by Paul Ham
On 8 March, having completed his ‘experiment’, Jellicoe moved to torpedo the idea. The captains of ten ‘tramp steamers’, he grandly informed the War Cabinet, had said they were ‘strongly against convoy’ and ‘would very much prefer to sail alone’.57 The ‘survey’ failed to persuade Lloyd George. The prime minister, to his credit, was determined to force the idea on the admiralty, even if that meant removing Jellicoe.
On 2 April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson delivered a War Message to Congress. ‘The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind,’ he declared. ‘It is a war against all nations. American ships have been sunk, American lives taken … There has been no discrimination. The challenge is to all mankind. Each nation must decide for itself how it will meet it …’58 Four days later, the United States declared war on Germany.
Immediately, Britain sent Lord Balfour with an urgent shopping list for troops, guns, medical supplies, wheat and steel.59 With America in the war, the British were no longer reliant on the long and dangerous delivery of Australian wheat: US battleships would join the convoys in helping to combat the submarine threat.60
Meanwhile, Lloyd George was close to proving the admiralty dead wrong over the submarine menace. His first ‘experiment’ in convoy protection tore up the admiralty’s case that escorts wouldn’t work. On 10 May, several British destroyers escorted seventeen merchant ships out of Gibraltar; twelve days later, all reached British ports safely, with their cargo intact. It was a shining moment for the British war effort amid all the gloom.
By mid-1917, most merchant ships were sailing in protected convoys across the Atlantic. Germany would never again repeat the record strike rate of April, the only month in which her submarines sank more than 600,000 tons of British shipping – the threshold on which Berlin’s 1 August victory deadline relied. From July 1917 onwards, the U-boat campaign would fall well short of Germany’s war-winning tally.
That posed the question: why launch a huge land offensive against German U-boat bases on the Belgian coast when the convoy system showed every sign of defeating the enemy’s submarines? Third Ypres was scheduled to begin in July 1917. Yet as early as May, the U-boats were being deterred and the convoys protected. Why go ahead with Third Ypres at all if the submarines could be defeated at sea, as seemed likely? Haig and his generals had their reasons, as we shall see. The War Cabinet was silent on the issue. It was never pursued.
4
KNIGHTS AND PAWNS
And so we went to bed, thoroughly disgusted with our Government and the Politicians.
Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, 26 February 1917, at the Calais conference
At first, their relationship seemed workable. Haig spoke well of the prime minister, as a man he thought he could work with. Neither knew that their feelings would soon degenerate into a state of mutual contempt that would fester for the rest of their lives. This was not a passing power struggle between a political leader and his commander; this was viscerally personal, as one story reveals. After Haig gave an ill-advised interview to French journalists that came across as vainglorious in The Times’s English translation, infuriating Lloyd George, the prime minister tried to persuade Lord Northcliffe to turn his arsenal of ink on the popular commander. ‘[Lloyd George] made the proposition,’ the press baron recounted, ‘that I should attack [Haig] in my group of newspapers and so render him unpopular enough to be dealt with. “You kill him and I will bury him.” Those were his very words.’1 (At the time, Lloyd George was the more likely target of Northcliffe’s press.)
At the heart of the dispute lay the question of how best to win the war: Lloyd George and Haig had very different ideas. The prime minister had no faith in Haig’s strategy of attrition, which he saw as pointless butchery. Lloyd George preferred to use the British Army in defence and on a third front in Italy, to limit losses. He later professed that he and the War Cabinet were not told of Haig’s Flanders Plan until June 1917, a month before the ground offensive began, implying that, had he known, he could have stopped it, and that he, at least, was not responsible. (This whitewash is one of several barefaced lies in Lloyd George’s otherwise riveting memoir.)
For one thing, Lloyd George had known of the Flanders Plan as early as 21 November 1916, when the War Committee fastened on ‘the very great desirability … of military action designed either to occupy Ostend or Zeebrugge, or at least render those ports useless as bases for destroyers and submarines,’ according to Asquith’s account. ‘There was no difference of opinion … that the submarine constitutes by far the most dangerous menace to the Allies at the present …’2 On the 23rd, the Committee reinforced the point: the ‘expulsion of the enemy from the Belgian coast’ was of the highest importance.3 Lloyd George was not then prime minister, but it is inconceivable that a politician with his ego and hankering to be at the centre of events was unaware of the planning of the most important Allied offensive of 1917.
In January, General Sir William ‘Wully’ Robertson, the hot-headed, popular chief of the imperial general staff (CIGS), apprised Haig of the government’s support for an offensive in Flanders, and the ‘great importance’ it attached ‘to the capture of Ostend and Zeebrugge before next winter’. In whose name was he acting if not in the name of the government of the new prime minister?
Robertson’s letter, dated 1 January 1917, raised the question of whether General Nivelle’s plan for a new offensive in Champagne would prevent Haig ‘from undertaking the operations which you contemplate in Belgium’.4 The issue was extremely sensitive, because Haig’s hopes of attacking in Flanders hinged upon the support of his prime minister, which was never a given. Soon it would become clear that Lloyd George saw in Nivelle’s reckless plan for a lightning breakthrough a far more appealing alternative to Haig’s gradual attritional war.
On 5–7 January 1917, Lloyd George attended the Rome conference of Allied leaders and their military advisers to discuss the year’s war plans. True to his flamboyant form, the prime minister stole the show with an idea that tore up everything his advisers thought they had privately agreed before the meeting. Lloyd George had, in fact, been studying an alternative to Haig’s wearing-down war, which he had not discussed with anyone. Even members of his own Cabinet were in the dark, showing just how much the prime minister ran the war as he pleased.
Why not hurl the brunt of the Allied attack at Germany’s weakest point, on the Italian front, along the Isonzo River, Lloyd George asked the conference. ‘Would it not be possible,’ he said, ‘to make a great and sudden stroke against the enemy on the Isonzo front … to inflict a decisive defeat on him, and to press forward to Trieste and get astride the Istrian Peninsula?’5
‘No’, the delegates variously said or thought, ‘it would not’. The idea defied all conventional military sense. The British military advisers, led by Robertson, were ‘completely taken aback at finding their own Prime Minister putting forward a plan they had never heard of’.6 Robertson bit hard on his humiliation and calmly opposed the idea.
The French officials firmly rejected it. The British leader’s Italian ‘strategy’ was wrong-headed on several grounds, the commanders pointed out, not least because 130 of Germany’s 200 divisions, including the enemy’s best units, were then stationed along the Western Front – and any weakening of Allied pressure risked provoking an enemy offensive. The war would be won or lost in France and Belgium, the French and British delegations argued. To shift guns and men to Italy would denude the French and Belgian lines of defence and encourage the Germans to attack.
Even the callous and incompetent General Luigi Cadorna, the Italian commander-in-chief, who would fight a string of failed offensives on the Isonzo, was reluctant to agree to the reinforcement of the Italian front, despite his own government’s delight at the prospect.
Lloyd George refused to release his Italian bone: 20,000 railway wagons, he said, could safely transport the Anglo-French forces to Italy without fear of submarine attack, and Britain could spa
re much of its heavy artillery for a third front in Italy. Had the man lost his senses? Was Lloyd George seriously suggesting that they dismantle their vital defensive positions on the Western Front? And pack off the heavy guns in France and Flanders, then holding back the German steamroller, to Italy?
The delegates consigned the idea to a respectful oblivion, at least for now: the three governments’ military advisers agreed to examine the proposal and respond in good time.7 If they hoped the idea would sit and gather dust, they underestimated the British leader. He would never abandon his cherished Italian offensive (not even to appease Lord Northcliffe, who, on 2 January, had threatened to bring down the government if Lloyd George dared to move two divisions from the western theatre). It was a measure of Lloyd George’s extraordinary self-confidence – a union of wilful ignorance and sincere determination to spare Britain another Somme – that he reckoned he could turn the great ship of war to Italy.
For now, at least, the prime minister was obliged to stick with the Western Front, where his gaze settled on a fresh plan that owed nothing to Haig and promised fewer casualties: the lightning offensive envisaged by the dashing new French commander, General Robert Nivelle, the hero of Verdun. The Nivelle Offensive, when he heard of it, was music to Lloyd George’s ears. It aimed to break the German line on the Aisne River in a matter of days, heave the enemy out of France and end Haig’s war of attrition.
Robert Nivelle, 61, was a supremely self-confident artilleryman who had convinced himself, if not his fellow generals, that the artillery barrages with which he’d won the last battles of Verdun would work in the wider, better-defended theatre of the Aisne valley. Saturation shelling on an unprecedented scale followed by a concentrated, creeping barrage in advance of waves of shock troops would rupture the German lines and win the war. Best of all, in the politicians’ eyes, the Nivelle Offensive would be a short sharp blow with comparatively few casualties. All Nivelle needed was 48 hours, the Frenchman promised, and if the breakthrough took longer he promised he’d call the whole thing off.
Nivelle laid his plan before Haig on 20 December 1916. It aimed, Nivelle wrote, ‘to destroy the main body of the enemy’s armies on the Western Front’. The French forces, with British help, would ‘pin down as large a portion as possible of the hostile forces’ in the Somme and Arras–Bapaume sectors, while an ‘attaque brusquée’ would ‘break the enemy’s front in such a manner that the rupture can be immediately exploited’.8 If it failed, ‘it will still be possible’, Nivelle reassured Haig, ‘to carry out in fine weather (á la belle saison) the operations projected in Flanders’.9
At first, Haig gave his French counterpart the benefit of the doubt (he would later change his mind). The British commander agreed that ‘a decisive blow’ should be ‘struck by surprise’ now that ‘the Enemy’s morale is weakened’.10 Brigadier General John Charteris, Haig’s unreliable intelligence officer, spoke in awe of Nivelle’s self-confidence and how the Frenchman ‘sees big’.11
Nivelle was strong on grand statements but short on detail. Who would lead the Anglo-French forces? Would there be a unity of command? At what point would the British and Dominion troops be released from the French offensive and entrained to Flanders? The transfer would involve a gigantic logistical operation, moving hundreds of thousands of men and huge amounts of ammunition and supplies. How would this be achieved?
With these questions high in mind, Haig told the French general (on 6 January 1917) that he would support the attack on the Aisne on the condition that it had a strict time limit: the decisive attack, Haig reminded Nivelle, would be of short duration (up to fourteen days in the opening bombardment phase, and 24–48 hours in the second phase). If Nivelle failed to get results in this time frame, Haig reserved the freedom to break off the offensive and move his troops to Flanders. ‘[T]he clearance of the Belgian coast,’ he wrote, ‘is of such importance to the British Government that it must be fully provided for before I can finally agree to your proposals.’12 Haig henceforth planned two offensives in 1917: on the Vimy, Arras and Ancre sectors in France, in support of Nivelle’s left flank, scheduled for April; and in Flanders, on the Ypres Salient, scheduled to start in late July.
Haig proceeded on the assumption that his prime minister, whatever their personal differences, retained faith in his operational ability. For a commander of such experience, Haig could appear strangely guileless. He saw himself as a man of his word, an upholder of the Victorian values of honour and self-respect. He disdained the strange, slithering beast of the politician. Haig despised the political type, their venality, their molten nature, the ease with which they poured themselves into a new vessel and threw out the old. If you had told Haig then that Lloyd George was about to cast aside the strategic priority of the Belgian coast, he would have disbelieved you. If you had told Haig then that his prime minister was secretly working with the French to subordinate him to Nivelle, he would have thought you mad.
Lloyd George’s infatuation with Nivelle reached a high point on 15–16 January, when the Frenchman arrived at a conference in London to present his plan for victory. Nivelle was a great success. His dash and pluck charmed the ladies and enthralled the men. A smallish man, with a well-pruned moustache and an excellent command of English (the gift of his English mother), Nivelle deeply impressed Lloyd George, who, playing the amateur phrenologist, remarked that he liked the Frenchmen’s head. ‘He often judged men in this way,’ observed Brigadier General Edward Spears, the Anglo-French liaison officer. ‘[H]e either liked the shape of a man’s head or he did not’.13 Lloyd George also liked the way Nivelle spoke, and he quickly persuaded himself that the Frenchman’s plan was the right one.
In Nivelle, the prime minister espied a fellow man who got things done. Nivelle’s all-or-nothing gamble on the Aisne spoke to Lloyd George’s penchant for decisive, fleet-footed action over Haig’s long ‘bleeding’ war. What’s more, Nivelle was easier to comprehend, Lloyd George cruelly joked, than his famously inarticulate commander-in-chief. The Nivelle Offensive appealed to him for another reason: ever mindful of the rising body count, Lloyd George assumed that French troops would bear the brunt of the fighting – and the casualties.
Not everyone shared the prime minister’s faith in Nivelle. The Frenchman’s victory-clenching battle plan failed to persuade the experts in the War Office, who refused to believe that saturation bombing, however concentrated, could destroy nine to twelve lines of trenches set in a defensive system five to twelve miles deep. Nor were they convinced that the French guns could be moved up in time to support the advancing infantry, who, without artillery cover, would be cut to pieces. Yet the Nivelle Plan hinged on a breakthrough within 48 hours, a feat that neither side had accomplished in two years. The boffins in the War Office were ignored: Nivelle so impressed the British Cabinet that Lloyd George dismissed the criticisms as signs of weakness. He even ordered Robertson to send a special instruction to Haig to back Nivelle’s proposal ‘in the letter and in the spirit’ and on no account to keep the Frenchman waiting.
The Nivelle Plan gathered the support of powerful civilians. Soon, in Lloyd George’s mind, it had eclipsed the Flanders Plan. The U-boat menace on the Belgian coast, once thought so dangerous, receded as a priority. Nivelle himself dismissed the attack on the submarine bases as ‘an idée fixe’: a British obsession that would merely push the submarines eastward. The real war was in north-eastern France, he insisted. Only after the defeat of Germany on French soil, he granted, would the lesser glory of clearing Belgium fall to the British.
As the terrible day approached, Nivelle made ever more strident claims for his plan, propelled by the unwavering support of Colonel d’Alenson, his chef de cabinet, ‘a Napoleon without genius’ who was dying of phthisis and who burned for victory over Germany before he expired.14 Yet Nivelle’s nerves began to tell: he had never commanded an army on this scale; he received slender political support, in the form of Prime Minister Aristide Briand, himself in a fragile political state; an
d he enjoyed none of the affection the French people had bestowed on Joffre and Foch.
Nivelle overcompensated for his anxiety with a puffed up sense of his own importance, displaying a dangerous tendency to treat Haig as a subordinate (as field marshal, Haig easily outranked the French general). On 25 January, Nivelle wrote to his British counterpart in dictatorial tones, heavy with the presumption that the British and Dominion armies were a part of the French Army. This deeply rankled at Haig’s headquarters, where the issue of command had not yet been resolved.
As yet unknown to Haig, these were the opening salvoes of a ‘wearing-down war’ against the British commander, conducted behind the scenes by Lloyd George in concert with the French Government. The prime minister had privately decided to place Haig and his forces at the beck and call of Nivelle. If Lloyd George could not sack his commander-in-chief, under his pledge to the Conservatives, he could so humiliate him that Haig’s pride would do the rest and he would resign.
On the face of it, a more despicable act of sabotage of a commander-in-chief by his prime minister is difficult to imagine. For his part, Lloyd George had persuaded himself that his intentions justified this act of gross disloyalty: he wanted No More Sommes. That meant taking the reins of the British Army out of Haig’s blood-soaked hands and putting them in the Frenchman’s.
The prime minister delivered the body blow at the Calais conference on 26–27 February 1917, innocuously convened to resolve an Anglo-French dispute over railway lines in the British zone of operations. Well in advance, Lloyd George had made the true agenda of the meeting clear to the French Government but not to his own commanders: that was, to hand over command of the British forces in France to the French.
