World War One: A Short History (14 page)

Still, as so often, generals were lured into disaster by an initial success. In an epic of doggedness, miners had tunnelled below the Messines ridge, and had twenty-one great mines to blow up under it, with a million tons of TNT. Infantry had been carefully trained, with scale models of the ridge, and the local army commander, Plumer of the Second, was a careful, prudent man who paid attention to detail and was without grandiose ambitions. On 7 June the mines were blown – an explosion heard in London – and a vast bombardment silenced the German batteries. The Germans collapsed and withdrew, which gave the British high ground from which to fire, and it made their supply-lines to Ypres more secure. As ever, though, after such initial successes, the attack petered out. Haig threw away the advantage.

There was then an extraordinary interval before the next British attack – an interval lasting until 31 July, during which the German defences were strengthened, in the formidable, sophisticated way that was then becoming second nature – five or six miles of intensive digging, with concrete ‘pill-boxes’ (the British name for them) in which heavy machine-guns were placed, in such a way as to stitch a web of fire-lines that would be deadly (and unexpected) for attackers. These defences required some cunning. If the front line were too thinly held, the
defenders might become demoralized, supposing that they were meant to be sacrificed. If they were too thickly held, the defenders would be wiped out by the concentrated fire that generally ended a sophisticated bombardment (the Russians calculated that it took 25,000 rounds to cut a small hole in wire obstacles). The seven-week pause between Messines and the opening of ‘Third Ypres’, as the British offensive was called, meant that the German defence expert, a Colonel von Lossberg, could do his best, with six separate defensive positions. The front position consisted of three lines, breast-works with parapets rather than elaborate trenches. They were 200 yards apart, manned by a few infantry companies. Two thousand yards back was the second position, with concrete pill-boxes to shelter the support battalions, and between the first and second positions there were more pill-boxes, with heavy machine-guns. This was ‘the forward battle zone’. A mile back was another system, sheltering reserve battalions. Then a third position, another mile back, where the decisive events were expected to occur, the ‘greater battle zone’.

‘Third Ypres’ was to do more to disaffect the British educated classes than anything that Lenin ever wrote. Haig was unlucky, in the sense that it rained more than usual, though students of the weather could have told him that rain did happen in those parts. The initial bombardment, starting in the middle of July, went on for two weeks, and of course gave the Germans notice of what was to come: no surprise. Nine attacking divisions faced five, but the weather had been so bad that aerial reconnaissance was impossible, and ‘sound ranging’, an ingenious method of detecting the whereabouts of an enemy battery from the sound-wave of its firing, did not work. The bombardment, ‘of unprecedented ferocity’, was not very accurate: 4,300,000 shells were fired, but German guns placed behind the Passchendaele ridge were unharmed, and sixty-four strong-points remained intact to confront the attackers’ left and centre. When the attack started, at 3.50 a.m. on 31 July, low and stormy cloud obscured the rising sun, and since the bombardment
had destroyed the front positions, the infantry got forward in some areas, but not on the central and right areas where a continuation of the Messines ridge, the Gheluvelt plateau, had to be taken if German artillery were not to enjoy a continuous advantage of height. The creeping barrage was in places lost, and signalling, given the weather, did not make clear where the front line even was. Even so, the first day was not unsuccessful – no first day of the Somme. Had the objective simply been to take the ridges around the Ypres salient that made life so difficult there, the operation might have made some sense. But Haig was ambitious for a breakthrough, and clogged up the supply-lines, as ever, with useless cavalry; and Gough, of the Fifth Army, believed in ‘hurroush’, the gallant advance. This translated, in practice, into a plod through the mire.

There followed one of the most extraordinary episodes of this or any other war. Rain fell on the first day, and carried on for seven days. In August, there were only three rainless days. It fell and fell, twice the average for the month. Heavy shelling made the problem far worse, because the battlefield and the routes towards it turned into quagmires. If wounded men fell off the cart taking them to the rear, they drowned. A field-ambulance sergeant wrote: ‘it requires six men to every stretcher, two of these being constantly employed helping the others out of the holes; the mud is in some cases up to our waists. A couple of journeys… and the strongest men are ready to collapse.’ When even the lightest field artillery had to be moved to escape from German fire, the mud was so thick that moving a single gun just 250 yards took six and a half hours. Wounded men who had crawled into shell-holes for safety found that the rain caused the water in them to rise and rise, so that they could see their own deaths by drowning approaching, fractions of an inch at a time. In this, Gough launched his August attacks, failing miserably again and again.

Plumer was then given his hand. He insisted on a degree of
reinforcement that had been refused to Gough, and proposed only very limited operations – the ‘bite and hold’ principle. Troops should just take their initial objective and have their positions strengthened, rather than attempt to advance any further, beyond the artillery’s capacity and preparation. Plumer was also lucky, in a way that Gough never was: the weather cleared, and the ground began to harden again, though never sufficiently. Three limited battles followed in September – that for the village of Broodseinde being the best known – and they were marked by creeping barrages of great intensity, keeping a curtain of shells just ahead of the attackers, reaching only up to 1,000 yards ahead, with the infantry keeping careful step. German counter-attacks were broken up by such a bombardment, and the troops, not too far from their own positions, could count on reasonable backup. The Germans had no answer to such tactics, and Plumer’s limited operations (like Peátain’s in the same period) were a success. But they did only cover 3,000 yards, with immense effort, and at that rate the war would never be won. Still, Haig started dreaming again, and was somehow convinced that German morale was cracking, that the Germans would soon be surrendering in droves. He ordered Plumer to continue; and then the rain started again. Throughout October and in the first half of November, the troops concentrated on the insignificant village of Passchendaele, and finally clawed their way through the mud to take it – an advance that created a thin salient which everyone knew would have to be evacuated if ever there was a serious counterattack. A senior staff officer at last visited the battlefield, towards the very end. As he approached, he burst into tears, and asked the driver, ‘Did we send the men into
that
?’ When warned by his own intelligence chief that the Germans were not cracking, Haig added a characteristic note: the man was a Catholic and therefore was perhaps getting information from tainted sources. However, Haig did at least have a faith in
ultimate victory, and did not lose heart. The year ended with events that pre-figured the end of the war – Cambrai.

Here at last the tank experts were allowed their heads. They had said that tanks would be effective if employed together in large numbers, and on hard ground, with proper artillery support. Air support was beginning to matter, as well, because it could force the defenders to keep their heads down, or even just to look elsewhere – the beginnings of the
Blitzkrieg
techniques that were to win battles in 1918. There were also techniques open to gunners that had not been available before. The most important target of guns was the enemy guns. Earlier, these had to be identified from the air or by their own shots, and artillery used against them would have to be registered, that is, ranging shots fired, which both stopped surprise and identified the hostile gun-position. Now, after aerial reconnaissance (itself much more professional, with proper photography) the enemy gun could be marked on a grid map, and the artillery assault on it therefore prepared in theory without practice shots. In other words, at Cambrai the British gained surprise. The attack went in on 31 October and won an immediate success, with a considerable advance and a large capture of prisoners and guns. In England, the church bells were rung. The advance went far ahead, as usual beyond its supply-lines, and even into open country at last. But the German commander was an able man, who organized a counter-attack on the new principles used in the East – specially trained ‘storm troops’, moving fast, using grenades, and avoiding strongpoints. The German counter-attack could have been held had the British had reserves, but there were none – Passchendaele had seen to that.

At the same moment in late October, again using the new principles, came what was the most brilliant
victory of the entire war, with the possible exception of Brusilov’s – brilliant in the sense that brains and determination overcame material weakness. By summer 1917 astute German gunners had also worked out the principles known to the British, but they applied these principles more thoroughly. Guns could vary in range and direction; or wind and rain might affect the firing. Each one was therefore tested on firing ranges to check for variations, so that due allowance might be made. The bombardment was not designed to smash defences, but mainly to neutralize the command system, the movement of reserves, by a hurricane of shelling and gas. The new methods were tried out at Riga on 1 September, with thirteen divisions assaulting Russian positions on the Dvina, upstream from the city. There was complete surprise; the reserves, generally so fatal for an exhausted attacker, could not come in because a ‘box’ bombardment isolated the defensive area, with a steady curtain of fire to prevent the reserves from coming up. There were new infantry tactics as well. Each army acquired a specially trained assault battalion, carrying light machine-guns and flamethrowers; its task was to move fast ahead, in a loose skirmishing line. The counter-attack at Cambrai had succeeded through these methods, and at Riga they had also shown their value if combined with the new type of bombardment. Commanders who understood such methods were now transferred from the Russian front to others.

In this case, Italy. Not unlike Russia, she had much that was ancient and much that was modern, but a great part of her people were still in a localized, peasant world – one third of the soldiers were illiterate. Her rulers had pushed the country into war, making her run in the hope that she would learn to walk. They had expected an easy trot to Vienna, and had hardly advanced beyond the customs-posts; subsequent offensives had brought twice as many casualties to the Italians as to the Austrians but had only occasionally brought any kind of gain. There were eleven separate battles on the north-eastern border
– the river Isonzo (now, in Slovenia, the Soca) – and, as the Italians learned about guns, and the Austrians became tired, there were successes of a fairly modest kind. However, as with Haig’s doings, these gains came at an enormous cost – one and a half million casualties, as against 600,000 Austrian. In the eleventh battle, where part of the Bainsizza plateau was taken, the Italians lost 170,000 men, 40,000 of them killed.

For this, the military establishment were inclined to blame the men. Somewhat as in Russia, there was an enormous gap between officer class and men, and the north Italian Cadorna, who ran the strategy (he was the son of the man who bundled the Pope into the Vatican when Italy was united), reckoned that his men would only fight if terrorized. If men did not get out of their trenches to attack, their own guns must fire on them. After the war, monuments to the Unknown Soldier went up in Paris and London – men who had been blown to pieces of bone and could no longer be identified, with widows of such men chosen at random for an opening ceremony. The Italians had such a monument, but the area where the Second Army fought was excluded from the search for unidentified remains, because any soldier there might have been killed by his own generals. One such officer, who became head of the Fascist militia (and was probably murdered in revenge, thrown from a train, in 1931) used to take his stand in the front trenches, with his revolver, shooting down his own men if they hesitated. Cadorna even adopted the Roman practice of decimation, shooting every tenth man at random in a regiment that had done badly. There were some cases of extraordinary cruelty – for instance, a father of seven shot for being the last to go on parade because he had overslept, this in a brigade that had been cut off in no man’s land, had tried to surrender, had been rescued, after an otherwise commendable record, and was now supposed to be punished. When, in August 1917, the Pope launched his peace appeal, at a time when the entire intervention
of Italy could easily be judged to have been a dreadful blunder, Cadorna banned the Italian press at the front.

He was about to receive retribution. The Bainsizza affair had scared the Germans: what if Austria dropped out? With the end of the war in the east, troops were freed for other purposes, and a new German army was set up, the Fourteenth, under the competent Otto von Below, who knew about the Riga methods. His force contained two future field marshals, Rommel and Schörner, both of whom distinguished themselves, this time as junior officers capturing mountains. Seven German and five good Austrian divisions mustered on the upper Isonzo, in very mountainous territory, after a display of virtuosity with transport of which, in this war, the Germans and French alone were capable (the very delivery of milk to Vienna schools had to be suspended). Over railways of limited capacity, and then over narrow mountain roads, a thousand guns with a thousand rounds each were delivered, and with Porsche’s traction machines and four-wheel drives, or ingenious manoeuvring of monstrous instruments of war through mine-shafts, the Central Powers established formidable local superiority without the Italians’ taking it at all seriously, though deserters warned them.