet responded to the challenge to break the blockade by taking on Britain’s Grand Fleet in a major battle, it would lose.

  But doing nothing was as frustrating for German naval officers as it was for Beatty. Indeed, it might prove as prejudicial to the long-term survival of the fleet as sailing into the teeth of the British guns. As the junior service, the German navy still had to prove its value to the new nation in a way that the army did not. Tirpitz had spent the best part of two decades battling in the Reichstag for funds to ensure the fleet’s steady expansion. If those ships spent the war safely in the harbours of Wilhelmshaven and Kiel, apparently doing nothing, while the army overran much of Continental Europe, continued high spending on the fleet after the war would be hard to justify. The answer was Kleinkrieg, small operations to erode the Royal Navy’s superiority through the use of mines, coastal batteries and submarines. When the Grand Fleet had lost a few battleships, the strengths of the two sides would be more equal and the High Seas Fleet would be able to risk a battle.

  The trouble with this strategy was that its weapons were those of coastal waters. It depended on the British positioning their ships off the German mainland, mounting what was called a ‘close’ blockade. As Beatty’s memorandum for Churchill made clear, the Royal Navy did not need to do this to achieve its objectives. Closing the exits from the North Sea, a ’distant’ blockade, was just as effective in denying Germany access to the world’s oceans and trading routes, and obviated the risk of losses caused by Germany’s maritime defences. Distant blockade, which Britain adopted at the outbreak of the war, closed down one German option; however, it opened up another. The Grand Fleet itself was based at Scapa Flow in the Orkney islands, so shutting the northern exit from the North Sea to the Atlantic. Although smaller units were stationed elsewhere, much of the east coast of England was comparatively undefended. German attacks on the British coast, as opposed to British attacks on the German coast, might sting the British into a response and so enable the German navy to take on fractions of the Royal Navy and gradually whittle away its strength.

  At 8 a.m. on 16 December German battle cruisers of Franz von Hipper’s Scouting Squadron bombarded Hartlepool and Scarborough, killing over a hundred civilians. The British press made much of another instance of the Huns’ brutality, but the sufferings of non-combatants were not the prime purpose of the raid. The Germans hoped to tempt British forces into pursuing them over freshly laid minefields. Moreover, the battleships of the High Seas Fleet lay offshore to give support to the Scouting Squadron. Beatty’s own battle cruisers had been reduced in number by the despatch of Invincible and In-flexible to the South Atlantic to deal with Spee, and the decision was taken to keep the bulk of the Grand Fleet in harbour. As a result ten British capital ships set out in search of twenty-four German. The latter had succeeded better than the fleet commander, Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl, realised: he had in his grasp what proved to be the only opportunity for a major naval victory vouchsafed the Germans in the entire war. But he did not know that the Grand Fleet was confined to Scapa Flow. Alarmed by the volume of British wireless traffic, he turned for home.

  The German navy attacked the British mainland from the air as well as by sea On 8 September 1915 a Zeppelin
commanded by Heinrich Mathy, the greatest airship commander of the war, killed twenty-two people and caused £500,000 worth of damage to Aldersgate in London

  Flag signalling preserved radio silence but could not depend on the perfect conditions enjoyed by the yeoman on the battleship, Kmg George V

  In this there was a double irony. First, the British were as a general rule far more observant of radio silence than the Germans, preferring to use flags for tactical communications, even when the weather or smoke obscured visibility and made the flags hard to read. Second, the fact that the encounter had taken place at all was the product of German wireless transmissions, intercepted by British signals intelligence.

  Within four months of the war’s outbreak the British were in possession of all three German naval codes. The Australians laid their hands on the code book for merchant shipping; the imperial naval code book was taken by the Russians from a cruiser which went aground in the Baltic; and the traffic signals book from a sunk destroyer was picked up in the nets of a British trawler. Listening stations were set up along the east coast, so that cross-bearings could enable the position of the vessel sending the message to be fixed, and the intercepted signals were analysed in a newly created department within the Admiralty Old Building, Room 40. Staffed by academics, not professional sailors, its operational effectiveness was principally the achievement of the director of naval intelligence, Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, so called from his constant blinking, a habit his daughter somewhat improbably attributed to the terrible food at his preparatory school. But there was much that was unlikely about Hall, a fearsome interrogator of prisoners and a devious runner of agents and spies: ’all other secret service men are amateurs by comparison‘, the American ambassador in London told President Wilson.3 Room 40’s work was aided by the Germans’ belief that wireless might offset their numerical inferiority: it enabled real-time communication and so facilitated the concentration of forces in space and time. The effect was that their chatter, which continued between ships even when in harbour, conferred exactly those advantages on their enemy.