The First World War

by John Keegan

  The course of operations in Italy during 1916 had one positive result: by attracting Austrian divisions from the Russians’ southern front, it allowed the Tsar’s armies to organise a successful counter-offensive against their weakened enemy. The Russians were committed to such an offensive by the Chantilly agreement of December 1915, while intelligence of Conrad’s punishment expedition had caused Cadorna to request its mounting as a matter of urgency. Its results exceeded what had been promised or expected, most of all by the Stavka, whose plans for 1916 were for a resumption of an offensive against the Germans on Russia’s northern front rather than the Austrians in the south. The German advanced positions in the north threatened Petrograd, the capital, and had brought under enemy occupation the productive Baltic States, where Ludendorff had created a full-blown occupation economy. In an anticipation of what Hitler would less imaginatively attempt after 1941, he divided the region into six administrative areas, under a German military governor, and set about harnessing its agricultural and industrial resources to the German war effort. Ludendorff’s plans went beyond the purely economic. “I determined to resume in the occupied territory that work of civilisation at which German hands had laboured in those lands for many centuries. The population, made up as it is of such a mixture of races, has never produced a culture of its own and, left to itself, would succumb to Polish domination.” Ludendorff foresaw the transformation of Poland into “a more or less independent state under German sovereignty” and by the spring of 1916 was planning to settle much of the Baltic States with Germans, who would take the land of the expropriated inhabitants. They did not include the Jews who, being often German-speakers, were regarded as useful instruments of occupation policy.64

  Ludendorff’s scheme to Germanise the Tsar’s possessions in Poland and the Baltic regions was one reason for the Stavka to choose a resumption of the offensive in the north as its main strategy for 1916. It began, in response to a French appeal to relieve the pressure at Verdun, with an attack on each side of Lake Naroch, aimed at Vilna, the chief town of eastern Poland, on 18 March. Thanks to the mobilisation of Russia’s industry for war, and to the call-up of new classes of conscripts, the Russian armies now outnumbered their opponents, by 300,000 to 180,000 in the north and 700,000 to 360,000 in the centre; only in the southern sector, commanded by Brusilov, did numbers remain equal at about half a million men on each side. In the north the Russians for the first time had a large superiority in guns and stocks of shell, with 5,000 guns and a thousand rounds per gun, considerably more than assembled by the Germans for the Gorlice-Tarnow breakthrough.65

  Somehow, however, the advantage was cast away. The artillery preparation was not co-ordinated with the assault by the infantry of Second Army which, attacking on a very narrow front, ran into its own fire and then, in the salient it had won, came under bombardment by German guns from three sides. Three-quarters of the infantry, 15,000 men, were lost in the first eight hours; yet 350,000 men were theoretically available for the offensive, had it been launched on a wider front. Reinforcement merely increased the casualty list without the gain of more ground. By 31 March, when the offensive ended, Russian losses totalled 100,000, including 12,000 men who had died of exposure in the harsh late-winter weather. In April a counter-attack by the Germans, who had lost 20,000, recovered all the ground the Russians had gained.66

  Prospects for the general offensive promised in June did not therefore augur well, since the Stavka again wished to attack in the north, above the Pripet Marshes that divided the front into two. In fact, Evert, commander of the army group that had failed at Lake Naroch, did not want to attack at all. Alexeyev, the Chief of Staff, was nevertheless insistent and secured the reluctant co-operation of Evert and Kuropatkin, the other army group commander on the northern sector, on the understanding that there would be copious reinforcements of men and material. To the surprise of those present at the conference on 14 April, the new commander of the southern front, Alexei Brusilov, who had succeeded Ivanov in March, was not reluctant at all. He believed victory was possible, by careful preparation, against the weakened Austrians and, as he requested no reinforcements, he was given permission to make his attempt. He had proved his ability at lower levels of command and he had also found the time to consider the problems of attacking entrenched positions covered by defending artillery with reserves in rear ready to stem a break-in. The solution, he had concluded, was to attack on a wide front, thus depriving the enemy of the chance to mass reserves at a predeterminably critical point, to protect the assaulting infantry in deep dugouts while they were waiting to jump off, and to advance the line as near as possible to the Austrian, by digging saps forward as close as seventy-five yards to the enemy trenches. These were great improvements. In the past the Russians had often left no man’s land a mile or more wide, thus condemning the attacking infantry to heavy casualties during the approach, following equally heavy casualties suffered in trenches unprotected against enemy bombardment before the attack began.

  Brusilov’s preparations worked admirably. Though his superiority of numbers over the Austrians on the twenty miles of chosen front was only 200,000 to 150,000, with 904 to 600 guns, the enemy was genuinely surprised when the attack opened on 4 June. The Russian Eighth Army overwhelmed the Austrian Fourth and pushed on to take the communication centre of Lutsk, and to advance forty miles beyond the start line. Huge numbers of prisoners were taken, as the shaken Austrians surrendered to anyone who would take them prisoner. Eighth Army’s neighbours also advanced but the greatest success was achieved in the south, between the River Dniester and the Carpathians, where the Austrian Seventh Army was split in two, lost 100,000 men, mainly taken prisoner, and by mid-June was in full retreat.

  At the beginning of July the Russian armies north of the Pripet Marshes also went on to the offensive, profiting from Brusilov’s success and the confusion reigning in the Austro-German high command as to where best to deploy its very scanty reserves, to press forward towards Baronovitchi, the old Russian headquarters town. Evert’s offensive, opposed by German troops, was soon stopped but Brusilov’s army group sustained its success over the Austrians throughout July and August and into September, by which time it had taken 400,000 Austrians prisoner and inflicted losses of 600,000. The German forces involved in opposing the Russian advance had lost 350,000, and a belt of Russian territory sixty miles deep had been taken back from the invaders. Had Brusilov possessed the means to follow up his victory and to bring reserves and supplies forward at speed, he might have recovered more of the ground lost in the great retreat of 1915, perhaps even to reach Lemberg and Przemysl once again. He possessed no such means. The rail system, which in any case favoured the Austrians rather than the Russians, could not provide tactical transport across the battle zone, while the roads, even had he had adequate motor transport, were unsuitable for heavy traffic. Nevertheless, the Brusilov offensive was, on the scale by which success was measured in the foot-by-foot fighting of the First World War, the greatest victory seen on any front since the trench lines had been dug on the Aisne two years before.67

  The Brusilov offensive

  The Russian victory, though it also cost a million casualties, sealed the fate of Falkenhayn, whose security of tenure as Chief of Staff had been weakening as the battle for Verdun protracted. His dismissal, and replacement by Hindenburg, was disguised by appointing him to command in the new campaign against Romania. Romania, long courted by both the Allies and the Central Powers, had thus far prudently avoided choosing sides. Its neighbour, Bulgaria, had thrown in its lot with Germany and Austria in October 1915 but Romania, which had acquired Bulgarian territory at the end of the Second Balkan War in 1913, continued to hold aloof. Its chief national interest was in the addition to its territory of Transylvania, where three million ethnic Romanians lived under Austro-Hungarian rule. As Brusilov’s advance pushed westward, widening the common border of military contact between Russia and Romania and apparently promising not only Russian support but
Austrian collapse, the Romanian government’s indecision diminished. The Allies had long been offering an enlargement of Romania’s territory at Austrian expense, following Allied victory, and Romania, unwisely, now decided to take the plunge. On 17 August, a convention was signed by which France and Russia bound themselves to reward Romania, at the peace, with Transylvania, the Bukovina, the southern tail of Galicia, and the Banat, the south-west corner of Hungary; in secret, the two great powers had previously agreed not to honour the convention when the time came. That the Romanians could not have known the treaty was made in bad faith does not excuse their entering into it. Good sense should have told them that their strategic situation, pinioned between a hostile Bulgaria to the south and a hostile Austria-Hungary to their west and north, was too precarious to be offset by the putative support of a Russian army which had only belatedly returned to the offensive. It was Brusilov’s success that had persuaded the Romanians to take the plunge from neutrality into war, but his success was not great enough to guarantee the security of their flanks against a German intervention or an Austrian repositioning of divisions; against a Bulgarian attack it could offer no assistance at all.

  The Romanians nevertheless went to war on 27 August in apparent high confidence in their army of twenty-three divisions, formed from their stolid peasantry, and in the belief that the Russian offensive north of the Pripet Marshes, towards Kovel, would prevent the transfer of German reserves towards Hungary, while Brusilov’s continuing offensive would hold the Austrians in place. They appear to have made little allowance for the eventuality of Bulgarian or, as came to pass, Turkish intervention and they overestimated the military potentiality of their armed forces, which were poorly equipped and owed their reputation for fighting power to their success in the Second Balkan War at a moment when Bulgaria was hard pressed also by the Serbs, Greeks and Turks. Alexeyev, the Russian Commander-in-Chief, in a rare flash of realism, actively discounted the value of the Romanians as allies, rightly reckoning that they would drain rather than add to Russian reserves. He certainly did little to assist them. Nor did the French and British at Salonika, whose undertaking to mount a diversionary offensive had been a major consideration in bringing Romania to declare war. In the event their attack was pre-empted by the Bulgarians who, forewarned by evidence of Allied preparations and with the assistance of the German and the Turkish divisions, took the Allies by surprise, on 17 August, defeated the refugee Serbian army at Florina and succeeded in postponing the main Franco-British offensive until mid-September.

  The Romanians, in these deteriorating circumstances, opened an offensive all the same, not, as the commanders in Salonika had expected, against Bulgaria, where it might have lent support to and been supported by their own, but into Hungary through the passes of the Transylvanian Alps. Retribution was quick to come. The Austrians quickly organised the local defence forces into a First Army, under General Arz von Straussenberg, while the Germans found the troops, some Bulgarian, to position two armies, the Ninth, under the ex-Chief of Staff, Falkenhayn, and the Eleventh, under the old Eastern Front veteran, Mackensen, in Transylvania and Bulgaria. While the Romanians, having occupied eastern Transylvania, then did nothing, their enemies made their preparations and struck. On 2 September the Bulgarians invaded the Dobruja, the Romanian province lying south of the Danube delta. On 25 September Falkenhayn, whose troops included the formidable mountain division known as the Alpenkorps, in which the young Rommel was serving, made his move in Transylvania and began to push the Romanians back through the passes towards the central plain and the capital, Bucharest, which fell on 5 December. By then Mackensen’s army had crossed the Danube and was approaching Bucharest also. Assailed on three sides by four enemies, for the Turks had sent the 15th and 25th Divisions by sea to the Dobruja, the Romanians had been thrown into full retreat towards their remote eastern province of Moldavia, between the Sereth River and the Russian border. There, as winter closed in, and with support from the Russian Fourth and Sixth Armies, they entrenched themselves on the Sereth to sit out the bad weather.

  Their decision for war had been disastrous. They had lost 310,000 men, nearly half as prisoners, and almost the whole of their country. Their most important material asset, the Ploesti oilfields, at the time the only significant source of oil in Europe west of the Black Sea, had been extensively sabotaged by British demolition teams before they were abandoned to the enemy. The Allies’ decision to entice Romania into the war had been ill-judged also. The addition of the nominal fighting power of lesser states—Portugal (which became a combatant in March 1916), Romania and even Italy—did not enhance the strength of the Allies but, on the contrary, diminished it, once the inevitable setbacks they underwent came to require the diversion of resources to shore them up. The defeat of Romania not only necessitated, as Alexeyev had foreseen, the commitment of the Russian armies to rescue them from total collapse, it also delivered into German hands, over the next eighteen months, a million tons of oil and two million tons of grain, the resources that “made possible the … continuation of the war into 1918.”68 The accession of Greece to the Allied side, through a coup stage-managed by Venizelos but engineered by the Allies in June 1917, equally brought the Allies no advantage at all and, by its installation of a violently nationalist and anti-Turkish government in Athens, led to Greek mobilisation in the cause of the “Great Idea”—the recovery of the Greek empire in the east—which would complicate the Allied effort to resettle the peace of Europe for years after the war had ended.

  NINE

  The Breaking of Armies

  THE FACE OF THE WAR at the beginning of 1917 was little altered from that it had shown to the world at the beginning of 1915, after the shutter of the trench lines had descended to divide Europe into two armed camps. In the east the course of the trench line had moved 300 miles and its southern shoulder now rested on the Black Sea instead of the Carpathians but in the north it still touched the Baltic. There was a new entrenched front on Italy’s border with Austria and on the Greek border with Bulgaria, while the entrenchments at Gallipoli and Kut had come and gone. In Caucasia a front of outposts and strongpoints straggled between the Black Sea and northern Persia and in Sinai an uneasy no man’s land divided the British defenders of the Suez Canal from the Turkish garrison of Palestine. That showed little change from 1915. In France there had been no change whatsoever. The geographical features on which the fighting armies had expended their final energies in the offensives of 1914—the Yser, the low Flemish heights, Vimy Ridge, the chalk uplands of the Somme, the Aisne and the Chemin des Dames, the River Meuse at Verdun, the forests of the Argonne, the mountains of Alsace—remained the buttresses of the trench line, now greatly thickened, though over the narrowest of areas, by digging, wiring and excavation. Much digging and wiring had been deliberate, particularly on the German side where the defenders had sought to secure trenches against assault by the elaboration of their positions, by 1917 usually three belts deep and reinforced by concrete pillboxes; but a great deal of digging had also been hasty and improvised, done to incorporate stretches of trench won from the enemy into an existing system.

  The thicker the trench system grew, the less likelihood was there of its course being altered even by the weightiest of offensive effort. The chief effect of two years of bombardment and trench-to-trench fighting across no man’s land was to have created a zone of devastation of immense length, more than 400 miles between the North Sea and Switzerland, but of narrow depth: defoliation for a mile or two on each side of no man’s land, heavy destruction of buildings for a mile or two more, scattered demolition beyond that. At Verdun, on the Somme and in the Ypres salient whole villages had disappeared, leaving a smear of brick-dust or pile of stones on the upturned soil. Ypres and Albert, sizeable small towns, were in ruins, Arras and Noyon badly damaged, the city of Rheims had suffered heavy destruction and so had villages up and down the line. Beyond the range of the heavy artillery, 10,000 yards at most, town and countryside lay untouc
hed.