Authors: Terence T. Finn
Tags: #History, #Asia, #Afghanistan, #Military, #United States, #eBook
Serbia, Romania, the Italian Alps and the Caucasus, Bulgaria, and Palestine are all places far from the trenches of Western Europe. For most Americans, it is these trenches that have come to symbolize the First World War. Yet in each location just mentioned, generals issued orders, soldiers obeyed, and men died. But there are two other places not usually associated with the conflict of 1914–1918 that saw military operations during the Great War. These are Africa and China. Both witnessed the clash of arms.
In 1914 Imperial Germany had an outpost on the northern coast of China, at Tsingtao. Eager to expand its influence and believing Germany to be otherwise occupied, Japan, with Britain’s concurrence, landed sixty thousand troops nearby and, in early November 1914, took control of the city. During the same period, Japan also seized German outposts on the Caroline and Marshall Islands. None of this came as a surprise to the generals and admirals in Berlin, because Japan had declared war on Germany months before, on August 23. In addition to outposts in China and the Pacific islands, Germany also had a presence in Africa. So did other European powers, most notably Britain, France, and Belgium. Germany controlled what is today Togo and parts of Cameroon, Ghana, Tanzania, and Namibia. In all these locations British and German forces went to war, with both sides employing mostly native soldiers (the French brought their African troops north and employed them in the trenches, where no doubt the rain and cold came as quite a shock). Eventually, the British carried the day, although in German East Africa one hundred thousand British troops were unable to decisively defeat fifteen thousand irregulars of the enemy. The latter were led rather brilliantly by the German Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who both during and after the war was a national hero.
***
Lettow-Vorbeck never had to deal with trench warfare, where barbed wire, heavy artillery, aerial observation, and machine gun nests made both attacking and defending a hazardous occupation. Joffre and Falkenhayn did, as did Sir John French, the commander of the BEF. In 1915, all three went on the offensive. The result for each of them was failure. Their armies gained very little ground but suffered substantial casualties. 1915 was a year of slaughter.
The French, in particular, took heavy losses. In the autumn, attacks alone in Joffre’s army had 190,000 soldiers killed or wounded. At Loos, in September 1915, the BEF saw 16,000 of its men dead with another 25,000 wounded. Four months before, at the Second Battle of Ypres, a German assault also resulted in numerous casualties. The Germans, who again failed to push the British out of the city, suffered 38,000 casualties. What makes the Second Battle of Ypres particularly noteworthy is that Falkenhayn’s forces began their attack by employing chlorine gas. The British responded in kind at Loos. As the war continued, gas remained one of the available weapons, although it did not prove decisive.
The inability of the French and the British to achieve success on the Western Front late in 1914 and early in 1915 led to a decision to seek victory elsewhere. They decided on Gallipoli, a peninsula jutting down from Istanbul adjacent to the Dardanelles, the body of water that links the Black Sea with the Mediterranean Sea and which separates the continents of Europe and Asia. Success at Gallipoli would relieve pressure on the Russians and might well compel the Ottoman Empire to withdraw from the war. It also would boost the morale of the folks back home, who by now had noticed that despite huge loss of life, victory was nowhere in sight.
At first British and French warships attempted to force their way through to Istanbul. That did not work, so the British landed troops ashore in the largest amphibious operation of the war. Among these troops were Australians and New Zealanders. They were known as the ANZACS (the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) and their exploits at Gallipoli would win them great fame. However, they suffered some 10,000 casualties, for them a substantial number but a small percentage of the 265,000 Allied troops killed or wounded in an expedition that failed. When the British withdrew in December, no one in the British army or government thought the effort had been other than a debacle.
As the British were departing from Gallipoli, Joffre and the new commander of the BEF, Sir Douglas Haig, were planning their campaigns for 1916. The French general believed in offensive maneuvers and in the imperative of removing German soldiers from French soil. Haig believed the only way to win the war was through attrition, engage the German army in battle, defeat it, and do battle again. Their plans for 1916 envisioned a series of strikes, straight at and through well-entrenched German positions.
However, Erich von Falkenhayn struck first, preempting Joffre’s attacks. In late February, following a massive artillery barrage, the German general sent his troops forward. Their objective was Verdun, a town on the Meuse River some 150 miles northeast of Paris, a town Falkenhayn knew the French would be unwilling to lose. So began the longest single battle of the First World War. When it was over, 162,440 French soldiers were dead. The number of Germans killed was slightly less. Falkenhayn had hoped to so wear down the French army as to render it ineffective. He came close. But the French commander in charge, Philippe Pétain, one of the few French generals committed to defensive warfare, led his soldiers calmly and courageously and held Verdun. He earned, as Joffre had at the Marne, the reputation of saving France. Given the battle’s outcome, Falkenhayn was relieved of command. His failure at Verdun instead had worn down the German army.
If, as it is by many, the First World War is seen as a bloodbath of the first rank, the Battle of Verdun is one reason. Another is the Somme.
One hundred and fifty miles long, the River Somme flows through Amiens into the English Channel. The battle to which the river gave its name began in July 1916 and lasted five months. Haig, a general whom history has not treated well, planned meticulously. His attack was to be preceded by the heaviest artillery barrage the British army could muster: one field gun every twenty yards across a sixteen-mile front. This was intended to destroy the barbed wire and machine gun emplacements the enemy were known to have deployed, as well as kill any Germans unfortunate enough to be in range. As the British infantry advanced, their supporting artillery was to move forward, providing covering fire. It was to be a creeping barrage.
The plan was sound. Its execution was not. The British artillery failed in its task. There were too few guns, they were too small in caliber, there were too many shells that did not explode, and there was too much mud. Moreover, the kaiser’s soldiers proved remarkably resilient. For Haig’s troops, the results were catastrophic. That first day, July 1, 1916, 19,240 British soldiers were killed. That number needs to be repeated: 19,240 British soldiers died on the first day of the Somme. Total casualties that day numbered 57,470. The battle continued for another forty days. Losses piled up, for the Germans as well and for the French, whose Sixth Army was part of Haig’s force.
When the battle came to a close—it’s official end is deemed November 18, 1916—the butcher’s bill was staggering. Great Britain’s official history of the war states that the combined casualties of the British and French forces totaled 623,907. Of this number the British owned 419,654. All for a negligible gain in territory. German losses are more difficult to ascertain, but certainly numbered near to those of their enemy. As John Keegan has written of the British army, the Somme “was, and would remain their greatest military tragedy of the twentieth century, indeed of their national military history.”
Yet it must be recorded that the Somme was a victory for the British. Not due to territory gained, a mere three miles that in no way altered the strategic picture, but because having themselves suffered horrendous losses, the German army retreated, withdrawing up to forty miles in some places. They then completed a system of strong defensive positions which the British dubbed the Hindenburg Line. Once there, the kaiser’s army, now with Hindenburg and Ludendorff in charge, planned no major offensive. The Somme, wrote an officer on the German General Staff, had been “the muddy grave of the German field army.”
While the German commanders were content to remain on the defensive, their counterparts in the French and British armies were not. For them and their troops, 1917 would be a difficult year.
The heavy losses at Verdun had spelled the end of Joffre’s tenure as commander in chief of the French army. He was replaced by General Robert Nivelle. An expert in artillery, Nivelle had performed well at Verdun. In 1917, he persuaded the French government that he had battlefield tactics that would bring success against the Germans. He did not. In fact, his tactics were more of the same: massive artillery strikes across a narrow front followed by infantry and continuous, rolling cannon fire. Nivelle’s offensive began on April 16, 1917. It lasted just five days. The French army got nowhere, but incurred 130,000 casualties. Nivelle and his offensive were disasters. The result was a broken army. More than a few units refused to do further battle. These were the famous mutinies that inflicted the French army in the middle of 1917. Pétain was ordered to replace Nivelle, and by improving the lot of the ordinary
poilu
, and by not, for a while, engaging in offensive actions, he was able to restore both discipline and morale. He also had 629 soldiers condemned to death, but executed only 43.
The British army too went on the offensive in 1917, several times. Embracing the strategy of attrition Haig wanted his troops to attack, and attack they did. The first assault occurred at Arras and began on April 9. At first, the British troops did well, taking 9,000 prisoners and suffering few losses. But, as happened so often in the First World War, the attack stalled, the Germans struck back, and a slugging match became a stalemate. In the end, the British listed 150,000 men as casualties.
Taking part in the Battle of Arras were four Canadian divisions, some eighty thousand men, operating for the first time as the Canadian Corps. Their attack on Vimy Ridge was successful, earning well-deserved fame for Canada and its soldiers. For the action at Vimy Ridge, the Canadian Corps’s commander, Major General Arthur Currie, was knighted on the battlefield by King George V.
The second British offensive of 1917 took place at Ypres, the third time this city and its environs became a battlefield. Its objective was to secure the coast of Belgium, thereby denying submarine bases to the German navy. The attack began with 2,229 pieces of artillery opening fire, ten times the number employed at the Somme. The infantry went “over the top” at 3:50
A.M.
on July 31. As with Nivelle’s offensive, the outcome was disastrous. After four months, seventy thousand British soldiers were dead. What made the attack fail was the pervasive rain and mud. And, of course, German resistance. Keegan calls the battle “the most notorious land campaign of the war.” The battle often goes by the name Passchendaele, a small village outside of Ypres that marked the farthest advance of Haig’s army.
The British commander believed the Germans were suffering as much as his army and could less afford the losses. So Sir Douglas attacked again. This, the third British offensive of 1917, took place at Cambrai, a city northeast of Paris, not too far from the border with Belgium. The results followed a familiar pattern: initial success but little gain once the Germans counterattacked. What makes Cambrai significant in military terms is that, for the first time, massed formations of tanks were used. Though slow and prone to mechanical failure, these machines at Cambrai ushered in a new era of land warfare.
***
During 1917, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, Nivelle and Pétain, and Douglas Haig commanded troops that engaged in battle, in titanic struggles that help define the First World War. Yet 1917 also witnessed two events that marked the beginning of the end of the great conflict. One such event took place in Washington, D.C., in April. The other occurred in Berlin.
On January 9, 1917, at its capital Germany announced its intention to renew unrestricted submarine warfare. “Unrestricted” meant that no longer would a German
unterseeboote
, or U-boat, refrain from sinking neutral vessels or allow time for crew to disembark from a ship about to be torpedoed. Beginning in February, any ship would be sunk on sight. Many people were shocked by this announcement. What the Germans were about to do was considered uncivilized, unnecessarily cruel. But the commanders in Berlin understood that war requires harsh behavior, and besides, submarines had little room for displaced sailors. Moreover, the kaiser’s admirals, and his generals as well, understood that after several years of conflict, such U-boat strikes offered the best chance of winning the war. The goal was to force Britain to withdraw from the war, by depriving the island nation of food and essential materials. If Britain were to opt out, France, then alone, could be defeated. This goal had to be achieved before the United States entered the war, which it was likely to do once the U-boats began their campaign. When America joined forces with France and Britain, the battlefield equation would be altered and Germany would lose the war.
Of course, the war at sea had begun well before 1917.
When the German East Asiatic squadron had to abandon Tsingtao late in 1914, most of its ships sailed across the Pacific Ocean to the coast of Chile. There, under the command of Maximilian von Spee, they destroyed two Royal Navy cruisers, killing sixteen hundred British sailors. In London the Admiralty promptly dispatched three battle cruisers, among them the
Invincible
and the
Inflexible
, to deal with the Germans. This they did, totally destroying Spee’s squadron in December.
In 1914 Britain may have had a small army, but it possessed a large navy, one which, if it did not rule the waves, came very close to doing so. Upon the declaration of war, the Royal Navy instituted a blockade of Germany. Writing in 1930, Captain B. H. Liddell Hart, a noted military historian, said the blockade “was to do more than any other factor towards winning the war for the Allies.” The navy’s blockade effectively cut off seaborne traffic to and out of German ports. In time, the blockade imposed severe hardship on the country’s industry and civilian population. By 1917, food shortages were causing great distress. By mid-1918, the situation in German cities was such that social unrest was unraveling the political cohesion of the Imperial German state.