Elegy
Page 3
ROYAL AIRCRAFT FACTORY FE2B
A British two-seater biplane fighter; it came into service in late 1915 and saw action during the Somme Offensive.
When war broke out in 1914, Haig commanded I Corps, which he took to France, and at the end of that year he was promoted to command the newly formed 1st Army. He led a brilliant defence of Ypres in late 1914, where he repulsed the German attempt to reach the Channel coast. In late October 1915, after French’s fiasco at the Battle of Loos, Haig told King George V that French was ‘a source of great weakness to the army, and no-one had any faith in him anymore.’7 It was one of those unusual cases when he who wielded the dagger wore the crown, and Haig replaced French on 19 December 1915.
Haig was never short of enemies, especially amongst Liberal politicians in the British government. In his book Great Contemporaries, Winston Churchill, who was First Lord of the Admiralty when the war broke out, compares Haig to
a great surgeon before the days of anaesthetics, versed in every detail of such science as was known to him: sure of himself, steady of poise, knife in hand, intent upon the operation; entirely removed in his professional capacity from the agony of the patient, the anguish of relations, or the doctrines of rival schools, the devices of quacks, or the first-fruits of new learning… If the patient died, he would not reprove himself. It must be understood that I speak only of his professional actions. Once out of the theatre, his heart was as warm as any man’s.8
Churchill undermined any praise of Haig with waspish qualifications such as: ‘If Haig’s mind was conventional, his character also displayed the qualities of the average, decent man, concentrated and magnified… He was rarely capable of rising to great heights; he was always incapable of falling below his standards.’9*2 There had long been bad blood between the two men, partly because Haig refused Churchill command of a brigade which Sir John French had promised him, and gave him a mere battalion instead.
Haig was also criticized by later commentators, many of them serious figures such as the military historians Sir Basil Liddell Hart and Professor Sir Michael Howard. ‘The German General Staff used to divide army officers into four categories,’ the latter has written, ‘the clever and lazy, the clever and hard-working, the stupid and lazy and the stupid and hard-working. The clever and lazy made the best generals, the clever and hard-working the best staff-officers, the stupid and lazy could be fitted in as regimental officers; but the stupid and hard-working were a positive menace and had to be got rid of as quickly as possible. Douglas Haig belonged to the fourth group.’10
Haig was certainly hard-working, and almost obsessive about detail: in the 3rd Battle of Ypres he concerned himself with the cost of the stones that the French were supplying for road repairs. Yet he wasn’t a château-general either, preferring to live in spartan conditions and refusing to emulate Asquith’s recourse to brandy when the prime minister visited his headquarters. A devout Christian, Haig was interested in fundamentalist religion and spiritualism; as a young officer, he had been put in touch with Napoleon by a spiritualist, and on the Western Front a Presbyterian chaplain persuaded him that he was carrying out God’s will.12
Often depicted as heartless butcher, Haig was in fact anything but. Haig’s diaries are littered with references to him visiting hospitals of every description—once nine in one day, plus three veterinary hospitals, yet it took a tough commander to show the necessarily stern exterior to keep up morale during terrible losses. He can be criticized for over-optimism before and during the Somme Offensive, but excessive confidence was rife amongst his High Command, especially in the opening stages, and this can be partly blamed on the Intelligence team he gathered around himself, as we shall see.
GENERAL SIR DOUGLAS HAIG
Commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Haig was a highly educated soldier and a moderniser.
By the winter of 1914/15, after it had been made clear at the Battle of the Marne the preceding summer that the Germans were not going to break through and capture Paris as their Schlieffen Plan had envisaged, a continuous line of trenches stretched over 400 miles (644 km) from the Swiss border to the English Channel, likened by the historian John Keegan to a long scar across the face of north-western Europe. The question therefore facing the British and French High Commands was straightforward: how to win the war against the most powerful military-industrial power in Europe, one that already controlled almost all of Belgium and eleven départments of northern France? Sitting still was not an option, and the Gallipoli adventure to try to turn the line of the Central Powers in Turkey had turned into an unqualified disaster by December 1915. The French were forced to counter-attack on the Western Front because so much of their national territory was occupied; as one British historian has put it, ‘The British equivalent would have been the German army entrenched at Canterbury’.13
If there was a way of fighting the First World War that did not involve trying to smash frontally through formidable enemy defences, neither side discovered one. This was Haig’s dilemma. As the war diarist of X Corps was to put it succinctly after the Battle of the Somme: ‘The vast number of troops employed in this war have enabled both sides to prepare and occupy lines from Switzerland to the sea, leaving no flank to be turned and no room for envelopment and manoeuvre; the offensive must take the form of a frontal attack.’14 The Dardanelles defeat had failed to knock the Ottoman empire out of the war, and the Russians had failed to make significant headway in Eastern Europe, so the struggle was clearly going to be a long, hard slog focused on the north-west of the continent and to a lesser extent on the Isonzo front in the north-east of Italy.
As the French contributed far more troops to the Western Front, and much of the fighting was taking place on their territory—the war never once extended into Germany itself—Haig did not have the final say over the grand strategy and timing of campaigns and attacks; moreover he was under direct instructions from the British government ‘to assist the French and Belgian governments in driving the German armies from Belgian and French territory’.15 His duty was therefore to fit in with French commander-in-chief Joseph Joffre’s overall plans. But where to attack? In 1916 the BEF’s five armies numbered fifty-six infantry and five cavalry divisions, a total of 1.4 million troops.16 As soon as Haig took over in December 1915, he ordered his staff to plan for another major offensive at Ypres in Flanders, to the north of the Somme sector. It was Joffre who persuaded him to attack at the Somme instead. (In a sense ‘The Somme’ is a misnomer for the battle, because no British soldier saw action anywhere near the river, and few even so much as laid eyes on it as it was not even in the British sector.)
It was important that there should be a major Anglo-French offensive on the Western Front in mid-1916 so that it could form part of a massive, coordinated, continent-wide plan to defeat the Central Powers. The middle of the year would see a simultaneous attack on all fronts against Germany and Austria-Hungary, pushing them to their limit strategically and it was hoped preventing them from shifting reserves and resources from one front to another. The Allied leaders met at Chantilly in France in December 1915 and agreed a strategy of attack with France, Britain, Italy and Russia acting together.17 The attack on the Somme would be co-ordinated with a Russian attack against the Austro-Hungarians (the Brusilov Offensive*3), which would encourage the entry of Romania into the war on the Allies’ side, and a major Italian offensive against Austria on the plateau of the Carso above the river Isonzo. Victories in each theatre would leave the Central Powers surrounded on every side.
Political considerations ought to play a minimal part in the formulation of strategy, though of course wars are ultimately fought for political reasons. The decision to attack on the Somme was in large part a political one, however, as it was the theatre of war where the French and British armies were adjacent to one another, so they could conduct operations jointly, the entente in action. Furthermore, if the Allies were to break through decisively, the Somme seemed like a good place to do so. The
area north of Ypres was wet and prone to flooding; south of Verdun there were rivers, forests and mountains; between the two sectors the rivers Oise and Aisne ran through relatively steep valleys. What was ideally needed were gently undulating, dry chalky slopes with the minimum of forest, where cavalry could operate and where the railways ran on an east–west axis.18 Artois and the Champagne district offered these apparently perfect conditions, but the Allied offensives there had ended in the painful Battles of Loos and Vimy Ridge. Now it was time for the Somme—a chalk plateau overlaid with loamy soil and cut by small ravines—to come into its own.
Detailed Staff discussions for a joint Anglo-French attack on the Somme had started in December 1915, immediately following the Chantilly conference, and by early 1916 it was agreed that an offensive would take place in mid-April, though only a minor one intended to thin out the German reserves there.19 Haig wanted to delay the main attack so that it would coincide with the Italian and Russian offensives later in the summer. At a meeting on 20 January, Joffre agreed that the major British offensive of the summer could be in Flanders, so long as there was also a major attack on the Somme in the spring, and then on 14 February Haig and Joffre agreed that the BEF would attack on the Somme in early July.
The French Gen. (later Maréchal) Ferdinand Foch meanwhile did not want to fight on a wide front on the Somme, believing there were not enough heavy guns on the Allied side; he wanted to attack in one concentrated area.20 Joffre overruled him, demanding co-ordinated assaults across the largest possible area. Haig had a low opinion of Foch, whom he thought of as a mere military theorist, and agreed with Joffre, though their expectations from the Somme Offensive proved to be wildly divergent. By mid-February 1916, the planned operation had ballooned to one that would involve no fewer than forty French and twenty-five British divisions. It was intended to start on 1 July. Gen. Erich von Falkenhayn’s massive attack on the French at Verdun on 21 February 1916 altered all their plans and strategic thinking. This made an early, large-scale Somme offensive all the more necessary, in Richard Holmes’ phrase, in order to ‘drag the Germans from the French windpipe at Verdun’.21 That windpipe was the Voie Sacrée (Sacred Road) from Verdun to Bar-le-Duc, which could only be saved if German attention was directed elsewhere.22 Only six weeks after the Battle of Verdun began, France had suffered no fewer than 90,000 casualties.23
GENERAL JOSEPH JOFFRE
The French general privately thought that Haig’s hope for a breakthrough was unachievable, and that the war would be won by attrition.
When Joffre visited Haig at his HQ in May, French losses at Verdun were expected to be 200,000 by the end of the month. When Haig promised an attack in the Somme area between 1 July and 15 August, Joffre said that ‘the French army would cease to exist’24 if the latter date was chosen. Haig therefore promised Saturday, 1 July as the day that twelve British divisions would attack north of the Somme, and Joffre promised that twenty French formations would attack south of the river. The date was thus set, although the size of the various forces changed later. Those six weeks would probably have made little difference to the outcome, but when added to the other alterations in British plans demanded by Joffre, Haig’s options were drastically narrowed. His later defenders have much right on their side when they point out how constrained he was. As Corelli Barnett has written: ‘It was in no way Haig’s fault that he had to launch his half-trained rank-and-file led by ill-experienced commanders in a premature offensive against immensely strong defences manned by the best army in Europe.’25
Haig himself had high hopes that after a massive bombardment on the Somme, his troops would be able simply to occupy the trenches of a demoralized enemy and then pursue the breakthrough he had wanted for so long. By contrast, Joffre had privately concluded that Haig’s hope for a breakthrough was a chimera, and that the war would instead be won by attrition—usure—which of course would necessitate far larger loss of life, French and British as well as German.26 One might—perhaps morally one should—deplore the heinous cynicism of trying to win a war by bleeding the enemy white at a terrible cost to one’s own countrymen, but at least Joffre could excuse himself on the basis that he was ultimately proved right, and that no one else had any better ideas.27
GENERAL ERICH VON FALKENHAYN
Pictured left, with his Chief of Staff Colonel Hans Hesse, he completely disrupted the Allies’ plans with his massive attack on Verdun.
The German strategy on the Somme in 1916, meanwhile, was entirely defensive while their armies in the east, supported by the Austro-Hungarians and the Turks, tried to knock Russia out of the war, which would allow them to bring their full weight to bear on the Western Front. The surprise Verdun Offensive was intended to kill as many Frenchmen as possible, relying on French pride in not withdrawing from the iconic fortress city on the Meuse, and it was largely successful in this. There was no need for Germany to advance on the Somme, even if they had the capacity to do so, which they did not during the Verdun Offensive. For over a year the Germans had therefore been digging deep dugouts and laying out barbed wire across the whole front. The Prussians and Bavarians they stationed there were not the hardened, experienced veterans of legend; because the sector had been hitherto so quiet, units were sent there for rest, recuperation and time in the reserves. Many came from the south of Germany and tended to despise the Prussians, and had only joined up after war broke out. The troops were mostly in reserve regiments not officered by career soldiers. ‘They were the sorts of soldiers who defined the German army of the middle war years,’ writes an historian of the Central Powers, ‘grumbling about rations, praying to God to protect them just that little bit longer, and yearning for Maria, Ursel or Greta. It was their bad fortune to be in the path of a juggernaut determined, as they saw it, to carry the devastation around them into their homeland.’28
By the spring of 1916 the French army seemed to be suffering far more than its German opponent, because of its heroic but bloodily expensive stubbornness in refusing to yield up Verdun. (As with the Russians at Stalingrad in the Second World War, French honour was bound up in this symbolic citadel, which was the centre of a vast network of forts and bunkers.) The British Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, had not wanted the BEF to shoulder the main weight of fighting the Germans in 1916, preferring a policy of ‘defensive attrition’ until the army was properly trained and equipped.29 On 5 June, however, he was drowned in HMS Hampshire west of the Orkney Islands on his way to Russia, so Haig was able to impose an ambitious battle plan that Kitchener had never envisaged nor wanted. The level of Haig’s ambition may be judged by the widespread belief in the General Staff that the offensive would be the ‘Big Push’ that could indeed bring the war to a successful conclusion. Although Haig drew up plans that envisaged a great breakthrough, he had the political sense to try to minimize expectations in the event of failure. ‘It is always well to disclaim great hopes before an attack,’ he wrote to General Charteris, his chief of Intelligence, the day before the assault.30
The ground north of the river Somme that was about to be contested so aggressively had been fought over scores of times by almost every army that had invaded or made war in France over the centuries; indeed some of the same farms had been occupied by the Cossacks fighting Napoleon I in 1814 and by Bavarians fighting his nephew Napoleon III in 1870. The undulating, chalky Picardy farmland and the meandering Somme and Ancre Rivers formed a sector which was also pitted with small villages whose names meant nothing to the world before 1916 but were forever afterwards to be synonymous with untold slaughter. The Germans had been expecting and methodically preparing for an attack in the Somme sector, which had been quiet since September 1914. Some German divisions there had hardly lost a man since then.31 The first two lines of German trenches—a third was under construction—had been built long before by Russian prisoners captured on the Eastern Front, and the 2nd Army of General Fritz von Below and the 6th Army commanded by Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria had had twenty-one m
onths to perfect their defences.32 The German Staff had analyzed the war’s previous battles carefully, and ordered the construction of deep dugouts, protected bunkers, solid strongpoints and well-hidden forward operation posts, and they had thought especially carefully about their machine guns’ fields of fire. They also kept modifying their plans as new information became available.33 The more advanced dugouts had several exits and were sophisticated enough to incorporate kitchens and supply rooms for food, ammunition and equipment such as grenades, ammunition and woollen socks. Some even had rails attached to the steps so that machine guns could be pulled up quickly and placed into position on the parapet.34
CROWN PRINCE RUPPRECHT OF BAVARIA
Promoted to Field Marshal shortly after the first day of the Somme Offensive, Prince Rupprecht was one of the few royal officers considered worthy of his command in the German army. He was a decent man, competent commander and future anti-Nazi.
Although Haig would have preferred to attack at Ypres, he took solace from the fact that the Somme had better railway access and drier ground.35 The chalk downlands of Picardy have roughly the same geology as Kent, yet that very similarity made it relatively easy for the Germans to dig deeply into the ground.*4 Whatever advantages lay with the BEF and French as the attackers, they were heavily outweighed by the disadvantages. The Germans had been in possession of the area since the early weeks of the war, and they held almost all the high ground along the battlefront, especially at Beaumont Hamel, the Schwaben Redoubt north of the village of Thiepval, and Thiepval itself, making the tasks of their machine-gunners and artillery forward observation officers very much easier. There were no fewer than eleven redoubts in the sector, as well as the nine fortified towns.