A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (65 page)

On April 28, after waiting more than a month for the ground to firm up, Hindenburg and Ludendorff launched a counterattack at Lake Naroch. It was as spectacular a success as the original Russian attack had been a failure, recapturing in a day everything that the Russians had managed to take in a week in March. The ease with which the Germans swept back over their lost ground was in part the result of an innovation introduced by the commander of their artillery, a lieutenant colonel of retirement age named Georg Bruchmüller. This was the
Feuerwalz,
or dance of fire. (The British would give it the more prosaic name “creeping barrage” when they adopted it later in the year.) It replaced days of shelling with a shorter, shockingly intense bombardment that, when the infantry advanced, moved ahead of it into enemy territory like a protective wall. Its effectiveness lay in the way it gave defenders no time to adapt, and attackers the sense that they were being literally shielded from the enemy as they advanced. It was, implicitly, a rejection of the artillery tactics being used by both sides on the Western Front. Ultimately it would prove to be one of the war’s most important tactical innovations. Ludendorff’s strategist Max Hoffmann recognized its brilliance in bestowing on its inventor the nickname Durchbruchmüller—Breakthroughmüller.

In the two fights at Lake Naroch the Russians had suffered at least one hundred thousand battlefield casualties, a total that excludes the twelve thousand troops who froze to death. German losses totaled twenty thousand. But it was not the direct results of the battle (neither side gained any ground) that made it important. Lake Naroch changed the course of the war in the east by persuading Evert and Kuropatkin that further offensives could not succeed regardless of how many men, guns, and shells the Russians used.

Background

AIRSHIPS AND LANDSHIPS

THE GREAT WAR DID NOT GIVE BIRTH TO AVIATION; THE
Wright brothers made their first flight at Kitty Hawk eleven years before the war began. It did not even give birth to combat aviation; the Italians had used nine primitive airplanes in snatching Libya away from the Ottoman Empire in 1911 and 1912.

But the war transformed aviation with dazzling speed. In a matter of months it changed the airplane from a novelty of uncertain value—“a useless and expensive fad,” Britain’s top general said as late as 1911—to an essential element in the arsenal of every nation.

The Great War did give birth to the tank, which would not have been invented nearly as early as it was if not for the stalemate on the Western Front.

Both phenomena, air
forces
as opposed to mere airplanes and tanks as an antidote to trenches and machine guns and barbed wire, made their first appearance in 1916.

It is sometimes claimed, falsely, that Europe’s military leaders remained almost entirely blind to the potential of the airplane during the decade before the war. Skepticism was indeed widespread, and sometimes it was absurd: Ferdinand Foch, when he was commandant of the French War College, had declared the new flying machines “good for sport but not for war.” But in 1909, when Louis Blériot crossed the English Channel in a plane he had designed and built himself, more than a few British leaders understood that their island nation was suddenly no longer as safe as it always had been. When the French began using aircraft effectively in their annual military exercises, the Germans understood that their fledgling aviation industry and its inferior products had better catch up—and fast.

France (not America, despite the Wright brothers) was the leader in heavier-than-air flight throughout the prewar years. Though both France and Germany began the war with more than two hundred airplanes in military service, those of the French were distinctly superior. The British lagged behind with fewer than a hundred aircraft, only forty-four of which were sent to the continent with the BEF. The Russians, though they had acquired substantial numbers, were entirely dependent on foreign sources for their planes. Few and simple as they were, however, airplanes quickly proved their value. Weeks after French fliers confirmed the shift of the German First Army away from Paris, setting the stage for the Battle of the Marne, the British began using their aircraft as artillery spotters. When the Western Front became static and cavalry were rendered useless, aircraft became essential in reconnaissance. Aerial photography reached a high level of sophistication as early as 1915.

Air combat followed as the fliers on both sides began trying to knock each other out of the sky. French and German pilots (often enlisted men at first—mere chauffeurs) went aloft carrying passengers who fired at each other with rifles and shotguns. Somebody got the idea of mounting a Hotchkiss light machine gun at the front of France’s Morane Saulnier monoplane, which with a top speed of a hundred miles per hour was the best of the war’s first aircraft. Another innovation soon followed: steel plating on the back side of the propeller blades, to spare pilots the indignity of shooting themselves down. So armed, the French began destroying their adversaries in numbers that mattered. The Germans, who until then had been spending most of their aviation budget on massive lighter-than-air Zeppelin dirigibles, again had to scramble to catch up. There began a game of technological leapfrog that continued through the war, with first one side and then the other gaining temporary advantage. The rudimentary technology of the time made the game a fast one. As the British aviation pioneer T.O.M. Sopwith said, “We literally thought of and designed and flew the airplanes in a space of about six or eight weeks.”

A major advance came in the form of a new German biplane (a term indicating that it had two main wings, one above the other) designed by the Dutch engineer Anthony Fokker. In most respects this Fokker Eindecker, introduced in 1915, was little more than a copy of a captured Morane Saulnier. But in one respect it was revolutionary: Fokker equipped it with an interrupter gear (an idea he got from a Swiss engineer) that permitted its two machine guns to fire through the propeller without hitting the blades. This innovation completed the integration of piloting and killing. It turned airplanes into true weapons—flying gun platforms built for attack. With it the Germans dominated the air by late 1915. They were able to establish a virtually impenetrable umbrella over Verdun, keeping their preparations for the attack there a secret from the French. Even so, the Eindeckers needed half an hour to climb to ten thousand feet and had a top speed of only eighty-seven miles per hour.

The French and British regained the lead with three new and distinctly superior models: the Nieuport and Spad biplanes, and a Sopwith triplane that was a marvel of climbing power and maneuverability. The Entente armies assembled hundreds of these aircraft in preparation for their offensive on the Somme. The Germans, inevitably, responded with even more potent new aircraft that were ready for service by the fall of 1916. The race would go on from there.

The war’s great fighter aces have since become romantic legends—the Red Baron and his kind, knights on flying horses—but there was more to air combat than chivalry. Before the war was a month old, the Germans were dropping bombs on Antwerp from their Zeppelins. In 1915 Zeppelin raids over southern England became almost commonplace, killing and wounding hundreds. As airplanes became more capable, they also became specialized: scout planes, fighters, and aircraft equipped for strafing troops on the ground. The vulnerable Zeppelins were replaced with increasingly heavy bombers, making the war terrible in a wider variety of ways. February 1916 brought the first sinking of a ship, a British merchantman, by bombardment from the air. In July a French raid on the city of Karlsruhe inadvertently bombed a circus, killing 154 children.

The tank, unlike the airplane, came out of nowhere. In fact there was no such thing as a tank when the war began; only a few obscure visionaries had even imagined such a weapon, and none might have been built by the war’s end if not for Winston Churchill. As early as 1914, impressed by the effectiveness of armed and armored cars in the early weeks of fighting (they would become useless as soon as the war of mobility ended), Churchill was asking the naval designers at the Admiralty to see if they could turn such vehicles into some kind of “trench-spanning” machine. Such a machine proved impracticable, there being no way to drive wheeled vehicles across trenches, but by January 1915 Churchill had found a different approach. Convinced that human flesh and bone were never going to be a match for artillery and machine guns, and encouraged by military engineers, Churchill sent a memorandum to Prime Minister Asquith proposing the development of “steam tractors with small armored shelters, in which men and machine guns could be placed, which would be bulletproof” and would “enable trenches to be crossed quite easily.” Asquith passed the suggestion along to Kitchener, who was not enthusiastic but ordered that design work should begin. After another month, dissatisfied with the pace at which the war ministry was proceeding, Churchill assembled his own design team and funded it out of the Royal Navy’s budget. By the time he was replaced as First Lord of the Admiralty, contracts had been let for the construction of eighteen prototype “landships.”

The project slowed down drastically after Churchill was dismissed, and it probably would have died if he had not intervened to persuade his successor of its potential. In January 1916 a first working prototype—it would be nicknamed “Mother”—was ready for testing. It was a mother indeed, thirty-three feet long and eight feet wide and high. It carried a crew of eight with two machine guns and two cannon firing six-pound shells. It weighed twenty-eight tons and under optimum conditions could achieve a top speed of four miles per hour. It moved not on wheels but on caterpillar-type steel tracks capable of crossing trenches and crushing any barbed-wire barricades in its path.

As the first of the new vehicles came off the production line, the project was shrouded in deepest secrecy. Anticipating the questions that would be provoked by huge, strangely shaped objects concealed under tarpaulins, officials at the war office decided to say that they were special water carriers—mobile tanks—bound for Russia. That was the name that stuck. Among the names rejected were landship (too descriptive), reservoir, and cistern.

In the summer of 1916, when Churchill learned that Britain’s (and the world’s) first forty-nine tanks were being sent to France for use on the Somme, he was horrified. He thought it essential that the new weapon be kept out of action and unknown to the Germans until sufficient numbers could be assembled to produce a decisive breakthrough. He appealed first to Lloyd George and then to the prime minister. Asquith agreed that delay seemed advisable, but when he suggested it to Haig, he was politely ignored.

Chapter 22

Maelstrom

“These were the happiest days of my life, and my joy was shared by all of Russia.”

—G
ENERAL
A
LEXEI
B
RUSILOV

B
y the end of April casualties at Verdun totaled one hundred and thirty-three thousand for the French, one hundred and twenty thousand for the Germans. And the slaughter continued. The Germans were still doing most of the attacking, forcing their way onto the slopes of Le Mort Homme, taking part of the crest at one point but unable to hold on. General Max von Gallwitz, a skillful artillery commander and a veteran of the conquest of Serbia, arrived to take command on the west bank. Upon getting a look at the situation he declared that Le Mort Homme must indeed be taken, but that it never would be until the guns protecting it were cleared from an adjacent ridge called Côte 304. To that purpose he assembled more than five hundred heavy guns along a single mile of front, an even greater concentration of firepower than the Germans had mustered for their earlier attacks, and on May 3 he opened fire. The idea was the usual one—to blow the French away, so that the infantry could then move forward almost unopposed. As usual it didn’t quite work.

Gallwitz’s barrage continued through all the first day and all of the night that followed and another entire day beyond that. But though it reduced thousands of the defenders to body parts and buried many others alive, and though neither food nor water could be got through to the French troops cowering in the depths of their ruined bunkers and trenches, those troops were not annihilated and the ones who survived did not run. (The mystery of how men could hold their ground under such circumstances is explained in part by what awaited them in the rear: their own sergeants and junior officers, ready to shoot them on the spot if they tried to escape.)

The Germans captured Côte 304 in the end, taking possession of ten thousand rotting French corpses with it (the victors got double rations of tobacco as an escape from the smell), but they had needed three terrible days of fighting at close quarters to do so. They had broken off another important piece of the Verdun defensive system, taking another step toward gaining control of the west bank, but they had paid dearly for their success. What was worse, Le Mort Homme still stood unconquered in front of them, its guns still in action. But again the attackers were ordered to push on.