To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  In January 1912 the Prussian War Ministry agreed to maintain a peacetime stock of 1,200 rounds per field gun, but this target had not been reached by 1914. In November 1912 each corps had 400 rounds per field gun, and there were a further 200 in reserve; the position with regard to light field howitzers was marginally worse, and that for heavy field howitzers somewhat better. Moltke reckoned such stocks would be exhausted in forty days. He and Ludendorff lobbied for more at regular intervals from 1909 onwards. However, after 1912 they undermined the effects by also calling for more men. Overall stocks rose between November 1912 and August 1914, but the simultaneous expansion of the army prevented the ratio of firepower to manpower improving in proportion. In August 1914 Germany had 5,096 field guns and 1,230 light field howitzers. If the available shells had been equally distributed between all the available pieces, each field gun would have been allotted 750 rounds and each light field howitzer 712. In reality, the allocation for each gun on field service was higher and that for guns kept in reserve or fortifications lower. The official history states that the total horsed for the field was 4,200 guns and 1,230 light field howitzers, and that the allocation for these was raised to 864 and 882. Other sources suggest that in fact as few as 3,042 field guns and 720 light howitzers were put into the field, at least initially; they therefore conclude that each field gun had 987 shells and each light howitzer 973.15 But the corollary of this procedure was that, as the reserve guns were mobilized (and in October five new corps were created), the existing shell stocks had to be divided over more pieces and the allocation per gun reduced accordingly. The sense of crisis in shell supply was therefore exacerbated, not because aggregate shell stocks had fallen but because more guns had to be supplied. In general, Germany’s artillery was, depending on its calibre and on whether it was in the field or in garrison, between 20 and 50 per cent below its target shell stocks on mobilization.

  However, what France’s preoccupation with German stocks failed to highlight was Moltke’s constant emphasis on the need for the rapid expansion of shell production on mobilization. The German chief of the general staff recognized the trade-off between peacetime holdings and wartime deliveries. If production was slow to get into its stride on mobilization, then the German army would have to have large reserves ready for use. But, as Einem recognized when minister of war, stockpiling devoted resources to shells which might be obsolete before they could be fired. Furthermore, Moltke reckoned that the opening engagement, spread over several days, and likely to be fought in the longer daylight hours of summer, would consume the seemingly enormous total of 500 rounds per gun. Rather than crack the intractabilities of shell consumption in such circumstances, he urged the need to maintain sufficient plant to replace existing stocks within six weeks. Resupply should begin on the twenty-first day of mobilization and be sustained at monthly intervals thereafter. The Germans prepared to vary their standards of production and to incorporate fresh plant in the manufacture of munitions at short notice. This, and not the relative size of their stockpiles, was the cardinal difference between them and the French.16

  Both the French and the Germans cited the Balkan wars as evidence of increased rates of consumption. But more immediately influential in shaping Russian thinking was the war in Manchuria. During the most intensive fighting at Mukden shell consumption had risen to 375 rounds per gun. Total expenditure over the war as a whole averaged 730 rounds per gun, and the highest in any one army was just over 1,000 rounds per gun.17 These demands had far outstripped the capacity of Russia’s state-owned arms industry, and Russia had to turn to foreign producers. To obviate such measures in future it increased the flow of peacetime orders to private manufacturers.18 But, as in France, the basic emphasis lay on initial stocks more than on long-term capacity. ‘Previous wars’, the director of the main artillery administration (or GAU) explained in May 1915, ‘provided clear evidence that an army got along on that reserve of munitions which existed in peacetime. Everything ordered with the declaration of war was caught up with only after the war’s conclusion and served to make good on expended reserves.’19 The plan was to create a stock of 1,000 rounds, thought to be enough for four to six months fighting. But manoeuvres in 1911 and in April 1914 suggested that more than 400 shells per gun might be fired in a single battle. In 1914, as Russia closed on its target of 1,000 rounds, the general staff persuaded the GAU that it should be revised to 1,500.20

  This figure was also that chosen by the other belligerent with recent experience of quick-firing artillery in combat, even if the quick-firers had been in the hands of the enemy. In the Boer War the British found, as the Russians were to discover in Manchuria, that domestic orders for shell did not keep pace with consumption. The problem was that no peacetime organization could prepare production adequate to meet the theoretical capabilities of modern quick-firing field artillery. In 1905 Britain’s Army Council reckoned that a six-gun battery could fire between 3,600 and 5,400 shells in an hour. A horse-drawn supply system could only sustain such guns for two hours. The Army Council therefore adopted what was effectively an arbitrary ruling: each field gun would have 500 rounds, with a further 500 in reserve.21 By 1913 the scale was 1,500 rounds per 18-pounder field gun, and 1,200 per 4.5-inch howitzer. Provision was made for an additional 500 for the first and 400 for the second after six months of fighting.22 Britain’s reserves of shell in 1914 were two-and-a-half times greater than they had been in 1899. They were reckoned to be sufficient for four major battles, each of three days, during the first two months of war.23

  The armies of Europe had not not thought about the problems of shell consumption. Broadly speaking, they had doubled the figure they had first thought of. Moreover, shell shortage was not, in the first instance, precipitated by an underestimation of the length of the war. France reckoned its shell stocks would be sufficient for three months,24 but confronted crisis within six weeks (or within a month of the commencement of active operations). Britain’s plans assumed that its allocation per gun would see it through the first six months of hostilities; in fact it lasted less than half that time. The German munitions services (Feuerwerkswesen) had made a similar calculation, and were comparably confounded.25 The Russian general staff was proved more accurate in its predictions, arguing that 1,000 rounds per gun would last four months, but it encountered opposition from the main artillery administration which claimed that such provision would last four times as long.26 Thus, the supplies available in August 1914 were almost universally reckoned to be sufficient for a longer period than proved to be the case. The shells crisis of the autumn of 1914 was emphatically not a manifestation of a belief that the war would be short.

  The immediate causes of shell shortage lay in the fact that the manner of fighting was so different from pre-war expectation. This point can best be demonstrated negatively. The attention to shell shortage in 1914 causes scholars to neglect the problem of shell abundance. The all-big-gun ship, the Dreadnought, and the complexities in the production of its projectiles generated major pre-war worries concerning supply. The ability to fire rapidly at a long range implied increased consumption, but nobody had any direct experience on which to base rational calculations. The British government erred on the side of over-provision. Although it manufactured its own cordite at the Royal Gunpowder Factory at Waltham Abbey, its demand exceeded the capacity of its own plant, and even in peacetime absorbed 60 to 80 per cent of that of the private sector. Conscious of the dangers of monopoly relations between government and business, it endeavoured to promote competition among the eight leading firms engaged in the manufacture of high explosives. Unbeknownst to the Admiralty, however, Nobels controlled directly or indirectly five of the eight, and by 1913 provided 75 per cent of the British government’s needs. After a loss in 1908, Nobel returned significant profits in each of the last four years before the war despite the fact that not a shot had been fired in anger. On the outbreak of war the Admiralty stepped up production once more, telling its principal cordite contractors
to increase output to the maximum possible. By the end of 1914 the private firms had orders for 16,000 tons of cordite, approaching double their annual pre-war capacity of 10,000 tons. Some of this was destined for the army, but one constraint on the army’s shell supply was that the navy continued to have first call on cordite production. As early as 14 October Churchill reluctantly acknowledged the navy’s over-provision when he sanctioned the transfer of 1,000 tons of the increased supply to the army.27 By the end of 1915 the Royal Navy had fired only 5,000 large-calibre shells, and in the war as a whole it expended only 29,200.28 In its case the accumulation of stocks, not their lack, was the primary cause of embarrassment. Britain had plenty of certain sorts of shells, and could have fought a long war without any crisis if the nature of the war had been different.

  The British example is obviously an extreme. The continental powers did at least anticipate major land operations. But what they had reckoned on was manoeuvre warfare. This is not to say that mobility could not generate shell shortage, but it tended to be local and limited, the product of transport problems rather than of low aggregate stocks. The pace of the opening advances frequently outstripped the logistical capabilities of the armies. This was the German and the British problem on the Marne and even at the first battle of Ypres.29 It also explains the apparent discrepancy between the shortages experienced on both Russian Fronts, North-West and South-West, in late August 1914, and the simultaneous reassurances concerning shell supply emanating from Sukhomlinov in the rear.30 The lack of railways and the poor state of the roads continued to be major determinants in shell supply on the eastern front in 1915. But because the front was more fluid than in the west, the requirement for shells was not itself so great: the Germans (unlike the Russians) insisted that shell shortage was not a factor in their operations in the east.31

  Thus, manoeuvre warfare created a virtuous circle. As long as armies remained mobile, their pauses to fire were less frequent and so their shell consumption was restrained. When armies were stopped and trenches were dug, both attack and defence became more dependent on artillery. The guns themselves could identify more fixed targets, and could rely on securer lines of supply: both became factors fostering prodigality in munitions expenditure.

  The shift to positional warfare also had the effect of generating a need for a different balance in types of shell. Pre-war thinking had assumed that the principal targets for field artillery would be infantry scattered in skirmishing formation. Shrapnel, which exploded in the air sending fragments over a wide area, was the most appropriate shell for this sort of tactical application. However, in position warfare high explosive was preferred, as it was better adapted to the destruction of field fortifications; the most useful function that shrapnel could perform in these circumstances was to cut barbed wire. The Serbs had used high-explosive shells in field guns to good effect in 1912, but in 1914 the field artillery of all the major belligerents was—to varying degrees— shrapnel dominated.

  Most extreme were the British. The equipment of their field howitzers and heavy guns was 70 per cent shrapnel, and in August 1914 all their 13 and 18-pounder guns were entirely supplied with shrapnel. The reasons were largely technical. The tactical value of an effective high-explosive shell was recognized, but that used in South Africa, lyddite (made from picric acid), was liable to detonate either prematurely or not at all. The latter was particularly the case in guns of smaller calibre. Therefore, high-explosive shell was reserved in the field artillery for the 4.5-inch howitzer. The decision was justified by Britain’s adoption of the 18-pounder as its quick-firing field gun in 1903. With a calibre equivalent to 83.8 mm, its power was much greater than the field guns of other armies. Trials suggested that an 18-pounder shrapnel shell could do much of the work of high explosive, including hitting infantry in entrenchments, putting a shielded gun out of action, and penetrating the walls of an ordinary building before exploding. The dominance of shrapnel was endorsed as late as 1913.32

  In Britain tactics were used to justify technological retardation; although in Germany the reverse occurred, the result was no better. Shrapnel had not worked against field fortifications in Manchuria or in the Balkan wars. The Germans had, therefore, adopted common shell for their field howitzers in 1906. By sacrificing some high explosive the common shell made room for shrapnel, but in doing so it risked fulfilling the roles of neither. Although the common shell was also formally adopted for field guns in 1911, its technical sophistication and the cost of its manufacture militated against mass production and rapid replacement. Once the war broke out it was soon abandoned. In 1914 half of the German army’s shell supply for field guns was still made up of shrapnel.33 The French occupied an intermediate position: rather more than half their 75 mm shells were shrapnel.34

  Thus the early shell crises were not often manifestations of a general shortage but of a specific one. Confronted with field fortifications, armies fired high explosive in preference to shrapnel, and, given their limited stocks of the former, ran out of it sooner than they did of the latter. Joffre’s exhortations to his generals in mid-September dwelt on the merits of shrapnel, so urging them to make the best of what they had rather than to request what was not available.35

  There were other remedies as well. Heavy artillery was designed to fire high explosive, and at a slower rate than quick-firing field guns. The French and Russians had allocated their heavy artillery to fortresses rather than to the field armies. Joffre was forced, through his lack of divisional heavy artillery, to strip coastal defences and fixed positions of fortress artillery in order to press it into field service. In doing so he was able to liberate shells that would otherwise have been unuseable: half the stocks of Verdun, Toul, Epinal, and Belfort were plundered in this way.36 Russia was not so resourceful. The upgrading of the Polish fortresses before the war attracted funds that could have been allocated to the field artillery, but the resources so committed were not redistributed in 1914. When the Germans captured Kowno and Novo Georgievsk in 1915 they seized 3,000 guns and nearly 2 million rounds of ammunition.37

  High-explosive shell became the technological panacea for the new tactical conditions in which armies found themselves. It could blast a way through deep defences supported by barbed wire and machine-guns. The prime mover in Russia’s attention to its Polish fortresses, Grand Duke Nicholas, wrote to the main artillery administration at the end of September that, in default of ‘the liberal employment of artillery fire’, ‘no tangible result can be achieved’.38 Such pronouncements formed an oft-repeated litany that frequently smacked of rhetoric rather than of reflection. Thus, Douglas Haig voiced a common orthodoxy when he told the military correspondent Charles Repington in January 1915 that, ‘as soon as we were supplied with ample artillery ammunition of high explosive, I thought we could walk through the German line at several places.’

  Significantly, however, Haig believed that the major effect of higher rates of shelling would be not material but moral.39 This approach made the case for more shells open-ended. Even if there were sufficient shells to meet the material objectives, failure could still be accounted for in moral terms. Moreover, the generals’ analysis of why more munitions were required was itself productive of shell shortage. It implied that the only solution to the stalemate was an even more prodigal use of artillery. Few paused to ask, as did the deputy Prussian war minister General Franz Wandel, whether shortages were not the product of excessively lavish expenditure.40 In the French and the Russian armies in particular, the infantry were criticized for becoming over-dependent on artillery support. A German serving in the Ypres sector at the end of October 1914 noted that the French artillery opened fire on a single horseman.41 Thus, while commanders-in-chief wrote to ministries of war, threatening an imminent cessation of hostilities for lack of shells, their subordinates in the field began to appreciate that the consequences of restraint were not necessarily so deleterious. A British infantry officer recorded in his diary in January 1915 that a more limited and system
atic use of artillery had made the crises of October and November a thing of the past.42

  The rhetoric of shell shortage not only boosted shell expenditure. It could also generate false shortages. Russian batteries responded to the infantry’s continuous demands by hoarding shells. This became known to the main artillery administration, which in its turn treated calls for munitions from the front with increasing scepticism. Therefore, by 1915 the artillery administration was secreting shell stocks in order to resist what they saw as rapacious battery commanders, and battery commanders were underestimating what they held in order to increase their leverage over the artillery administration. The result was to obscure the true position on munitions, and to make appearances worse than reality.43

  Accurate accounting would have cleared the air. It would have revealed the real position and facilitated the planning of production. But Joffre’s insistence that each army report its munitions stocks every night was not typical.44 Although by the autumn of 1914 the German armies in the west were required to report their stocks each day, the Prussian Ministry of War was not getting regular returns of consumption until 1915, and even then only on a monthly basis. The scope for each party to deceive the other was acknowledged by the head of the munitions section at general headquarters, who prided himself on his inner sense of what was reasonable but recognized that that itself rested on each report’s comparability with the last return. In the winter of 1914–15 his tendency was to bypass the Ministry of War entirely. The need to split his stocks between west and east became a source of flexibility, as he met crises in one army or on one front by calling on the resources of another, rather than by adding to the already excessive demands on home production.45 In Russia orders for shell passed from the Fronts to the rear, bypassing Stavka: at the end of 1914 Stavka could only account for a third of the shells with which it had been supplied. When Grand Duke Nicholas complained about shell shortage he did not really know, in any detail, what he was talking about.46