The Marshall Cavendish Illustrated Encyclopedia of World War I - 04

THE MARSHALL CAVENDISH ILLUSTRATED ENCYCLOPEDIA OF

WORLD VOLUME FOUR 1915-16

THE MARSHALL CAVENDISH ILLUSTRATED ENCYCLOPEDIA OF

WORLD Editor-in-Chief Brigadier Peter

Young

Board Barker; Dr. John Bradley

Editorial

Lt.-Col. A. J.

Professor John Erickson; Lt.-Cdr. Peter

Kemp

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The Marshall Cavendish encyclopedia of World War One. Bibliography: Includes index. 1.

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World War, 1914-1918— Chronology.

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The Marshall Cavendish illustrated encyclopedia of World War One. 1. World War, 1914-1918 II. Pitt, Barrie I. Young, Peter, 1915Dartford,

940.3

ISBN

Gill

Marshall

86307 185 6 vol

III.

&K

1984

ISBN 0-86307-181-3

Art Director

I.

Cavendish Corporation.

D522.5.M39

New Edition

title:

Mark

D521 0-86307-181-3

(set)

86307 185 6 vol

12878 Contents of Volume 4 985 Zeppelins: The Growing Threat

Douglas Robinson 992 Zeppelins:

A Pilot's

View

Air War: The First Fighter Planes

D. B. Tubbs 1004 America: The Benevolent Neutral

Marion C. Siney 1010 The First Flame Attack Michael Dewar 1013 Kitchener's First 100,000 Peter Simkins

1020 French Offensives in Artois and

Champagne John Keegan 1030 Loos

A list air Home 1036 The Chinese Situation

Ronald Heiferman 1041

TheANZACs

John Vader 1048 SuvlaBay Don Schurman

1138 Gallipoli Judgement The late Sir Basil Liddelt Hart

1060 Desert Rescue Major J. W. K. Bingham

1142 The Mesopotamia Situation Lieutenant-Colonel A. J. Barker

1064 The Senussi War Gregory Blaxland

1146 Townshend's Regatta Lieutenant-Colonel A.

J.

Barker

1149 The Capture of Kut Lieutenant-Colonel A.

J.

Barker

1069 Bulgaria Joins the D. R. Shermer

War

1076 Bulgaria's Forces

1153 Persia: Stepping Stone to India

Jan Berdnek 1084 Gunboats on the Peter Kemp

Danube

1089 The Secret War: Intelligence

Donald McLachlan 1097 Mackensen's Balkan Victory

Norman Stone 1113 Serbia:

The Long Retreat

Dr Kurt 1121

Peball

A British

Nurse

in Serbia

Pamela Bright 1

123 Naval War in the Adriatic Peter Kemp

1125 Salonika

Alan Palmer 1130 Gal poli Evacuation and Withdrawal I i

:

Alan Wykes

Eugene Hinterhoff 1158 Strategy and Supply in Lieutenant-Colonel A.

the Desert J.

Barker

1164 Ctesiphon: Townshend's Pyrrhic Victory

1237 Montenegro

Major-General H. H. Rich 1174 Retreat to Kut Lieutenant-Colonel A. J. Barker 1181 The New Warfare Major-General H. Essame

1242

Alan Palmer

Verdun— The

Plans

Christopher Duffy 1248

Verdun— The Storm Breaks

A list air Home 1260

Crown

Prince Wilhelm and Petain

Ammunition Scandal Major Henry Harris The Belligerents

John Keegan 1262 The Fall of Erzerum Robert C. Walton

Major-General Sixsmith

1265 Fort

1186 The 1191

— The Smallest Ally

1200 Neutral Attitudes D. R. Shermer 1209 Plans for 1916 Brigadier Anthony Farrar- Hockley 1216 The Fall of Sir John French Patrick Scrivenor 1217 Haig and Robertson

John Keegan 1218 The Tunnel War W. T. T. Prince 1224 Peace Moves Charles Neu 1228 Austria on the Defensive Friedrich Wiener

Douaumont

Kenneth Macksey 1274 Portugal at

War

Hernani A. Cidade 1276 Conscription

Arthur Marwick 1286 Lake Narotch Ward Rutherford 1293 The Easter Rising Const antine Fitzgibbon

1306 Trabzond: Russian Success in

Turkey Robert C. Walton 1314 The

End

in the

Cameroons

David Chandler

\

DUMMY

"EACH

MUST BE MEOAROED AS AM ACTUAL ARMED OPPOHtHT " ».

m

mm**, fit !

1915 AUG

4

British land at Suvla Bay.

20

Germans occupy Poland.

21

Italy declares

SEPT

5

war on Turkey.

Czar Nicholas

II

French-British offensive in

28

British take Kut-al-Imara.

7

Austrian and

Army. Champagne and Loos.

takes control of the Russian

25

OCT

NOV

Germans capture Warsaw.

6

German

forces invade Serbia.

11

Bulgarians invade Serbia.

14

Bulgaria declares war on Serbia. Serbians defeated.

15

Britain, France

19

Italy

22

Battle of Ctesiphon. Anglo-Indian forces return to

and Serbia declare war on Bulgaria.

and Russia declare war on Bulgaria.

Kut.

DEC

7

19

Kut besieged by Turks.

Anzac

forces evacuate

British relief attempt fails.

from Suvla Bay.

1916 JAN

9

FEB

21

Battle of Verdun.

25

Germans capture Fort Douaumont.

29

British forces at

APR

MAY

Allies

withdraw from Gallipoli.

Kut surrender to Turks.

British start building rail

and water

lines

on Sinai

coast.

31

JUN

JUL

Battle of Jutland.

4

Russian offensive near Pripet Marshes.

5

Sherif Husein of against Turks.

1

25

Somme

Mecca organizes armed

revolt

begins.

Remnants of Serbian army

arrive in Salonika.

By the middle

of*

1915 the

Germans had

constructed larger and more efficient Zeppelins and were ready to extend their air raids into a major attack on England. As the raids began, Germany's Leaders had high hopes that they could influence the outcome of the war to a considerable extent. Douglas Robinson. Above: From left to right L 13, L 12 and L 10 during the raid August L915 with which German ened he first i

1

strategic aerial offensive

i

listory of

war

During the first ten months of the First World War the Zeppelins of the Imperial German Army and Navy had attempted to influence

the

course

of the conflict

by

bombing raids in support of the field armies and by exploratory attacks on England. Now, in the latter half of 1915, they were ready to make a major effort against England. This effort, in the minds of the Ger-

man people as well as their leaders, was expected to knock the chief opponent out of the war. Newer and bigger Zeppelins were available, with greater range and lifting capacity— L2. 38, the first of the 1,000,000-cubic foot craft, delivered to the army in April, could lift 31,000 pounds of fuel, oil, bombs and men, more than double the 14,500-pound useful load of the prewar Zeppelins. In raids on England she could attain an altitude of 11,500 feet with 4,400 pounds of bombs on board. Compared with the earlier craft she was better streamlined and larger, with a length of 536 feet and a diameter of 61 feet. The gondolas were enclosed, protecting the 19man crew from the elements; four Maybach engines of 210 hp each gave her a maximum speed of nearly 60 mph, while the cruising speed in raids on England averaged 45 mph. During the remainder of the year nine more of these 'p' class Zep-

pelins were delivered to the army, and ten to the navy. At the same time, the new airship sheds in the occupied territories and on the North Sea coast, whose construction had been undertaken at the outbreak of war, became available for housing

the expanded Zeppelin fleet. Certain tactical considerations had to be taken into account when planning raids. Only during the moonless half of the month could the Zeppelins be risked against even the rudimentary defences of 1915 and even

then bad weather and high winds caused many raids to be cancelled or aborted. Mechanical failures also were frequent, particularly with the insufficiently tested Maybach HSLu airship engine introduced prematurely in the autumn of 1915. Worst of all, the Germans had not developed an accurate means of navigation over England at night, and the early attacks of 1915 revealed that dead reckoning was totally unreliable, given the large drift errors of the slow, monster gas-bags. An elementary type of radio direction finding was in use after April 1915, but positional errors of up to 60 miles were common. Initially the army airship service, though lacking effective leadership or consistent policy, had been in the lead in the attacks on England by virtue of its larger number

and because it had bases in occupied Belgium within easy reach of the enemy across the Channel. Now, at one blow, the army's advantage was to be nullified. On June 6, 1915, the three army Zeppelins available in Belgium were sent out against various objectives. LZ38, under orders to bomb London; suffered engine trouble and returned to her shed at Brussels-Evere; there she was caught of ships,'

and burned when two Royal Navy Henri Farmans from No 1 Naval Squadron at * Dunkirk bombed her shed at dawn. Far more spectacular was the success of Flight Sub-Lieutenant R. A. J. Warneford, who had left the advance landing ground at Furnes at 0100 hours in an 80 hp Morane to bomb the Zeppelin shed at Berchem Ste Agathe. Five minutes later he observed a Zeppelin over Ostend and turned in chase. This was the small LZ37

of prewar type, sent out that night to attack Calais. Catching up with the Zeppelin beyond Bruges at 0150 hours, Warneford came under heavy machine gun fire.

Turning away to gain altitude, he found the monster pursuing him. The Zeppelin's

commander

failed to press his advantage, however, and finally Warneford, attaining 11,000 feet, switched off his engine and glided down on the Zeppelin 4,000 feet

below him. Six 20-pound bombs were released along the back of the airship, which exploded and fell to the ground in flames. The blast overturned Warneford's Morane, fractured a petrol pipe, and damaged a pump, which the airman succeeded in repairing after a forced landing in Germanheld territory. Warneford received the Victoria Cross — the second awarded to an airman — but was killed ten days later in a

The Zeppelin commander, Oberleutnant von der Hagen, perished together, with seven officers and men, but in a case almost unique in the history of the airship services, one man survived, for as the flaming wreck fell on a convent in a suburb of Ghent, Steuermann Alfred Miihler was precipitated from the forward gondola and landed in a bed with only flying accident.

burns and bruises. LZ 39, which claimed to have dropped 2,100 pounds of bombs on Harwich, likewise had an encounter with British aircraft over Ghent, but escaped by diving into a cloud bank.

superficial

The

last of the trio,

The army airship service was forced to retreat, never again playing the leading role in the air war against England. The

MP

advantageously located sheds at Gontrode, Brussels-Evere, Etterbeek and Berchem Ste Agathe — all less than 200 miles from The

electric

bomb-switches (above)

in

the

forwa r d or control gondola (below) of a German naval airship. The new larger airships introduced in the second half of

1915 had enclosed gondolas to protect the 19-man crew, and could carry 4,400

pounds

of

bombs

A Zeppelin bomb damage in London

V

The targets and bases of the Zeppelin raiders are shown on the map, while the chart compares the weight of bombs dropped with the damage to property and the loss of life caused

1915

The machine gun and look-out position on the outer envelope of a German airship. The gunner communicated

<\

with the control cabin by a speaking tube Number Date

of

airships

Number

despatched

Target

arrived.

3

Army

June 6 1915

1

Navy

1

June 15 1915

2

Navy

1/Tyneside

August 9 1915

5

Navy

June

6

1915

Bombs dropped

Casualties killed/wounded

3 536

18/72

41

760

1

/Eastchurch

/Dover

17/21 (total)

11

992

(£s)

'A3

44 795

Hull

1

Damage

(pounds)

5

580

(total)

(total)

1/Goole

August 12 1915

4 Navy

1

/Harwich

none none

1/N Foreland

August 17 1915

4 Navy

1

62 bombs

/Ashford &

Faversham 1/London

Tyneside_# Jarrow--* Westgate

Army

Sept 7 1915

2

Sept 8 1915

4 Navy

1

1

/Skinningrove

1/London Sept 13 1915

3

Navy

1

Harwich

October 13 1915

5

Navy

1

/Coltishall

1

Totals

incendiary

5

165

4,7

3

3

730

?2/87

530 787

5

635 (London)

/Hertford

71/128

(total)

80 020

(total)

50 250 (London)

28/60 19/42 9/15

+

33 raids

19 raids

31 683

despatched

delivered

63 other bombs

MILES

500

none 13 672 (total)

1/London 1/Woolwich 1/Hythe & Croydi in

Redcar Skinningrove-

Scarborough. Hornsea. Goole.

10/48

/London 1/E London 1

100

712 834

127/352

200

Hull.

Number. Bacton Coltishall

Horstead

Yarmouth Lowestoft

Hage Borkum Cuxhaven Nordholz

Woodbridge Orfordness Ipswich

The Hague

Harwich Cambridge Hertford

London Eastchurch Shaiford

Faversham Ashford

^

tings

""the

Ostend Bruges Dunkirk Diisseldorf

Ghent Brussels-Evere

Berchem Ste Agathe Calais

Do Dt

Ramsgate Margate

N Foreland

Namur Maubeuge

London — never again housed a raiding Zeppelin except briefly or in emergencies. Henceforth only the large 1,000,000cubic-foot ships would be employed against England. Of this type, LZ 72 arrived at Diisseldorf only on July 19 and LZ 74 at Darmstadt on July 30 — the former promptly being withdrawn from frontline service because of numerous girder fractures caused by the use of poor quality duralumin in the structure. The two survivors of the army raiding fleet in Belgium— Z XII and her near-sister LZ 39 — were transferred late in June to the Eastern Front, where the inferior Russian air defences would be less of a hazard to them. During the summer these two ships, assisted by the old Sachsen, aided Hindenburg's great offensive against the Russian armies by bombing railway lines leading from Warsaw to Mlawa, Brest Litovsk and Vilnyus. Great successes were claimed in such attacks on railway stations and junctions. Newer ships of the 1,000,000-cubicfoot type joined them later in the year — LZ79 making her first raid from Posen on August 10, LZ 85 and LZ86, based on Allenstein and Konigsberg in October. The victorious advance of the German armies eastward through Poland proved an embarrassment to the army airship service, as their permanent hangars soon lay too far distant from the fighting zone. A new shed was built at Warsaw and occupied early in October by LZ 39. But on December 7 she was lost while attacking encampments north of Rovno. Meanwhile, the German navy continued exploratory attacks from the North Sea bases. Kapitdnleutnant Heinrich Mathy, revealing his uncannily accurate navigational sense, did £45,000 worth of damage in Hull on the night of June 6. Afterwards, feelings in the city ran so high that mobs sacked many German or supposedly German shops in the city. On June 15, Kapitdnleutnant Klaus Hirsch caused much destruction in a surprise attack on Tyneside shipyards and industries, particularly in Palmer's shipyard at Jarrow where 17 workmen were killed and 72 injured. For

the first time L10 used radio bearings for navigation over England, but the results were inconclusive as the two direction finding stations at Borkum and Nordholz were nearly in line with LlO's position over the Northumberland coast. Hirsch further advised his chief that the June and July nights were too short and bright to be suitable for raids. Strasser, head of the Naval Airship Division, agreed, and mounted no further attacks until August.

Zeppelins unopposed So far the Zeppelins had met with no resistance to the flights over England, but the British authorities were preparing a variety of defensive measures. More guns were placed on the East Coast, while new air stations were set up by the Admiralty at Redcar, Scarborough and Hornsea. With night flying then still in its infancy, it was unlikely that the aircraft based there would be much of a danger to the Zeppelins. Because the raiders were frequently sighted in daylight while approaching the English coast, a force of six light cruisers, carrying two anti-aircraft guns each, was assembled in the Humber to deal with them out at sea. All of these defensive measures were greatly aided by the growing sophistication of British naval Intelli-

gence, which through the use of captured German naval code books was reading much of the Germans' radio traffic after November 1914. With the German army airship service temporarily eliminated from the campaign against England, the navy took the lead. It was now the turn of Admiral Bachmann, the Chief of the Naval Staff, to press for permission to open an all-out attack on the City of London. In contrast to the victories and sacrifices of the army on the Eastern and Western Fronts, the Imperial Navy had nothing to show except defeats at Heligoland Bight and the Dogger Bank. A success with the novel aerial weapon might justify the sacrifices made to build up the navy, and raise both service and civilian morale. The Kaiser's last decision on the subject of targets had permitted attacks only on

The

strategic aerial offensive in the history of warfare first

London east of the Tower — thereby ruling out the Admiralty, the War Office, the Foreign Office, the main railway stations and above all, the Bank of England and the surrounding square mile packed with the counting houses and warehouses of the great mercantile firms whose strength was the Empire's. A French air attack on Karlsrube on June 15 gave Bachmann the excuse to press for freedom of action in the air war against the British capital. First he had to deal with the Imperial Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, whose humanitarian outlook had determined to a considerable extent the previous restrictions on attacking London.

On

July

9,

Bethmann-Hollweg agreed

to

attacks on the City of London provided these were made between Saturday afternoon and Monday morning, when the City would be empty, and furthermore, provided that bombs not be dropped on historical monuments such as St Paul's Cathedral and the Tower. Bachmann knew the former restriction was impractical; as he wrote in a memorandum for the Kaiser on July 20, 'this limitation is unacceptable because of the dependence of the airships on the weather. Every night the City empties of people regardless of the weather, also the enemy has no regard for humanitarian behaviour in attacks on Karlsruhe and elsewhere'. These arguments convinced the Kaiser, who henceforth set no limits to the attacks on the enemy capital except that royal palaces and historic edifices should not be bombed. Thus the German navy opened the first strategic aerial offensive in the history of warfare.

The

first

squadron

raid,

though led by

Strasser aboard L10, was hardly a success. On the afternoon of August 9, five Zeppelins from Nordholz and Hage rendezvoused off Borkum and headed westward in loose formation. L9 was presently detached to attack the mouth of the Humber. The newer ships, intended to approach London via the coast of Norfolk, ran into low-hanging thunder squalls and

had to drop much of their water ballast, and even some fuel, to compensate for the weight of rain on their fabric envelopes.

None of them succeeded in carrying out their mission that night. Mathy had already had enough trouble with his new L 13 to cause much superstitious headshaking among his older petty officers and on this night they were not surprised when failed and L 13 had to turn back the coast. L10, commanded by her executive officer, Oberleutnant zur See der Reserve Friedrich Wenke (Hirsch was on leave), reported reaching eastern London and that her bombs burst among shipping. Actually she was far down the Thames and her missiles fell in a line across the Eastchurch Naval Air Station on the Isle of Sheppey. Oberleutnant zur See von Buttlar, commanding L 11, dumped all

an engine

when

off

bombs when he came under fire from some 12-pounder anti-aircraft guns at Lowestoft, and reported having attacked the naval base at Harwich — a clear case of amalgamated wishful thinking and poor navigation which caused a gross overhis

Peterson in

estimation of success.

L 12

way Making

his landfall at Westgate, he thought he was far to the north on the Norfolk coast. The lights of

also lost his

Margate, Ramsgate and Deal he confused with those of Yarmouth and Lowestoft, and finally, after forcing his ship up from 6,500 to 9,500 feet, he dropped his bombs on Dover by mistake for Harwich. The local 3-inch gun got off three rounds and reported a hit as the Zeppelin disappeared behind a 'smoke screen', actually hurriedly-dumped water ballast. In fact, two gas cells aft were seriously holed, Cell 4 emptying completely in half an hour, while Cell 3 ran three-quarters empty. While the crew threw overboard all spare parts, machine guns, provisions, equipment and finally the radio, Peterson steered for nearby Belgium. Still the crippled raider sank inexorably until at 0240 hours she settled stern-first on the waters of the Channel. Despite self-sacrificing attacks by British naval airmen from Dunkirk, L 12 was towed into Ostend, but caught fire during salvage operations and little was saved but the gondolas. Only the small L 9 got anywhere near her objective, though a ground mist hampered her commander, Kapit&nleutnant Odo Lowe, in his search for Hull, while a broken rudder cable caused her to describe two complete circles. Thus when he thought he had found his target, Lowe was 20 miles to the west, over Goole, which was betrayed by the reflection of shaded street lights off the wet pavement below. Hero lti people were killed and injured, and ten houses destroyed — the majority of the dam age and casualties inflicted in this raid Four Zeppelins set out for England on August 12, but only two reached (he coast, Mathy's /, 13 again experiencing engine trouble. Wenke, in L10, estimating the head wind at his altitude of 10.000 feel at 30 to 45 mph, abandoned the attack on London and diverted to Harwich. Not only did he succeed in identifying Wood bridge, Ipswich and ultimately the Fast Coast naval base itself, hut also claimed direct hits on the electric power plant and railway station. British accounts state that only two houses in Harwich were wrecked. Buttlar appeared only briefly over the North Foreland /ithout dropping any bombs, hut had a hair-raising expi ri ence en route home a thunderstorm off the Dutch coast Blinding flashes of lightning surround his /, //, leaping 1

1

li

989

from cloud to cloud ami from cloud to sea, while bluish-white tongues of St Elmo's Fire a foot long burned on the machine gun sights, the who grommets in the caps of the lookouts on the upper platform, and even from Buttlar's fingers when he thrust out the control car window. The ship's inflammable hydrogen was protected by the 'Faraday cage' formed by the metal girder framework, yet she would have burned instantly if she had been carried above the pressure height' at which the expanding hydrogen in the cells would have been vented to the outer air. In the next attack, on August 17, one

them

the tour Zeppelins participating at last reached London. Again the credit goes to /. /() and her temporary commander, the skilful Friedrich Wenke. Making his landtall at Orfordness, which he correctly identified. Wenke was able to check his course and position by the lights of towns and villages below despite a ground mist. At 2145 hours, a glow like an aurora loomed on the south-west horizon — the lights of London, only partially blacked out at this time. An hour later, Wenke reported, he brought his ship over the West End of the city and turned to cross the centre of the capital a little north of the Thames. 'Bomb o\'

dropping was ordered to begin between Blackfriars and London Bridges. Collapse of buildings and big fires could be observed.' But alas, his missiles found their billets, not in the City, but in the north-east suburbs of Leyton and Wanstead Flats, where the Leyton railway station was

partly wrecked, a tram garage and many houses destroyed.

damaged

von Wobeser which alone accomplished anything of note during the raiding period. On the night of September 7 she came inland via the River Crouch and the River Lea to drop her bombs on Millwall, Deptford, Greenwich and Woolwich. The docks and arsenals presented numerous targets of military significance, but Wobeser was unlucky and his bombs mostly struck dwellings. On the homeward journey SL2 had engine trouble and drifted over Holland; she arrived at Berchem with only one

engine working, fell heavily during the approach and landed on a house. Emergency repairs kept the ship at Berchem until October 17. One of SL2's companions on this night, LZ 74, dropped the first bomb on the City of London, an incendiary which landed in Fenchurch Street. Unfortunately her commander, Hauptmann George, had earlier released the remainder of his payload on the glasshouses of Cheshunt! The third airship, LZ 77 under 'Hauptmann Horn, got no closer than 25 miles to London. Indeed, although their commanders had extensive experience going back several years before the First World War, neither LZ 74 nor LZ 77 accomplished anything of note in several further starts against England during the September new moon period. In the following month the army High Command sent its Zeppelins to attack railway lines behind the front in ,

France.

One night after Wobeser's foray, the German navy's Zeppelins attacked, and the consequences were even more serious. Four airships set out from the North Sea bases on September 8, the oldest, L9, under

Defences blacked out

Two

other Zeppelins turned back with mechanical trouble — Mathy's L 13 with a broken rudder coupling, while the new L14 suffered repeated engine failures. Lll's commander, Buttlar, turned in a dramatic report of having bombed London, but his attack was made on the Kentish towns of Ashford and Faversham. Near the latter was a powder factory protected by a searchlight and anti-aircraft gun, but the gunners were rendered impotent by the factory manager, who cut off the electricity to the searchlight lest it betray the factory's position!

L10

did not long survive. Once again Hirsch, she was returning from a scouting flight on September 3, when she was struck by lightning and fell in flames into the shallows off Cuxhaven. All on board perished. The airship's recording barograph was recovered and showed that just before the final* plunge the Zeppelin had risen 2,400 feet, above her pressure height, and therefore must have been valving hydrogen from overdistended gas cells. Henceforth Strasser ordered his airships to try to go around thunderstorms, and if forced to go fhrough them, they should proceed as far under pressure height as the squalls would allow. For the next new moon period the army proposed to join in the it tack on England. Four airships were moved forward from Rhineland bases, three of them big new foot craft. LZ 79 went to 1 ,000,000-cubic Maubeuge, LZ 74 and LZ 77 to Namur, which was over 100 miles from the redoubtable naval airmen at Dunkirk. The

commanded by

SL2, lengthened and rebuilt after her adventures of the spring, was riskc closer alhe to the Allies in the Berchem Sti

old

1

990

shed near Brussels. Ironically, it was this old Schiitte-Lanz ship under Hauptmann

orders to attack the benzol works at Skinningrove on the Yorkshire coast. Lowe had bad luck, being unable to locate the plant even though it had been built by German technicians who presumably had provided target information. Worse still, when he released his bombs where he believed the works to be, three of them landed on the premises without effect — one, which struck a TNT store, failing to explode!

Of the southern airships, L 11 and L 14 had engine trouble. Only L 13 reached London, but it was a momentous night for Heinrich Mathy, more than redeeming the

previous

numbered

failures

ship.

It

of his unluckilyalso a night on

was

Zeppelin airship appeared — a potential war-winning weapon, and the frustration and anger which Londoners experienced at Mathy's arrogant assault on the heart of the capital led the government to reorganise the London defences. With 16 men on board, and nearly two tons of bombs in her racks — one being the first 660-pound explosive bomb to be carried over England — L 13 had lifted off from the Hage field at 1310 hours. The crossing of the North Sea had been uneventful until 1920 hours, when a trawler off the Happisburgh Lightship fired on the Zeppelin, which was approaching at 2,600 feet. Mathy rose sharply to 3,700 feet,

which

briefly

the

— as

and went on west unscathed. For an hour

L 13

idled offshore waiting for darkness, then as she came inland over the Wash, Mathy throttled back his engines for four minutes while he verified his position from an altitude of 1,500 to 2,000 feet. Proceeding south at 50 mph, Mathy sighted from north of Cambridge the reflected glow of the lights of the capital along the horizon ahead. As L 13 came in high over the north-west suburbs at 2230 hours, her crew, many of whom knew London from prewar days, eagerly pointed out attractive targets. Mathy himself was well acquainted with the capital, having spent a week there in 1909 when his classmate, Hermann Gercke, married an English girl. Hence he observed confidently, 'orientation over London itself was not difficult, since for example Regent's Park could be clearly recognised from the "Inner Circle" which was lit as in peace time'. From here he steered L 13 south-east, and at 2235 hours, began dropping bombs from 9,200 feet. The bulk of L 13's cargo was intended for the City, and one of the first bombs to explode there was the 660-pounder, which shortly after midnight descended in Bar-

tholomew ('lose. The concussion wave and flying fragments blew out glass and shattered the walls of buildings on the four sides of the square. Mathy, impressed, reported that 'a whole cluster of lights vanished in its crater'. Further showers of incendiaries rained down on the textile warehouses then lining the crooked lanes north of St Paul's Cathedral, and the sky

glowed crimson from fires in Wood Street, Addle Street, Silver Street and Aldermanbury. Still ahead lay the Bank of England and Tower Bridge. At this point the Parliament Hill gun put a shell close to the Zeppelin, causing Mathy to climb hastily to 11,200 feet. Thus distracted, he missed his chance at the Bank. Liverpool Street and Broad Street Stations now loomed beneath, and the raider's last four bombs were directed at them. Though one tore up the permanent way north of Broad Street Station, all missed their intended targets; but two made direct hits on motor buses, bringing the night's casualties in London to 22 killed and 87 injured. Next morning gutted and burned out buildings in the City attested to a

damage

more than £500,000. The shock, anger and unacknowledged fear of what

toll

of

the Zeppelin might accomplish never entirely disappeared, and as a result of press agitation, the Admiralty on September 12 placed the noted gunnery expert, Admiral Sir Percy Scott, in charge of the London defences.

Thunderstorms and headwinds

On

the afternoon of September 13, three naval airships set out for England. Thun-

derstorms and headwinds were encountered, and only Mathy held on, hoping to bomb London at about 0300 hours and get away from the country before daylight. Orfordness, then Harwich, were accurately identified despite the thick weather. Here Mathy had the bad luck to take a 6-pounder shell amidships from the gun at Felixstowe, which was firing blind into the clouds at the sound of the Zeppelin's engines. Two gas cells were holed and rapidly emptied. Turning back at once, Mathy headed home

by the shortest route, deliberately flying over Holland. Despite dumping all her ballast and 1,750 pounds of fuel, L 13 was still heavy at her landing at Hage and damaged her gondolas and the girders in her hull. For the next new-moon period, Strasser was ordered to bomb Liverpool. On October 13, five Zeppelins crossed the North Sea together, but Buttlar in Lll promptly eliminated himself when he came under machine gun fire and dropped his bombs on the Norfolk villages of Horstead, Coltishall and Great Hautbois, though Buttlar credited himself with an attack on London. The most spectacular blow of the raid was struck by a newcomer, Kapitanleutnant Joachim Breithaupt, in the new L15. Though he had never been over Eng-

land before, Breithaupt steered a direct course from Bacton in Norfolk to London. Coming in from the north west to put the wind behind him, Breithaupt aimed for the War Office and the Admiralty. Yet his first bombs fell in the theatre district north of the Strand, a third of a mile to the east. Later Breithaupt admitted to the author: 'I must have lined up my bomb sight on the wrong bridge across the Thames.' Several packed theatres narrowly escaped direct hits. Farther east the Inns of Court were

damaged by

fire

and explosives.

miss from a new French anti-aircraft

from 7,200

A

near

75-mm mobile

gun forced Breithaupt

up

while the intrepid commander was further disconcerted by the sight of aeroplanes below the Zeppelin. Five in all had taken off, armed with small incendiary bombs, but only one pilot saw L15. Yet Breithaupt had again struck at the City, leaving 28 dead and 60 injured and a scene of devastation and to

10,200

feet,

confusion.

Mathy, carrying the largest bomb load — 4,370 pounds — aimed to deliver part of his cargo on the water works at Hampton in order to lighten L 13 for a further attack on London. Through following the River Wey by mistake for the Thames he dropped 12 110-pounders on the village of Shalford.

Heading north-east from

there,

The wreckage of Zeppelin L 10 in the shallows off Cuxhaven Returning from a scouting flight on September 3, she was struck by lightning and fell in flames. All on board perished

he released the remainder above Woolwich Arsenal, where they struck barracks and other unimportant buildings. Bdcker in L 14, after coming inland over Norfolk with the other Zeppelins, slanted off to

lower

the south-east, crossed the

Thames and continued south above Kent Apparenthe mistook the Channel for the Thames, for at this time, he reported: 'We crossed until reaching the sea at Hvthe. ly

Thames at Woolwich and attacked the dock facilities there as well as the arsenal with nine explosive bombs.' Six of these the

and wounded soldiers in an army encampment overlooking the Channel. killed

in a run worked his

Bocker recovered his bearings

down-Channel

to

Hastings,

way back to London, and dropped the rest of his cargo on homes in Croydon. Peterson in the new L 16, over England for the first time since losing L 12 three months earlier, reported bombing the London districts of Stratford, East

Ham

and West Ham. His bombs fell actually on the town of Hertford, a good. 20 miles north of the capital. Nine people were killed and 15 injured. Breithaupt's deadly progress from the theatre district to the City was long remembered, while the bombs in Woolwich and Croydon brought the London casualties to 47 dead and 102 injured. The overall total for the entire attack was 71 killed

and 128 injured. But this first squadron raid on London was not repeated for nearly a year, and because of bad weather, was the last Zeppelin attack of the year 1915. The campaign of terror and destruction might have influenced the outcome of the war if the pressure could have been kept up; but isolated attacks, even though the damage at times was considerable, merely aroused and angered the British public to an even greater determination to win the war. Yet in the back of many minds was a persistent fear of the effects of a really serious strategic bombing campaign against large cities. The Zeppelin raids of the First World War wen primarily of psychological significance, and the Imperial German Navy and the citizens of the German Reich at least enjoyed the satisfaction of having shaken and humiliated the British through the daring exploitation of a novel and remarkable weapon.

Further Reading

Gamble, C. F. Snowden. The Story of a North Sea Air Station (OPU 1928) Groos, O.. Der Kneg in der Nordsee (Berlin. Mitter 1924)

Jones. H.

(OUP

A..

The War

in the Air,

Volume

III

1931)

Lehmann, E. A. and Mingos, H., The Zeppelins (Putnam 1928) Morison, F War on Great Cities (Faber & ,

Faber 1937)

Neumann. in

G. P Die deutschen Luftstreitkrdfte Weltkrieg (Berlin: Mittler 1920)

Robinson.

,

D. H.,

The Zeppelin

in Conih.it

(Foulis 1962)

DOCTOR DOUGLAS ROBINSON

has

been

fascinated by the Zeppelin since the age of live. He has made himself an authority on the German navy's in the First World War, knows surviving personnel and has attended

Zeppelins their

many many

of of

Manne-Lultschilfer Kameradschalt meetings. He is a member of this association. His books include The Zeppelin in Combat and LZ 129

the

Hmdenburg.

!)01

the

L 15 was

officers,

ZEPPELINS: A PILOT'S VIEW Here Kapitanleutnant Joachim Breithaupt,

commander of the new L 15,

gives the pilot's

view of the most spectacular of the blows struck by the squadron raid of 13/14 October. His target was London, where, in a litter of devastation, he killed 28 people and injured 60 before his bombs ran out London had always appeared to me the most rewarding target for an air attack, and I had accordingly planned the course for such a flight. In the early morning of October 13, 1915, orders for an attack by all

available airships arrived by telephone.

Preparations were immediately begun. The crews, pleased with their first opportunity to take part in a raid, carried the munitions and bombs on board, and the petrol tanks and the gas bags were filled. At 1300 hours, Central-European time,

in the air.

two warrant

The

On

board were two

officers

and 12

rat-

weight-carrying capacity of the ship, including barometers, temperaings.

total

and humidity-measuring appliances, and also the specific weight of the gas (Traggases) was about 30,800 pounds. At this weight the petrol (Betriebstoff) comprised about 11,000 pounds, and bombs 3,410 pounds (28 explosive bombs of 110 pounds each and 15 incendiary bombs of 22 pounds each). ture-

We

steered over the Friesian Islands outside the three-mile limit in order to avoid infringing Dutch neutrality. Thick fog lay over the sea. We rose, therefore, in order to avoid the so-called 'washhouse' (Waschkuche) and surmount the clouds. In bright sunshine the airships steered be-

tween the cloud masses at various altitudes. We closed with the other two airships on the same mission as ourselves. The English opinion that the airships manoeuvred in formations under the leadership of a commander-in-chief or senior officer is not correct. The order of the day was as follows: 'Attack military and economic objectives of importance in South England.' Each commander acted within the limits

O

Air raid

damage

in

the City on the 14

October, the morning after Breithaupt's raid Kapitanleutnant Breithaupt of the L 75. As well as the inevitable Iron Cross, he is wearing the ribbon of the order Pour le Mente gained for this bombing raid. Breithaupt's bombing course north of the Strand. His hits fell as follows: 1 Exeter St: 2 Wellington St: 3 Catherine St: 4 Aldwych: 5 Royal Courts of Justice: 6 Carey St: 7 Linco Ins Inn: 8 Hatton Garden: 9 Farnngdon Rd

A

O

992

of this general order as an independent unit; the choice of objectives was always left to the pilot. Korvettenkapitdn Strasser avoided giving more than general directions. He knew, as an experienced pilot, how much the decision of the commander must be influenced by weather and local conditions. For this reason the ships did not fly in close formation. At 1930 hours we were between Cromer and Great Yarmouth at a height of 6,500 feet, a few miles off the coast. The visibility was good under a starlit sky. In the distance gleamed the white breakers, and beyond them the outline of the cliffs was clearly cut against the sky. We took our bearings precisely, waited for full darkness, and then steered a direct course for our objective — London. As we crossed over the coast we came under sharp fire from the batteries, and the ships were lit up by the searchlights of the coastguard and shore batteries. As we flew over the land we checked our position from time to time by dropping light bombs. At about 2130 hours the Thames, with its characteristic windings, was clearly distinguishable below us. All water ballast was now thrown out so that

we might

attain

the

greatest

insensitive to the beauties of nature and to the feelings of the people below. It is only afterwards that all this comes to one's consciousness. At the moment we needed all our wits about us. We flew over the City

possible

and all hands manned action stations. London lay darkly under us, only a few lights showing. Suddenly, from all sides, searchlights leaped out towards us, and as we flew over Tottenham a wild barrage from the antiaircraft positions began. The shells burst height

at between 9,000 and 9,800 feet and dropped 20 110-pound bombs, and all the incendiary bombs. We could see large explosions between Charing Cross Station and the Bank of England.

at a good height right in our course. I therefore rose, after dropping three explosive bombs, and endeavoured to make an attack from another quarter. We circled round London by north and north-west.

From what I could make out, the antiaircraft shells exploded for the most part too high. From all sides blazed the flashes There was only one thing to do trust in our star. What effect the bombs had at the places where flames were observed I cannot say, but I of the guns.

— carry on and

Searchlights, shrapnel and bombs At about 2200 hours we were well west of the sea of houses, which could now, on account of the many searchlights, be clearly seen. We then steered over Hyde Park,

believe

in the direction of the City. The picture we saw was indescribably beautiful — shrapnel

bursting

all

it

was pretty warm

in the City.

have learned from English eyewitnesses that the attack of our airships made no small impression on the people. Captain Joseph Morris writes of this attack in his interesting book, The German Air Raids on Great Britain, as follows: The casualties caused, if considered from I

around (though rather uncom-

fortably near us), our own bombs bursting and the flashes from the anti-aircraft batteries below. On either hand, the other airships which, like us, were caught in the rays of the searchlights, were visible. And over us the starlit sky! Still, at such a moment one is inclined to be a little

the point of view of the total number of ships employed and of bombs expended, were more severe than in any other airship raid before or after. Breithaupt reserved most of his bombs until well over the centre of the City, and dropped them on Exeter Street, Wellington Street (between the Lyceum Theatre and the offices of The

Morning

Post), on Catherine Street, Aidwych, the Royal Courts of Justice, Carey

Hatton Garden, and 19 high-explosive and 11 incendiary bombs fell from his ship on London. This statement corresponds with my own observations. Sixty minutes had simply flown by since we dropped the first bombs. We breathed more freely as about 2245 hours we left the City behind us. Then suddenly, as we were about over Leyton, a new and murderous fire began from a direction in which we had not expected it. At the same time, through the rays of the searchlights a number of British aircraft appeared on both sides, and were simultaneously reported to be overhead by the lookout man on the top of the ship. Morris disputes the presence of aircraft in the air on this occasion, but believe he is wrong. Star shells whizzed through the air, describing glowing white parabolas as perfect as any drawn on paper. Over the coast, in the neighbourhood of Ipswich, we again suddenly came under fire, at about 0030 hours. Searchlights played around us, but the last shell shot far away below us as a parting salutation. and we found ourselves over the sea at Street, Lincoln's Inn,

Farringdon Road. In

all,

1

12,500

We

feet.

announced the

result of the attack

by wireless telegraph to our chief, and steered for the Dutch coast. Fog again lay thick over the North Sea, and it was diflicult to keep our course, even with wireless directions. Time pressed, since we had only enough petrol for a lew hours more At last, at 1300 hours in the afternoon of the following day, we made out the cap tive balloon which was flying over the fog above our landing place as a guide for us. We came down, through a sheet of cloud 1,000 feet thick, and land safely, being ^ warmly greeted by our commander and 3 other comrades, who had landed earlier, to

E

I [Reprinted from Th * 15, 1928.}

Living Age ofJanuary

993

I

warfare. Inspired by a French attempt, Fokker invented for the

Germans an interrupter gear which permitted a machine gun to forward through the airscrew, and at the same time the - :>k the lead in strategic bombing attacks and originated dseM air fighting.

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On

April 18, 1915, an event which was to have extreme importance in the history of aenal fighting took place A well-placed rifle bullet tired by a rifleman named Schlenstedt, defending Courtrai railway station, fractured the petrol pipe on a Morane-Saulnier monoplane in which the

well-known French pilot Roland Garros who had been the first to cross the Medi terranean by air. from Bizerta to St Raphael wa> attacking the line Garros landed, hut before he could set lire to his machine it was captured by the Germans. The secret was then out: Garros, who had destroyed several German aircraft in the previous tew weeks, was found to have a machine gun able to fire forwards through the airscrew

The propeller, which was armoured with deflectors to avoid damage from the

own bullets, was shown to the Dutchman, Anthony Herman Gerard Fokkei whose M 5 monoplane was then undergoing service trials, and within 48 hours Fokker was claiming to have invented an

aircraft's

.

interrupter gear to prevent bullets hitting the screw But then Fokker's brilliance as a demonstration pilot was equalled only by .

his

unscrupulousness

and

his

flair

for

public relations. The irony in the situation lies in the fact that Fokker'-s new monoplane, which went into service as the El lEindekker— monoplane), had been design-

ed only after Fokker had acquired and analysed a Morane. Furthermore, Saulnier o\' Morane-Saulnier had himself invented

vered Top: The fabric with which the wings wert carrying out. were a common but necessary chore

and

tried

carded

it

an interrupter gear but had

dis-

because of the unreliable per-

formance of service ammunition. He sawan improvement, and he may have been right in the early war years. 'Bad rounds' continued to bedevil machines with interrupter and synchronising gears on both sides throughout the war. This, rather than official steel deflector plates as

could possibly be the reason the notion of using the airscrew to

stupidity,

why

gun had

not been adopted before, unlikely. Several patents existed besides that of Franz Schneider, fire

a

though

it

is

the Swiss aeronautical engineer working first for the French Nieuport and later for the German LVG companies, whose device not only closely resembled Fokker's new 'invention' but had already been flown operationally in an LVG E VI monoplane which, according to one account, was shot down bv rifle fire from the Morane two-

was very susceptible to damage, and repairs such as the German ground crew above Above The Russian Sikorsky llya Mourometz. the world's first four-engmed bomber

are

A Short seaplane dropping a torpedo. The idea of using aircraft to drop torpedoes eventually proved sound, but aircraft engines of the period were not powerful enough to give the required lift or impetus. Nevertheless, limited

successes were to be achieved seater of the French Sergeant Gilbert in December 1914. It is more likely, however, that it crashed as a result of structural failure. Drawings of the gear had also

been published in The Scientific American. 6

IX

The 'Fokker Scourge' however, the Fokker monoplane and gun were not new, they were certainly ben trovato. They came at a time when the German air service was being remodelled and liberally dosed with 'offensive spirit' by a new Chef des Feldflugwesens (Chief If,

its

of Field Operations), following a period of

dreadful docility during which French Voisin and Farman bombers had raided Fatherland unmolested, inflicting the damage which had inspired notices on Rhineland walls saying 'Gott strafe England— and unsere Flieger!' (God smite England — and our own airmen!) The outcry which followed the 'Fokker Scourge', so richly dramatised in the House of Commons during 1915/16, therefore had its German counterpart many months before. In the face of unarmed two-seater Type B reconnaissance biplanes and a German air service then forming part of an amorphous, largely 'chairborne' transport command, the machine gun carrying Voisins of the lere Groupe de Bombardement (GB 1) had had things all their own way. It is arguable therefore that the seminal aircraft of 1915 was not a Fokker monoplane at all, but Gabriel Voisin's type treize-cinquante (13-50 metre) which could not only bomb but shoot down defenceless B-Flugzeuge. The reason the

Fokker caused such

mann

a stir

when Immel-

scored his first victory on August 1, 1915, is very simple: the Germans had begun to shoot back. The French, along with the highly combative and enterprising Royal Naval Air Service, realised that aeroplanes were no

mere substitute for cavalry vedettes and quickly explored their offensive possibilities. General Joffre himself was keen, and his liaison man at GHQ, the ex-pilot Commandant Bares, saw the importance of strategic bombing as opposed to squandering aircraft on tactical missions. Orders to carry out a mass bombing attack on the Kaiser's personal HQ at Mezieres in September 1914, had been countermanded — for some reason — but a potent instrument existed in the lere Groupe de Bombardcmerit under Commandant Goys, who had worked out theory and practice for longrange sorties, albeit rather elementary. This groupe, comprising three six-machine escadrilles (an escadrille, like a German Fliegerabteilung, was smaller than a British squadron) was armed with Voisins. It took part in the fighting in Champagne and at one stage moved close to Ypres; it was quickly joined by the 2eme Groupe, operating most notably from Dunkirk in co-operation with the British, and the 3eme Groupe. French bombing aeroplanes included various types of Farman, Breguet and Caudron, but as the Voisin 13.50 was both original and typical of its species, the twoseater pusher biplane, it is described heir Aeronautical engineers like Geoffrey de Havilland were right on aerodynamic grounds in regarding 'pusher' machines as crude and archaic; but the occupants of a pusher, sitting in a nacelle like a boot slung forward of the mainplanes did enjoy a fine view forwards, sideways and downwards for observation and, in the Voisin's case, later the use of a Hotchkiss machine gun or 37-mm cannon. Pushers were 'blind' to the rear, but in the absence of hostile fighters this mattered little. Gabriel Voisin chose the powerful [for 1914) 130 lip Salmson (alias Canton-Unne) engine for the Type 3 13.50, which was unusual in being

a water-cooled radial, and believed that E strength was more- important than speed. 8 He chose a wingspan of 13.50 metres, which 5 gave the machine its type name. | This powerful clodhopper Ve rustre puissant' as a friend of Voisin's called it) « was tough enough to operate without I hangars and was designed to take off from the roughest ground. Its landing run was short because one axle of the four-wheeled undercarriage was fitted with motorcar brakes, and the machine was easy and not unduly heavy to fly. As normal l\ used, the 13.50 could carry two men plus 220 pounds of useful load for three hours. Its maximum speed was given variously as 90 or 95 kph, i.e., 55 mph or so. I

Early French raids VAs 1915 opened the French launched fre quent raids to relieve the pressure on the Russians on the Eastern Front, from St Pol-sur-mer (Dunkirk) they cooperated with the British, and targets in Cham pagne, Lorraine and the Argonne were attacked. Here MF 25 (a Maurice Farman escadrille as the initials imply) attacked

1

German

industrial

targets

opposite

Ste

Menehould. west of Verdun From Intelligence and other sources even pictui postcards — target dossiers were compiled, and crews set about learning to drop bombs. first with the aid of three nails knocked into the cockpit as a guide for high, medium later with the aid of a Triplex glass panel in the floor,

and low-level attacks, hut

stopwatches, spirit-levels and other less crude bomb-sights: the Dorand sight appeared in February, the Lafay ifi April. The British too bad a sight, evolved at the Central Lieutenant Flying School by Bourdillon.

At first it proved true that 'the bomb always get through'. One ol the m08t spectacular sorties was a reprisal raid for the

The world's

first

fighter aircraft

FoK

Top

left:

The Morane-Saulnier

deflector gear. Its object was not to interrupt the stream of bullets from the machine gun, but to deflect those few which would otherwise have struck the propeller rather than passing between its blades. Top: right:

A Morane-Saulnier N

with the deflector gear. (Contrary to popular belief, Garros was flying a Type L Parasol when he was shot

fitted

down.) Engine: 80 hp

Gnome

Armament: One Hotchmachine gun. Speed: 102

rotary.

kiss

mph

at 6,500 feet. Ceiling: 13,000 feet. Length: 21 feet 11| inches. Left: The Fokker synchroniser gear. In this gear, the cam aligned with the propeller blade stops the gun firing when blade is in front of the muzzle.

Above: The Fokker E

1

,

fitted

with the interrupter gear.

Engine: 80 hp Oberursel

UO

Armament: LMG .08 machine gun. Speed: 80 mph. rotary.

Weight loaded: 1,239 pounds. Span: 29 feet 3 inches. Length: 22 feet

1| inches.

V4

V An unarmed Albatros B-type taking off from an airfield in France: easy prey for any armed plane

>/

'<*£?!

'

*-.

£*}*.

•>, MM $.£

Boelcke began to evolve the first techniques of air fighting. The Aviatik was less satisfactory, for it the observer was still en-

m

caged beneath the centre section, as obsolete

unable

B-class to

use

in

the

niacin lies, and virtually his gun. The 'standard'

British observation machine of the period, designed at the Royal Aircraft Factory,

Farnborpugh, and produced by innumerable sub-contractors, never

lost its

archaic

layout: a BE2c pilot sat in the rear seat, while his observer struggled helplessly in the front seat, hedged about

'B-class'

by wings, fuselage, wires and struts. First fighter units

Without a good interrupter gear, efficient armame nt could only be mounted at the expense of aerodynamic efficiency This French Farman F40 used a pusher engine and a boom-mounted tailplane

German

poison-gas attack of April 22. Great care was taken in preparing the

which was launched from Malzenear Nancy, HQ of GB 1. The target, involving an out-and-home flight of five hours led by Commandant Govs in person, proved to be the Badische Anilin- undSodaFabrik. Ludwigshafen, near Mannheim. The Voisins were loaded with Cantonattack, ville.

Unne bombs — 90-mm and 155-mm

shells,

supplied with fins and impact fuses by the»

Canton-Unne

engine

These

firm.

were

France's standard aerial missiles. The three escadrilles took off at 0300 hours on May 26. Two 155-mm and 47 90-mm bombs were dropped on Ludwigshafen and a further two 155-mm and 36 90-mm bombs on a secret establishment at Oppau nearby, with highly satisfactory results. Chlorine acid factories were damaged, fires started and lead storage-chambers breached, releasing clouds of poison gas into the lower town of Mannheim. The only Voisin which failed to return was that of Commandant Govs, which force-landed with ignition trouble. Govs eventually escaped

and

from captivity, but his temporary loss was a serious blow to French bombing. Before this, in April, effective raids had been made on the Thyssen factories, on blast furnaces at Thionville, on an electric power station at Rombach and on an explosives factory at Buss in the valley of the Moselle. No opposition was encountered, but the end of

was in sight. must not be thought that the Germans had no bombers. As early as September 1914, a bomber-force of 36 aeroplanes had been set up at Ghis lies, 11 miles southsouth-west of Bruge. by Major Wilhelm and balloon Siegert, a keen privati ice. officially pilot of prewar days. 1

this tranquil period It

i

known

as the Fliegerkorps ties Obersten comprised Heeresleitung (GHQ Air Coi r-pigeon two wings, code-named BA Osunits' tBrieftaubeiiabteilungen tende (BAG) and BA Metz (BAM). As a start, Siegert himself, flying as observer in night an Aviatik BT biplane, led B A O in '(

bombing raid on 1000

Dunkirk on January

28/29. Flying at 3,500 feet, they dropped 123 bombs as a dress rehearsal for raiding England; but before big British raids could take place was posted to the Eastern Front, where the unit assisted greatly in the breakthrough at the battle of Gorlice-

BAO

Tarnow in March. Meanwhile at home, Major

Siegert

was

appointed second in command to the new Feldflugchef, a very able 48-year-old staff officer of wide experience named Major Hermann von der Lieth-Thomsen. Thornsen's cry was: 'We've got the men, now give us machines!' The Inspektion der F liege rtruppen, Idflieg for short, was gingered up, industry organised and communications between Berlin and all fronts streamlined in every way. The German and Austrian

As has been seen, however, before there could be a 'Fokker Scourge' there had to be a Morane and a Garros. Morane-Saulnier monoplanes had been used for racing before the war, when their clean monoplane lines and rounded fuselage cross-section made them highly competitive, despite the drag of cabane, bracing and the external wires by which the wings were warped. Late in 1914, J. B. McCudden had used a rifle while flying as observer with Captain Conran of No 3 Squadron RFC on private offensive patrols: in January he reported that the squadron had received two Lewis machine guns for its Moranes, and the latter

were being

fitted

with 'machine gun

offensive patrols were flown in Sopwith Tabloid, Martinsyde Scout, Bristol Scout and other fast singleseaters by picked pilots in the and RFC. A 'scout' or two was attached to each squadron, rather as riding-schools kept a hunter for the use of star pupils. It is surprising indeed that the term 'hunter' was not coined by the British, for the French already spoke of avians de chasse. and it was they who really originated organised racks'.

Similar

RNAS

air fighting.

Escadrilles de chasse were formed, one each army. Their duties were to protect

for

motor car industries, drawing upon prewar racing experience, had already doubled the horse power of their 1914 designs, the specification of which had called for 80100 hp. Mark II engines had been giving 120 hp reliably, and the Mark Ills were

now emerging, mainly

in

overhead-valve

water-cooled

six-cylinder-in line form, offering 150, 160 or even a claimed 180 hp, to power a new generation of greatly improved airframes. The A-class monoplanes were already dead, and the B-class of unarmed twoseater biplanes was ripe for replacement by

the C-FLugzeuge which would not only have more power and consequently a greater speed, higher ceiling and better climb, but in most cases the tremendous advantage of a 'sting in the tail', namely a defensive Parabellum MG14 light machine gun developed by DVVM, makers of the famous infantry Luger automatic pistol. This armament had been under development since November 1914, and the C-class began to emerge, complete with an effec-

gun-ring for the observer's cockpit: the Rumpler CI il60 hp Mercedes DHL. Albatros CI (160 hp Mercedes Dili or 150 hp Benz BzIIL and Aviatik CI (Mercedes Dili). The most important of these, perhaps, was the Albatros, for it was while flying aircraft of this type that Oswald tive

~w

Allied reconnaissance machines and to escort bombers. With such practitioners as Garros, Vedrines and Pegoud flying Moranes the results could not be in doubt. Three famous escadrilles flying Moranes

MS

3, under Commandant Brocard, under Commandant de Vergette, MS 12, whose commander, Com-

were

MS

23,

and

did much to evolve the tactics of aerial combat. Passengers were given mitrailleuses for offence and defence and single-seater pilots often had aircraft armed with a fixed machine

mandant Tricornot de Rose,

gun to fire through an armoured propeller. Hardened steel deflector plates impaired efficiency of the airscrew, but the tactical surprise of bullets coming from an

the

impossible direction brought Many types of Morane were used, with mid-wing, shoulder wing or a wing mounted above the fuselage, the lastnamed being known, for obvious reasons, as a 'parasol'. British Morane pilots included Flight-Sub-Lieutenant Warneford, VC, RNAS who brought down a Zeppelin while flying a Morane (he also flew a singleseater with deflectors I, and Captain L. A. Strange, whose inventions included an offset Lewis gun-mounting for the pilot. Garros force-landed his Morane on April 18 but his colleagues continued to score while the Fokker E I was incubating, using not only the single-seater 'Bullet', as the British called the Type N Morane, but also the L-type Parasol two-seater, which Brocard, Guynemer and others often flew

apparently

many

victims.

solo on offensive patrols.

may

tually

be

came

into

service.

on August

Two

excellent

two-seater pushers were in fact flying be-

1.

The DH2, designed by Cap-

tain Geoffrey de Havilland, had undergone flight trials by July 1915 and the FE8, a Farnborough design by J. Kenworthy, had been started at the Factory in May. Con-

trary to aviation folklore neither of these aircraft was called into being by the Fokker; they were probably seen as an improvement on the Morane. All the same, the central feature which made the Morane and Fokker so effective was not appreciated at the time. The first DH2 had a Lewis gun on a moveable mounting controlled by the pilot. It was not realised that success lay in aiming the aircraft as a whole. This fact renders all the more remarkable the feat brought off by Major Lanoe G. Hawker,

No 6 Squadron RFC on July 25, just six days after another great pilot, Guynemer, had drawn first blood. That evening Hawker brought off a treble. He drove down one German C-class two-seater; another he forced down with a damaged engine: and the third he shot down in flames. All three were armed with machine guns: Hawker's Bristol Scout had one hand-loaded cavalry carbine on the star-

of

wondered, in view of the chanciness of using a deflector propeller, and the non-availability of interrupter gears, why somebody did not bring out a fighter with a pusher engine. The answer is that several people had thought of it, and several effective pusher fighters evenIt

outbreak of war. Vickers exhibited a biplane, the 'Gun-bus', in 1913, and laid down a batch of 50 on their own initiative. Unfortunately the Wolseley engine chosen proved a failure, and the Monosoupape Gnome rotary was not yet available. A rather similar machine with an even more dilatory history was the Royal Aircraft Factory's Farman Experimental (later called Fighting Experimental) FE2b. The FE2b was easy to arm and made a useful fighting aeroplane. Orders were placed for it on the outbreak of war, but the six-cylinder Green engine chosen proved too heavy and the Beardmore, developed from a prewar Austro-Daimler, took some time to arrive. Two excellent single-seater pusher scouts were also on the stocks well before Immelmann first scored fore the

Anthony Fokker, the contributed so

much

Dutchman who German aviation

brilliant

to

board side firing obliquely forward to miss the propeller. He was awarded the VC. An oblique mounting of this sort, adopted, also for the Strange Lewis gun for BE2c pilots was indeed one solution. Another, adopted on St range's own Marti nsyde scout was a Lewis on the cent re sect ion inclined upwards so as to miss the propel- £ ler. A quadrant mounting for such a gun $ was devised by Sergeant Foster of No 1 1 5 Squadron RFC. The oddest resolution of| was -s tractor/pusher the controversy adopted by the Royal Aircraft Factory for * its

experimental BE9, which was basically

An RNAS Voisin LA on Imbros This type was more than a match for any aircraft the Turks had

^

"^Z

nier sehen Euch

mmli Hier diirfen

FahrzeugE nichf halfen An early German exhortation to the army on the need for camouflage against prying aircraft

The gunner

a BE2c with the engine moved back and a nacelle for the observer rigged forward of the airscrew. Similar arrangements were

into the crankcase. where movement of the engine turned it into vapour. This combustible mixture was drawn into the cylinders by an automatic mushroom valve in the crown of each piston and exhausted after a normal four-stroke cycle through a pushrod operated valve in the cylinderhead. Wipe contacts carried current from a stationary magneto to a sparking-plug in each head via plain brass wires. It is thought that all magnetoes were obtained from Germany via neutral sources during the early months of the war as neither Britain nor France had developed this branch of the industry.

adopted on the Spad A2. In 1915 engines were too scarce and too unreliable for the Allies to attempt a twinmotor layout, which would have provided high performance together with fore-andaft shooting for pilot and observer. The Germans, however, evolved an effective (bomber/ three-seater Kampfflugzeug escort aircraft) early in 1915 mainly for the Eastern Front. Designed to use a pair of the obsolete Mercedes DI 100 hp engines, the AEG GI grossfleugzeug had a span of 16 meters (52 feet 6 inches). It could carry its load at a maximum speed of 125 kph (78 mph). and thanks to the overheadvalve water-cooled engines in which the

German

industry specialised, possessed a

useful ceiling.

The rotary engine The rotary engines used French and British (and

so widely by the also by Fokker) the advantage of

during 1914-1916 had compactness and a good power-to-weight ratio, but because of their atmospheric

discarded in automobile practice) performance fell off badly at altitude and in hot weather. A note on the working of the early rotaries may be of inlet valves 'long since

interest.

The Gnome engine was invented Laurent Seguin in 1907. The cylinders were disposed radially like the spokes of a wheel and were finned for cooling like by

those of a motorcycle engine. In contrast with the latter, however, in which the main body of the engine remained stationary while the crankshaft rotated, the cylinders and crankcase of a rotary revolved about a stationary crankshaft, carrying the airscrew with them. The usual number of cylinders was seven or nine and all the pistons acted upon a single crankpin; one master' connecting-rod mounted on ballbearings embraced the crankpin direct, while around the periphery of its big end were arranged plain hearings for the big ends of the other connecting-rods. A sini| le single-jet carburettor, stationary of course, supplied petrol via the hollow crankshaft

1

002

of a German C-class aircraft Early experience had shown that important to have a gun covering the tail

The Monosoupape Gnome, as the name implies, had one valve only, a mechanically-operated poppet valve situated in the cylinder head. This functioned not only as exhaust valve, but also admitted plain air during the first part of the induction stroke to mix with the rich mixture entering the cylinder through a ring of ports in the cylinder wall, uncovered by the piston at the bottom of its stroke, and communicating with the crankcase, which was pressure-fed from the carburettor. The Mono was an improvement upon the ordinary Gnome, but both weie superseded by the Le Rhone, in which both inlet and exhaust valves were mechanically operated. The Oberursel used by Fokker was a copy of the Le Rhone, as was the Austrian version made in the Steyr arsenal. British Le Rhone engines were made in quantity by W. H. Allen Son & Co Ltd. Better than the Oberursel was the Swedishbuilt Thulin version of the Le Rhone, which reached German in considerable quantity. All rotary engines, however,

made one demand which proved embarrassing for Germany: to avoid dilution of lubricant in the vapour-filled crankcase they required pure castor oil. which does not mix with petrol Castor oil in Germany was very scarce. From the start of the war until January 1915. Austin -Hungarian squadrons were not uniformly equipped, having a selection of Etrich Taube monoplanes and Lohner Pfeil arrow -wing biplanes with various inline and rotary engines, together with Albatros Bis made under licence bv

it

was

vitally

Phonix. These aeroplanes were designed by Ernst Heinkel. who was to have a great influence on Austrian design. -Just before the war. the Trieste magnate, Camillo Castiglione, had bought up the Brandenburgischen Flugzeugwerke at Brandenburg/Havel and the Hanseatische Flugzeugwerke, afterwards known as HansaBrandenburg, and Heinkel became chief engineer. Austria's most important contributions, however, were the AustroDaimler and Hieronymus (Hiero) engines, on which Dr Ferdinand Porsche worked.

Frustrated bombing attacks When Italy declared war on

May

24,

1915, the Austrian air forces found the

Alps

somewhat hampering. The were

Italian

high state of readiness, but were very under-equipped and lacking air forces

at a

in modern aircraft. Italy had also five airships. A French naval squadron went to

and the U-boat Ull was by Enseigne de Vaisseau Roulier. Attempts to bomb the Austrian arsenals at Trieste and Pola were frusVenice

to assist,

damaged on

-July

1

trated by the Italian aircraft's insufficient performance and the prevailing Austrian

C-Flugzeuge.

Equipment was seldom

for

'side-show'

operations

of the best, as the British found in East Africa. A German commerce-

the light cruiser Konigsberg had taken refuge in the Rufiji River in October 1914. Unsuccessful operations by Short Folder seaplanes, a Curtiss flying-boat and two Sopwith S07 seaplanes located and photographed but could not destroy the Two Henri Farmans and two raider. Caudron G Ills arrived in June, and on the lth of that month, shellfire directed by a Farman and a Caudron put an end to the Konigsberg. As an example of a MiddleEastern side-show may be cited the bombing of El Murra on April 16, 1915, by two Maurice Farmans and a BE2a from raider,

1

the Ismailia Flight of the HFC in Egypt. The amphibious operations in the Dardanelles provided scope for both the RNAS,

under the dashing Commander C. R. Samand also the French, operating from the islands of Imbros and Tenedos. Two son,

seaplane carriers,

HMS

Ark Royal,

a con-

An Albatros two-seater dropping bombs. By this time (mid-1915) the value of bombing from aircraft was being increasingly exploited

kein Tannenberg': 'Without airmen there

would have been no Tannenberg.'

Among

the junior officers on this front

was the cavalry subaltern Manfred von Richthofen, lately transferred to the air service, having decided that cavalry warfare was no occupation for an officer of the 1st Regiment (Emperor Alexander III) Uhlans. Richthofen was posted to the East

as an observer in June 1915. He had not applied for training as a pilot, being convinced the war would be over too soon, and took part during June. July and August in the Central Powers' advance from Gorlice to Brest Litovsk. His Albatros B I was brought down by infantry machine gun fire, but was able to land on ground which had just been taken from the Russians, a matter of yards only. The Russian air services, through faulty organisation and widely stretched communications, made no great showing. Technically, however, they had much of interest to contribute, apart from French aeroplanes made under licence, the most advanced being some Sik'orsk}' Ilya Mourometz four-engined bombers pro-

duced by the Russo-Baltic Wagon Works. An Anatra two-seater copy of the Voisin verted merchant ship, and the Isle of Man packet, HMS Ben-My-Chree, made the operations sea- and airborne. Turkish flourmills and other ration targets on the Gallipoli peninsula were bombed, the Turkish troops visited regularly at mealtimes, and highly effective attacks made on shipping. 'The British,' wrote a French historian, 'had an ineluctable vocation for bombing.' Squadron-Commander C. H. Edmonds (Short 184 Seaplane, 225 hp Sunbeam) sank an enemy merchant ship off Injeburnu, and a Turkish ammunition ship off Ak-Bashi-Liman, and Flight-

was

Lieutenant J. B. Dacre sank a tug off Nagara, using an air-launched 1,000pound Whitehead locomotive torpedo. During 1915 the RNAS made 70 attacks on

was

shipping. In addition to their coastal patrol, anti-submarine and anti-Zeppelin activities, naval squadrons also joined the RFC in Flanders. Following a nomadic existence during the retreat and occupation of so much of their country, the Belgians reorganised their air service early in 1915. In April the Aviation Militaire took up quarters at Coxyde and Houthem. Five escadrilles of Voisin, Henri Farman and Maurice Farman pusher biplanes were formed to support the Belgian divisions in the field. When General Ludendorff was a mere colonel in October 1910 he took the opportunity of going up in an aeroplane with Hauptmann de le Roi and expressed himself 'delighted'. Ludendorff's appreciation of the possibilities of aerial reconnaissance received confirmation on both Fronts. In August 1914, Feldfliegerabteilungen Nos 14, In, 16, 17 and 29, together with four Festungsfliegerabteilungen (fortress defence flights) went to the Eastern Front. Aerial reconnaissance certainly paid dividends: news of Russian troop movements brought back by Leutnant Canter and lus observer, Leutnant Mortens, proved of vital importance for the Battle of Tannenberg. Landing where they could, and proceeding to General von Francois's head quarters by cycle, cart and commandeered motor car. they made possible a great

German remarks

victory. in his

As Hindenburg himself memoirs, 'O/inc Flieger,

but structurally Russo-Baltic produced the RBVZ SI 7 and S20. In the armaments field thev did even better. A Sikorsky S16 (80 hp Renault, later 100 hp Gnome) was fitted with a machine gun synchronising interrupter gear invented by Lieutenant Poplavko, whose experiments with Maxim guns had been proceeding since 1913, while news of another Russian interrupter gear was brought to London late in 1914 by Lieutenant-Commander V. V. Dybovski of the Imperial Russian Navy, who, with Engineer Smyslov, successful,

fairly

weak, and armoured

its co-inventor. Later, Dybovski was to co-operate fruitfully on such matters with Warrant-Officer Scarff, RNAS. On the lunatic fringe of the aircraft armament world may be mentioned a Russian pilot named A. A. Kazakov, who tried conclusions with an Albatros biplane near the village of Gu/.ov on March L8, 1915. Having endeavoured unsuccessfully to entangle his enemy's propeller with a trailing cable and grapnel, he rammed it with his undercarriage. It is of interest that a trailing bomb was tried from a BE2c of No 6 Squadron.

Further Reading

RFC HO

Baring, M.,

(Bell 1920)

Sky Fever (Hamilton 1961) Gray, P. and Thetford, O., German Aircraft of the First World War (Putnam 1962)

de Havilland,

Sir Geoffrey,

Joubert de la Ferte, Sir Philip, The Fared Sky (Hutchinson 1952) Lamberton, W. A., Fighter Aircraft of the 19141918 War (Harleyford 1960) A Bomber and ReconnaisLamberton, sance Aircraft of the 1914-1918 War (Harley-

W

,

ford 1962) Lewis, Sagittarius Rising (Davies 1966) Longmore, Sir Arthur, From Sea to Sky (Bles 1946) Robertson, B Air Aces of the 1914-1918 Wa< (Harleyford 1962) Weyl, A E Fokker. the Creative Ye (Putnam 1965)

C

.

,

\ForD. B. Tubb's biography, see page 641.] ion:

i

THE BENEVOLENT NEUTRAL? By 1914 the United

States was in the midst of a depression, and the initial effect of the European crisis in the middle of that year was to exacerbate her troubles. Yet by the end of 1915 American business was booming and exports were rising fast: the impact of Allied war

and Irish- American organisations.

A major factor at

which helped push the Americans towards the Allied camp was the 'skulduggery' of German and Austrian secret agents — incendiarism, industrial sabotage and bribery. Marion C. Siney. Centre: This cartoon illustrates one of the many pressures (moral, political and economic) which both sides exerted on America to induce her to compromise her policy of neutrality; its caption reads 'It should be America's duty to help us subdue the mad dog I of Europe' this time

orders was pushing the economy out of the doldrums. As trade with the Allies grew, America's policy of neutrality inevitably came under increasing pressure, and by the end of 1915 America had gone a measurable distance towards alignment with the Allies, despite the pressuregroup activities of German Economic aid from the United States

to the Allies in 1914-1915 as a business proposition, and only secondarily for reasons of sentiment. But from the outset the attitude of President Wilson and the State Department with respect to the limitations that should be put on the sale of contraband goods and on the character of the financing of Allied purchases was involved in the interpretation of the rights and duties of a neutral state. Inevitably those who were pro-Allied and those who favoured the Central Powers exerted pressures on the government, hoping to make their views prevail. In 1914 the United States was in the midst of a depression, and producers of both primary and manufactured goods were anxious to sell their wares. The European crisis in late July and early August had immediate adverse effects on business at many levels. Many enterprises had been financed by the sale of stocks and bonds to Europeans, and ordinary foreign trade transactions were often financed by short-term credits provided by British banks. By January 1, 1915 repayment of some $450 million would be due in London alone. The New York Stock Exchange by July 31, 1914 was so upset by wholesale dumping of securities that it was closed to avoid disaster, and reopened only on December 16. Similar uproar occurred on the copper and cotton markets where on one day cotton prices fell $7 to $10 per bale in an hour. A phenomenal rise in the value of the pound brought new disruptions. By August 1 it had risen from the par of $4.86A to $6.20, with the result that since it was cheaper to pay debts abroad in gold, there was a great outflow of gold, $4,200,000 being shipped to Europe and $1,550,000 to Canada in early August. It is against this background that the first moderate and permissive pronouncements made by the United States government must be viewed. President Wilson on August 4 affirmed that 'All persons may lawfully, and without restriction by reason of the aforesaid state of war, selPwithin the United States arms and munitions of war, and other articles ordinarily known as contraband of war.' Even before this statement, however, the French government, using Rothschilds of Paris as an intermediary, enquired of J. P. Morgan & Co., the investment backers, whether it could sell $100 million of Treasury bonds in th&.United States, on the under-

was provided mainly

.

.

standing that most of the money would be spent there. Although Robert Lansing, then Counsellor of the State Department, advised Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan that he knew of no legal objection, Bryan informed Wilson on August 10 that he believed 'Money is the worst of all contraband because it commands everything else.' Furthermore, he thought America's refusal to lend money would shorten the war, and leave the United States itself less the prey of divisiveness. Hence Bryan informed Morgans that 'Loans by American bankers to any foreign nation which is at war is inconsistent with the true spirit of neutrality.' Wilson then appealed to the public on August 19, urging that 'the United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name. We must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb on our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another.' The British at

first had ample funds to cover the purchase of munitions, foods, and other essentials which they bought, but it was France's acute financial need that soon raised again the question of her mode of payment. New York bankers believed that if the United States wanted to sell its goods to Europe it must accept the fact that instant payment was not possible. Could some sort of short-term credit, which would not be sold to the investing public but which would be arranged by foreign governments with American banks, be devised? When enquiries were made at the State Department, Bryan was in Nebraska and Lansing, the Acting-Secretary, urged Wilson to consider the consequences if the buying power for these purchases dried up and the business went to other countries. Wilson rather easily agreed with Lansing that there was a distinction between loans and credits — that by the former Americans would, by loaning their savings, be financing the war, but that the acceptance of Treasury notes would be merely a means of facilitating trade which would avoid the 'clumsy and impractical method of cash payment'. News of the decision travelled quickly in banking and business circles, and the pace of British, French, and Russian buying increased, with the three governments, and even departments within a government, competing with each other and forcing up prices. Early in November Morgan & Co first proposed to the British

government that it might act as purchasing and fiscal agent for the War Office and Admiralty in order to reduce this hazard. It took until January 1915 to complete these negotiations, but even in November Morgans was being asked to arrange contracts with American manufacturers for 250,000 to 500,000 Lee-Enfield rifles, using British designs. The British offered to provide funds for expansion of factories and procurement of tools, since the two chief

arms manufacturers — Remington Arms and Winchester Rifle already working at full capacity. The offer was intended to be an incentive to companies which made sewing machines or agricultural equipment to convert to guns and other military goods. This deal was suspended, however, because the War Office agent in the United States objected to what he regarded as Morgan's interference in his sphere.

Arms — were

Submarines 'un-neutral' One of the most astonishing

operations was negotiated by Charles M. Schwab, President of Bethlehem Steel Corporation, with Lord Fisher in London in early November. Bethlehem was well equipped to produce guns and artillery shells, which it was soon doing for the Allies; through its subsidiaries in the shipbuilding business Schwab also saw the possibility of producing submarines for the Admiralty, a project dear to Fisher's heart. Without first consulting the State Department Schwab agreed to build 20 submarines within ten months, at the price of $500,000 each. It was assumed that it would be un-neutral if the United States permitted warships, ready for service, to depart from American ports; therefore it was intended to send the ships in parts for assembly in Britain. Lansing's first response to an enquiry was that since neutral trade should be as lightly burdened as possible, this would be acceptable. Acting on this advice, Schwab signed the formal contract on November 10, and work was begun at once at Bethlehem's shipyards, part of the manufacturing being sub-contracted to the Electric Boat Co. When Bryan returned to his post, he was horrified. He asked Wilson to prevent the contract from being carried out, for he saw grave dangers arising from protests by Germany and GermanAmericans which would lead to 'excitements' in Congress. Wilson proved to be less pliant than in the matter of credits, and in the end Bryan's view prevailed. Wilson informed Lansing that it was the duty of the United States 'to prevent submarines being shipped from this country even in parts'. Lord Fisher was furious, but Sir Cecil Spring Rice, British Ambassador in Washington, believed that it was better not to push the question to a point where anti-Allied and pro-German forces would be marshalled to demand that the United States prohibit the export of all munitions. Schwab was only temporarily balked. Early in December he made another hurried trip to London where he arranged that machines, skilled workers, and materials should be moved from shops in the United States to the Canadian Vickers Ltd plant in Montreal where, unrestricted, Bethlehem's contract could be carried out on ten submarines; work on the other ten would proceed in the United States for later delivery. All this was done without the Admiralty consulting either Canadian Vickers or the Canadian government. But by early January the enterprise was It was a 'secret' known generally in the press that Schwab had circumvented the policy of the United States. No federal statute was violated, but the German Ambassador, Count Bernstorff, and his Austro-Hungarian colleague, Dr Constantine Dumba, both protested. The State Department's reply to their notes was based partly on

well launched.

the ingenious distinction which Lansing and Paul D. Cravath, Bethlehem Steel's lawyer, worked up on February 6: if materials sent to Canada required 'further fabrication' before a submarine was launched, they would not be regarded as parts of warships. Moreover, Bryan, on Lansing's advice, gave the two Ambassadors the impression that Canadian Vickers had sought raw materials in the open market and had purchased some from Bethlehem Steel, and that he had ascertained that 'no component parts are being built by Bethlehem Steel Works or being sent to Canada'. This was not incorrect, nor was it really true, for although Bethlehem in Pennsylvania was not engaged in this enterprise, its subsidiaries and sub-contractors certainly were. The ten submarines completed in Canada crossed the Atlantic under their own power in the summer of 1915. Long before these ships were ready for duty, the Admiralty's interest in having large numbers of submarines declined. Since Germany had very few vessels on the high seas, there was little essential work for submarines to do. No one can pretend, therefore, that this was an American contribution of overwhelming importance to the Allies, but it serves as a fine example of equivocation on the part of the United States government.

German-Americans protest German attempts at espionage and sabotage were

Early

not very

by an untried and small staff in the embassy — under the immediate control of Captain Franz von Papen, Captain Karl Boy-Ed, and Dr Heinrich Albert, respectively the Military, Naval and Commercial Attaches — these activities raised fine questions about the line in a neutral country between the normal work of diplomats and sabotage. The German government on July 31 cancelled the sailing of all German merchant ships and those at sea were ordered to seek refuge in neutral ports. Thus direct commerce between Germany and trans-Atlantic ports almost ceased. By mid-August large numbers of German ships were lying in American ports where they, with their idle crews, proved very useful observation posts and workshops. Before the war two German-controlled wireless stations had been established in New Jersey and at Sayville on Long Island. From these in the first days of the war directions were sent to German ships, including cruisers operating in South Atlantic waters. When a presidential proclamation on August 5 forbade the transmission of radio messages in code, the German and Austro-Hungarian Ambassadors protested that this was unfair because Britain and France had free trans-Atlantic cable communications for both commercial and military messages (implying that it was the duty of a neutral government to maintain a balance of advantage between the two contending sides). The United States relented to the extent of permitting code messages provided both the messages and the code were given to the Navy Department which thereafter exercised censorship. Events proved that the Germans developed evasive tactics; by interrupting the transmission of dots and dashes they could either interpolate new messages or indicate that a special cypher message, which apsuccessful. Directed

peared harmless, was to follow. Another plan, developed before the war, was for the HamburgAmerica Line to buy or charter merchant vessels, load them with coal, food, and other stores and then send them out to supply German warships. Twelve such ships were obtained and ten sent out between August 3 and September 8, using false manifests and false declarations of destination in order to secure clearances by the United States Customs. Some $1,500,000 was spent on the project, at the order of Boy-Ed. One of the most active organisations with which the German government co-operated in its propaganda was the National German-American Alliance. Created in 1901 as an amalgamation of several cultural societies, by 1914 it had some 2,000,000 members. It had had close tie-ups with the anti-prohibition movement, with the big breweries subsidizing it generously. Now, partly spontaneously and partly with German encouragement, it directed protests against United States policies that seemed to favour the Allies. Its greatest campaign was to secure new federal legislation to prevent the exportation of munitions. Had Germany been able to buy munitions in American markets and transport them to Europe there is little reason to think that the Alliance would have urged such an embargo. In December two Congressmen announced that they would sponsor such a bill. Lansing's view on the proposed measure was foreseeable; Wilson's may have wavered; but even Bryan believed an arms embargo would be an unneutral act. Page, the American Ambassador, was instructed to explain to Sir Edward Grey the natural preferences which many Americans of European origin had for their former countries, but he sent reassurance that the proposal would not be adopted. For the moment agitation for an arms embargo died down, and when Bernstorff tried to revive it by a clumsy appeal to the public, he only aroused more anti-German feeling and downgraded himself in the eyes of the government in

Washington.

American exports soar

On January

1915 the agreement was signed by which Morgan the purchasing agent for Great Britain, charging a 2% commission on the first ten million dollars purchased and 1% thereafter for their work. A similar agreement was made with France in May. Morgan & Co was not the sole agent, however, for contracts continued to be made directly with Bethlehem Steel, for instance, and the British Remount Commission spent $100 million for horses. Between January and August 31, 1915, $140,465,926 was disbursed by Morgans to contractors in the 15,

& Co became

United States. Payment was in dollars and was not dependent on safe arrival of the goods in Britain. Large new contracts were also arranged, but signing contracts did not bring instant de

Between February and August 4,400,000 rifles at a price $194 million were ordered from the Remington and Winchester

livery.

of

1

005

companies, about SI',

of the business being

handled through

Morgan & !o The French and Russian governments made i

fairly regular secure new credits for themselves, although for some o( their orders Britain stood surety. Enquiries of the State Department about whether the proposed sale to the public of $50 million of French one-year Treasurj notes would be considered as a loan or a credit brought this reph on March 31: 'While loans to belligerents have been disapproved, this Government has not felt that it was justified in interposing object ion to the credit arrangements which have been brought to its attention." Early in March a German loan of ten million dollars had been offered for sale by (.'handler Bros of Philadelphia, apparently without protests, so this statement ought not to be interpreted as a pro-Allied gesture. In June when Rothschilds tried to make arrangements for still another French credit, the New York bankers showed great reluctance to act unless acceptable collateral was provided by Fiance, its general 'faith and credit' not being regarded as sufficient It was agreed that bonds of the Pennsylvania Railroad Co and the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St Paul Railroad Co, whose value was expressed in francs and which had been bought by French investors, should be sent to the United States to be held by the banks or re-sold. This device proved to be a precedent for a similar proposal in the negotiations for the Anglo-French loan

attempts

to

of October L915.

The

relative ease with which these transactions

were carried which Britain now was beginning to face, led Morgan & Co in June to seek a more comprehensive plan for dealing with foreign exchange and payments problems on behalf of their client. The tempo of American exports to the Allies had accelerated sharply in early 1915. Department of Commerce statistics on foreign trade in the period to June 30 showed sales of $598,141,974 to the Allies in the 11 months as compared with $80,398,921 in the comparable period the preceding year, an increase of more than 600^. Spectacular increases had taken place in exports to Britain of horses and mules, and maize and oats where only a few thousands of dollars had been spent previously. German submarine warfare brought sharp exchanges between the United States and Germany, particularly after the sinking of the Lusitania, and the large loss of American lives. Eventually, however, there was disagreement between Wilson and Bryan over the manner in which complaints against Germany — and to out

.

and the financial

difficulties

a certain extent those against Britain — should be dealt with. Bryan resigned on June 8, and with the succession of Lansing to his post the probability that ways would be found to ease the Allies' financial plight increased.

German 'skulduggery' As the submarine crisis continued, the public became much more aware of the activities of German agents in the United States. The newspapers of July 18 carried stories about the discovery, through the use of an amplification and recording device developed by an amateur radio operator in New Jersey, that the Germans had been sending illicit messages via the Sayville radio station. The navy had been rejecting some messages as being unclear, so they were not unprepared for these revelations. Careful study of the recordings gave evidence that information was being sent to Germany about the movement of Allied and neutral ships, particularly those carrying munitions; messages were sent to submarines at sea. Later in the year it was revealed that the

source through which information on cargoes and ship movements came was a German reservist, Frederick Scheindl, who worked at the National City Bank. He had access to documents which he carried to the office of the Hamburg-America Line where they were copied, sometimes through the night, so that the originals could be returned to the bank in the morning. Scheindl was paid $25 per week, and made $400 before his role was discovered. Since early in the year the German General Staff and the Naval Intelligence Staff took a lively interest in plans for sabotage in the United States. Instructions had been given on January 26, 1915 that Dr Albert was to handle the funds; Papen was to direct the spies and agents in the United States and Canada; Boy-Ed was to concentrate on ship abotage and recruitment of spies to was aroused over the use by the send to Europe. Great ill-w Germans of falsified Americj and other neutral passports to help German reservists return to Germany, or to provide cover for spies in Allied countries.

More

direct plans

were made

Ui

ler

Papen's direction, and with

consuls in the west, to dynamite tunnels and bridges on the Canadian Pacific Railroad, and to

close co-operation of

1006

German

A This German cartoon shows America as Britain's saviour from a nearly mauling by Germany's U-boats VA painting showing an American steamer unloading vital war materials for the Allies fatal

burn docks and warehouses in Oregon and Washington. In the Eastern United States similar plans were made to destroy the Welland Canal, which connects Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, avoiding Niagara Falls, and the Vanceboro Bridge in Maine, over which trains went from New England loaded with goods bound for the port of Halifax. There were constant reports of fires in munition factories, in railway yards, and on ships at sea. Some were undoubtedly genuine accidents, but the incidence was too high for all of them to Later evidence showed that the director of many of these fires was Captain Franz von Rintelen. He was sent by the German be.

to the United States in April, travelling on a Swiss passport as Edward Gasche and carrying special credentials from the Kaiser. He had immediate access to $500,000. Rintelen, a former Director of the Deutsche Bank, had been in both England and the United States before the war. In New York he was a member of the Yacht Club, and had good connections in society. When he 'surfaced' he had a completely plausible background, but under cover he was busy on the waterfront organising German sailors and Irish dock hands to disrupt English trade. Rintelen was associated with a Dr Scheele, a chemist who developed small bombs the size and shape of a cigar, in which an acid ate through a metal casing to set off fire when it came into contact with other ingredients, all at a predictable time. Some of the 'cigars' were made on the Friedrich der Grosse, one of the ships lying rn New York harbour. Stevedores then hid them in cargoes on ships all along the coast. More than 30 ships and valuable cargoes were damaged or destroyed. Rintelen established a biological warfare project in which horses and mules awaiting shipment were innoculated with anthrax and tetanus germs. He established a firm which bought up food and ammunition presumably on Russia's account, delayed shipment as long as possible, and then sometimes gave the cargo the 'cigar' treatment. He also established a trade union among German- and Irish-Americans (Labour's National Peace Council), particularly among dock workers. Although several hundred thousand dollars were spent, it soon died. There is some evidence that Papen did not approve of Rintelen 's competition. He probably was not sorry to see things close in on Rintelen so that Rintelen was recalled. Was it accidental that messages were sent to Germany via Sayville in which Rintelen was named and his mission made fairly clear? Even with this evidence it was difficult for the United States government to bring such a person— or even an actual saboteur — to book because there was no clear federal jurisdiction over ordinary cases of incendiarism. Rintelen left New York on August 3, 1915, again as Gasche, on the Noordam, bound for Rotterdam. But he was detained at Falmouth and kept in custody at Donington Hall.

Admiralty

A The caption with this American cartoon

is simply: British Em-Piracy. Stimulating her economy, yet threatening to embroil her in a European conflagration, British war orders were a mixed blessing for America

Secret documents revealed

The great 'break' sabotage came in

securing direct evidence of espionage and July when Dr Albert forgot his briefcase when he hurriedly got off a train on Sixth Avenue. That day Albert was being 'tailed' by a secret service agent. Frank Burke, who was delighted to claim the briefcase as his own and run out one door of the train while Albert was trying desperately to gel back on to retrieve it. Albert pursued Burke down to the street where Burke got away on a tram. Consultations between the Secretary of the Treasury, William McAdoo, and Wilson led to the decision that a selection of the Albert papers should be given to Frank Cobb, editor of the New York World who began publishing them in mid-August, withoul any indication of how the newspaper acquired them. The documents were reprinted and commented on across the country. Many ingenious business deals which were not illegal, were revealed in the documents. Attempts had been made to lui\ all available supplies of liquid chlorine, one of the ingredients of poison gas, and of carbolic acid, used in explosives. The chief source of the latter was a company owned by Thomas Edison, w ho had been assured that his product would he converted h\ Ger many 'solely into highly salutary remedies'. The Bridgeport Projectile Co was incorporated on March 31, 1915, with a capitalization of $2,000,000 in the name of llu::.» Schmidt, who was ailing for Albert and Papen. The specific aim of the company was to purchase all of the smokeless powder produced by the Aetna Explosives Co. Since the DuPonl Co had agreed to sell all that it produced to the British, Aetna's SUpplj was the only other one available; it was assumed thai he British would soon he bidding for it. The added insult was that Bridgeport Projectile then accepted British and Russian orders for shrapnel wit h no intention of delivering the goods. The President of Bridge port Projectile was Arthur -1. Moxham, an Englishman, who said in

late

I

(Ml,

satisfaction over the sinking of the Ancona, that

it

asked the

Dumba. He departed on October !>. New outrages, which were laid at the door of the Germans, were soon perpetrated. There were two large (ires on November 10, one at Bethlehem's machine shop No 4 with a $3,000,000 loss, and the other, more important, at Midvale Steel and Ordnance Co where patterns for the Lee-Enfield rifle were destroyed. On NovemAustrian government

to recall

ber 16 two fires were started within half an hour in railway cars filled with munitions, awaiting trans-shipment in the yards at Weehawken, New Jersey. On December a great blast occurred at one of the DuPont powder mills, after mysterious warnings had been posted on nearby fences and buildings. One newspaper estimated that there had been 67 fires in munition factories, and a loss of 69 lives, since the beginning of the war. Whether they were all German-inspired is doubtful, but the price was undeniably high. There appeared to be real reluctance on the part of Wilson and Lansing to complicate relations with Germany any further, and great forbearance was shown to Papen and Boy-Ed. Evidence that Boy-Ed was behind the Hamburg-America Line's fleet-supply project was revealed in such detail in a New York federal court in November that the axe finally fell. On December 4 the recall of both these men was requested: Bernstorff was not held responsible for his subordinates' actions. One of the most incomprehensible things about Papen's final days in the United States was his decision to take home a large number of documents. Whether he thought that the British safeconduct made his luggage inviolable is not clear. He and Boy-Ed sailed on the Noordam on December 22, and once more the authorities at Falmouth did their work. They confiscated at least 31 documents and more than 100 cancelled cheques, many of which revealed the names of Papen's agents and, in some cases, the work they had done. Was this sheer stupidity on his part? Major Horst von der Goltz, a German agent early in the war, who later turned state's evidence, stated in his memoirs that this was a means of settling old scores against some who had not co-operated to Papen's satisfaction, and a means of intimidating others who might balk in the future against Germany's demands. The end of the year saw American business booming, with stock market prices slightly more stable: with sterling exchange hovering between $4-76 and $4-78: and with the United States having received $420,528,672 more gold than it exported. Railway yards were so congested with goods awaiting space on ships that temporary embargoes on new shipments to the East coast were enforced by some railways. Trade statistics for the entire year simply emphasised what had been known in June: there were exports of $3,547,480,372, compared with $2,113,624,050 in 1914. Tremendous increases occurred in exports of explosives, now at $181,778,033: and in automobiles and parts, $94,879,738, with $50,977,410 going to Britain and France. There were similar increases in wheat and flour, maize, copper and cotton. The producers made large profits. It appears that Morgan & Co were also well paid for their work, since they received $1 1,273,766 in commissions on the $1,100,453,000 purchases they made on behalf of the British government in 1915, and $2,240,499 on those for France. On the other hand, one may doubt whether without the intervention of the New York hankers the Allies could have weathered the economic crisis they faced. Although the United States government still had many complaints about British controls over neutral commerce, by the end of 1915 it had gone a measurable distance towards alignment with the Allies 1

The

British

made

in harbour. She was one of the submarines Canada through an unorthodox American deal

submarine E 19

for Britain in

their sales had been made on the understanding that the was to be used exclusively in shells for the Allies.

powder

Further evidence about German and Austrian attempts to encourage strikes among munitions workers came out in August and September. Doubtless workers were dissatisfied with long hours (50 or more a week), low wages (20
was committed abroad. In August an American journalist-lecturer, James F. J. Archibald, who had been given special facilities by the Germans when he visited Europe early in the war, made another trip. At Falmouth the British authorities took from him some thirty documents, both private letters and official correspondence, which had been given him for safe transport by his German and Austrian diplomat friends. News of all this was spread by articles in The World, sent by their London correspondent: soon the British published 34 documents from the collection in a Blue Book. In some Papen explained about Dr Albert's lost briefcase and the effect this had had on German operations. Another letter from

Dumba

to his

Foreign Minister enclosed a

memorandum

said to

have 'been received from the editor of a Hungarian language newspaper. It proposed a scheme to tie up steel and munitions production in Cleveland, Toledo. Detroit, and at Bethlehem. The author of the memorandum was William Warm, a former editor in Budapest and for 13 years engaged in various publishing ventures in New York. Recently he had been an assistant editor of the Cleveland Szabadsag. Warm's role was revealed by the contemporary editor of that paper who thought that it was unfair that the 'credit' should go to others The editor of another Hungarian paper in Toledo had brought Warm's ideas to Archibald's attention, and he in turn, informed the diplomats.

Further Reading

M Neutrality for the United States (New York AMS 1973) The German-Americans in Politics, 1914-1917 (UniverChild. Clifton J sity of Wisconsin Press 1939)

Borchard, E

,

.

Landau. Henry, The

'The axe finally fell' Some Hungarian-Am* an editors denied that they had been subsidised in order to promote industrial unrest; one said, 'We would Not all Hungarians, however, appredo it as a patriotic dut\ ciated the activities of Warm, et al. On Sunday, September 12, the Hungarian Socialists in Cleveland organised a mass meeting of munitions workers, at which he editors were denounced. Dumba was said to bo presumptuou. to think that he could dictate to them as though they were still Hungarian subjects. Dumba, Boy-Ed and Papen all made denials at the time which Papen reiterated in his evidence lefore the Reichstag Committee in 1919 and in his Memoirs), thai they had gone beyond their normal and valm work. The United S tes government was sufficiently annoyed by this issue, as well a.^ by Austria's failure to give '

i

1

1008

Enemy

Link. Arthur. Wilson:

Within (G J

The Struggle

Putnam

for Neutrality,

s

Sons 1937)

1914-1915 (Princeton

University Press 1960) Rmtelen. Franz von. The Dark Invader (Macmillan 1933) Smith. Gaddis. Britain's Clandestine Submarines. 1914-1915 (Yale University Press 1960) Tansill. Charles C America Goes To War (Little. Brown & Co 1938) Wittenberg Ernest. The Thrifty Spy on the Sixth Avenue El', American Heritage. XVII (December 1965). 60-64, 100-101 .

born in Muskegon, Michigan in 1 91 3 and was educated the University of Michigan where she received bachelor's, master's and doctor's degrees In 1941 she joined the staff of the Western Reserve University (Case Western Reserve University), and became Professor of History there Her

MARION C SINEY was

at

publications include The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1914-1916 and many Modern History and the American Historical Review

articles in the Journal of

1914

1915

594 000 000 Gt. Britain 9 2 000 000 60 000 000 France 3 69 000 000 345 000 000 Germany 29 000 000 1

1

figures represent dollars

SOME BIRD The Returning Do\e Nothing doing." The Eagle: "Say. Boss,

more

Top left: The effect of the war in changing the direction of America's exports from the Central Powers in favour of the Allies. Top right: This Punch cartoon shows Britain's

loss

growing hopes that America would become more war-like as her peace initiatives failed

Benevolent neutrality: profit C «

than

Fnu.koer 4 Co

Londod.

EC

Series

No

if

you please

Chords of Foreigners

_

"

gentlemen, may

Yes. _ try the

1910

26 23.9

millions of long tons

1912 1913 1914 1915

Automobiles 1910 total product in

1911

millions of dollars

1912 1913 1914 1915

Wheat

1910

total product in

1911

tens of millions of bushels

1912 1913 1914 1915 1910

in

tens of millions of bushels

with trying

me ?

Centre: Two prewar British postcards exposing the way America (and other foreign Powers) benefited from Britain's Free Trade policy. In both, John Bull's simple-minded generosity (Free Trade) is fully exploited by foreigners. Bottom: The war saved America from a depression.

I

1911

product

wfcat'a the matter

corner

Steel

total

Woodrow Noah)

BHl

total product in

Oats

President

V**Ji -|

Jo?ir>Ou//_

(to

US production I9IO-I9IS

32.1 11

62.5

110 6

1911

1912 1913 1914 1915

1009

Bellewarde Lake

1

XXXII Res

53 Res

126 IR

1

"

1 42 Inf

Bde

Ves-Men '"Road

V

41 Inf Bde

14Div

» » %

»

% %

\

yv

43 Inf

Bde'

/IILES

v

r

y4

h

OKMS HOOGE CRATER

After an ominous silence in the early hours of the morning the Germans released the terror of a new weapon: from the nozzles of six flame

throwers they launched jet upon jet of liquid fire at the British trenches at Hooge. Although it was a very minor action, the new weapon achieved a spectacular success. Michael Dewar The idea

of the modern flamethrower was conceived by one Richard Fiedler, a Berlin engineer, in 1900. Fire had, of course, been employed as a means of war-,

AFTER ACTION BRITISH FRONT AFTER ACTION TRENCHES CAPTURED

fare for hundreds of years, but it was Richard Fiedler who converted this art into a science. In 1901, the German army tested two a|odels, both submitted by Fiedler. The

40 seconds continuous

trench

lines,

Bde

first flame attack was proximity of the but this basis vanished immediately the Germans advanced

firing.

the smaller version with which we are chiefly concerned. It consisted of a steel cylinder resembling a milk churn in shape filled

Inf

The necessary basis of this

It is

and

139

WOOD

bout 20 vards. larger version, wnicn was more cumbersome to transport and operate, had a range of some 40 yards, and fuel enough for

The

>

BEFORE ACTION

flaming oil for

first

smaller Flammenwkrfer, which was sufficiently light to be carried by one man, used gas pressure to send forth a stream "f

GERMAN FRONT

with an inflammable

liquid.

The

interior of the cylinder was .divided into two parts, the lower containing a com-

pressed gas to provide the pressure, and the upper, the inflammable liquid. To one side of the cylinder was fitted a rubber hose, six feet in length, with a long steel nozzle at. the end. This whole apparatus was attached to the back of the operator by padded metal arms. The principle upon which the Flammenwerfer worked was extremely simple: a valve released the gas in the lower chamber which pushed the liquid in the upper

111 m i

* 4r &*

»—

t

*

V ...

JtK *

H jpM 1

v<>*'

M1MM

"V

was 120 feet wide and 20 was occupied. Hereabouts, NoMan's Land was some 70 to 150 yards wide, but in the vicinity of the Hooge crater it was as little as 15 yards. In fact at one point what had become a German com-

crater which

into the rubber pipe. Two other valves held the fluid in check before it reached the device for igniting it at the nozzle. This device consisted of a small tube containing a spring, a detonator, some gun cotton, and a wick soaked in paraffin.

chamber

feet deep,

the gas pressed the fluid against the

munication trench led from the German

spring, the wick ignited, and a jet of flame projected from the nozzle for 20 yards or more. To add to the effect, volumes of black smoke were also produced. The flame had a total duration of approximately two minutes. However, should bursts of a shorter duration be required, a firing tube had to be fixed into the end of the steel nozzle for each separate ignition. Numbers 23, 24 and 25 Pioneer Battalions were issued with this equipment in 1911. In 1912 the first Flammenwerfer

line right into the British line: it was barricaded at the British end, but by means of a periscopic arrangement the German sentry could be seen on the other side of the barricade precisely five yards away. On July 22 two further attempts, involving, in each case, two platoons, supported by

When

m4**~

bombers and an

made

Regiment was formed, namely the 3rd

Guard Pioneer Regiment, consisting of 12 flamethrower compa Redde action on botl

meats were formed the Sturmbatallions.

An ominous

A

silence

detachment, were

German

lines

near Hooge. Both failed, breaking down under heavy German fire. The Hooge sector was held by the 41st Brigade of the 14th Division. On the night of July 29 the 8th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade and the 7th Battalion of the King's Royal Rifle Corps replaced the 7th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, and the 8th Battalion of the King's Royal Rifle 'Corps. The Rifle Brigade held the front at the Hooge crater, and the King's Royal Rifle Corps was situated on their right. They .13 were total strangers to the front.

The Germans knew exactly what was

The

Official French History of the World War records a flame attack b

Germans

RE

to seize parts of the

as early as October 191Malancourt wood, ietween the Argonne *he Meuse, the enemy sprayed one :

The larger version

of the

German flame thrower.

The smalierverston could be carried by one man

Hooge in July actions had taken place recently in the area, but on July 18 nited by incendiary bombb, another techthe Germans still held the line of brick nique used by the Germans. Flammenheaps which had once been, Hooge Chateau, werfer Apparate, however, were definitely while the stables remained in the hands of used against the French on February 26, 1915, near Verdun. Major Reddermann of the British. From that point the British line ran westwards, grossing and recrossing the 3rd Guard Pioneer Regiment commandthe Ypres-Menin road through the ruins ed this particular flame attack. In retroof Hooge village. On July 19 a mine was spect, it would seem that this attack was exploded by the British and the resulting a dress rehearsal.

The

tactical situation at

1915 was as follows.

Two

-

Stupefying in its effect, the 'flame' was a thick smoke incandescent at the centre an stretching for approximately 20 yard

taking place. They knew that the new troops were comparatively inexperienced, and that they found the crater and mining operations difficult. They almost certainly knew not only the identity of the division and the fact that it belonged to the New Army, but also the composition q| the brigades, and even the names of the commanding officers, gaining this information by means of 'listening sets', which enabled them to intercept all British telephone messages. Consequently they could act § with full prior knowledge of British move- f ments, and previous British attacks had s failed for precisely this reason. § An ominous silence pervaded the Hooge « sector of the front on the night of July g. 29-30. few bombs, thrown into the Ger- ^ .

A

man trenches, provided no reply. Then, at 0315 hours on duly 30. came the carefully planned German stroke. From the nozzles of six Flammenwerfer Apparate placed unobtrusively over the parapets of their trenches, the\ launched jet upon jet of simultaneously dropping a liquid tire, three-minute intense artillery bombardment on the British line. A sudden hissing sound was heard by 2nd Platoon, A Company of the Rifle Brigade who were situated on the left of the crater and a platoon of C Company on the right of the crater. Seconds later they were hit by a deluge of flame. Intense small arms fire swept the 300 yards of open ground between the British front and support lines in Sanc-

tuary and Zouave woods. Then the Germans attacked in force.

The

Rifle

Brigade dispositions were too

and also lacked depth. They had inherited an unsatisfactory position, which they had had neither the time nor tightly packed,

opportunity to improve. The unoccupied Hooge crater dominated the centre of their position and was a positive invitation to disaster. The German attack broke through at the crater, and fanned outwards left and right, bombing along the trenches. 'Exactly what took place,' says Reginald Berkeley, 'will never be known, for there is no one alive to speak.' One can only surmise that the Germans occupied the trenches on either side of the Hooge crater with comparative ease as there can have been no real opposition remaining. Brigadier-General Oliver Nugent, commander of the 41st Brigade at Hooge, says of the attack: 'Those that were on the flank of the flame attack speak of the great heat generated by the flame, and their evidence tends to indicate that it was in the nature of thick smoke, incandescent in the centre and up to about 20 to 25 yards from the nozzles of the projectors rather than an

inflammable

gas.'

'A sudden hissing sound' Perhaps the most accurate firsthand account is provided by Lieutenant G. V. Carey, who was in A Company at Hooge. He gives the following extremely interesting account: There was a sudden hissing sound, and a bright crimson glare over the crater turned the whole scene red. As I looked I saw three or four distinct jets of like a line of powerful fire hoses spraying fire instead of water, shoot across my fire trench. How long this lasted it is impossible to say, probably not more than a minute, but the effect was so stupefying that I was utterly unable for some moments to think correctly. About a dozen men of Number 2 platoon were all that I could find. Those who faced the flame attack were never seen again. Most of the 8th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade were overwhelmed and fell back. The Germans did not follow, but consolidated in the trenches either side of the Hooge crater. All but a small sector of the King's Royal Rifle Corps' trenches were flame,

also lost. The Germans brought up their Flammenwerfer again, but they were unable to use them since there were no tar-

gets

sufficiently

close.

Moreover,

rapid

was directed upon the crews by the mainder of A Company, who had now

fire

re-

re-

covered sufficiently from their initial surprise to offer organised resistance. By 0900 hours all that remained of the 8th Battalion, reinforced by one

1012

company

of

the King's Royal Rifle Corps, held a line along the northern edge of Zouave wood. The Germans had achieved complete surprise, and the employment of flamethrowers was not only totally effective within the limited area in which they were used, but also terrorized the troops in the peripheral area of the attack. Colonel Carey, the only witness to the attack surviving today, states that the numbers actually killed by the flame were comparatively small. Most were able to duck the flame, but the German infantry were so close on its heels that they were able to bayonet the British troops while they were still sheltering from the effects of the flame. He says, 'If the flame is being discharged from 15 yards range, there is every possibility of someone with a bayonet jumping on top of you before you have time to get up. No doubt this happened at Hooge.' The events in the vicinity of Hooge crater, and the German success in that area, formed only part of what was a much larger attack. German troops were launched against the whole front held by the 41st Brigade. But the only sector in which they succeeded in taking any substantial area of ground was either side of the Hooge crater, and there they drove the British back to Zouave and Sanctuary woods. The trenches lost by the British were some hundreds of yards in length, for the Germans had worked their way into part of the line held by the King's Royal Rifle Corps on the right. They had succeeded in gaining a footing on a commanding ridge, and the division decided that the

their initial surprise remarkably quickly, and offered a spirited resistance. A certain degree of unwarranted criticism was levelled at the British troops at Hooge. It was pointed out that a man using a Flammenwerfer which carries only about 20-30 yards, is bound to be a vulnerable target, and that a rifle or a machine gun brought up on a flank will make short work of him. This is true provided, firstly, that the trench of the flamethrower is more than 30 yards away and secondly, that his opponent has flanks which can be utilised. In this case the Germans had no need to leave their trenches in order to discharge the flame, and A Company had no flanks for offensive purposes, tor the right flank was left 'in the air' by the crater, and on the left flank the trench bent back towards

ground must be retaken without delay, the position in Zouave wood might become untenable. It was determined that the assault should be made by the 8th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade attacking from Zouave wood, and by the 9th Battalion of the King's Royal Rifle Corps from Sanctuary wood, with the 7th and 9th Battalions of the Rifle Brigade in support. The objective was Hooge and the trenches in its neigh-

Flammenwerfer. There was every chance that an attack with Flammenwerfer might yield the success which the weapon so sorely needed. For these very simple reasons, the Germans specifically chose Hooge for their experiment. The success at Hooge undoubtedly explains the retention of the weapon for future operations. But the same combination of favourable circumstances was seldom presented to the Germans, which explains why Flammenwerfer failed

bourhood. Against the advice of the brigade commander, the attack took place that afternoon. Artillery preparation was limited to three-quarters of an hour's bombardment. At 1500 hours the four battalions duly went over the top and were swept out of existence by an enemy whose machine guns there had been no time to locate, and on whom the meagre artillery bombardment had made no impression. Many were caught on the British wire, and none got more than 50 yards beyond the edge of Zouave wood. The utilisation, in the forefront, of the 8th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, a spent force, was a serious error of judgement. Consequently, the casualties on July 30 were extremely heavy.

to

otherwise

Unwarranted

criticism

The flame attack

at

Hooge was

in itself

only a small part of an attack which was aimed at the front of a whole brigade. Thus it was an episode of limited importance, but because of the nature of the attack, Hooge has assumed a special place in the history of the First World War. Hooge serves as an example of the ingenuity of the German military mind, and of the tenacity and courage of these representatives of the New Army. Despite the obvious disadvantage of facing a new and terrifying weapon, the British troops at Hooge recovered from

the support line.

C Company's

The same

facts applied to

sector.

in many ways, the ideal place prove the effectiveness of the Flammenwerfer in battle. The apparatus had been used before, but with little effect, and a success was needed if the weapon was to be retained. The Flammenwerfer could only be used effectively in certain limited

Hooge was,

to

conditions. It was cumbersome, and therefore could only be operated safely from the security of a trench. Since the German

trench systems were seldom less than 40 yards from those of the French and British, there were few places where the Flammenwerfer had any potential use. But at Hooge, not only was the British position weak, but the two front lines were sufficiently close to be within the limited range of the

achieve

a

success

as

spectacular as

Hooge on the Western Front again. The British and French, for their part, ensured that their trench systems remained, where possible, beyond the range of the German Flammenwerfer. Further Reading Das Ehrenbuch der Deutschen Pionere (Ger-

many

1923)

Flammenwerfer und Sturmtruppen (Germany 1921) Hare, Steuart, Annals of the King's Royal Rifle

Corps King's Royal Rifle Corps Chronicle, The KRRC Club Ltd (London 1915) Military Operations, France and Belgium 1915, Vol II, Official History of the War (Macmillan & Co 1928) The Rifle Brigade 1914-1918, The Rifle Brigade Club Ltd (London 1927) Roberts, A. A., The Poison War Terraine, J White heat: the new warfare 1914-18 (Guild 1982) ,

MICHAEL DEWAR was born at Fulmer in Buckinghamshire in 1941, and was educated at Downside, RMA Sandhurst and Pembroke College, Oxford, where he obtained an Honours Degree in History and specialised in Military History. He saw active service with his regiment, the 3rd Royal Green Malaysian-Indonesian during the Jackets, confrontation in Borneo in 1965-66. He instructs at the

RMA

Sandhurst and writes

publications.

for military history

KITCHENER'S

FIRST 100,000 In August 1914 Kitchener seemed to be the only man in high office to perceive the scale and duration of the coming war. He spoke of the 'armies of millions' Britain would need to stay the course of the conflict and on August 7 he proclaimed his first call to arms. In the months that followed, Kitchener's stern head and pointing finger glowered over the voluntary enlistment of thousands of untrained, optimistic patriots, resolved to abandon all for their King and country. Peter Sim kins. Above: Marching off to war: soldiers of the New Armies 1013

Between May 9 and July 12. 1915, the six divisions of the First New Army left England for active service in the two theatres o( \\\w where the British army was then most heavily committed. The 9th (Scottish), 12th 'Eastern and 14th (Light) Divisions were being sent to strengthen the BEF in Prance and Flanders, while the 10th (Irish). 11th (Northern) and 13th (Western) Divisions had heen earmarked for operations in Gallipoli. Behind them lay nine months of muddle, improvisation and hard work, in the course of which they had been transformed from heterogeneous mobs of raw but enthusiastic recruits into disciplined units apparently ready for the front lines. The rapid expansion of the British army after August 4, 1914 had been a painful process, plagued at every turn by the country^ failure to prepare adequately, before the war. for the type of conflict with which Britain's military it was now confronted. policy and organisation had been based on the widely-held assumption that any major European war would be of short duration.

be worked out. Britain also lacked the capacity to arm and equip rapidly an army numbering more than a few hundred thousand men. The output of the government factories, and of the few private firms which handled government contracts, was geared to the concept of a short war, and little provision,

Once the Regular Army had been mobilised and fully equipped, there was precious little in reserve, either in terms of trained manpower or of munitions output, with which to sustain it in a long campaign or to facilitate any large-scale expansion. In-

other than those arising from the need to sustain the Expeditionary Force in a campaign which was expected to last no more than a few months at most. Moreover, there was no immediate way in which the

tered by the County Associations and trained under centralised War Office control. This Force which, in July 1914, contained some 250,000 men and was considerably below its nominal establishment, had been created primarily for home defence,

although Haldane, its architect, had foreseen that its members might be willing to volunteer for active service abroad if the need arose. Haldane had intended that any expansion would, in fact, be carried out through the County Associations. A draft scheme had been roughed out and some Associations already possessed, in part, the necessary machinery to put the plan into effect, but, in the absence of final statutory sanction,

remained

many

essential

details

to

late

still

to

had been made

BEF and to equip new formations. As as mid-December, the Territorials were 160,000 rifles short, and were still using the obsolescent long Lee-Enfield in large numbers. The artillery situation was equally serious. In August, there were enough guns for eight divisions, with a small reserve for wastage, while the output of shells for the four main types of artillery piece then in use was little over 30,000 rounds a month. This meant that one 18pounder, for instance, could be supplied with ten rounds per day for a campaign lasting six months, yet, during the First Battle of Ypres, some guns fired up to 80 rounds per day. of the

meet possible demands

Towards expansion This was the situation facing Field-Marshal Earl Kitchener of Khartoum when, on August 6, 1914, he took office as the new Secretary of State for War. He had long been almost alone among Britain's leading soldiers and statesmen in predicting that a European war would be a long and costly affair, and he naturally viewed the existing organisation of the army as being totally inadequate for such a struggle. Accordingly, he began to take immediate steps to expand the army. That very day, Asquith obtained Parliamentary approval for an

A Willing recruits.!© Kitchener's ,"« r

p the outbreak of war, nq> comprehensive programme of expansion existed which could be put into immediate operation. The Regular Army numbered some 450,000 men, including 118,000 serving in India or other stations abroad, who were to return home when replaced by local troops, and also the battalions of the Special

Reserve, usually the third battalions of each line regiment. All c the latter, which contained a large pro^ ^tion of semid to provide trained men, mainly exi 'osses in the drafts for the replacement seven divisions of the ;peditionary Force.

Behind the Regular

Army

w

professional Territorial Force, 14 infantry divisions and 14 ca gades, recruited, equipped and

1014

the nonuprising Iry bri-

ninis-

^af

.

_

Many private firms were engaged in the manufacture of munitions for the Royal Navy and could not easily redeploy skilled labour or convert their plant to meet purely military requirements, while only a limited number of companies possessed the plant necessary for making the many items of clothing and equipment — from uniforms and boots to mess-tins and blankets — according to regulation pattern. In August 1914, the British armaments industry was unable to produce more than 6,000 rifles a month, and, of the 800,000 rifles available in the country, only about half were of the new short pattern. When the army had been fully supplied on mobilisation, there remained a reserve of of 150,000 with which to meet the wastage supply could be accelerated.

armaments

ridiculous

a«d preposterous army'. Shortage of clothes and equipment did little to curb enthusiasm. -t> Invitation to smile in the knowledge that you'were doing your bit. Posters implied that happiness was a by-product of duty increase of 500,000 men, and, on 7, Kitchener outlined his proposals to his Cabinet colleagues, declaring that the war could not be won by sea-power alone and that Britain must be prepared to put armies of millions into the field and to maintain them for several years. He intended to base his own calculations on a war lasting three years and to build a series of new armies, complete in all their branches, numbering, in all, at least 1,000,000 men. Deferring to Asquith's judgement that a policy of conscription would be politically suicidal, he resolved to raise his new formations by means of the traditional system of voluntary enlistment. What Kitchener envisaged was essentially the expansion of the Regular Army through the medium of the Adjutantinitial

August

General's department of the War Office rather than through the County Associations. As he later stated, he was relying on the energy of the country to make up for the deficiencies in previous experience and preparation, but, even with widespread public support, the task of raising, training and supplying his new armies was one of herculean proportions. His decision to by-pass the Territorial organisation was dictated partly by prejudice. A professional to his finger-tips, he instinctively distrusted non-regular troops — a feeling formed, to some extent,

by his first-hand observation of the poor conduct of French citizen-soldiers while he was serving with the French army in the war of 1870-71, and reinforced by subsequent experience, particularly in South Africa. Having spent much of his career abroad, Kitchener was ignorant of the full implications of Haldane's reforms and under- rated the quality of the best Terriunits. Naturally aloof and selftorial reliant, he also suffered, as an administrator, from a constitutional inability to delegate authority, and was therefore unlikely to utilise an organisation over which he may have lacked full control. There were, however, more objective reasons for his decision. Not only did the County Associations vary greatly in strength and efficiency, they also differed in terms of the wealth and population of the area they controlled. Another problem

men who answered the were to enlist for three years or until the war was concluded. The appeal was followed, four days later, by details of the proEmergency'. The

call

posed organisation of the First

The

New Army.

'Commands', into which Britain was militarily divided, were each to provide an infantry division, complete in all arms and services, by raising at least one battalion for grafting on to every line six regional

regiment. Instead of a 'Southern' Division, however, there was to be a 'Light' Division formed by adding one or more extra battalions to light infantry and rifle regiments. The new 'Service' battalions, as they were

were numbered consecutively after existing battalions of the parent regiment. Those in the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, the 1st and 2nd Battalions were regular units, the 3rd belonged to the Special Reserve, the 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th to the Territorial Force and the 8th (Service) Battalion to the First New Army. The training centres selected were Aldershot for the Light and Scottish Divisions, Colchester and Shorncliffe for the Eastern Division, Dublin and the Curragh for the Irish Division, Salisbury Plain for the Western Division and Grantham for the Northern Division. By this time, men were flocking to fill the ranks of the 'First 100,000', from all walks of life and from every corner of the nation. Men for whom the army had previously held little attraction now enlisted as called,

this initial response to Kitchener's call, was only too pleased to accept offers of assistance from MP's, local authorities and leading citizens who, throughout the country, acting in Kitchener's name, lent or hired halls to accommodate bigger recruiting offices, collected civilian doctors and

clerks to help deal with the thousands of

volunteers pouring in daily, and housed fed the men until they were ready to be sent off to the regimental depots.

and

Patriotism and necessity The motives which impelled so many to enlist were as diverse as the backgrounds from which they emerged. The majority undoubtedly believed in the justice of Britain's cause and felt a quiet but very real sense of duty to 'King and Country". The Times, recording the scene outside the Central London Recruiting Depot in Great Scotland Yard, where mounted police were needed to control the crowds, noted that there was no cheering and little excitement, although the disappointment of those who failed one or other of the tests was obvious'. Others were intensely idealviewing German ambitions as a istic Irishmen threat to civilisation itself. buried their grudges against England and enlisted to fight for the honour of all small nations or in the hope that Home Rule would ultimately be ratified by a grateful

government. Some

men came

for less ele-

vated reasons, either to escape from a dull

Join the brave throng that goes marching along was

that, each year, despite their undoubted enthusiasm, the Territorials, under normal circumstances, inevitably received less training than the regulars. Indeed, the statutes of the Force recognised this and provided for six months embodiment of all Territorial units on mobilisation,

to bring them up to the required standard. Although, the Territorial cadres could have provided a nucleus around which to build, Kitchener undoubtedly suspected that they might be swamped and reduced to impotence by vast streams of untrained recruits. In the event, he allowed the Territorials to continue their own recruiting, to complete their training as far as possible

and, ultimately, to volunteer, as units, for active service alongside his new armies. The Territorial formations were thus able to fulfil their primary role in the home defence scheme and to provide reinforcements for the BEF, but Kitchener's policy also had the less desirable result of permitting two organisations to exist side by side, with all the potential waste and duplication which this implied. On August 7, 1914, the newspapers carried Kitchener's first 'Call to Arms'. Under the heading Your King and Country Need You, an appeal was made for 'an addition of 100,000 men to his Majesty's Regular Army, in view of the present grave National

privates. Stockbrokers, engineers, teachers

and undergraduates joined the rush

to the

colours with miners, fishermen, shop assistants and farm workers. Many walked more than 20 miles to the nearest recruiting office, some sleeping in fields and ditches on the way, and then waited patiently for hours along with hundreds of others, while hard-pressed recruiting sergeants laboriously took each man through the seventeen elaborate questions on the official attestation form. Not all were of military age. A young boy named George Coppard was under 17 when he presented himself at Mitcham Road Barracks, Croydon. On stating his age, he was told to come back the next day and say he was 19, which he duly did: 'I attested in a batch of a dozen others and, holding up my right

hand, swore to fight for King and Country. The sergeant winked as he gave me the King's shilling.'

By August 9, recruits were streaming in at the rate of 3,000 a day, a scale of response which continued to grow until, at the end of the month, some 30,000 men were daily being attested. As this latter figure represented the average yearly intake before the war, it is hardly surprising that the existing recruiting machinery quicklybroke down. The War Office, completely unprepared for the overwhelming volume of

or an unhappy family background; while a lesser proportion enlisted simply because they were unemployed. The resources of the regimental depots, where the recruits were sent to he organised into battalions, were in turn overwhelmed by the sudden influx of men. The command of these battalions of the First New Army was generally given to Inregular officers who had been left in charge

job

i

of the depots, as these

men

invariably had

some experience in handling new recruits, Such was the initial shortage of junior officers and NCO's that several battalion commanders followed the example of the

CO

of the 5th King's Shropshire Light Infantry who was forced, at Shrewsbury, to press ten policemen and two prison warders into temporary service as instructors,

Depots which normally accommodated 250

men soon contained up

to 1 ,500. At Bodmin, recruits arriving in drafts of 200-300 to join the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infant r\ had to be billeted in local schools and

church halls. The confusion at Chichester, depot of the Royal Sussex Regiment, was typical. According to one officer, the men turned up 'with nothing more than he clothes they stood in, and without docu tnents to show to what regin they had been posted; all joyfully tig to be immediately issued with He and bayonet I

<

i\

i

L015

and

sent

to

Franco. Stereotyped regula-

were hopelessly inelastic to deal with such abnormal problems: undisciplined humanity, drilled for ten hours daily, many unaccustomed to hardship and lacking even toilet essentials." Yet in Ireland, where the tions

manpower

reserve

was smaller, battalions

were tilled up with surplus drafts from England, the 6th Leinsters, for example, containing some 600 men from the Bristol area. In spite of all the difficulties, however, most oi the battalions had moved to thentraining centres by August 21, 1914, the day on which the First New Army officially

came into existence. One of the most pressing problems facing the 'First 100,000' was the lack of trained instructors, a shortage which had been accentuated by the mobilisation of the BEF and the departure for France of almost every regular officer with any experience in training recruits. Kitchener quickly recognised the problem and one of his first acts was to order each battalion of the BEF to

leave three officers and a number of NCO's form a framework for the new battalions at the depots. To supplement these, he retained some 500 Indian Army officers who were home on leave at the outbreak of war. An appeal, on August 10, 1914, for 2,000 young men of good education to serve as officers for the 'First 100,000', produced an eager rush for commissions. After the first battles on the Continent, officers who were convalescing from wounds were also impressed for training purposes. Many senior posts in the new battalions were filled by retired officers, or 'dug-outs', who re-enlisted in large numbers. Some were physically unfit, like the second-in-command of one battalion who, at the age of 55, had to use a chair to mount his horse. Others were unable to adapt themselves to the drastic changes which had been wrought in drill and tactics with the introduction of the new Field Service Regulations in 1909. However, the experience of most of the 'dug-out' officers was, in the long run, to prove an invaluable asset. Although Kitchener, by such means, obtained as many as six regular, or exregular, officers for the senior ranks of the First New Army battalions, he also had to provide an adequate number of junior officers. One of the main sources of supply was the Officers' Training Corps, conceived by Haldane as a way of expanding the commissioned ranks of the army. The units of the senior division of the OTC at universities and Inns of Court, and the junior cadet units at public and grammar schools, provided a large number of young men with at least an inkling of military training. Junior commissions were also given to undergraduates, senior school boys, or men with responsible positions in civilian life, all of whom may have lacked military training, but otherwise seemed capable of command. Former senior NCO's were similarly accepted as potential officer material, while officers for the technical and scientific services were recommended by the heads of the corresponding civil p ofessions. Good NCO's are the pn ict of long training and experience and uch men were nlistment of even harder to find. The authorised NCO's up to the age of 50 \ s successon August 1 1 and some batta ;al newsfully appealed, through their in their papers, for ex-regular NCO's to i ho did d regiments. Nevertheless, thos many re-enlist were a drop in the ocean a to

i

1016

A Due to the shortage of V Later, uniforms and

the new recruits spent their first weeks drilling arrived and battle situations could be simulated

rifles,

rifles

and exercising

battalion commanders were forced to make up the required number simply by selecting those recruits who picked up the drill and discipline with the least difficulty.

Cameron Highlanders

The 5th

solved the problem

by promoting forty men from one company. Even so, as Kitchener informed the House of Lords on September 17, the chief difficulty was 'one of materiel rather than Energetic measures personnel'. had quickly been taken to deal with a critical situation. As early as August 10, contracts had been placed for arms and equipment for the six divisions of the First New Army, supplementary to the requirements of the BEF. The War Office staff, geared to the administration of a small army, was illfitted to grapple with this problem in detail. The contracts were therefore divided between the Government Ordnance Factories and seven leading armaments firms; these issued sub-contracts to smaller firms for their own quantities which exceeded capacity, thereby giving the Superintendent of Ordnance Factories, and directors of private firms, a great deal of initiative. On September 30, the Cabinet requested munitions firms to increase plant to meet larger orders, and, 12 days later, the Cabinet Committee on Munitions was formed. By the end of October, this Committee had sanctioned massive expenditure to subsidise the expansion of munitions firms, and had checked the unrestricted enlistment of skilled workmen. Unfortunately, although some foundation for an adequate future organisation had been laid, all these measures took some months to produce any appreciable results. In the meanwhile, the men of the 'First 100,000' were paying the price, in terms of hardship, for such rapid expansion. During September and October, few battalions were fully armed and many had no more

than a handful of rifles between them. In the 8th King's Royal Rifle Corps, for example, initial musketry instruction was confined to the handling and study of one company rifle, 'an heirloom kindly, if unconsciously, lent by the Rifle Depot'. The 9th Essex did not finish their musketry course until November 27, and then only by passing one set of rifles from company to company. Even in January 1915, there were only about 400 new service rifles per battalion, and many troops had to make do with rifles not quite of the service pattern

and technically known as DP (drill-purpose) rifles. The artillery faced even more depressing

shortages.

For

months,

the

Wooden guns and cloth caps divisional gunners had to learn their complex duties without even seeing a gun; it was not until May 1915 that the full complement of artillery pieces had been supplied. In October 1914, the divisions possessed an average of six 18-pounders, instead of the required 54. wooden guns were made by enthusiastic officers, and obsolete 12- and 15-pounders were also used to teach the men the notions of loading and firing; but there were few technical aids — such as range finders — and without these the batteries were almost helpless. But it was the lack of uniforms which

Dummy

was, perhaps,

Most of the

felt

most keenly by the men.

recruits, expecting to be issued

immediately with a complete uniform, had joined up in their oldest civilian clothes. As there were no uniforms or equipment available for the majority, many had to wear their civilian clothes and boots for several more weeks and, under the rigours of the

early training, these soon began to wear Michael MacDonagh of The Times was present when King George V inspected some of the Kitchener divisions at Aldershot on September 26. As he noted, 'few were fully equipped as to uniforms and accoutrements. Some were only half made up, wearing the scarlet jackets, the kilts or the trews of the old Army uniforms, mingled with articles of civilian attire. There was to be seen, accordingly, a diversified and discordant display of straw hats, bowlers and tweed caps.' A supply of 500,000 blue serge suits was obtained by the War Office and, as a temporary measure, half a sovereign was paid to recruits who could provide themselves with a good greatcoat, boots and a suit. Leading clothing firms, under War Office contracts, organised small firms, throughout the country, to manufacture the necessary uniforms, but it was not until January 1915 that the majority of battalions were fully attired in khaki Service Dress uniforms. In the meantime, several battalion commanders demanded powers from the War Office to purchase from civilian sources, and the 7th Royal Sussex succeeded in buying thousands of articles, at considerably less than army contract rates. The shortages were rendered more acute by the staggering rate at which men continued to flow into the recruiting offices. The formation of the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, on September 2, 1914, provided an additional spur and by Sepout.

tember

7,

439,000

men had been

attested,

exclusive of enlistments into the Territorials. On September 11, the Second New Army was created by duplicating the units of the* First; the gigantic battalions of the 14th (Light) Division, for instance, were drawn up at Aldershot, and company commanders were simply told to fall out half

V

Rifle practice -an essential skill for the infantryman, despite the machine gun

:

+**

•s

*

%£

ST «%i

ii fe-v

w

-

'-»

-

<

•••

#>

.«

m SB tHTjflk

,

-

»

V

.

'

.'

men to form the battalions of the 20th ight) Division. Two days later, the Third

their 1

Now Army came into existence, while, following a suggestion by Lord Derby, 'Pals' battalions, composed of groups of friends or workmates who were willing to enlist together, were everywhere springing up, ultimateh forming the Fourth and Fifth New Armies. During the last months of L914, in feet, L, 186,337 men were attested, including recruits for the Special Reserve and the Territorials. Posters were now displayed on every hoarding calling the nation's manhood to arms and one, designed by Alfred Leete, which depicted a pointing Kitchener over the legend Your Country Needs You, prompted Mrs Asquith to remark that if Kitchener was not a great man. he was at least a great poster. With the numbers fast becoming unmanageable,

War Office was eventually forced to raise the physical requirements for recruits in order to stem the flood, but, inevitably, the men of the Second and Third New Armies suffered from the shortages to a greater degree than the 'First 100,000'. The early training of the First New Army was hampered, to some extent, by the fact that mam- officers and NCOs started with the men on a common level of more or less the

Above: Kitchener's appeal to the country; it found an immediate response among the young men of England, many of whom walked 20 miles to the nearest recruiting station. Left: Lord Kitchener in 1914. Mrs Asquith remarked at the time that if Kitchener was not a great man, he was, at least, a great poster. Opposite page: Top right: A glimpse of the enemy? By the end of August 30,000 men had offered their services to meet the 'grave national emergency' and the recruiting machinery was collapsing under the pressure. In choosing to bypass the Territorial Army as the framework

complete military ignorance. As one officer remembered: 'It was quite a novel experience to be shown 250 men and told that

was one's Company, the staff consisting of one ex- Regular Colour-Sergeant and one corporal.' One advantage of the lack of equipment, however, was that it became possible, in these early weeks, for all con-

this

cerned to concentrate purely on

drill

and

new forces Kitchener incurred considerable waste and duplication of resources. Top left: Contrary to what the poster suggests, new recruits often had to wait many weeks to replace cloth caps with khaki owing to the acute shortage of uniforms. Right: After six

for his

this stage, training was confined to PT, marching, squad

discipline.

At

mainly drill and digging. As arms and equipment gradually became available, the men progressed to company training, elementary musketry and bayonet drill. The average day's training began at 0630 hours and included six and a half hours of drill and PT, ending at about 1845 hours with a lecture on a chosen military topic. Junior subalterns, learning as they went along, would often sit up late, preparing their work for the next day, and, at mess, consistently defied the age-old taboo of 'talking shop'. After two months, the hard work and tremendous enthusiasm of the men at last began to produce results; the First New Army began to gain the semblance of a

months

allowances of cubic space'. By the beginning of 1915, the units of the First

New Army

away from

were moving into billets, their training centres. As more

uniforms, arms and equipment began to reach them, battalion training became possible. The art of constructing field fortifications, particularly trenches, was taught, and machine gun instruction was given

with

dummy

potential fighting force.

spirit

and discipline of the

From September to November, 1914, most battalions remained in their training areas. Those in barracks invariably had to

this period was provided by a review on Laffan's Plain on January 22, at which Kitchener and M. Millerand, the French War Minister, were both present. Most of the troops had to march many miles to the review in a steady downpour of sleet and

'double up' with other battalions, as many as 2,000 men often being crowded into accommodation intended for 800. A large proportion, nevertheless, were forced to live in billets or tented camps until an extensive scheme for building suitable hutments began to relieve the situation early in 1915. Even when the huts were provided, they were often inadequate. During December, the 7th Royal Sussex moved into new

hutments near night,

Shorncliffe.

One stormy

rain started to pour through the

causing one officer to remark: 'Well, they may say what they like, but I know they don't have a vorse time than this in the trenches.' Un rtunately, Kitchener was not always sympathetic. The suggestion that the new recruits were badly overcrowded was met with a reply that conmed little but references to 'the damned roofs,

bols of doctors'

1018

who

insisted

on 'ridiculous

of

war dependents' allowances were

increased

guns.

A

severe test of the

New Armies

at

snow, and then had to wait up to two hours in a biting wind before Kitchener's party arrived. The ground was a morass of icecold water and many of the musicians, suffering from numbed fingers and lips, were unable to play. Despite the appalling conditions, however, few men fell out, although several afterwards died of

pneumonia. In February, the men moved back to their training centres to begin brigade and divisional training, the majority having by now completed the trained soldier's musketry course. Between the end of February and the middle of April, brigades and divisions went out for marches and exercises lasting two or three days, being fed by divisional trains, which drew food

and forage from supply points. Night marching and digging and the relief and feeding of units in trenches were thoroughly taught, with particular attention being paid to the lessons then being learned from the Western Front. Early in May, the final stages of training brought the men to artillery practice in camp, to rifle and machine gun training on the ranges and to interdivisional exercises. Little else could learnt at home; the time had come to complete the training of the 'First 100,000' under active service conditions.

now be

'Shadow armies' The whole process of raising and training the New Armies had not passed without considerable criticism from the senior commanders of the BEF, who, understandably, regarded it as a dangerous diversion of effort and resources, at a crucial time, from what they considered to be the decisive point of the war. On September 15, 1914, Sir Henry Wilson had written of 'K's shadow armies for shadow campaigns', declaring that: 'under no circumstances can these mobs take the field for two years. What we want, and what we must have, is for our little force out here to be kept to full strength with the very best of everything.' Two days later, in referring to Kitchener's 'ridiculous and preposterous army' as 'the laughing stock of every soldier in Europe', he noted that: 'It took the Germans 40 years of incessant work to make an army of

25 corps with the aid of conscription; it will take us to all eternity to do the same by voluntary effort.' The fact that the divisions of the First New Army were considered ready for active service less than ten months after Kitchener's original call for volunteers, was therefore, in itself, an indication of the magnitude of the nation's achievement. The 9th (Scottish) Division, which left on May 9, 1915, was the first New Army division numerically and the first to go to the front. It was followed, on May 29, by the 12th (Eastern) Division. The 13th (Western), 11th (Northern) and 10th (Irish) Divisions left for the Dardanelles on June 13, July 1 and July 7 respectively, while the 14th (Light) Division left for France

THE

IF

CAP FITS

YOU

JOIN

A

THE ARMY

on June

Quick!

TO-DAY

18.

New Armies popuname, for it was his which planted the seed from which they grew. However, the effort involved in creating the New Armies It

was

fitting that the

larly bore Kitchener's foresight and energy

was

essentially a national effort, for withthe overwhelming support and enthusiasm of the majority of the population, the talent of the British people for improvisation and their capacity for hard work and cheerful acceptance of hardships once national security is threatened, it would

out

R.

have been impossible to raise, as they did, more than 2,000,000 men for the land forces of the Crown, by purely voluntary methods, in less than a year from the outbreak of war. Mistakes were undoubtedly made and the overall cost in effort would have been less if proper use had been made of the

INCREASED RATES from MARCH

1, 1915

Increased Separation Allowances for the War are now given to the wives and children of married soldiers and to the dependants of unmarried men and widowers. -;

\s

km

Wife Wife and child - Wife and 2 children

New Weekly

Rates are as folio**

i

Ouaricr - KejeM

Private and Corporal.

Sergeant.

12s. 6d.

15s. Od.

16s. 6d.

17s. 6d.

20s. Od. 23s. 6d.

21s. 6d.

21s. Od. With

These rates include the usual allotment

2s.

C'"l

-Serircnnl

25s. Od.

Strnreani

22s. Od. 27s. Od. 30s. 6d.

23s. Od. 28s. Od. 31s. 6d.

extra lor each additional child.

of 3a. 6d.

a week lor privates and corporal*, and 5s. lOd lor ether ranks.

Adopted children are admitted. The ordinary limit ol age lor children Is now 16, and the allowance is te 21 to certain cases (lor higher education, apprenticeship on a nominal wage, or physical or mental infirmity*. Soldiers marrying AFTER enlistment are now eligible.

up

H

3s. 6d.

a weak

is

paid In the ease of soldiers living in the London postal area at the time ol e n listment

the tamllie* continue to live there.

Forma of Application

for Separation Allowance

5s. a

week

t%\*>

eon bo

Ailed In at the Recruiting

omce

who

ww

m

to

CUM

—Aa H is hwekSWantes to e.piatn >n the olaaeee of oaeoe on a aoeter, intending recruit* ean ekttaln fuller Imfm mmUcn from the two p.mphiot. for married and unmarried men, revleed te let Marolt, tats, whid. the* OSM* «et at

any Po.t Omoe.

Cooper, Bryan, The 10th (Irish) Division in Gallipoli (Herbert Jenkins 1918) Ewing, John, The History of the 9th (Scottish) Division 1914-1919 (John Murray 1921) Germains, Victor, The Kitchener Armies (Peter Davies 1930) Hay, Ian, The First Hundred Thousand

(Blackwood 1915) Magnus, Philip, Kitchener: Portrait of an Imperialist (John Murray 1958) Scott, Maj.-Gen. Sir Arthur and Brumwell, M. History of the 12th (Eastern) Division the Great War (Nisbet 1923) Williams, Basil, Raising and Training the New Armies (Constable 1918) P.

in

clear for each child.

unmarried or a wWawar (or one whose wlto Is not drawing separation allowance b eca e related or not), la sto dtog living apart from him before the war) had any parson or parsons (whether actually depindint upon him Before h« enlisted, the Government will pay that dependent a weekly sum intention Has soldier contribute* a share The Is one third or toss) at the amount. te allow te Mea within certain limits (ass below) the same amount weekly that the soldier pant Mm ar hex awtora toss any portion that want to pay for hi* awn keep. example, N the soldier had paid 17s. M. a week In paaas to his mother, and 7s 8d ol this was nssdad for his awn nan admissible will be tea remaining 10s. Toward* this tea soldier will contribute M. a day tram Ms pay the Government will pay to any ana dapandant si a aaWlar will nat eiaeed the amount at eeparettoa allow TIM iter a wtto (aaa table above), tori that limit will be raiaad H more pereens than ana ware dapandant an the same setotor. Te an sltowanee tea soldier must eamplata Army Farm (which will be given te Mm at the KsentrMng tea completed term to his Commending Officer within ana month ol enlistment ).

H •

and preparation.

Further Reading The

An extra

existing Territorial organisation; but, for all his faults, Kitchener's drive and leadership had at least enabled the nation to create a vastly expanded army despite all the previous deficiencies in experience

PETER SIMKINS was born at Greenford in 1939, and was educated in Ealing and then at King's College. London, where he read

Modern

an honours degree in War Studies. Having 1961 he was appointed as archivist to for

History, specialising in

graduated in Captain Sir

Basil

tions Officer,

becoming Keeper

,

Liddell Hart, with the task of cataloguing the latter's papers prior to their eventual transfer to the Centre for Military Archives at King's College In 1963 he joined the staff of London's Imperial War Museum, as Research and Publicaof Exhibits in

1965

capacity he has been largely responsible for co-ordinating the Museum's contribution to this In this

History

L019

FRENCH OFFENSIVES INARTOIS JF»

optimism, despite the setbacks of the first year of war, was still high. Thanks to Kitchener^ he had obtained the co-operation of the British, and plans for the offensive had been prepared over many months. On September 25, the dawn of the attack, Joffre told JofFre's

his troops that their elan would 'prove irresistible' and that the offensive would win the war. But despite their superiority in manpower, the French

needed more than Joffre's confidence to enable them to win the victory that had eluded them for so long and at so enormous a cost to France.

John Keegan

ois,

the

gne was a flat, sparsely populated

area. For miles around,

above the scarred

trees, flares pattern the night sky

>

4

<

*

,

The

failure of the French spring offensive in Artois — and failure it had been what-

ever gloss the communiques put upon itdid nothing to moderate the aggressive temper of the French High Command. Indeed it— or rather he — for Joffre in early 1915 was the French High Command — had not waited for the outcome of the battle to begin turning over plans for a fresh attack in the autumn. It was to be, moreover, an attack on a far greater scale, for Joffre's reading of the Artois operation had convinced him that it had failed because, large as it was, it had been mounted on only a single front and that too narrow. He determined, therefore, that in the autumn the French, and the British also, whose new armies had now begun to enter the line, would attack with all their disposable force on fronts as broad and widely separated as possible. The object of such a separation was twofold: firstly, to prevent the Germans using their reserves, such as they were, in a concentrated block; secondly, to 'pinch out' the salient in which three of their armies stood. This salient (the Noyon salient so-called,

-

•

»i

where, as the masthead of 'Clemenceau's newspaper daily reminded Parisians, the Germans' entrenchments came closest to the capital), marked the line stabilised in the fighting on the Aisne and the Somme in September and October 1914. Joffre's eyes were fixed, however, not on the front itself but on the railways which fed it. Along those railways came the munitions and supplies which kept the German divisions in the trenches and the reinforcements which made good their losses. And between these feeder lines ran the great lateral railway, from Sedan via Mezieres and Douai to Lille, along which reserves could be raced from a quiet to a threatened sector in less than a day's travelling. In orthodox military terms — and Joffre, like his fellow generals on both sides of the front, still thought in such terms— it was these railways, rather than the positions they supplied, which structured the German occupation of France and, by the same token, could be made to appear extremely vulnerable. Douai, after all, stood only 15 miles from Vimy Ridge and Mezieres, and though 40 miles behind

the lines, was not beyond the range of a hardriding force of cavalry, once the necessary gap in the trenches had been opened for it. Both Artois and Champagne — the two fronts on which Joffre planned to strike — belonged moreover to the limited range of sectors suitable for major offensive operations. Much of the Western Front was not suitable. Below Verdun, it traversed territory too broken or wooded to permit the passage of large armies; north of Ypres, natural or man-made inundations rendered movement almost impossible and even trench life semi-aquatic (the Germans, with neat logic, garrisoned that region with naval troops). The Argonne, between Verdun and the Champagne, was an impassable forest; and the Noyon salient, because it invited direct assault, could be ruled out on those grounds. Artois, Champagne and the Somme remained as choices. The Somme was scheduled to be taken over in time by the British and attacks there were accordingly to be postponed. Artois, on the other hand, was a front in which the French had already* invented much blood and, giving as it did onto the great plain

The

familiar

moment

arrives: soldiers of the

Tenth Army await orders

of northern France and the nodal points of the German communication system, offered the obvious point of penetration for a northern attack. The bare and desolate Champagne was the equally obvious point of departure for the armies which were to attack convergently from the south. Of the two, Joffre favoured Artois for the major effort, partly because the strategic objectives lay closer than in Champagne, partly because it abutted onto the sector held by the BEF, which now fielded numbers large enough for him to plan an operation on a front almost double the width of that in the south. On June 4 he accordingly sent details of the project to Field-Marshal French, asking for his co-operation in two respects: a) by taking over an additional 20 miles, of front to the south of Arras, thereby releasing French divisions for the attack: bl by participating in the French Tenth Army's attack in Artois, either on its left or in the new sector on its right. French signified his willingness to cooperate in both respects and on June 19 told Foch (now commanding the northern of the three Groups of Armies into which Joffre had very sensibly divided his widelystretched force that the BEF's preparations would be complete by July 10. He preferred the Lens- Loos sector to that on the Somme, and he proposed to attack with four divisions. 1

I

Difference of opinion :

1

was as small a contribution as he decently offer. Even so, he was to hard in the succeeding weeks to from it, on both tactical and 1

grounds.

Tactically,

he

made

to leave their trench

and go

into the attack. Shells burst in the

much

of the report submitted by Douglas Haig, the general responsible for preparing the operation. He repeated that the open nature of the ground on the British side of the front would allow clear fields of fire to the Germans, while on theirs the ruined mining villages and pithead workings (for this was mining country) would provide them with easily defensible positions and superior facilities for observation. Losses were, therefore, likely to be very heavy. He was particularly concerned — in view of the strength of the German defences which the British had tested at such cost at Festubert and Neuve Chapelle in the spring — by the shortage of heavy

and of all calibres of ammunition and therefore purposed that they should make no more than a demonstration on the immediate left of the French Tenth Army, confining their main effort to an attack astride and to the north of the La Bassee canal where the lie of the land was less artillery

forbidding.

On June 20, two days before Haig reported, French's doubts had been reinforced by the conclusions reached by an

inter-

ministers (Lloyd George representing Britain, Albert Thomas representing France) held at Boulogne. They had met to review the problem which so disquieted Haig, the shortage of heavy artillery and ammunition, and their findings revealed the very real substance of his misgivings. The Germans, the conference was told, deployed heavy guns in a proportion of one to three field guns (3,350 pieces of calibre Larger than 150 (5.9-in) to 10,500 smaller) while the proportion in the French army allied conference of munitions'

mm

background

stood at one to five (their heavy guns, moreover, being almost all obsolete) and in the British at one to twenty. Since the salient lesson of the war thus far was that the

heavy gun dominated the battlefield, this augured very badly for any immediate Allied offensive. Quite as interesting was the disparity between German and Allied rates of shell output. Owing to the advanced state of her chemical and metallurgical industries, Germany was producing 250,000 shells per day, France only 100,000 and Britain only 22,000. Far too much of the Allied disparity

production, moreover, was of shrapnel, a projectile effective against barbed wire only

when

fired in enormous quantity and almost perfectly harmless to entrenchments. Given current realities, and contrasting

them with what was now known

to

be not

merely desirable but necessary for the success of an operation — a ratio of one heavy to two field guns and an assured supply of 1,000 and 2,000 shells for each respectively — the conference concluded that it would be wiser not to risk a major attack, and therefore waste irreplaceable lives in 1915, but to wait for the coming year. The British would then be present in strength and the French would have acquired the necessary complement of heavy artillery. Thus equipped, it was hoped that the two powers would be to mount offensives of real penetrative power. Apprised of these conclusions, French raised with Joffre the question of postponing the offensive until 1916. He rejected the idea, and when they met at Frevent on July 1 1 he insisted that the British should abide by their agreement to attack in the

able

near future.

He

stated furthermore that come at the spot, so

their attack should

disfavoured by Haig, which he had originally indicated. He also dismissed a newlyraised British objection to the replacement of the Third Army, on the Somme. Because that arrangement would separate the Third Army from the First (the French Tenth Army occupied the intervening sector in Artois), French asked that it be put into line on the Second Army's left, thus extending the British flank almost to the coast. Joffre demurred. His reason for doing so, though unstated, was probably founded on fears, widely held in the French army, that if the approaches to the Channel ports were confided to the care of the BEF, the BEF might, in the event of a German breakthrough, fall back instead of battling to restore the front in France. A French presence in the coast was, therefore, seen by the French army (which could not forget Sir John's haste to be off for Le Havre in September 1914) as a guarantee of Britain's commitment to the common cause. Joffre had given explicit reasons for wishing to hold the British to their promise to attack in concert in the coming autumn. Besides the unrelenting urgency of the need, felt by all Frenchmen, to expel the Germans from the ten departements which they occupied, he was moved by the belief that the moment was particularly auspicious for victory. France had never been and might never again be so strong; and Germany was temporarily weak, perhaps weaker than she would ever be, on the Western Front. France was strong because she had at last made good her losses suffered in the disasters of 1914, and, by extraordinary measures, had assembled a strategic re-

One down and one

to go:

French

infantry, having

drawn from a variety of sources. Twelve new divisions had recently been raised by

ed a plan to Joffre on August 10 which, careful scouting revealed, would confine British participation in the French Tenth

detaching a regiment

Army's attack

serve of considerable power.

It

had been

for each of the active divisions and replacing them with infantry for the reserves of the Corps. To these, numbered 120-131, could be added three new colonial divisions, 10, 15 and 16, formed

tion'

freeing divisions of younger tion to the strategic reserve.

men

chener was summoned post-haste to Compiegne and he and Joffre held a long and secret conversation. Both were oppressed by the news from Russia, where the recently unleashed German offensive had led to

thereby for addi-

The improve-

the

continued thereafter to raise quibbles over details, but when these were countered and any further deferment refused, he forward-

German

trench, scramble up

fall

of Warsaw and the fortress of Ivan-

gorod on August

Secret plans The most obvious way by which to overcome disagreements between the Allies of the sort which had now arisen between GHQ and GQG was to subordinate the conduct of operations to an inter-allied command. British susceptibilities would not permit the subordination of Sir John French to Joffre and would probably have stood in the way of any secret arrangement had not the Field-Marshal now overplayed his hand. He had already secured the postponement of the offensive into August and

line

to an 'artillery demonstraflank. Joffre, exasperated by

for consideration but, outraged by French's latest display of tepidity, he moved against him with a quick and terrible anger. Kit-

ment of the French entrenchments also allowed a reduction in the density with which the link had hitherto been held, and further additions to the reserve of heavy artillery had been procured from the fleet and the forts.

captured a front

its left

his prevarication, had already submitted to the French Minister of War. for transmission to the British cabinet, a formula of agreement which would have bound Sir John to accept his instructions as to the 'effectives, objectives and dates fixed for each operation!' He had submitted it only

from regular white regiments whose worth had been proved beyond question in the battles of the Frontiers and the Marne. Seven divisions of territorials (old reservists of little fighting value) had been disbanded to release the necessary artillery for the new formations and such territorial divisions as were left had been consigned to the garrison of quiet sectors,

on

its

5.

These were major

dis-

asters for the Allied cause, entailing not only vast losses of territory on the most critical sector of the Eastern Front, but also the death, wounding or capture of Russian soldiers in hundreds of thousands and the destruction of quantities of irreplaceable equipment. Both drew the conclusion towards which they guessed Falkenhayn must be moving: that the Russians were defeated for the time being and that the German strategic reserve must soon be brought back to the Western Front, Before this happened, the Allies must attack, together and at once. Kitchener accepted Joffre's formula himself. On his return he immediately secured the cabinet's agree-

ment, and on August 22 transmitted its import to Sir John French who, the following day, submitted new plans to Joffre which met his stipulations in every respect sides to launch an attack on the second line

I

(D>

British Fust Army would attack, at the date prescribed and with all its resources, shoulder to shoulder with the

The

French Tenth Army. The Tenth Army's offensive was to he a repetition of that essayed at such heavy cost in May a direct assault on the crest of

Yum

Ridge. In tactics

and scale of support,

however, there were to he important differences Whereas d'Urbal had had only 290 hea\\ guns on his 12-mile front, he was now to deploy 420; and the reserves, which had then been retained too far behind the front, were now to be formed up in the immediate rear of the leading troops and to follow them as soon as the advance began. objectives were also much calling as they did for the dispatch of a large force of cavalry against the German rail centres in the Douai plain and thereafter into southern Belgium. By early August, however, the Artois offensive had taken second place in Joffre's planning to that already under preparation

The operational more ambitious,

Champagne, where the French had fought their first trench offensive in the winter of 1914. He had come to prefer the Champagne area for the reason that it was sparsely populated. In Artois, the numerous villages that had been reduced by bombardment to impassable heaps of rubble had impeded the French advance. There were almost no villages in the 'dry' Champagne, a region so poor that locals said if an acre had a hare on it, it was worth two in

francs.

did not

But

its suitability for

recommend

it

manoeuvres

as a campaigning

ground. Its very openness made for excellent observation — particularly by the Germans on the high ground — and the lack of interrupting walls and railways meant that the construction of battery positions and supply dumps would need much effort. Since the work was essential, however, it had been undertaken from the end of July. The first necessity was to add to the road and railway network and the staff of the Central Group of Armies (Castelnau) began by doubling the only wide-gauge railway in the region. Petain, whose Second Army was to hand over its sector in the Somme to the British in order to spearhead the attack, decided on arrival that it would also be necessary to lay a large mileage of miniature-gauge railway and to construct a major highway for each corps, besides building hutted camps for the ten extra divisions which had to be accommodated, and piping in a water supply. The second necessity was to advance the line to within charging distance of the German trenches: 300 yards was the most a wave of infantry could cross at a single bound. This work entailed enormous labour, for at some points the lines were as much as 1,000 yards apart. It was also decided to dig these communication trenches, up to 3,000 yards long, on each divisional front, one 'up', one 'down' and one for the evacuation of casualties. Besides this, telephone wiring was to be doubled or tripled (most would nonetheless be cut as soon as the battle started) and shell-proof dugouts built for each battalion jump-off area. The work had to be carried on partly in daylight and cost each of the divisions

engaged between four and ten men

killed

every day. Besides this, numerous battery positions had to be sited and excavated, for the heavy gun was seen as the key to success in the oming battle. Artillery directions in the [024

French army had undergone a complete transformation in the year since the war's outbreak. Before August 1914, and for months afterwards, French gunners had

what was called the rafale, in which their guns — almost all mobile and quick firing 75's — deluged the front of attack with a rain of shells during the four minutes before an assault, selecting their targets more or less without reference to the infantry. In the open field the effect could be devastating; it would even be very

practised

telling against

enemy

infantry in single

entrenchments,

provided the attacking infantry could get on top of them before they recovered their bearings. But wire prevented that, and though it could be cut, the time and effort necessary robbed the assault of all surprise. Faced with this quandary — and with the added difficulty presented by the Germans' construction of shell-proof dugouts — the French High Command had decided to reconcile itself to the loss of surprise and aim to achieve material destruction of the Germans' position by a protracted and deliberate bombardment — the germ of the doctrine that 'artillery conquers, infantry merely occupies'. J offre had accordingly allocated to Castelnau almost a quarter of his still scanty reserve of heavy guns, some 700 pieces. The stocks of ammunition provided were abundant: 1,200 rounds for each of the field guns and a total of 800,000 rounds for the heavy artillery. It had to be recognised, however, that the French heavy artillery, piece for piece, remained inferior in quality to the German, as it still did in quantity. The bulk was naval or fortress equipment, unsuitable for rapid movement and nowhere approaching the German 5.9-inch howitzer, in power, range, accuracy or mobility. Unless the breach was made quickly, the German heavy artillery rescue, which would be rushed to defend it, could be expected to overwhelm the French guns in a counterbattery duel. In infantry, on the other hand, the French enjoyed a marked superiority both in num-

Above: French soldiers with a Lebel 8-mm rifle which they have fitted to a frame so that it can be fired more accurately with the use of a periscope. Below: Joffre on a visit to the BEF. Exasperated by Sir John French's prevarication, Joffe had submitted a formula to the British cabinet by which French would be forced in future to submit to his directives in the planning of major offensives. Right: French troops leave their trenches — to walk into heavy German artillery fire. Allied casualties proved the superiority of German guns

n

bers and quality. In Artois, on a front of 20 miles, there were 16 French Divisions against six German divisions; in Champagne, on the same width of front, 18 against seven. On both fronts they disposed of sizeable reserves, whereas the main weakness of the German strategic posture was the almost total absence of reserves.

These amounted

in all to

only six divisions,

distributed singly at distances of about 50 miles; there were also four infantry brigades and some cavalry.

New

tactics

German weakness

in manpower was considerably offset by the marked improvement which their defensive systems had undergone. Originally, in obedience to the prewar teaching of one line only and that strongly held, their line had consisted of a single trench, supported by machine gun posts about 1,000 yards behind it at intervals of 800 yards. Since at Neuve Chapelle it was these strong points alone which had prevented a British break-in, Falkenhayn had subsequently ordered the construction of a second position, behind the 'intermediate' line of strong points (now joined to the front trench by communication trenches) and at a distance of some 2,500-3,000 It was to be wherever possible on a reverse slope, out of direct observation by the Allied artillery, and wired in. Its garrison was to be

yards from no man's land. sited

provided by the support battalions of the regiments in line, which normally held the front with two battalions 'up', half in the firing-line and half in the 'intermediate' position. If it became necessary, those battalions, which had only 400 men on 3,000 yards of front, would fall back on the second position under covering fire provided by the artillery. It too had been trained in new defensive tactics, which

consisted in laying

programmes

down these separate

an attack threatened: Zerstorungsfeuer, a heavy bombardment of the enemy's forming up places; Vernichtungsfeuer, a whirlwind bombardment of fire

if

front line at the moment of attack; and Sperrfeuer, a barrage to curtain off the German line once the enemy infantry was, in the open. The French, though unaware of the evolution which German defensive doctrine had undergone since their assaults in Artois, had also appreciably modified their doctrine of the offensive. Reserve formations were now to be started forward simul-

the

enemy

taneously with the leading waves, in order to avoid the fatal delays which had robbed them of success on the crest of Vimy Ridge on May 9. It should also be explained, however, that d'Urbal's decision- to retain the reserves until he had news of where they were most needed had been dictated by the paucity of numbers available to them. If the French could now be more prodigious, it was because they had more reserves to

commit. The artillery programme had also been much augmented, again because of an increase in the numbers of guns and shells to hand. The bombardment was to last four days, concentrating at first on the German positions, then on the approach routes, and finally on producing the nervous collapse of the defenders by a hurricane of explosions. In view of the enormously laborious preparations undertaken by the French over many weeks, and despite several bungling attempts at deception essayed by their Intelligence staffs, it might be thought impossible for the Germans to have remained in ignorance of what lay in store. Yet strangely, almost to the moment of assault, and indeed even beyond it, Falkenhayn refused to credit reports that the French were planning to attack.

early as August 16 his headquarters warned Sixth Army (Prince Rupprecht), which occupied the sectors opposite the BEF and the French Tenth Army that

As

had

the evidence supported the likelihood of an Allied offensive in the near future. But thereafter Falkenhayn, perhaps because Rupprecht confessed himself unconvinced, seems to have relaxed his caution. Certainly he dealt very coolly with Einem. commanding the German Third Army in Champagne, who from the end of August sent him message after message warning of the dangers he felt threatened his front. They were lent substance not merely by the physical evidence of new French entrenchments, pushed close up to his own, but also by the admissions of deserters that a large attack, spearheaded by the crack Colonial Corps, was scheduled for mid-September. In response to his requests for large reinforcements both of infantry and artillery, he allotted him one brigade of infantry (85th Reserve) and the nine heavy batteries he asked for, later increased by another three. He also intimated that from September 7 one of the six divisions in reserve in the west would be stationed be-

hind his front and on September 9, when Einem's pleas for yet another 11 heavy batteries took on a note of desperation, he replied that none could arrive before September 12. He was by now also receiving requests for reinforcements from a thoroughly alarmed Rupprecht but could allow him only three batteries of heavy artillery and those not until September 21. Rupprecht himself was making what shifts he could on his own account, borrowing batteries from his neighbouring army commanders and moving his disposable reserves (2nd Guard Reserve Division and the Hammer Infantry Brigade) behind what he judged to be the threatened sectors.

1025

Bethune

J

9 Div

XI

—- / VII

•Haisnes

24 Div

Lille

Res

\ 21 Div-

15 Div

BEF1

Both commanders continued to complain OHL that their airmen were unable to

to

penetrate the Allied front, while theirs were scattering bombs over all the detraining points in the back areas. Einem's reports were particularly circumstantial, containing descriptions of French mining activity and of the construction of jumpingoff positions within a hundred yards of such important features of the Butte de Souain and the Main de Massiges (a multiple ridge so called by the French for its resemblance to the fingers of a hand). Whether Falken-

hayn felt alarm or not, he showed so little that on September 21, as the French preparatory bombardment began, he obeyed a summons to join the Kaiser at Great

IV

French

TENTH 47Terr Div

General Headquarters and for Pless, in

left

Belgium

Germany.

81 Terr Div

A 'war winning' offensive?

XXI

The French armies destined

43Div

1 13 Div IIDiv

70Div

f

I

(Givenchy

§ i^s

VI

SIXTH

I

-77| Vimy Ridge

55 Div

^f£y

5Dil

f 12Div

<

24 Div

XII

23 Div

34Di\

BRITISH FRONT

FRENCH FRONT ALLIED

GAINS

GERMAN FRONT SECOND

LINE

OKMS

XII

Res

VIII

Res

an his

he the

'Soldiers of the Republic': After the months of waiting which have allowed us to increase our forces and resources, while the enemy has wasted his, the hour has come to attack and conquer and to add new pages of glory to those written on the Marne, in Flanders, the Vosges and at Arras. Behind the whirlwind of iron and fire unleashed thanks to the labours in the factories of France, where your comrades have worked night and day on your behalf, you will assault together, across the whole front and in unity with the armies of the allies. Your elan will prove irresistible. It will carry you at one bound onto the battery positions of the enemy, beyond the fortified lines which now face you. You will allow no rest or quarter until the achievement of victory. March with high hearts, for the liberation of the soil of the nation, for the triumph of

justice MILES

to

General Sarrail, and firmly quashed attempt by the President to scrutinise plans as of right. On September 23 addressed these stirring words to

Neuville

SSMaroeuil

for the attack a high pitch of excitement. All observers testified to their high state of morale, unshaken, perhaps even fortified by the appalling losses of the past year, and characterised by their determination to make this offensive a warwinner. Their fervour was whipped up by Joffre's special order of the day. He himself was in an ascendant mood, having recently rid himself of the Republican intriguer,

were now keyed

and

liberty.

These were not words which would have

moved

British soldiers but they belonged to a style of oratory familiar to, even expected by, French soldiers since the days of Napoleon. And at 0915 hours on the morning of September 25, they carried the attacking battalions out of the trenches in Champagne in an onslaught by eight successive waves; the attack in Artois was to begin three and a half hours later. It is perhaps most instructive to look first at what Falkenhayn made of this development as it was reported to him on the mornRight: Three sections of the front in Northern

France-ground that had been fought over many times in the first year of the war. From top to bottom: The Massiges hillocks, Eparges and the wide, flat expanse of the Champagne region. Left: The September attacks on German positions in Artois and Champagne. Planned since the spring, the offensive was aimed at shattering German confidence on the Western Front. But the ground gained was minimal and German superiority in the skills of trench warfare never in question

1026

p

r »

-

— .^m •

*-

*

'*;

In

the aftermath of the offensive -a German soldier, shocked but alive, is found among the dead

-«'

BBS !

Wk V

* -;

ing of September 25. He had left on September 21 convinced that he was threatened by a general menace and not by an immediate attack, and reassured Einem in his parting message that the French

lacked 'cutting power' (Schneid). Reports followed him as he made his way with the Kaiser between the headquarters of the armies on the quiescent left wing (Verdun to the Vosges) of a growing bombardment, but he betrayed little anxiety,

and he remained unconcerned even after news of infantry attacks began to come in. It was not until at noon he reached the headquarters of Fifth Army, whose left wing was under strong pressure from the French, that reality broke in. Then he found two urgent appeals for help. Third Army signalled: 'Enemy has broken through between Souain and Somme-Py. Details not yet known. Fifth Army has been asked for reinforcements.' Sixth Army's signal was more explicit: 'Enemy has, with the help of gas, broken through the IV Corps positions near Haisnes and Loos and VII Corps positions west of Aubers. The whole of the Army reserve and 8th Division must be sent to the help of TV Corps. Furfirm

ther reinforcement of the Army unconditionally necessary.' Falkenhayn at once ordered 56th Division from the Vosges to

ment, aligned the best of their divisions against the worst of the German, the Liebert and Dittfurth divisions, separated by the 50th, which held the centre of the front of attack. Opposed to them were the redoubtable Moroccan Division, the new 10th and 15th Colonial, lusting for honour, and the stern Savoyard 27th and 28th. It was the onset of this formidable concentration which had so alarmed Einem, and not without cause, for by noon almost the whole of his front between Souain and Tahure, across a distance of 8,000 yards, had been driven in as far as the second position, at points beyond it. The attack had come from behind a curtain of drenching rain, which began to fall after weeks of brilliant weather, in the early hours of the morning.

Undismayed, the French had advanced

the leading waves of these six divisions had arrived more or less unscathed on top of the German first line and had begun to tumble their defenders backwards in the briskest fashion. Almost everywhere they found the wire well cut, after the four day bombardment, and the trenches and dugouts in ruins. The work of searching out any survivors still ready to show resistance

Third Army's sector and 192 Brigade to

was

Sixth Army and alerted the commanders of the Ground and Corps, so providentially arrived from Russia, to hold themselves in readiness to intervene. He then left by motor car for OHL.

grenades

X

How

well-founded was Falkenhayn's alarm? No general could have been expected to receive the news that his front had been assaulted at two widely separated points on a total width of 50 miles calmly. Time would reveal, however, that the most serious danger in the north was the threat of the British attack at Loos, as Sixth Army's report intimated, rather than the French attack on Vimy Ridge. There the French had made, and were to make, serious inroads at only one spot, beneath the Loretto Spur and around Souchez where they had shed so much blood for such little profit in May. Taking the French corps from left to right, the results achieved by each may be summarised as follows: the left hand division of XXI Corps made a little progress towards Angres, its righthand division reached Souchez— the best result of the day; the left hand divisions of XXXIII corps captured the Germans' first line, the right hand division was stopped dead; the left hand division of III Corps reached the Germans' front trench but could manage to stay in only a part of it, the right hand division was everywhere driven back or destroyed; the XII Corps captured a short section of the German front line in the centre of its sector; both divisions of XVII Corps attacking in front of Arras were driven back to their own positions; and the divisions of IX Corps were both stopped by uncut wire and heavy machine gun fire and driven back into their own lines. It was a tragic day for the Tenth Army, but one from which Falkenhayn took heart. Originally inclined to consider his Sixth Army in greater danger than the Third in Champagne, he decided in view of its success in repelling the French attack that the bulk of the reserves could be transferred to Third Army, where its front was buckling in several places. There the French had, by luck or judge-

be-

hind unfurled colours, the trumpets and drums sounding the pas de charge and the bands playing the Marseillaise. Incredibly,

equipped with while the main assault parties pressed on towards the intermediate and second positions. left to 'trench cleaners',

and

Browning

pistols,

144,000 casualties: a condemnation of Allied planning The centre of the front was dominated by the heights of the Bois de Perthes, into which the Moroccans found difficulty in penetrating. On their left however, the 10th Colonial Division, commanded by General Marchand (the Marchand of the Fashoda incident which had brought Britain and France almost to war 15 years before) advanced 2,500 yards in under an hour and by 1000 hours were in the German second position. At that moment one of those tragic mistakes which made thoughtful soldiers despair of conducting operations on the Western Front occurred: the French heavy artillery, fulfilling its fire programmes, opened a heavy bombardment on the position and, as was almost always the case in those pre-wireless days, could not be signalled to shift its targets. The right hand brigade of the 10th Division had made slower progress and stuck on the intermediate position until Marchand himself appeared and ordered its commander, Colonel Peltier, to go forward himself and restart the advance. As his party moved off, one of Peltier's aides was killed outright by a German shell, his artillery liaison officer was killed 50 yards further on and he himself was gravely wounded. Pressing on, he was struck again but refused help and was not evacuated until the evening. Command of the brigade now devolved on one of the regimental commanders, as he thought, but when he ordered the advance to continue, through a curtain of 'short' French artillery fire, the other regimental commander produced his record of service, which proved him senior, and revoked the order. The brigade therefore began to dig in on the German

intermediate position. Marchand had left the brigade to go back and start forward the 1st Regiment of the Foreign Legion, which was in support. He was hit almost at once by a bullet in the stomach but when his ADC tried to put him on a stretcher he told him, T am hit, my spine is broken, leave me', and ordered him to carry his orders to the Legion Commander. (This astonishing man was fit again by early November.) Meanwhile, in the eastern flank of the Bois de Perthes, the 28th Division was making similar progress, though also at heavy cost and attended by equal confusion. The experience of one of its battalions is perhaps typical, though the conduct of its commander was exceptional, even on a day when exceptional bravery was the rule. Commandant Rapp, of the 3rd Battalion, 30th Regiment, had orders to cross the German first and intermediate positions and then swing left to line the edge of the Bois de Perthes, through which the Moroccan Division was to advance. His men easily crossed the German front line, under a German barrage which fell too late, but then bunched on the intermediate position. Rapp got them going again by shouting parade ground orders to extend and calling out the step. Once across the obstacle, and despite a profusion of French 75 shells dropping short, he lined the wood and kept the Germans inside it cowed by directing

machine gun fire into it whenever he detected movement. In this way he held the front, though alone and unsupported, five in the afternoon, when 1,200 Germans came forward under a white flag

until

and surrendered. Such splendid moments were rarely

re-

peated on the front of either the Second or Fourth Army that day. The 39th and 2nd Colonial Divisions had made some progress on the Main de Massiges on the extreme right and the 42nd and 7th Divisions had captured a pocket handkerchief of ground in the extreme left but only in the centre did progress justify all the promises Joffre

had made

to his commanders in the weeks before the battle had opened. But Falkenhayn was already hurrying the artillery and the 19th Division of Corps to the damaged sector and had committed the 5th Division and the 192nd Brigade. Joffre was now too deeply committed to the success of the operation to slacken the tempo and throughout the four succeeding days hurled divisions one after the other at the breach. None of his attacks succeeded and on September 30 he announced that the offensives in Champagne and Artois alike were to be temporarily halted. On October 6 in Champagne and October 11 in Artois he was to attempt an unconvincing reprise but neither achieved more than inflicting heavy casualties on the divisions which

X

jumped

off.

Total Allied casualties for the two opera tions amounted to 47,000 in Artois and 144,000 in Champagne; the Germans lost some 85,000 men. The balance of profit, if profit can be measured in these terms, lay therefore with the Germans. Strategically, the outcome of the autumn offensives was an undoubted setback for the Allies, a blow to their pride, a condemnation of their planning and a demonstration of the Germans' continuing superiority in the skills of trench-warfare.

[For John Keegan's biography, see page 96.

1029

<**> «

%

As Joffre was making his exhortations to the soldiers of the Tenth Army on the morning of September 25, a few miles to the north in the Loos sector Haig was waiting for a breeze. Five thousand cylinders of chlorine gas were mounted in the front trenches, all of them useless without a wind strong enough to carry the gas into the German lines. At 0515 hours Haig noted that the leaves of the poplar trees gently rustled' — encouragement enough, it seems, to release 150 tons of gas which drifted slowly back into the British lines. Alistair .

'

Home

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£ ^

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Throughout the first dismal year of the war, co-ordination of strategy between the Allies had been carried to no very high pitch. As far as the Western Front went, it had depended very largely on the persuasive powers of Joffre and Foch and the loyalty to them of French and Haig. Early in 1915, however, leading members of the French and British cabinets met to formulate a strategic plan for the rest of 1915. Joffre, still very much in the ascendant, had pressed with all his imposing weight for a new great attack' in the autumn which would recoup the disheartening failures of the spring offensives. His plan was more grandiose than ever, and his optimism remained supreme. The Allied armies were to pinch out the big German bulge opposite Compiegne, which remained an uncomfortable threat to Paris, by means of a French thrust northwards in the chalk downs of Champagne, coupled simultaneously with a Franco-British attack eastwards in the coal-mining area of Artois, towards Lens. These attacks were to be followed by a general offensive which would 'compel the Germans to retreat beyond the Meuse and possibly end the war'. In each case, the cavalry would be kept champing and snorting in immediate reserve, waiting to exploit the breakthrough — which, as usual, never came. The day appointed for the joint attack 25. It was already late in the campaigning season. As their part in the grand complementary offensive, the French Artois effort turned out to be no more than another prod in the direction of Vimy Ridge, carried out once more by d'Urbal's Tenth Army under the overall direction of Foch. The main weight in the north this time fell to Sir John French's BEF, to which was allocated the capture of the Flanders mining centre of Loos. The operation marked something of a turning point in the history of British endeavours on the Western Front. It was to be no longer an experimental probe, such as the engagements fought in the spring had largely been, but a full-scale offensive. Four divisions had been committed at Neuve Chapelle; six would now be thrown into the assault on Loos. The increase reflected the vast expansion of the British Army in France, which in the year 1915 rose from ten to 37 divisions. For the first time some of the new 'Kitchener Divisions' would be available for action. It would be difficult to recall a previous time when so large a British force had gone into action at one time. And following on the 'Shell Shortage' scandal provoked by Sir John French himself, the attacking British now had more gun power than ever before. Initially, all the British military commanders had been lukewarm to the role allotted them by Joffre. Haig, whose First Army would bear the brunt, reconnoitred the ground and declared it to be 'bare and open and so swept by rifle and machine gun fire from the German trenches and the

was September

numerous fortified villages immediately behind them that a rapid advance would be impossible'. French, whose opinions were tending to swing about more and more like an unboxed compass, had at first expressed general agreement with Joffre's plan, recording in his diary that the ground 'affords many advantages to an attacker'. But after a talk with Haig, however, French admitted himself 'doubtful of the success an attack against these places'. He was

of

Scottish troops went into battle

at

Loos

led by a piper

now very much averse to attacking at Loos, across a bleak coalfield, where pitheads, vast slag-heaps and mining villages provided ample cover for the Germans; he would much rather have made the British offensive at Ypres. In July, Kitchener too had been sceptical, noting that 'Joffre and Sir John told me in November that they were going to push the Germans back over the frontier; they gave me the same assurances in December, March, and May. What have they done? The attacks are very

and end in nothing.' And even more 'The French have an almost unlimited supply of ammunition and fourteen divisions in reserve, so if they cannot get through we may take it as proved that the lines cannot be forced.' But Kitchener, increasingly despondent costly

tartly:

at the lack of success of the Dardanelles expedition, was about to defect to the 'Westerners' and, after a hard push from

sounding out Scotland the Brave

fitness to command the BEF, and used his close friendship with King George to voice these doubts. Shortly after war broke out, he had told the King that. 'From my experience with Sir John in the South African War he was certain to do his utmost loyally to carry out any orders which

V

the government might give him. I had grave doubts, however, whether either his temper was sufficiently even, or his military knowledge sufficiently thorough, to enable him to discharge properly the very difficult duties which would devolve upon him during the coming operations." Sir John's performance during these operations of the first year of war had done nothing to mitigate bug's judgement. Thus he could ill afford to take an independent line with the almighty K Meanwhile, as the date of the battle approached, Haig became more enthusiastic Studying the difficult terrain, he decided I

'.

by mid-August he was telling Haig

that he should be able to achieve surprise

that 'he had decided that we must act with all our energy, and do our utmost to help the French, even though, by so doing, we suffered very heavy losses indeed'; and he frightened the British Cabinet with the alternative that Joffre might be overthrown and the French politicians would then make peace. His and French's loyalty

and make up for his continuing inadequacy in heavy guns by taking a leaf out of the German book. He would use chlorine gas

Joffre,

to Joffre

became

decisive.

Grave doubts In any event, French was becoming increasingly aware of the growing weakness and isolation of hisown posit ion. Kitchener had been hostile to him ever since the Boer War, and relations with llaig had gone from bad to worse. Haig made little secret of his misgivings about his superior's

on a large scale It

precede his attack that llaig's bust ,nos and attack towards

was agreed,

Army would

to

then,

I

Hulluch, with the particular objective of capturing Mill 70 on the mam road which ran behind the German lines from La Bassee to 1-ens. Foch visited Haig on Sep tember 12 to co-ordinate their optimistic plans, but Haig gathered that the mam object of Koch's visit was to find out

whether we British meant really to fight reassured him on that point'. not. British and French coordination, at any level, still left much to be desired. In planning the attack, Sir John remarked to

Or

1

lO.n

commanders that it was easier to gain information aboul the strength and com-

his

position of the enemy's forces than about the French', And Robert Graves, on being introduced as a junior officer to the front line thai spring, had been told that 'we don't know as much about trenches as the French do. and not near as much as Fritz does. can't expect Fritz to help, but the French might do something. But there's

We

never any connexion between the two armies, unless a battle is on, and then we generally let each other down.' The British would be attacking with their six divisions on a front line held by only one German division, the 117th, belonging to the Sixth Army's IV Corps, which also had to withstand the northern part of the French Tenth Army's thrust on its left. Haig's force consisted of Rawlinson's IV Corps on the right and Gough's I Corps on the left. His 117 heavy guns with their limited supplies of shells were reinforced by 5,243 heavy cylinders of gas mounted in the front trenches. He ignored the fact, however, that while chlorine could panic or asphyxiate human beings, it could not destroy fields of barbed wire. The situation at dawn on September 25 was tense, both at Haig's HQ and in the British lines, when it appeared doubtful that there would be enough wind to carry the gas, on which everything depended, across No-man's Land to the German lines. After waiting a quarter of an hour, Haig nervously ordered one of his staff to telephone I Corps and ascertain whether the timetable for the attack could be altered. The word came back that General Gough 'did not consider it practicable to get word in time to the front trenches'. In his diary, Haig wrote: 'I went out at 0500 hours. Almost a calm. Alan Fletcher lit a cigarette and the smoke drifted in puffs towards the north-east. Staff Officers of Corps were ordered to stand by in case it was necessary to counter-order the attack. At one time, owing to the calm, I feared the gas might simply hang about our trenches. However, at 0515 hours I said "carry on". I went to the top of our wooden look-out tower. The wind came gently from the south-west and by 0540 hours had increased slightly. The leaves of the poplar trees gently rustled. This seemed satisfactory. But what a risk I must run of gas

blowing back upon our own dense masses of troops!'

These sentiments, this high decision, contrast with Robert Graves's trench view of the same moment in history, on the 2nd Division flank of the attack. Haig's orders, as received by Graves' company, stated: The attack will be preceded by 40 minutes discharge of the accessory which will clear the path for a thousand yards, so that the two railway lines will be occupied without difficulty. Our advance will follow closely behind the accessory. Behind us are three fresh divisions and the Cavalry Corps. It is expected we shall have no difficulty in breaking through. Owing to the strength of the accessory, men should be warned against remaining too long in captured trenches where the accessory is likely to collect, but to keep to the open ana ibove all to push on. Graves goes on to record: It seems that at half-past four an RE captain commanding the gas-company in the front line phoned through to divisional headquarters: 'Dead calm. Impossible discharge accessory.' The answer he got was: 'Accessory to 1032

.

be discharged at all costs.' The spanners unscrewing the cocks of the cylinders proved with two or three exceptions, to be for

misfits.

for the

The gas-men rushed about shouting loan of an adjustable spanner. They

managed

to discharge one or two cylinders; gas went whistling out, formed a thick cloud a few yards off in No-Man's Land, and then gradually spread back into our trenches. The Germans, who had been expecting gas, immediately put on their

the

gas-helmets; semi-rigid ones, better than ours. Bundles of oily cotton- waste were strewn along the German parapet and set alight as a barrier to the gas. Then their batteries opened on our lines. The confusion in the front trench must have been horrible; direct hits broke several of the gas-cylinders, the trench filled with gas, the gas-company

stampeded.

Loos — the battle that ended French's career This was a scene that must have been repeated on many sections of the British front that morning, as well as the consequences that Graves describes so vividly: orders could come through because the shell in the signals dugout at battalion headquarters had cut communication not only between companies and battalion, but be-

No

tween battalion and division. The officers in the front trench had to decide on immediate action; so two companies of the Middlesex, instead of waiting for the intense bom-

bardment which would follow the adver40 minutes of gas, charged at once and got as far as the German wire — which our artillery had not yet cut. So far it had been treated only with shrapnel, which had no effect on it; the barbed- wire needed high-explosive, and plenty of it. The Germans shot the Middlesex men down. One platoon is said to have found a gap and got into the German trench. But there were no tised

survivors of the platoon to confirm this. Compared with the shortage of heavy shells, gas was plentiful; by zero-hour (0630 hours) over 150 tons had been released from cylinders. But the use of gas under the uncertainty of these conditions also had the effect of unsettling the subsequent waves of the British attack. As Graves's battalion, which was to form the second wave, came up the communication trench, Maison Rouge Alley, the Germans: were shelling it with five-nines and lachrymatory shells. This caused a continual scramble backwards and forwards, to cries of: 'Come one!' 'Get back you bastards!' 'Gas turning on us!' 'Keep your heads, you men!' 'Back like hell, boys!' 'Whose orders'?' 'What's happening?' 'Gas!' 'Back!' 'Come on!' 'Gas!' 'Back!'' Wounded men and stretcher-bearers kept trying to squeeze past. We were alternately putting on and

taking off our gas-helmets, which made things worse. In many places the trench had caved in, obliging us to scramble over the top.

Further casualties were caused to the attacking infantry by many of the shells falling short from the intense bombard-

ment which followed the release of the gas. Where the gas carried well, the initial British attack achieved some success: the cost, however, was extremely high, largely

through the ineffectiveness of the artillery in destroying the German wire and neutralising machine gun emplacements. this front, as in Champagne, the Germans had been preparing a second line of defence, covering La Bassee in the north and Lens in the south (as the British had been disturbed to discover in July). Scottish troops of the 15th Division went in led by a piper who continued to play 'Scotland the Brave' even after being wounded — for which he was awarded the VC. The Highland regiments pressed home their attack with great impetus, and within an hour they had broken into both the German trench lines in front of Loos. But now the front of their attack was compressed to less than half its initial width, and units became entangled with each other in confusion. One regimental history describes them, affectionately, as

On

being 'a magnificent Border rabble'. Thinking that the battle was virtually over, they then went on in a leisurely fashion to begin the assault of the critical Hill 70 like 'a bank holiday crowd'. Having reached the summit, they were caught on the downward slope by devastating fire from the unattended German second line, and pinned down. The casualties of this one division for the day amounted to about 60% of effectives; some battalions, such as the 9th Black Watch, were almost annihilated.

Regimental precision

On the right of the 15th Highland Division, troops of the 47th Territorial Division had gone into action dribbling a football in front of them, in that devil-may-care, almost amateurish elation that still pervaded the British army. Within an hour they had lost 15% of their numbers. But they succeeded in taking Loos. As the London Irish approached the village: the air was vicious with bullets. Ahead the clouds of smoke, sluggish low-lying fog, and fumes of bursting shells, thick in volume, receded towards the German trenches, and formed a background for the soldiers who were marching up a low slope towards the enemy's parapet, which the smoke still hid from view. There was no haste in the forward move, every step was taken with regimental precision, and twice on the way across the Irish boys halted for a moment striking

alignment. further north, the 1st Division attacked with small hopes of success towards Hulluch, across a wide belt of no man's land. There was much confusion as to whether or not a sector called Lone Tree was or was not to be included in the fireplan. The result was failure here. The attacking troops were badly caught by their own gas, and enfiladed by two solitary machine guns the Germans had pushed to correct their

A

little

forward into No-man's Land. The 1st Brigade of the same division was more successful and actually broke through the German second line at Hulluch. But losses were appalling; of the 10th Gloucesters, only 60 men survived. At 0910 hours a company of the Camerons reported back that the Germans 'appear to be retiring'. This was probably the critical moment of the battle, for the British had broken into the German front at its most vulnerable point. But the exhausted, decimated attackers would not be able to hold their own against even a light German counterattack. Available a short distance to their rear

a

r-

•

&

l»l-

I

fx

V^I

'

A: 'Ud

.

c

A Wounded men walk to a dressing station near Loos. The battle had been another of those victories' that were indistinguishable from defeat of the gas had drifted across to the German trenches. The sufferers were treated with oxygen which had been held in readiness VA little

H SCHOOL MEDIA CENTll

wore

tactical reserves of unused battalions totalling some 6,500 men; sufficient to consolidate to the breakthrough. But, as hap-

pened with heart-breaking regularity with British offensives, they were so man) moved up too late And when they were brought into action, thej were committed at Lone Tree, the one point in the line still strongly held by the Germans, and were cut

to

pieces

The Germans

in futile frontal assaults. swiftly rallied, and by even-

ing the remnants of the 1st Division had been forced back out of their second line. Yet for the thinly spread Germans the situation earlier in the day had been

HQ

serious, and staffs and orderlies had had to join in the defence. One regiment of German reserves pushed up into the Hul-

luch gap had reported at midday: There appear to be no German troops ahead on a front of about three miles and the forward batteries have all been overrun.' Sir John French, meanwhile, had stationed himself near Lillers, 25 miles away from his own Chief-of-Staff, without even a telephone. Moreover, he had insisted on keeping the strategic "reserve — the newly formed XI Corps -tightly under his own hand. This turned out to be one of the gravest and most tragic miscalculations of the whole battle. French's actions were motivated partly by anxiety over the weakness of the whole British front, partly out of unwillingness to throw two of its divi-

the 21st and 24th, which were the first from Kitchener's New Armies and only recently arrived in France, straight into battle; and partly, it seems, out of jealousy of Haig. Twice he refused Haig's request to be given absolute control of XI Corps, and only changed his mind at midday on the 25th. The two divisions were then at once given their marching orders; but too late. If Haig could have had these reserves ready under his command, in close support, the incipient break-in at Hulluch, though very narrow, might have been exploited. As it was, the use of this reserve fell between two stools. Finally, the two New Army divisions, despite their total inexperience, were thrown into the battle, but not till the second day, September 26. Because they had been held too far back, they arrived after a long and confused night march, soaked to the skin, without proper food, and had to attack under consions,

Above: The map shows British and German dispositions at Loos. The British managed to break through the town, but at a great cost. Right: By the end of October 1915 Loos was in ruins, but the battle dragged on until the first week in November, when it petered out

among

ditions

which by then had swung back

heavily in the Germans' favour. The Germans had been given the chance overnight to reinforce and strengthen their second line; whereas the two British divisions were attacking in the full light of midmorning, without any appreciable artillery preparation or support, and with no possibility of surprise. So they advanced in their dense ranks across open country,

swept by artillery and machine gun

fire;

and those that survived came up against the impenetrable entanglement of the entirely unbroken German wire which protected their second line. The diary of one German regiment describes how: Oru battalion in particular had an excellent position along the edge of a disused quarry overgrown with thick bushes and scrub. They were we'd concealed from view, and yet had a perfa t field of fire to front or flank. Four machine guns were placed in position there, with the champion machine gunner of the regiment at one of

them.

1034

krajM2rMU2£Ufc*£ittU8

The spirit of these New Army volunteers of the 21st and 24th Divisions was very high, they were 'delighted at the prospect of getting at the enemy'. Their courage as they advanced against the wall of machine gun and rifle fire was incredible. But the

German wire broke them. Nevertheless, the shock of their attack first to have unnerved the Germans defending Hulluch. One NCO machine gunner came shouting in panic to the Colonel of the 15th Reserve Regiment 'Two divisions we will be surrounded ... we must retire!' Then the Germans

seems at

.

moved

.

.

efficiently into their firing positions

as the Kitchener divisions deployed across their front. The regimental diary describes it: Ten ranks of extended line could clearly be distinguished, each one estimated at more than 1.000 men, and offering such a target as had never been seen before, or even thought possible. Never had the machine gunners such straightforward work to do nor done it so effectively. They traversed to and fro along the enemy's ranks unceasingly. The men stood on the fire-steps, some even on the parapets, and fired exultantly into the mass of men advancing across the open grass-land. As the entire field of fire was covered with the enemy's infantry the effect was devastating and they could be seen falling literally in hundreds.

Victory indistinguishable from defeat

On

the 24th Division's right, the 21st Division were advancing on the north side of Hill 70. The German 153rd Regiment, also freshly brought up, faced them. Here the story was similar to what had occurred on the 24th Division's front. The German diarists reveal astonishment at the persistence of the attacking troops; here the British came under the enfilade fire both of the troops lining the position and of a battery of artillery concealed in the village.

Their losses mounted up rapidly and under punishment the lines began to get more and more confused. Nevertheless they went on doggedly right up to the wire entanglement. The wire was over four feet high, firmly staked, and nearly 19 feet across. Confronted by this hopelessly impenetrable obstacle and faced by continuous machine gun and rifle fire the survivors began to turn and retire in confusion, though scarcely one in ten that had advanced seemed to go back again. At Bois Hugo, the German 153rd Regiment recorded how dense masses of the enemy, line after line, appeared over the ridge, some of their officers even mounted on horse-back and advancing as if carrying out a field-day drill in peacetime. Our artillery and machine guns riddled their ranks as they came on. As they crossed the northern front of the Bois Hugo the machine guns there caught them in the flank and whole battalions were annihilated. The English made five consecutive efforts to press on past the wood and reach the secondline position, but finally, weakened by this terrific

had to give in. British divisions had attacked with a strength of just under 10,000. In three and a half hours on that second day at Loos they lost 385 officers and 7,861 men. While their remnants made their way back past XI Corps HQ, the Corps Commander, their terrible losses, they

The two

General Haking, asked them what had gone wrong. As the Official History has it, their reply was one of classic simplicity: 'We did not know what it was like. We will do it all right next time.' There were now gaps left in the British line between Loos and Hulluch, and the last reserve, the Guards Division, was hastily brought up to fill them. However, German counterattacks were increasing dangerously, and Foch had to be asked to take over the right flank of the British line opposite Loos. In return, Sir John agreed

Commander

Chief

in

Chief of the General Staff

Army

CinC

Field

Marshal

19

Meerut

Lahore

2

Faskcn

Jacob

Keary

Home Capp ei

7

John French

Lieutenant-General Sir William Robertson

FIRST General Sir Douglas Haig

r Divisions

Sir

t

r

3 Cav

9

1

Thesiger

Holland Briggs

replaced

21 47 Guards 46 15 Montagu- ForesterMcCracken Barter Cavan Walker Stuart-

24 Ramsay

12 Wing

Wortley

September 28 by Bulfin

demand for a renewal of the which Haig undertook, out of step with the French, on October 13, to no effect and much 'useless slaughter'. Although the issue had really been decided on the second day of the fighting, the Battle of Loos dragged on until at last it petered out on November 4. to Joffre's offensive,

British command classed Loos, like Chapelle, as a victory. But as Churchill later said of the 1915 offensives as a whole, 'Victory was to be bought so dear as to be almost indistinguishable from defeat.' And if the Allies could claim that at Loos, Artois and Champagne they had at least 'bought' experience, this was even more true of the Germans who once again showed themselves readier to profit by their lessons. Summing up what he had learned during 1915, Foch declared to French: 'We must abandon the brutal assault in masses more or less deep and dense. ... It has never reached its goal.' From those at home all over France or in Britain, the optimistic or non-committal communiques, the cheery front-line propagandists, could not hide the passage and arrival of the train-loads of wounded, nor silence the persistent talk of mismanage-

The Neuve

ment they brought with them. In France the generals again survived the mounting criticism. They could always speak of the territory of eternal France regained from the Germans, even if it were only to be measured in square yards. Joffre was even promoted, to be overall Commander-in-Chief of the French Army in all

theatres.

It

was the French government which

suffered

from

the

failed

hopes

of

the

autumn

offensive. Viviani,

who had headed

all-party government since the beginning of the war, was replaced by the liberal, Briand; and Gallieni, the saviour of Paris in 1914, became War Minister.

the

first

The Chamber of Deputies was now demanding a greater say, with secret sessions, examination of generals, visits to the front and a more exact control over the running of the war. In Britain

it was the army against the criticism was directed, and Sir John French was made its scapegoat. His own Chief-of-Staff, Robertson, now joined Haig in intriguing against French with the King who, as titular Head of the Army, still had considerable influence. Haig was

whom

French

in

command on

this,

the main

Moreover none of my officers commanding Corps have a high opinion of battle front.

Sir John's military ability. In fact they in him.' All this was relayed to the King. Finally, in November French 'leaked' an inaccurate account of the reserves' episode to The

have no confidence

Times. Haig demanded that the full facts be 'put on record'. On this French collapsed, and by the middle of December 1915 his fate was settled. He was given a title and posted to the home front; Haig got his job as Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in France with Robertson as Chief of the Imperial General Staff. 1

provoked into becoming more open in his criticism of French by their violent disagreement over the availability of the reserves at the Battle of Loos. Whatever justification French may have had for not

allowing them to be committed at once, he blundered after the battle by trying to cover up, by entering wrong dates and times in his despatches, the delay in handing the reserves over to First Army. Haig would have none of this. Visited by Lord Haldane on October 9, Haig was outspoken on French's handling of the reserves, as well as on the C-in-C in person: T also felt it my duty to tell Lord Haldane that the arrangements for the supreme command during the battle were not satisfactory. Many of us felt that if these Conditions continued it would be difficult ever to win!' A few days later, Haig was voicing his doubts even more strongly to Robertson: '1 have come to the conclusion that it is not fair to the Empire to retain

ALISTAIR HORNE was born in London in 1925 and has spent much of his life abroad He served with the RCAF and the RAF in Canada in 1 943 and ended his war service as a Captain in the Coldstream Guards in the Middle East He then went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read English Literature Since leaving Cambridge, he spent three years in Germany as correspondent for the London newspaper Daily Telegraph and contributed to many other newspapers and periodicals His L include: Back into Power (1955), The Land is Bright (1958), Canada and the Canadians (1965) He has also written a trilogy The Price of Glory, The Fall of Pans, To Lose a Battle

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.HINESE SITUATIO In the^hree years which followed the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty and the establishment of a republic, China moved — through the ambition of Yuan Shih-k'ai — along a path that led step by step to the restoration of the monarchy, to a system of government that should have died with the last emperor. Standing apart from the war but harassed by the ambitions of other powers, China faced political chaos by the summer of 1916. R. I. Heiferman

On

October 9, 1911, a bomb was accidentally detonated in a warehouse in the Russian concession in Hankow, China. Attracted to the scene of the explosion, police soon discovered that the warehouse was the site of a miniature arsenal where members of the revolutionary T'ung Meng Hui (United League) were storing arms for an uprising against the Manchu dynasty planned for October 16. Several persons were arrested and the Hankow police, supplemented by Manchu officials and soldiers, searched the area for other conspirators. Local members of the revolutionary group, faced with the immediate prospect of arrest and conviction, hastily decided to take action rather than retreat or abandon their effort. The following day, October 10, their efforts at infiltrating local army garrisons bore fruit when some 3,000 troops mutinied and joined the rebellion. Although the number of rebellious soldiers represented only a small portion of the troops in the area, Manchu civil and military officials quickly fled, leaving control of the Wuhan area (Hankow, Hanyang and Wuchang) in the hands of the revolutionaries. Authorities in the other provinces of China responded quickly to the Wuhan revolt by declaring their independence of the Manchu dynasty in rapid succession. Scarcely four months after the incidents of October 9-10, 1911, the last Manchu dynast abdicated, thereby ending over 250 years of Manchu rule and a period of almost two millenia of imperial government in China. The Revolution of 1911 had begun. Ironically, the beginnings of the Revolution were accidental, locally supervised, and outside the control of the leaders of the revolutionary movement. On the very day the Revolution broke out, the leader of the revolutionary movement, Dr Sun Yat-sen, was travelling on a train in the United States between St Louis, Missouri, and Denver, Colorado. He read about the Wuhan revolt in a Denver newspaper. Likewise, Huang Hsing, the co-ordinator of T'ung Meng Hui military strategy in China, was a long way from the area. In short, after many years of planning and at least ten abortive attempts at insurrection, the leaders of the antiManchu movement found themselves faced with a successful revolt against Manchu authority which they had neither originated nor controlled — a fact which was to have important consequences after the Manchu abdication. Organised attempts to overthrow the Manchu dynasty had beomt increasingly common after China's humiliating defeat in the ipanese War of 1894-1895 and the failure of the Reform J

1036

of 1898. The anti-Manchu movement in the last years of the Ch'ing (Manchu) dynasty was not, however, a unified one. Reformist and revolutionary groups were fragmented and represented many conflicting political persuasions and programmes. Typical of this fragmentation was the rivalry between Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and Sun Yat-sen. Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (1873-1929), a product of the old scholar-gentry tradition, was a 'gradualist' who favoured a constitutional monarchy for China. After his flight from China in 1898, Liang rallied like-minded reformers to his standard from his base in Japan. On the other hand, Sun Yat-sen (18661925), a western educated physician and a professional revolutionary, favoured republican government and the overthrow of the monarchy. Like Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, he organised his supporters from an exile base in Japan. Between 1898 and 1911, supporters of both men carried on an ideological battle with great effort and vigour. All attempts to resolve their differences and bring them together in a common front against the Manchus failed.

Movement

Towards the Revolution Most anti-Manchu groups were based in Japan. In many ways, the Revolution of 1911 was 'made' in Japan. The Japanese government offered reformers and radicals political sanctuary and financial support. Japanese political leaders closely followed events in China and the exiled Chinese community in Japan. As a result of such interest, Japanese influence in China increased considerably in China between 1894 and 1914. From their bases in Japan, Chinese reformers and revolutionaries planned and plotted against the Ch'ing government. The largest of these groups, the T'ung Meng Hui, was founded in Tokyo in 1905. Led by Dr Sun Yat-sen, the T'ung Meng Hui organised branches in the Chinese communities of Europe, North America, and South-East Asia as well as within China itself. With the funds raised from overseas Chinese communities, the T'ung Meng Hui initiated a number of abortive insurrections against the Manchus between 1905 and 1911. By necessity, such attacks were organised outside China, the common military strategy of the group being to infiltrate areas bordering China which provided political sanctuary and safe retreat in the event of failure. Although none of these revolutionary attempts were successful, they cannot altogether be judged as military failures. They were also bold and dramatic demonstrations against the Manchus. The actions of revolutionary leaders and martyrs helped sustain faith

and attracted the attention of young movement. On the other hand, because of their

in the revolutionary idea

Chinese

to the

repeated failures, the revolutionary leaders increasingly turned their attention to the particular strategy or technique that might provide for their successful defeat of the Manchus while neglecting to devote much attention to the implications of a defeat of the dynasty. There were few if any well denned plans for the immediate post-revolutionary period. This lack of programmed developments after 1911 led to the rapid prostitution of the Revolution. Much of the impetus for revolution came from outside the revolutionary community. Railway controversies and debates over foreign investment and control over Chinese enterprise occasioned dissent and insurrection. In Szechuan, China's largest province, the announcement of the Ch'ing government that it was going to nationalise railways in May 1911 led to an angry outcry from local investors who feared that they would not be justly compensated for loss of their investment. Their demonstrations were soon transformed into an active uprising against the government in the summer and autumn of 1911. In fact, it was this uprising in Szechuan, lasting through the beginning of October 1911, that led members of the Hunan provincial chapter of the T'ung Meng Hui to plan the Wuhan revolt. It is clear that grievances against the dynasty were varied and widespread. Thus, the rapid disintegration of dynastic loyalues after the Wuhan revolt was not without substance or foundation. The anti-Manchu rebellion stimulated by the Wuhan revolt was spontaneously supported by the populace. The increasingly rapid defections from the dynasty made government efforts at reprisal difficult since government forces were surrounded on all sides by hostile adversaries. As news of the growing strength of the rebellion reached Peking, leaders of the government ordered general Yuan Shih-k'ai out of 'retirement', appointing him as the new Governor-General of Hunan-Hupei provinces with orders to suppress the rebels. Yuan Shih-k'ai (1859-1916) was a reluctant supporter of the Manchus who had many personal wounds to nurse against the court, not the least of which was his forced retirement by the Manchu regent. Yuan, who was a cunning man and a political chameleon, correctly assessed the weak position of the dynasty and hesitated to come out of retirement to fulfil the commission of the court. Playing out his hand, he demanded a series of concessions from the court before committing himself to any

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Above: Yuan Shih-k'ai with members of the Diplomatic Corps at Peking. After supporting the monarchy he changed sides and replaced Sun Yatsen as President of the Republic. Above left: Imperial procession 1916 style: Yuan Shih-k'ai accepted Emperorship but was not crowned

action on their behalf. Included in Yuan's demands were provisions for the opening of a national parliament, the organisation of a responsible cabinet, amnesty for those connected with the Wuhan insurrection, adequate allocations for military spending, and, most important, the vesting of all powers of control to deal with the rebels in him. On October 27, Yuan Shih-k'ai was appointed Imperial Commander of all Manchu forces; however, he continued to refuse to activate himself until his other demands had been met. At the same time, playing off both sides against each other, Yuan Shihk'ai's agents opened discussions with the leaders of the rebellion seeking to insure his position regardless of the outcome of the struggle between the revolutionary party and the court. On October 30, the Manchu regent announced the first in a series of concessions including the release of political prisoners, the drafting of a constitution, and the creation of a new cabinet with Yuan Shih-k'ai as Prime Minister. On November 8, Yuan was officially 'elected' by members of the appointive National Assembly and a week later he came out of retirement and announced his cabinet. Yuan's cabinet nominees included prominent Chinese of all pursuasions. However, few of these nominees accepted their appointments, leaving their posts to be filled by members of Yuan Shih-

personal clique. Shih-k'ai began his ministry in November 1911, the position of the Ch'ing government was precarious. The revolutionaries controlled almost two- thirds of the territory of China. Only four areas (Manchuria, Chihli, Honan, and Shantung provinces) were firmly controlled by the government. On the other hand, the revolutionary armies had no unified organisation or command and many of their leaders were still abroad. Although opposition to the Manchus was strong, the lack of co-ordination weakened the revolutionary effort which was, in effect, a province by province struggle. On November 23, 1911, representatives of all provincial revolutionary groups met in Wuchang to establish a national revolutionary provisional government. This first meeting of revolutionary leaders revealed wide differences of opinion, particularly on the question of who should head the revolutionary government. Such divergence of views within the revolutionary community extended to almost every other issue and not only delayed the creation of a provisional government, but also pointed to the weakness and division of the revolutionaries. k'ai's

When Yuan

A

temporary arrangement The arrival of Sun Yat-sen in Shanghai on December 25, 1911 provided an opportunity for leaders of the revolutionary community to resolve their differences on the matter of the provisional presidency. A world famous figure and best known of the revolutionary leaders, Dr Sun was elected provisional president of the Chinese Republic on December 29. He was inaugurated in Nanking on New Year's Day 1912. His position, however, was clearly a temporary one, being held by him until such time as Yuan Shih-k'ai, the man who held the ultimate fate of the Republic in his hands, should decide to desert the monarchy and join the Revolution. And the revolutionaries were more than willing to sacrifice Sun Yat-sen and negotiate with Yuan Shih-k'ai. As early as the November meeting to establish a provisional government, there had been suggestions that the provisional presidency might be offered to Yuan in return for his pledge of support for the antiManchu cause. The real purpose of continuing negotiations with his agents was to persuade Yuan Shih-k'ai to overthrow the Manchu emperor, after which Yuan would be offered the presidency as a reward. On his part, Yuan adopted a policy of caution and compromise with the revolutionaries. Even as fighting between the Manchu forces and the revolutionaries continued, Yuan Shihk'ai's emissaries were meeting with representatives of the Nanking government. Although repeatedly offered a prominent position Within the new government, Yuan remained silent, hoping to strike a major blow against the revolutionaries before entering into hard negotiations. The election of Sun Yat-sen as provisional president resulted in a temporary suspension of discussions between Yuan Shih-k'ai and the revolutionaries. Viewing Dr Sun's election as a breach of promise, Yuan doubled his efforts in the field against the Nanking rebels. Realising the situation, Sun Yat-sen made every effort to pacify Yuan and revive the discussions between their agents. Indeed, on the very day of his inauguration (January 1, 1912), Sun Yat-sen sent the following telegraphic message to Yuan Shih-k'ai: / beg to call the attention of Premier Yuan in

Peking to the fact that when I reached Shanghai two days ago my comrades entrusted me with the responsibility of organising a provisional government. Although I have accepted this position

1037

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actually waiting for you. and my offer clear /<> ///< world. I hope that you will

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The purpose of Sun Yat-sen's message to Yuan Shih-k'ai was to assure him that the wa\ was si ill open for his defection from the Ch'ing government Yuan, however, refused to be placed in a position where he would have to make a choice between monarchy and republicanism. In his response to Sun Yat-sen, he sidestepped the issue, pointing out that it was up to the public to make the choice between the monarchy and the republic. Trained as a military man and a statesman during the last days of" the monarch). Yuan Shih-k'ai never meant to ruin the imperial image and was careful to attend to the needs of the court in his negotiations with revolutionary representatives. Out of tune with republicanism. Yuan's ideal was constitutional monarchy. Although forced to accept republicanism, he neither lie was event ualK respected nor understood it. Moreover, he believed that there was little popular support for it. Revolutionaries like Sun Yat-sen were not unaware of Yuan Shih-k'ai's views, but were willing to accept him as the price to be paid for avoiding a long and bloody civil

promote

its

progress.

When Sun

Yat-sen received this message, he immediately tendered his resignation and recommended that Yuan Shih-k'ai be elected his successor. On February 14, 1912, the provisional legislature at

Nanking unanimously elected Yuan Shih-k'ai March 10, he took the oath of office

the presidency and on Peking.

to in

war.

During January 1912 there was talk of abdication at the Manchu court and a series of imperial conferences were held to discuss this possibility. Yuan Shih-k'ai, who had gradually come to favour abdication, counselled the court to negotiate with the revolutionaries but was opposed vigorously by members of the court. Some called for his resignation and an attempt was made on his life. As the details of his attempts to negotiate with the revolutionaries were revealed in the court, Yuan's influence within the court temporarily waned. Likewise, the revelation of his machinations against the revolutionaries turned them against him. However, this decline in fortune was only temporary. On February 1, 1912, the Empress Dowager ordered Yuan Shihk'ai to negotiate the conditions for the Manchu abdication with revolutionary leaders. On February 3, he cabled Nanking to this effect. Nine days later (February 12), the emperor Hsuan Tung Henry Pu-yit abdicated, acknowledging the loss of the Mandate of Heaven and empowering Yuan Shih-k'ai to organise a proi

visional government. The terms of the Manchu abdication included provisions for the favourable treatment of the emperor, protection of imperial properties, and an annual allowance for Acts of violence, such as arson

1038

the imperial family. In addition, the revolutionaries promised to accord the Manchu and Mongol minorities the same privileges as the majority of the Chinese people. The favourable settlement extended to the imperial family insured the success of the Revolution and accounted, in part, for the relative ease of transition from monarchy to republic. Soon after the Manchu abdication, Yuan Shih-k'ai sent the following telegram to the revolutionary government in Nanking: That a republic is the best political system is generally acknowledged by the world. It is really due to the energy and blood given by you gentlemen over many years that the nation has been enabled to make the change from a monarchy to a republic, which will be an end/ess blessing to the people. We should now work hard to

in

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of the Imperial palaces depicted below,

Stability and confidence Shih-k'ai's administration began on an auspicious note. Although the new government was financially insecure, it had wide popular support. Optimism was high and for the first time in many years there was a semblance of unity. Yuan Shih-k'ai controlled the largest military force in the country and had the allegiance of both militarists and republicans. Foreign reaction to the new government, although cautious at first, became increasingly enthusiastic. President Yuan Shih-k'ai was viewed by the diplomatic community as the strong man China needed. There was confidence within the foreign community in China that Yuan Shih-k'ai would continue to guarantee foreign rights and privileges. This confidence was expressed in the continued willingness of foreign financial houses to invest in China and extend credit to the new government. During the first years of the Chinese Republic domestic matters took precedence over foreign affairs. The creation of the Republican government occasioned the transformation of previously clandestine political groups into political parties operating within the context of a parliamentary environment. The first provisional

Yuan

were frequent and

effective during the revolution

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constitution, aaoptea in iviarcn tyiz, aennea tne powers or government agencies, provided for the election of parliamentary representatives, and established a responsible cabinet system. On the surface all seemed well, but, as later events were to prove, institutions alone do not suffice to make democracy work. In preparation for the first parliamentary elections of 1913, revolutionary and reformist groups revised their organisations, rallied their forces, and presented their programmes to the electorate. Although the tendency in the immediate post-revolutionary period had been one of political fragmentation, shortly after the appearance of the Republic splinter groups began to realign, forming larger political units. The formation of the Kuomintang (National People's Party) in August 1912 illustrated this trend. Formed from a union of the T'ung Meng Hui and other political groups, the Kuomintang (KMT) became the largest and most important political party and the nemesis of Yuan Shih-k'ai.

Mounting tension Chinese political parties during the early Republican period were rather unusual. Membership in one political party did not preclude membership of additional political parties. Multiple party membership was common, obscuring and confusing political issues. Party platforms were vague, often amounting to little more than short phrases or slogans designed to attract the widest possible membership. Without precedent or tradition, the operation of Chinese political parties left much to be desired. They had little popular support and remained the monopoly of the intelligentsia. Nevertheless, their very existence marked a major step forward from the days of the monarchy when there was no public choice of representatives. The national parliamentary elections of 1913 represented a high point in the early history of the Republic and a milestone in Chinese history. For the first time in over two millennia, the Chinese people were electing their governmental representatives. The results of this first election were interesting. The won the largest number of legislative seats and its leader, the young activist Sung Chiao-jen, emerged as the leading critic of Yuan Shih-k'ai. Campaigning all over China for the election of candidates, Sung attracted a great deal of notoriety and attention, threatening to replace Dr Sun Yat-sen as the leader of the revolutionary party. Dr Sun did not play an active role in this first election, devoting himself instead to his schemes for railway development and political indoctrination. Although the won the majority of parliamentary seats in the 1913 election, it is difficult to assess the real meaning of the victory since so many of its members also belonged to other political parties. The could not exercise effective leadership after the election and this undoubtedly reflected the problems of multi-party membership. Moreover, the was itself divided into several conflicting cliques and factions which precluded party discipline and co-operation. Although critical of President Yuan Shih-k'ai, members were able to take few if any effective measures to block his programmes in parliament and eventually individual members of the party either succumbed to Yuan's wishes or were purged from the

KMT

KMT

KMT

KMT

KMT

KMT

KMT

parliament. As the division between Yuan Shih-k'ai and his critics in the parliament grew, tensions mounted. Yuan Shih-k'ai proved to be incapable of comprehending the meaning and importance of a 'loyal opposition' and took drastic steps to silence his critics. The assassination of the leader Sung Chiao-jen by paid thugs on March 20, 1913, closely associated with the President illustrated the fact that Yuan Shih-k'ai was prepared to resort to whatever measures were appropriate to silence dissenters. Believing himself to be above the law, Yuan Shih-k'ai sought to silence a political movement by killing its leader. The murder of Sung Chiao-jen did not result in the disintegration of the KMT, but, on the contrary, fortified young radicals within the party to reject any compromise with Yuan Shih-k'ai. Sung's murder marked the beginning of the end of parliamentary government in China. Much of the hostility between Yuan Shih-k'ai and his critics was centred on the negotiation of foreign loans. The financial condition of the Republic was precarious to say the least, many critics of Yuan's government questioned the ways in which Yuan Shih-k'ai sought to obtain foreign funds and, more importantly, the uses for which such capital was sought. As later events were to prove, there was legitimate reason to fear that Yuan planned to use such funds for irregular purposes. There was also considerable argument over whether foreign loans should be negotiated before experiments were made with fiscal reforms at home. Unable or unwilling to update the tax base of the country, Yuan Shih-k'ai resorted to obtaining foreign loans to cover expenses,

KMT

many people equaieu wiui uie last yeais. ui liic monarchy. Although foreign capital continued to be available to the Chinese government, foreign banking consortiums continually raised the terms upon which such notes might be secured. Such terms generally included high rates of interest discounted in advance plus some pledge of anticipated tax revenues as a guarantee of repayment. Loan agreements often provided for foreign administration of Chinese governmental agencies concerned with collection of tax revenues as an additional guarantee of repayment. The 'Reorganisation Loan' of 1913 was typical of the financial arrangements engineered by Yuan Shih-k'ai's government with foreign banking consortiums. Ostensibly to be used toward reorganisation of government finances, the terms of the note called for a principal grant of slightly over £25,000,000 to the Peking government. The terms of repayment called for a high rate of interest which was to be discounted from the note in advance. With provisions for repayment until 1960, the total amount due back to the lending institutions if paid would have amounted to over £68,000,000. To guarantee payment of regular instalments of the note, the Chinese government pledged revenues derived from the salt tax to the repayment of the loan and agreed a policy wnicn

to the principle that a foreign adviser acceptable to all of the lend-

ing institutions be appointed to manage the tax collection. Protests immediately followed the announcement of the 'Reorganisation Loan'. Members of parliament, who were not asked for their advice or consent during the negotiations leading up to the conclusion of the loan agreement, were informed of the agreement only after it had been signed. Such irregular procedures angered members of parliament, many of whom were not to be placated by Yuan Shih-k'ai's attempt to legitimatise the agreement after it had been concluded by presenting it to parliament for its approval. party members led the opposition to the loan, basing their opposition on the grounds that it had been illegally concluded and that its provisions represented a threat to China's administrative independence and integrity. Their persistent and vigorous protest eventually led to Yuan Shih-k'ai's decision to take appropriate action against these trouble-makers. Yuan Shih-k'ai's ill-timed announcement of the 'Reorganisation Loan' after the assassination of Sung Chiao-jen led to the final breach between the President and the KMT. leaders, aware that their early hopes that Yuan Shih-k'ai might be trusted to guide the Republic were no longer valid, began to advise open resistance to the government. Sun Yat-sen, who had returned to China from Japan shortly after the murder of Sung, suggested that a military expedition be launched against the Peking regime. However, such strong feelings were not shared by all within the KMT. Divided between opposing factions and cliques, there was little chance of effective organized resistance to Yuan Shih-k'ai. Moreover, even if there had been greater unity on this issue, the military posture of the was weak. They could not depend on the loyalty of any of the military leaders and received little or no sympathy from the foreign diplomatic community.

KMT

KMT

KMT

Disintegration

Having secured

his foreign loan and used it to refurbish his army, Shih-k'ai moved against the and its supporters. Accusing party leaders of instigating and leading a series of armed insurrections against his government, Yuan quickly moved to curb the powers of the KMT. Those who had openly participated in the attempt to forcibly unseat Yuan, known as the leaders of the 'Second Revolution', were declared persona non grata in Peking and barred from their seats in parliament. The remaining delegates, divided between various factions, drifted toward disintegration. On November 4, 1913, Yuan Shi-k'ai finally signed the order for the dissolution of the KMT. The following day, over 350 members were evicted from their parliamentary scats and this number eventually rose to 438. Since the exclusion of this main members of parliament meant that the number left did not constitute a quorum, parliament no longer functioned, although it was not formally dissolved until January 10. 191 I. After the purge of the and the dismissal of parliament, all power was concentrated in the hands of Yuan Shih-k'ai and his Peiyang clique. At this point it became clear to leaders of all political parties that Yuan Shih-k'ai's presidency was not only not crucial to the continuation of the Republic, but, on the contrary, that the Republic could not exist as long as he remained in power. Unfortunately this realisation came too late. With the dissolution of parliament all effective opposition to Yuan Shih

KMT

Yuan

KMT

KMT

k'ai

was

silenced.

Yuan

Shih-k'ai took advantage of the absence of parliamentary opposition to announce the adoption of a new constitution on May 1, 1914. The result of this constitutional revision was to

1039

render Yuan a dictator. Cloaked in terms more appropriate to Confucian monarchy than to constitutional government, the new constitution paved the way for Yuan Shi-k'ai to attempt a revival of the monarchy with himself as the founder of a new dynasty.

Rumours

of a restoration of the monarchy became increasingly after the dissolution of parliament. Yuan Shih-k'ai did little to discourage such rumours. Indeed, his actions seemed to

common

corroborate them. Worship of Confucius was revived and the President himself prepared to offer the former imperial sacrifices to Heaven in the winter of 1914-1915. The old imperial censorate was resurrected and the power of former scholar-gentry in local affairs was reaffirmed. There could now be little doubt that Yuan Shih-k'ai sought to restore the monarchy and ascend the Dragon Throne. In the process of reviving the trappings of monarchy, all forms associated with parliamentary government rapidly disappeared. Just as Yuan Shih-k'ai and his supporters were getting ready to revive the monarchy, the Japanese government presented an ultimatum to the government in Peking. Presented to the Chinese government on January 18, 1915, the Japanese note (the TwentyOne Demands) asked for concessions that would have made China an economic and political appendage of Japan. Faced with internal dissention and external pressure, there was little that could be done to block the Japanese, and Yuan Shih-k'ai's government eventually agreed to most of the demands. There is some indication that members of Yuan's entourage tried to take advantage of the crisis posed by the Japanese ultimatum to advance the monarchal candidacy of their leader. There is also evidence to suggest that Yuan Shih-k'ai himself was willing to concede to Japan the majority of her demands in return for a Japanese pledge of support

new monarchy in China. But regardless of his motives, there was little Yuan Shih-k'ai could do to resist Japan. The other China powers were preoccupied with the war in Europe and could not be counted on to offer any resistance to Japanese aggression. Moreover, as a result of Japan's membership in the coalition opposing the Central Powers, she had for his

been given the 'green light' to take over former German leaseholds in China. As a neutral power, the Chinese government was not consulted when this decision was made and could do little short of risking war with Japan to alter this fait accompli. Without being privy to the councils of the Allies, the Chinese government could only hope that world public opinion might be rallied against the Japanese ultimatum. Although a valiant effort was made to mobilise this public opinion, the ultimate result was of no immediate use to the Chinese government. Weak oral condemnations of Japan were no substitute for firm warnings backed by force. Thus, the Chinese government finally succumbed to most of the demands on May 25, 1915. The Twenty- One Demands were primarily economic in nature. However, their effect in China was essentially political. As a result of its management of the Sino- Japanese crisis, the government of Yuan Shih-k'ai was discredited in the eyes of millions of Chinese. Anti-Japanese sentiment served to rally the divided anti-government forces in China much as anti-Manchu sentiment had rallied the reformers and revolutionaries prior to 1911. Modern Chinese nationalism was born in the response to the Japanese ultimatum. After the conclusion of the Sino- Japanese agreement of May 25, 1915, Yuan Shih-k'ai again turned his attention to the restoration of the monarchy. Fortified by what he believed to be a tacit pledge of Japanese assistance for his endeavour and convinced that the Chinese people more than ever wanted a restoration of monarchy and strong central government, Yuan Shih-k'ai redoubled his efforts. The pro-monarchical movement was given a shot in the arm in August 1915 when Frank Goodnow, an American scholar and adviser to President Yuan, published a summary of his study of the political situation in China which suggested that republicanism did not suit the condition of China. Yuan Shih-k'ai and his associates made much of this study and lost no opportunity to publicise its suggestions wherever there was an interested audience.

deliberation they unanimously 'elected' Yuan Shih-k'ai emperor, issuing the following communique on November 20: Reverently representing the public opinion of the nation, we request that the president, Yuan Shih-k'ai, be made emperor of the Chinese empire. He will have the highest and most complete authority and sovereignty over the nation. The throne will be handed down in his royal family from generation to generation through 10,000 generations. Yuan Shih-k'ai officially accepted the offer of the National People's Congress on December 12, 1915, proclaiming the beginning of the Hung Hsien (Glorious Constitution) reign. Yuan Shih-k'ai's restoration of the monarchy triggered an immediate response from both friends and foes alike. Remnants of the former political parties joined forces to resist the monarchy. They were soon joined by constitutional monarchists and supporters of a Manchu restoration. Even some of Yuan Shih-k'ai's closest associates in the Peiyang clique demurred from accepting his monarchy and joined the anti-Yuan movement. Within the foreign community, reaction to the restoration was mixed. Most foreign governments, preoccupied by the war in Europe, could do little to aid or obstruct Yuan. Nevertheless, many foreign governments eventually voiced their reservations about Yuan's scheme. Most important of all was the decision of the Japanese government to obstruct and oppose Yuan Shih-k'ai's restoration of the monarchy. Yuan, who had counted on Japanese support for his venture, lost one of the major sources of support for his new regime. Foreign opposition to the restoration of the monarchy reinforced domestic opposition to Yuan Shih-k'ai. Operating in the safety of foreign legations in Shanghai and other cities, domestic critics of the new emperor organised and initiated efforts to overthrow him. In the provinces, local political and military leaders joined the defection against the Peking government, demanding that Yuan Shih-k'ai give up his monarchist aspirations or face the prospect of civil war. Yuan Shih-k'ai's stubborn decision to go ahead with his scheme in the face of mounting opposition quickly led to the beginning of the 'Third Revolution' of 1915-1916. On December 25, 1915, military leaders in Yunnan province declared their independence from Peking. This declaration was followed by similar actions in other provinces. By February 1916 it was clear that the restoration of the monarchy might have to be temporarily postponed. Hoping that the monarchy might be saved by delaying his coronation, Yuan Shih-k'ai placed all his resources against the rebels. When this failed, Yuan was forced to accept reality and acknowledge that the monarchy would have to be abandoned. On March 22, 1916, Yuan Shih-k'ai formally disclaimed any intention of reviving the monarchy and ordered his agents to arrive at a compromise with his opponents. Yuan Shih-k'ai and his agents sought to revive the presidential system and insure his return to that position. However, having destroyed by his own hand the institution of the presidency, it proved impossible for him to reinstate himself in that position. Yuan Shih-k'ai's abandonment of the monarchy proved to be no simple solution to his problems. His opponents continued to press their cause against him, refusing to be bought off by sweet phrases and empty promises. At the lowest ebb of his career, Yuan Shih-k'ai died on June 6, 1916. In the aftermath of his death, China was divided and the Chinese people subjected to ravenous and undisciplined warlords. Political chaos and civil war were the legacies Yuan Shih-k'ai left to his people.

Further Reading

Chen, Jerome, Yuan Shih-k'ai (Stanford: Stanford University Press, Clubb, Edmund, Twentieth-Century China (New York: Columbia

1961)

University Press, 1964)

Hsueh, Chun-tu, Huang Hsing and the Chinese Revolution (Stanford Stanford University Press, 1961) Li, Chien-nung, The Political History of China: 1840-1928 translated by Ssu-yu Tenf and Jeremy Ingalls (Princeton Van Nostrand, 1956) :

Sharmon, Lyan, Sun Yat-sen His Life and its Meaning (New York: John Day and also reprinted in paper by Stanford University Press, 1968) Wright, Mary, China in Revolution (New Haven: Yale University :

Return of the emperor Throughout the summer and autumn of 1915 the monarchists increased the number and scope of their activities. Spear-heading this drive was the Peace Planning Society formed in August 1915 by Yuan Shih-k'ai's agents in order to win public support for the restoration of the imperial system. As a result of their activities, large numbers of p^ titions supporting the revival of the monarchy were collected and sent to Peking. In October 1915, Yuan Shihk'ai called for the elec on of a National People's Congress to deterne the future form o. government in China. In November 1915, tes to this congress assembled in Peking. After two weeks of 1

1040

Press, 1969)

RONALD IAN HEIFERMAN is at the City University of New York, where he offers a variety of courses in the history of modern China and Asia. He has also taught at Connecticut College and at Quinnipiac College in the state of Connecticut. His research interests include the history of the early Republican period in China, feminism in China and education in China. Between 1963 and 1964 he was a Fellow of Yale University and also the recipient of a National Defence Fellowship in Chinese from 1 964 to 1 966. He collaborated with Mr Sydney Mayer on a work about colonial administration in South East Asia.

1

1

For Australia and

New Zealand, the First

World War was the

first

chance to show

world that their young men could among the finest soldiers in the world.

to the

be

With no

real military tradition behind them, these nations started from scratch: but the fighting at Gallipoli proved them capable of producing superb military material. John Vader. Above: troops rest in a recently taken trench

ANZAC

rhere is no doubt that the people of Australia and New Zealand did not want war. yet paradoxically many of their young men hoped that it' war did break out they would have an opportunity to serve overseas Both countries were strongly opposed to any form of imperialistic aggression, all the more so aggression by a nation against a smaller one. The main reason for this it universal attitude was the spread of 'liberalism', emanating from the new governments o( both countries, which was a form of democratic socialism combined with private enterprise. Compared with Britain, military traditions were not an important part of the social heritage, and the military hierarchy, like other discarded social caste systems, was to the average person ridiculously artificial and authoritarian. It has been suggested that because there had been no war test o( Australians and New Zealanders, fighting as nations, their young men felt that they had to prove their national manhood. Perhaps this is true and possibly, like the youth of Britain in those post-Edwardian days, youth was unsure of itself in the new emancipated world, and the bold front of over-willingness to enlist covered the confusion inside. Volunteers had served, and gained some renown, in the Sudan and the Boer War, bringing back tales of war that were not of the horrors but of the adventure. Australia had achieved its nationhood in peace, when the dx colonial states had federated in 1900, yet in young men there formed that curiosity as to how Australians would compare with the old armies of other nations should the test be offered, the so-called test of manhood, a legacy from being brought up in a Victorian society, still culturally and emotionally British, when tin soldiers, uniforms and pop guns were universal toys. The evolving of the Anzac people, in a little over a century of colonial settlement, was toward a community of 'equality, liberty and fraternity': most British emigrants had left their homeland with these ideals at the back of their minds; they brought up their children to believe in them. The average Australian liked to think that all other Australians were average, viewing with suspicion any departure from the ordinary, particularly any departure from conventional and traditional cultural activities. His language eventually became average, the many shades of Scots, Irish, Welsh, Cockney, West Country or Midlands accents combining to form a confident, instantly recognisable speech. This change also occurred in New Zealand. Each new generation, whether in Sydney or 3,000 miles away in Perth, or in North Island or South Island, were communicating with a similar, classless accent which helped in the development of the extraordinary esprit de corps that existed not only in each battalion or division but in the two countries' entire army. The important years of democratic development were the second half of the last century. Before the turn of the century New Zealand's government had legislated for free education, national insurance, a rational taxation system, conciliation and arbitration and old age pensions. Land settlement programmes reduced the big holdings where the land was not being sufficiently developed and farmers with small capital were encouraged to take up land, with government assistance, on Crown land which still formed the bulk of the area suitable for farming. In Australia it was fortunate that an intellectual humanist, Alfred Deakin, was voted to the premiership from where he could promote progressive legislation. Deakin had a strong attachment to British constitutional traditions, believing that Britain and the Dominions could not only help each other but together could influence

the world in democratic government. Yet he was an Australian nationalist and challenged the old ideas about the 'colonies'. The first three Federal parliaments were dominated in policy by Deakin and his followers, their outstanding contributions to the country being the setting up of the machinery of the Commonwealth, the introduction of the Conciliation and Arbitration Bill and the granting of old age pensions. The Arbitration Court had enforceable powers to adjudicate over industrial employeremployee disputes, with stress placed on conciliation and legalising voluntary agreements. Arbitration encouraged and strengthened unionism so that everybody was given a 'fair go', an ideal that was an important part of the behaviour of Anzac soldiers. The 'anti-militarism', which was practically universal throughout both countries, remained the mood of the people until events forced them to a compromise. Australia and New Zealand were lonely outposts on the borders of Asia, and when the Japanese were so successful against Russia in 1904/5 the realisation of the countries' defence position was brought home to every political faction. The editor of the Sydney Labour newspaper, Worker, wrote to his readers that th curse of 'the armed occupation of your country by invaders — p< sibly by invaders of an inferior race' was greater than allowi: g militarism to flourish within. .

1042

A

fear of Chinese or Japanese expansion was one factor which led to a radical change in defence planning. The other major factor was the realisation that German naval expansion had

quickly reached a point where Britain's mastery of the seas was seriously challenged. Thus, when the Imperial Defence Conference was called in 1909, Australia, New Zealand and the other Dominions were anxious to use the opportunity to work together on the important subject of defence. Reflecting the wishes of the voters, Australian politicians ensured that in their dealings with Britain the Dominion's navy and army were to be free from any demands for use in actions which could be at all imperialistically aggressive. The politicians knew, however, that should Britain request aid in an emergency the people would surely rally to her aid. Basically, it was this fear of Chinese or Japanese expansion which led to the 'White Australia Policy'. Speaking in a debate on the Immigration Restriction Bill, which was to limit the immigration of Asians, Deakin said: 'We find ourselves touching the pro-

foundest motive of individual or nation — the instinct of selfpreservation — for it is nothing less than the national manhood, the national character, and the national future that are at stake.' W. M. Hughes, from the Opposition, also strenuously campaigned for the passing of the Bill. So, Australia and New Zealand began to think in military terms, not because of events in Europe, but because of possible aggression from Asia. To expand their armies, compulsory military training was introduced without much opposition in both countries. Most members of the political parties and the public generally accepted the compulsory military training clause in the defence legislation because, although 'anti-militaristic', they felt that a strong defence was necessary if Australia were to survive as a white British Dominion. Hughes argued that, compared with a large standing army, citizen soldiers were cheap and that their abilities in action had been proven during the Boer War. Compulsory training was not a severe strain on the young men called up; service was only for two or three weeks during the year and was considered to be morally and physically uplifting for youths from underprivileged areas.

A new threat in the Antipodes: fear of Japanese expansion After the defence Bills were put through, Lord Kitchener was invited out to advise both dominions on organisation. In Australia before Federation the states had been responsible for the training of their few groups of soldiers, mainly mounted infantry. When Kitchener arrived, late in 1909, he simply advised on the forming of brigades on the British system and also recommended training for junior and senior cadets — 12 to 18 year-olds. In 1908 Colonel W. T. Bridges, head of the Australian military forces, instituted his Defence Scheme for organising the Militia into numerous areas, each under the control of a fully-trained officer, warrant-officer or N.C.O. In 1912 Major-General A. Godley went to New Zealand from the British general staff, to inaugurate the defence scheme there and also to plan for the possibility of common action between the two Dominions. The two countries agreed to the plan that each should provide, in the event of war, volunteer contingents based proportionately on the number of troops sent to the Boer War; a division of two Australian brigades and one New Zealand brigade was thought then to be sufficient. In 1913, New Zealand agreed to a scheme for the immediate formation of an expeditionary force should it be needed. At the same time Australia's Defence Minister also undertook to guarantee Britain that such a provision was acceptable to the government. The British government conducted foreign relations on behalf of the Dominions and was solely responsible for declaring war, but only if the Dominions intended to do so, and in the event they were not obliged to send any troops outside their own territories. When the cabled news of declared war reached the two countries, both governments cabled back to Britain their declarations which were passed on through British diplomatic agencies. Simply because of the close ties to the Mother Country, which the majority of Australians and New Zealanders still referred to as 'Home', these Dominions entered the war, accepting the causes as just reason, and with the same aims for fighting and winning. In 'Anzac to Amiens', C. E. W. Bean summed up popular opinion of the dav when he wrote, 'Had Britain, despite her pledges, held Conditions of life in such places as New South Wales ensured that from them were in the prime of physical condition

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out of the war. the loyalty of the overseas Dominions to her would hardly have survived the shock to the Empire's honour.' Britain expected the response she received. New Zealand had offered, on July 30, to send a force of troops if need arose. On the 31st, Australia's Defence Minister declared that his country was no tan -weather partner' and the opposition leader pledged that Australia was with Britain 'to the last man and last shilling' should she he forced to go to war against Germany. When war was declared, both countries immediately offered volunteer forces to serve overseas and the volunteers were eagerly awaiting the call: the announcement of the formation of the AIF and the New Zealand Expeditionary Force resulted in overenlistment for the 20.000 and 10,000 places. By August 1914 there were 45.000 compulsory trainees in the Militia, known as the Australian Military Force — AMF. When the volunteer force, the Australian Imperial Force — AIF — was formed, the majority of the first 20.000 to volunteer were militiamen and only about 6.000 had received no previous military training. The New Zealand Force was recruited mainly from the Militia and the volunteer regimental units retained Militia titles; in some cases whole units volunteered to a man. There had been no slaughter by this time in France. War was looked on as an adventure, and service overseas meant visiting more interesting places than the outback or the small towns and cities, and, because of their ancestral background, the volunteers eagerly looked forward to visiting Britain.

Maoris and Raratongans After sampling military life in the simple war games, during a couple of weeks on military training grounds, the undercurrent 'we are as good as they are' attitude was increased. Any anti-war attitude was a social stigma, an unmanly, cowardly quirk despised by the majority of these men who were adolescent during the Edwardian chest-out-for-picture-pose days. Battle meant competition, between each other individually and against the foe collectively; battle to them was not an expression of bloodlust, it was a test, that would carry them over the top with bayonets fixed, to prove their manhood. There was the thrilling gamble in the sporting challenge of going to war to show that each man was as game as the other man, a competition bred on the playing fields and so easily transferred to the big ridiculous game of risking life against bullets and steel. For these early volunteers born in the Dominions it was not the irresistible call of duty. When war broke out, Maoris too offered to send volunteers. A Maori battalion of Pioneers was formed, leaving for the Middle East by the end of February, 1915. Also, from the Polynesian islands north of New Zealand, Raratongans from the Cook Islands and men from the Ellice-Gilbert group, hardly any of them able to speak English, offered their services. These men were enthusiastically received for they showed a fine instinct for military work. In the Anzac camps the Islanders were in great demand as entertainers, singing in their magnificent voices the rhythmical songs of their homeland. Bridges was given the responsibility of forming the AIF and also the Australian Division. He chose his staff from the small permanent group who administered and trained the militia: some of these officers were on loan or exchange from the British army. In choosing junior officers, Bridges at first decided that they should be from the better-educated sections of the community, and over 22 years old. Later, in action, it was found that neither age nor background were as necessary as the qualities of leadership; those who possessed such qualities were promoted as platoon leaders in the newer battalions on Gallipoli. The Royal Military College, opened the year before at Duntroon, was a nursery for all future staff officers and when Bridges formed the Division he took all the partly-trained first year's cadets. A policy of choosing cadets for the college, which was also open to New Zealanders, was that they should be from families which were representative of both professions and trades. RSM's, RQMS's and senior NCO's were picked from the permanent Warrant-Officers and NCO's. The age limits of th early recruits were 18 and 38. One fifth of the First Division w e under 21, two-fifths between 21 and 25, and the rest over t. age. About 90^ were single men. The medical examiners rt ted all but the fit, and even those with defective or false te< were unacceptable — in the first 1

i

year of recruiting. odley was appointed to command Major-General Sir Alexandei little difference between the the New Zealanders. There wa types of men in the two forces, bu there was a big difference in their uniformed appearance. The New Zealanders wore a shorterbrimmed hat, turned down and with the colour of their service arm streaked through the puggaree. Their locally made uniform cloth

1044

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was a browner khaki than the pea-soup shade of the Australian The New Zealanders wore Militia regimental badges while the Australians wore only the swords and daggers, or 'rising sun', badge on collar and hat, the hat turned up on the left side and, in the Light Horse, festooned with emu feathers. The Australians remembered how brass buttons glinted in the South African sunlight so all their brass buttons were oxidised a dull black. The Australian uniform of Norfolk jacket and breeches, with puttees over brown boots, was not as smart as the British uniform, but it was more comfortable and serviceable. The Anzac Light Horsemen, mounted infantry, were mostly bushmen who had ridden in from the plains and mountains to join their newly-formed units — many of them had bred and owned the horses they rode, and all of them, cattlemen, sheepmen, farmers, stockmen, orchardists and townsmen were used to handling rifles. They rode long in the stirrup and their easy, natural seat rarely gave a horse a sore back, despite long hours in the saddle. They wore leather bandoliers over their tunics and leather leggings below cord breeches. Although they practised with sword and lance during training at home, they carried only rifle and bayonet cloth.

in action. Their horses were not all of a uniform type though most were of some thoroughbred strain, varying from sturdy ponies to three-quarter Clydesdales. They were tough, well cared-for animals that could withstand long days in the heat and hard

going of the desert The Anzac convoy assembled in the bay at Albany, Western Australia, and the 28 transports sailed for France via the Suez Canal. On the way the escorting HMAS Sydney sank the German raider, Emden, the only real danger in these sealanes. By the time the convoy called at Aden, Turkey had entered the war and the Australian High Commissioner in London had discovered that the winter quarters on the Salisbury Plain had not yet been prepared. He therefore cabled Bridges: 'Unforseen circumstances decree that the force shall train in Egypt and go to the front from there. The Australians and New Zealanders are to form a corps under General Birdwood. The locality of the camp is near Cairo.'

Disgrace of desertion Birdwood's headquarters were in Shepheard's Hotel, Cairo, and it was here that the simple code-word 'Anzac' was suggested by a clerk who was inspired by an A & NZAC rubber stamp. It was long after the landing on Gallipoli that the word came into general use. It was in Cairo that the Anzacs developed a reputation for 'playing up a little' when on leave. Their pay of five shillings a day (Australians received another shilling, deferred until discharge) was the highest for any army's privates, giving them enough ready cash for spending wildly on drink. Venereal disease claimed many victims and as it was more or less considered a self-inflicted wound, the contracting of the disease was also considered to be very shameful, particularly for those cases sent back home. Under Australian regulations a deserter could not be shot, but among those early volunteers the disgrace of being taken from his unit and sent home was a great deterrent. With the arrival of the second contingent a second division was formed — the New Zealand-Australia Division of two NZ brigades and one Australian brigade. A Mounted Division, of three Australian Light Horse brigades and the NZ Mounted Rifles Brigade, was also forming. Under the agreement with Britain, that the Dominions would pay for their troops' keep, the

cost of transporting, arming, victualling and supplying ammunition was six shillings per man per day. Gallipoli was the Anzacs' first experience of battle. General Bridges was mortally wounded in May, and he died soon after

him a proud and comforting thought: have commanded an Australian Division for nine months.' He was proud of his men and they were satisfied with their own efforts. Every day they were 'proving their manhood' and proving too that they could fight an enemy superior in numbers, equally brave and situated always above. In the early days some of the over-enthusiastic offered five pounds to take the place of men going over the top. Once they had been in action, had seen close hand-to-hand fighting, had seen their comrades killed or badly wounded, they unflinchingly went back again and again. But it was adventure no longer, just a horrible job which they were determined to finish. At places, like Lone Pine and Quinn's Post the enemy was only a few yards away, too close for shelling and the few mortars available were not accurate enough: the fighting was rifle and bayonet charges, sniping and home-made bombs tossed at each other. The preconceived ideas of dashing, glorious,

in the trenches within rifle fire of the Turks, Corporal wrote: 'Dead figures writhe and beckon in my dreams, Wild eyes look into mine;

expressing what was to

'Anyhow,

While I, bewildered, watch the bloody stream With misty eyes ashine'

I

heroic charges died in the trenches. In the 'Anzac Book', compiled

Comus, AIF,

and, 'Horror it is and courage, yet are both Part of the price of peace.' John Masefield looked at the Anzacs with a poet's eye: "They were the finest body of young men ever brought together in modern times. For physical beauty and nobility of bearing they surpassed any men I have ever seen, they walked and looked like kings in old poems. As their officers put it, "they were in the pink of condition and didn't care a damn for anybody." At Gallipoli there were no tin hats and the men wore their slouch hats or pith helmets or British army caps. They had rifles and ammunition but most of the other necessary arms were in short supply. They fought a tough enemy and in the heat of the battle it was a fight to the finish and no quarter given, yet prisoners were well treated and the Turk developed a respect :

.

The finest body of men ever brought together in

modern times' Above

left:

ANZAC soldiers,

relatively class-free society,

brought up in a were always

conscious of the need to 'let the other fellow have a fair go'; an Australian gives a wounded Turk part of his precious ration of water. Right: Diggers. The universal nickname for Australians derives from those who, like the sapphire diggers above, wrested a living from the earth solely by their own efforts.

Below:

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well as dash and heroics for his foe. Turks at Quinn's Post once tossed a metal cigarette case into the Anzacs' trench. On the case was inscribed, in French, Take, with pleasure. To our heroic enemy.' Men of Anzac won Victoria Crosses and many of the lesser decorations for bravery in action, and in the process of earning renown for their name there were thousands of casualties. Later in 1915 the recruiting queues shortened but while the battle for the Gallipoli heights was being fought there was no shortage of volunteers to reinforce the divisions. Newspaper accounts were bringing home to people the truths of war, that it was not an exciting game but a bloody horror, and instead of offering adventure the politicians asked for more volunteers 'to destroy the warloving propensities of Germany who had spent so long preparing to plunge the civilised world into a horrifying cataclysm'. When the landing took place there was no mention in the newspapers of Anzac participation until five days later, and even then the conservative Sydney Morning Herald provided only an inch and a half of space; the second battle of Ypres was the lead story in one column and another column was devoted to the problem of alcohol which affected munition production in England. By May 12, small lists of casualties appeared daily and there were accounts of actual fighting. A London Times report was reprinted in Australian newspapers: 'The essence of the Dardanelles enterprise is the resource and vigour of the Australians and New Zealanders, who were ordered to carry out a task which would test the mettle of the most seasoned soldiers. They have already done well, and now are facing more deadly obstacles with a passion and enthusiasm.' Gradually the reporting from the front increased in detail and people at home began to realise just how terrible the fighting on Gallipoli could be. One account was headed Thrilling Duel, the report of a dramatic hand-to-hand fight: 'A thrilling duel between an Australian and a Turk, both equally matched, took place on top of a cliff at Sari Bahr. First they knocked the rifles out of each other's hands. The Australian did not attempt to regain his weapon, but closed with the Turk, hoping to throw him over the cliff The frantic struggle was intensified as they neared the edge. The Turk clung to his opponent like grim death, and both fell into the sea, where the Australian got the upper hand, and clutched the Turk's throat and held him under the water until he was drowned. The Australian is now at Cairo severely wounded.' And of the landing: 'There was an electric quality about the Australasians (an often-used term for Australians and New Zealanders) that inspired panic among the Turkish trenches. Fiercely angry at the loss of several of their officers, they charged with fixed bayonets, not waiting for supports. One charge was led by a doctor; another by a priest ... it was bayonets all the time. One huge farmer actually bayoneted a Turk through the chest and pitchforked him over his shoulder.' And so, as the casualty lists for the Anzacs grew from a halfcolumn to four full columns of newsprint by June, the politicians and the newspapers appealed for more recruits. There was no controversy in Parliament about whether or not the Anzacs should fight uphill against superior odds; it was taken for granted that they would stay there and win. It was to be expected that recruiting from the small populations must decrease as time went on, but the newspapers gave much space to the problem and persuasive editorials appealed to men to join up: 'Every man who fails (to join) must realise that his friends are the weaker and will suffer all the longer for this reason,' wrote one patriotic journalist. The vision of adventure had been changed to national loyalty in a time of crisis and, in June 1915, the Anzac peoples were solidly united in supporting Britain with all their resources, both human and material. There had been no protest marches against the sending of more troops over to the front, only marches to encourage more men to go to the recruiting offices.

Further Reading Barnard, M., A History of Australia (Angus & Robertson 1963) Bean, C. W., Official History of, Australia in the War: The Story of Anzac, 2 Vols. (Angus & Robertson 1941) Greenwood, G., Australia- A Social and Political History (Angus & Robertson 1945) British Official History, Military Operations: Gallipoli, 2 Vols. (Heinemann 1929, 1932) Masefield, John, Gallipoli (Heinemann 1916) North, John, Gallipoli: The Fading Vision (Faber

& Faber 1967)

[For John Voder's biography, seepage 711.]

„_- c«

AT THE

FRONTi

COME AND HELP •1ST ATS Above and below:

Recruiting, based on comradeship and affection for

the Mother Country' rather than hate of the enemy. Right: A sniper at Quinn's Post. Many Australians were fine shots with a rifle

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From

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18

until mid-July, British forces in Gallipoli had concentrated their main offen-

sive efforts against the heights of Achi Baba in the Helles area at the southern tip of the peninsula. This mode of proceeding had produced infinitesimal success at the cost of huge casualties. Even while these attacks were taking place,

however, General Hamilton received word that the attitude of the British governhis efforts was becoming increasingly sympathetic. By the end of June that sympathy took tangible form in the promise of some five new divisions, three of which ought to reach him by the

ment towards

-

end of July. He was also promised increased naval and materiel support. For a commander who had accustomed himself to manipulating slender resources this was almost an embarrassment of riches. Conto allow him that it appeared choice of offensive area that would remove the campaign from the immobilising confined with associated restrictions geographical position, artillery and the

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protected machine gun. On the other hand, prudence dictated that fresh troops should not be engaged in an area far removed from veteran support, and that the special facilities of the Royal Navy be utilised to the full. Manpower is not all in war. All this became immediately apparent

when Hamilton and his planners sat down to determine how to fit the new forces into fresh offensive plans. At Helles it had been proved time and again that, as in France, flesh and blood was unequal to

capturing prepared modern defences without overwhelming artillery support. At the same time, Anzac, that small toehold on the side of the peninsula, appeared to be unable to accommodate the men already there, let alone vast new forces. In fact the extra men offered to him presented real problems to the British Commander-inChief, for he already had his plan in mind, and that plan involved the capture of the heights of Sari Bair Ridge that dominated the peninsula, and the capture of that prominence involved striking out from the Anzac Cove position, with all the man-

power

restrictions

this

choice

involved.

A

reconnaissance in late May had revealed that the ridges to the north of the Anzac beachhead leading from near the sea towards the heights would require heavy fighting, and might indeed be impossible, to clear. On the other hand, an attack from the sea coast through the valleys between these heights, if unobserved for a short time, might lead directly if more precipitately onto the main heights of Sari Bair further inland. These heights themselves, Battleship Hill, Chunuk Bair,

Hill Q, and Koja Chemen Tepe, were obviously thought by the Turks to be inaccessible and were, consequently, lightly held or not defended at all. It was thought that the use of darkness might enable troops to capture positions at the seaward end of the outlying ridges and thus provide cover for attacking forces which would then advance up the valleys and then, still using the cover of the night, climb to their objectives. Once on high ground they would take advantage, in the south, of a long ridge called Rhododendron Spur that led

from a peak called Table Top

to the crest

Chunuk

Bair, and, at the far north of the positions, of the Abdul Rahman Spur that led to Koja Chemen Tepe. The capture of these high points on Sari Hair, and even of Chunuk Bair alone, would not only turn the Turkish position that faced the An/ac beachhead but would enable British forces to overlook the waters of the straits below and thus threaten to cut off the whole Turkish force on the tip of the peninsula. It is important to grasp the fact that it was here, in this concept of a night attack on Sari Bair. launched from the An/ae beachhead, that Hamilton and his planning staff visualised a victory. This was the of

focus, and all other attack plans including those that were subsequently developed at Helles, at Anzac over old ground and even that at Suvla Bay were conceived of as ancillary and secondary to this preoccupation. The tortured el ill' hangers at Anzac, with a leaven of new men, were to

have their chance to strike out, to liberate themselves and even to win the campaign It was on this presupposition that llamil10H) •

-•

B^B

tun's planners lavished their chief care. Looking back, it is clear that the addi-

tional plan to land two divisions at Suvla, to the north o( the Sari Hair operations,

complemented integral

ance was

it

am) ought

to

have boon

But, although Us importdiml) felt during the planning

to

it.

stages, this importance

was

not sufficiently

recognised. This was shown by the absence of liaison arrangements between the Sari Hair and Suvla operations and in the lockloss way that those in command at Suvla were appraised of their function. It is difficult not to conclude that the area was originally considered as a place where the time and energies o\' two divisions of men could be taken up. This being the case, it is best to look hard at the possibility of victory at Sari Hair considered on its own. bearing in mind that supporting operations might help to divert or disconcert the Turks, and thus only obliquely contribute to the success of the main effort. is absolutely certain that the main It attack was required to bear in its own thrust the possibility of final success.

Disease and enervation was ultimately decided It

that about 20,000 reinforcements to support this attack should be landed at Anzac Cove in great secrecy. These green troops would necessarily be held inactive for one to three days prior to the attack and then launched through unfamiliar country towards objectives that could only be dimly appreciated by map study. The veterans at Anzac, on the face of it, appeared to be a better bet, but among these soldiers there was hardly a man whom disease and the enervation induced by their almost unbelievable habitat had not weakened. Consequently the estimation of six- to eight-hour marches needed to reach their high objectives did not argue strongly for such men's success when one considers that heavy fighting might well be required on the way. Another point to be noted is the fact that while the route along the Rhododendron Spur had been reconnoitred carefully, that to the north advancing along the valley towards Kqja Chemen Tepe was imperfectly known, to say the least of it, and the danger of alarming the Turks was considered too great for an attempt to be made to supply that knowledge, in July or August, by scouting. Despite all this one may well think that to make a success of such an attack was not beyond the powers of intelligent men. This may be so, but it is necessary to emphasise that this work was to be accomplished in a tight six- to eight-hour schedule — in the dark. It is true that the least anticipated

danger was heavy Turkish resistance, and this, coupled with surprise if it could be obtained, would be a great asset. Before describing the ancillary plans it necessary to mention the command arrangements. General Hamilton at once appreciated that intricate planning schedules required strong alert commanders, and he asked that either General Byng or General Rawlinson be sent from France for Suvla. Lord Kitchener refused this request. Instead of one of these stalwarts, Hamilton got General Sir Frederick Stopford to command the newly formed IX Corps which was to land at Suvla. It may well be that it was this decision that led to Suvla being somewhat neglected in Hamilton's overall attack preparations. is

Stopford was 61, and was experienced neither as a war leader nor as a fighting soldier. Given strong supervision, Stoplord might have qualified for the judgement of 'adequate'. He did not get the required surveillance. Furthermore, although he arrived on duly 11 from England, ho was not told of the Suvla plan in any detail until July 22, because, he was informed, it was still secret. The overall command of the corps at Anzac, reinforced by the 13th Division. 29th Indian Infantry Brigade and a brigade from 10th Division, devolved naturally on General Hirdwood. The Sari Bair assault was to be directed by his subordinate, General Godley, who up to that time had led the New Zealand Division. Birdwood and Godley knew more about their plans than Stopford did. Godley, however, did not prove to be a strong commander. He was wedded to his base headquarters, and no commander in France ever conducted a battle with such monumental ignorance of its actual progress as Godley managed to build up through sheer physical immobility. The two divisional commanders under Stopford were Generals Hammersley and

Mahon. Neither was that, with a

brilliant.

The

fact is

good plan and mediocre com-

manders, Hamilton did not recognise these elements for what they were. The extra care, attention to problems and informed enthusiasm, based on knowledge of detail, that ought to have supported these men was not forthcoming from the Commanderin-Chief. He was the only one who could have made his leaders not just his enthusiastic friends but rather a 'band of brothers' geared to a common purpose. This leadership was not in him.

Too much secrecy Rather than indulge in useless judgements concerning what might have been it

is

wise to be at once clear that the

Commander-in-Chief and he alone had the power to strike the proper balance between secrecy and information sharing needed to secure the integrated success of his operaHe chose to emphasise secrecy and thereby lost. It is quite possible that Sir tion.

Ian's quick mind never understood or allowed for the more laborious processes that pass for clear thinking in the minds

of lesser mortals, and it is also possible that he never really appreciated how vital it was that specific plans be made to cover the physical communications gap between his island headquarters and his operational commanders at the scene of conflict. Nevertheless,

when command

failure occurs, no

recorder of war dare lay it to the charge of subordinate figures. Liman von Sanders, the Turkish commander, in contrast, gave clear explicit orders to subordinates at crisis moments in action. When his important lieutenants doubted or questioned the possibility of success he summarily dismissed them from their commands. A little iron in the soul of Sir Ian Hamilton might have been better for his men than was his gentle-

manly conduct to his officers. Courtesy and decisiveness need not be contradictory characteristics,

but

over-scrupulousness

and decisiveness are in opposition. After all, Hamilton had to back his own star to win. To do this he must follow his own accurate surmise that his forces would be lightly opposed in the area he had selected for his main attack, and must bear it con-

stantly in mind that this advantage would diminish with the passage of every second of time. This must have been obvious to a man of his intelligence. It was he who must ensure that this transitory advantage would not be wasted. The first 24 hours would be crucial. The other elements of the plan may be briefly described. The main assault on Sari Bair was timed for darkness on the night of August 6/7. In the afternoon a strong holding attack was to be put in at Helles, and another 'forlorn' at 1730 hours by the Australians under General Walker on the strong Lone Pine position at Anzac. Later on, while the ridges towards Sari Bair were being stealthily approached by 10,000 men in the darkness, 13,000 men under General Hammersley (11th Division) were to land south of Nibrunesi Point, and advance as far as the Hills by daybreak. By first light on August 7 it was also essential that the Sari Bair attack should have captured Chunuk Bair in order that attacks from Australian positions at the Nek, Pope's and Quinns should have support from forces moving against the Turkish rear. Meanwhile the 10th Division would land in Suvla Bay and advance along Kiretch Tepe towards Ejelmer Bay while the 11th Division captured Tekke Tepe on Anafarta Ridge. British forces would then hold the centre of the Turks' geographical

W

Above

left:

The man who allowed the chance

greatness to escape him

— Hamilton

of

with

members of his staff. Above: General Birdwood, commander of ANZAC, takes a break from his labours. Below: Turkish prisoners. The Turks fought doggedly against superior numbers and

conceded

little

position opposite Suvla, and, incidentally, stand ready to turn the whole of the Turkish dispositions around Sari Bair.

A natural amphitheatre The one support plan that might have succeeded was the one at Suvla. This was a new geographical area for the British at Gallipoli. The chosen battleground was a natural amphitheatre about four miles square and bounded on the west by the sea. To the north it was overlooked by the Kiretch Tepe which skirted the edge of the Gulf of Xeros. Eastwards, the land sloped slowly upward through broken scrub towards Anafarta Ridge with the high point, Tekke Tepe, in its centre. In the south and south-east were the foothills of the Sari Bair range that effectively sealed off the area. The seacoast on the west was indented by Suvla Bay, which was about two miles wide at its mouth, between Suvla Point in the north and Nibrunesi Point in the south, whence the coast stretched away south-east of Anzac Cove. Due east of Suvla Bay and Nibrunesi Point was a great salt lagoon that was, in August 1915, dry and could be marched on. Except for a few small hills, lonely outposts of the surrounding high ground, the centre of the Suvla amphitheatre was flat and existence there was hot, and Literally without cover, from either the sun or tinTurks on the heights. Near the seacoast were two hills known as Lala Baba at the south of the salt lagoon, and another, Hill 10, slightly to the north of it. To the south-east Chocolate, Green, Scimitar. and the Hills led towards the rising land beyond. Unfortunately it was not known that four feet under most of this arid soil there was fresh water. For purely geographical reasons, to say nothing of null lary ones, such a land was marked out as a transit area leading to the lolls. Asa stop ping point for large numbers of men it could be a natural (rap In this connection fate Stepped in before' the troops gol ashore. For from the begin

W

105]

Stopfbrd was worried about the nature of the opposition he might encounter and began asking awkward questions about Turkish dispositions that GHQ did not answer. They could not since they had not got proper Intelligence. Therefore Stopfbrd asked to have the force due to land at Nihrunesi Point divided, part to land in Suvla Bay on the first landings. This was reluctantly agreed to by Hamilton and the navy (who were worried about grounding). More important, Stopford's instructions were rewritten. The imperious command to swiftly take the Hills, to move along Kiretch Tepe, and eventually to take Tekke Tepe was dropped. The main emphasis now fell on the consolidation of the landing area as a base for the northern operations, and the priority requiring a quick push to take the other objectives became secondary. This was ironic because Hamilton's hunch that the Anafarta Ridge and the Turkish outposts on the Suvla plain were lightly defended proved to be true. In the event there were only about 1,500 Turks, together with a few guns, available to prevent the capture of the original objectives by upwards of 20,000 men in the first day of battle. The fact is that Hamilton seems to have been so mesmerised by the Anzac offensive that he not only committed this grave error of judgement when he revised Stopford's instructions, but he also failed to note the ning,

W

growing danger warnings in Stopford's communications, which indicated that the chief mood of IX Corps had become one of caution. This was bad enough but it concealed a far graver problem. General Stopford, immersed in these problems to which he had been so recently introduced, had to think of himself as a commander with independent objectives rather than a co-commander charged with executing a linked portion of a complicated overall

come

It is not uncommon for details to supplant priority conceptions in the minds of executants in any walk of life. At such junctures it is the task of leadership to recall subordinates to their corporate duty. Stopford received no such a call to sanity before the attack went in. The morale of the troops who were to carry out the whole offensive was not uni-

plan.

formly high. The fresh troops of the new division, lately arrived at the Aegean island centres from England, had read in their newspapers at home about the spring offensive and the resulting casualties at Gallipoli. To state of mind

increase this apprehensive flow of rumour back from the front lines, and the inefficiency that they observed all around them at their reception camps. These vignettes did not combine to frame a buoyant picture. On the Anzac position itself spirits were not exuberant. The miracle is that the troops kept some sense of humour in the face of their hardships at that rough place. Generally, the prevailing mood seems to have been uncertainty. This was not surprising considering the fact that even the officers who were to lead the men into action personally were only enlightened as to the particulars of the planning at the last possible moment; those for the Sari Bair push on August 2, and those for Suvla on the afternoon of the day of battle. Under these circumstances the confidence born of the intimate understanding of a good plan was conspicuous by its absence. Mustafa Kemal claimed to have divined the approach the British would make, and informed his immediate superior, Essad Pasha, the corps commander opposite Anzac, of this. Since Kemal did not predict that the attack would be by night, the nature of the difficult country, sloping down as it did from Sari Bair north-east to Suvla Bay, persuaded Essad to ignore the warning. Actually, General Liman von Sanders' position was not an enviable one. He could not be strong everywhere, and sea-power conferred on his foes the ability to select new attack areas. It was therefore mandatory to keep a sizeable force on the Asian side of the straits. Of the 95,000 men on the Gallipoli Peninsula, he distributed about 40,000 to keep the Helles position stable. Another 30,000 were detailed to hold at Anzac and to prevent a landing between the separated British front lines, between Helles and Anzac. The remainder of his force was deployed to protect Bulair at the neck of the peninsula—an obvious danger point. For the rest he depended upon the swift deploy-

was added the

An

Irish

sniper tempts his opposite

number

ment of forces from one area to another to meet unforeseen emergencies. Although,

we have seen, the British plan involved movement over most difficult terrain, it was nevertheless superbly calculated to as

upset Sanders considerably, involving as it did both concealment and taking advantage of positions already in existence. Even more important for Hamilton was the fact that he had brilliantly chosen the most weakly held part of the peninsula as the assault area. The Turks knew an attack was coming, but they were not sure where, and the reinforcement of Anzac by some 20,000 men, carried out over the nights of August 3, 4 and 5, was not appreciated by Sanders for the strong movement that it was. A fierce Turkish attack on Lean's Trench, half a mile south of Lone Pine at Anzac the day before the British offensive started, was beaten off and did not relate

The bivouac area on the beach at Lala Baba, where heavy casualties were incurred as a result of fire from Turkish 6-inch guns

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i

SWi

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his best to give some small reinforcement to Major Willmer's small force on Anafarta Ridge. Thus, within 16 hours of the attack, Sanders had

Meanwhile he did

made

his decisive moves. In retrospect they have the inestimable value of having been the right ones. Meanwhile, the second offensive of August 6 went in at Lone Pine at 1730 hours that afternoon. When General Bird wood asked Walker to assault the Lone Pine position the latter attempted to avoid this responsibility. When, however, he saw no help for it and the authorities held that this attack must be a part of the general scheme, he laid his plans with exemplary thoroughness. It was obvious to him that a head-on assault over 100 yards of fire-swept ground would simply lead to exorbitant casualties. To mitigate this evil two tunnels were dug across no man's land from which the leading assault forces were to dash at the Turks' trenches immediately the barrage was lifted. Some last-minute explosives were also fired in no man's land to give some cover to those troops who would be forced to start from their own trenches. The plan was partially

would have been more helphad the Australians known that the Turkish trenches were protected overhead by baulks of timber. The attack forces under heavy fire literally clawed their way down through the timbers into the trenches and there began the intimate, man to man and bloody fighting that gave that successful assault its proud but successful. It ful

An operating

theatre' in a dug-out. Hospitalisation

was impossible anywhere on the peninsula Turks. At daybreak on August 7 Sanders ordered his Helles reserve forces

to any Turkish penetration of their opponent's designs. The initiative lay with

the

General Hamilton.

march north-east to help hold the line facing the Anzac and Suvla attacks. In the face of such casualties the temptation of the commentator is to castigate British folly. A more difficult but ultimately more sensible reaction is to praise Liman von Sanders. Faced with reports emanating from the roar of battle in differ-

British deception perceived The offensive opened, as planned, with an attack at Helles. An artillery barrage of less than overwhelming proportions

heralded the attack by three brigades of VIII Corps over a front of one mile with the infantry assaults commencing at 1550 hours on the afternoon of August 6, with follow-up operations on the morning of August 7. No significant gains of territory were made. Some 7,500 Turks were British casualties were nearly killed. 3,500. This figure was some 500 short of the estimated maximum acceptable casualty figure allowed by the planners for a successful holding operation. But unfortunately it failed to rivet the attention of

to

ent areas he calmly allowed them to sort themselves out, and when they had done so he acted with deadly decisiveness. In the night (August 6/7) before he had ordered the Helles reserves to Anzac Suvla, he directed that three battalions leave the Bulair Isthmus for the new front. By 0700 hours the next morning he felt sure enough of his appreciation to order two divisions to leave Bulair and march the 30 miles towards the sound of the guns.

hellish reputation. For the way to victory was over the corpses of friend and foe alike in a confined space, and when they got to the rear of the position the troops found that exploitation was prevented by a

feature of natural geography they could not observe from their own lines known to history as the Cup. The Turks held the final communication trenches to the area of slaughter and so the assault ended. The

Australians won no less than seven VCs. e Between them the Australians and the § Turks suffered over 10,000 casualties. The J great question is did this well planned but| very costly attack assist in the great „ design? That it caused Turkish troop | movements in the Anzac area is unlikely, f

»*#

Above: Landing under

fire in Suvla Bay. Below: Rest for fatigue parties in Suvla Bay. The landings here were exploited far too slowly

What is more possible is that the strength of this attack contributed to the concentration on the Anzac-Suvla front that grew in Sanders' mind during the night of August 6/7. It is often confidently asserted that this attack was within an ace of complete breakthrough. In this context, and considering the broken nature of the country, it is legitimate to ask breakthrough to what, and with what? One of the most attractive pictures painted of the Gallipoli campaign is of suddenly demoralised Turks streaming in undisciplined confusion back to Constantinople. The only evidence in favour of such an argument is that Sanders clearly discouraged pessimism ruthlessly. This, surely, was only his job, and not evidence that demoralisation was only a hair's breadth away. This is

an important point in considering the operation as a whole, for it is generally confidently assumed that once the British were on the heights of Sari Bair all would have been won. It is true that the danger of being cut off might have induced a strong sense of insecurity in the Turks, but the idea that they would not fight tenaciously and firmly in a defensive posture and on the reverse slopes of hills is neither obvious nor complimentary to those stalwart Turks who for four months had fought British and Dominion troops to a standstill.

Night march from Anzac But the main issue was to be joined at Sari Bair, and at about 2230 hours the vanguard of some 10,000 troops quietly began to

move

from

off to

the

Chunuk Bair

in an almost east-west direcNorth of that were Bauchop's Hill and Damakjelik Hill, which together covered the entrance to Aghyl Dere, the selected route to Koja Chemen Tepe and Hill Q. By 0130 hours on August 7, all of these high points had been taken, and Table Top itself had been captured shortly after midnight. The road to Chunuk Bair was open. Unfortunately the force sent up Sazli Beit Dere got lost and only arrived on Table Top to greet the new dawn. On their left the troops advancing up Chailak Dere did better, climbing up to and passing over Table Top and on to the Rhododendron Spur by 0230 hours. As the da> dawned these forces were 1,000 yards short of the e summit of Chunuk Bair. There General § Johnston halted them to wait for the Sazli I tion.

the north along the beach

Anzac

position.

Immediately

north were the first two fingers of high ground that sloped towards the sea from

Right: The landings at Suvla Bay and the major diversionary attack on Sari Bair. Poor support doomed the attacks to failure

••^*r--

| S.

-

ior>r>

m

contingent to roach him. This was deliberate and fatal disregard of the letter and spirit o( his instructions and the 'consequences were of corresponding magnitude. When two hours later he pushed on again towards the summit, the troops came under tire from Turkish troops who were coming into the position in increasing numbers Johnston once more stopped his men and fed them. Finally Johnston was ordered to attack the summit at 1030 hours after a naval bombardment. It was too late. What would have been a brisk fight at 0700 hours was an attack against a deter-

mined position at 1030 hours. The machine guns chattered, the attack wavered and melted and everyone waited for nightfall. This was the decisive moment on Chunuk Hair despite the wavering fortunes of the next few days. The left assault column successful.

By 0200 hours

it

was much less had just reach-

ed the entrance to Aghyl Dere, when it ought to have been at its rendezvous on

Abdul Rahman Spur and

at the foot of Q. Consequently, not onl}' was this force well short of its objective at daylight but the situation was so confused that it would likely take the next day to sort out the whereabouts of the various British units, let alone find and assault positions of the Turks. Only one battalion of Gurkhas seemed in a favourable position to attack — at the foot of Hill Q. As the inevitable consequence of these objectives not being taken the attacks at the old Anzac positions of the Nek, Pope's and Quinn's, which went in soon after dawn on August 7, were sharply repulsed when denied the envisioned flank support from Chunuk Bair. They suffered nearly Hill

600 casualties. While these momentous events were taking place in the desperate dark below

1056

Chunuk

Bair, the Royal Navy was depositing its human and merchandise cargo to the north and south of Nibrunesi Point. By mid morning, most of IX Corps was ashore. One intelligently led battalion of Manchester's fanned out and established itself on Kiretch Tepe. Lala Bj?ba, to the west of the salt lagoon, was taken. There was nothing between IX Corps and the certain turning of the whole Anzac position by the capture of Anafarta Ridge, nothing except 1,500 Turks, and yet it was not until evening on August 7 that Chocolate Hill had been acquired. General Stopford stayed on his sloop Jonquil, which was not equipped or staffed to handle military messages. General Hammersley sought to sort out men and materials on shore, the Turks kept up a desultory fire on the green troops, and no one knew what was going on. During the long hours of consolidation on the beach no one looked in an intrepid way in the direction of the Turks. The navy had not mitigated the evil effects of a night landing of new troops by mixing up their delivery somewhat. Furthermore, as the day advanced and the hot sun beat down on this confused rabble of an army, the sailors were appalled to discover that the troops were not going forward to get the water in the hills but expected the navy to quench their thirst — and the navy had left behind four lighters at Imbros. Meanwhile the bulk of the 10th Division was landed hard under Suvla Point. All day that vast army quivered beside the hot sea in the hot sun, thirsty, annoyingly shelled, leaderless and helpless. On the next day this situation was allowed to repeat itself. Back at Anzac on the 8th it yet appeared possible to keep some benefits for the offensive. Under the command of Major Allanson, the Gurkhas' at the foot of Hill Q

HMS

were

still

anxious to attack and as they

moved up the Hill they were joined by a company of the Warwicks then in command of Lieutenant William Slim, the future Field-Marshal. But they were held some 300 feet from the top. Further to their right

the

agreed

Chunuk

key

to

the

whole position,

was early on swept by naval and the New Zealanders and

Bair,

gunfire, British troops there, led by Colonel Malone, advanced over the top and began to dig in on the reverse side. But the position was exposed to fire from Turkish forces on Battleship Hill and Hill Q, to which difficulty was added the truly crucial one that it proved to be impossible to get reinforcements through during daylight.

Consequently repeated Turkish attacks on this diminishing band forced them back on to their own side of the crest. There they

held out all day against artillery fire and infantry attacks with casualties up to 90% in some units until darkness cloaked their agony and brought blessed relief.

Turks fanatically determined It was a hard day for the Turks as well. From the moment that their reliefs had been thrown in at Chunuk Bair on the morning of August 7, they had realised the importance of the position and their high casualties testified to the quality of their determination to maintain the crest; but they had been shaken by the desperate experience. Nevertheless, the Turkish grip on Chunuk Bair held firm. Further north, Australian and British forces at-

tempting to work up to Koja Chemen Tepe to support their comrades on Sari Bair were prevented by a combination of the intricacies of the Aghyl Dere terrain and carefully sited machine guns. In planning for the morning of August £ 9 it was decided by General Godley that &

Chunuk Bair should be again

assaulted.

Unfortunately it was subsequently decided by General Baldwin, in consultation with Johnston on the end of Rhododendron Spur, to attack the Bair by coming at it from 'the Farm', off and below the Spur to the north — a position that could be reached only after some marching through the still imperfectly understood maze of Aghyl Dere. This movement took all night and as the troops came straggling into 'the Farm' early on August 9 they were at once stop-

ped short. The Turkish line on Chunuk Bair held and Allanson's slightly reinforced attempt to take Hill Q succeeded — only to be blasted back off the Hill by artillery fire that did not appear to be Turkish.

Again Turks commanded the

heights. Furthermore, the balance of power

on the ridge had shifted to the Turks. After the initial thrust, on the night of the original assault, the firm grip of overall leadership was absent from the Sari Bair attacks. Nothing else could have redeemed the time that had relentlessly slipped away, and had now obviously run out. On August 8 at Suvla, Stopford stayed aboard his ship. Hammersley was busy planning a massive advance towards the Anafarta Ridge for the morning of the 9th. On the 8th, however, General Headquarters began to bestir itself. Captain Aspinall arrived and found to his horror that the Anafarta Ridge was still Turkish. Agitated, he sent a message to Hamilton that never reached its destination. It was 1800 hours when the Commander-in-Chief finally arrived. He had been delayed for

hours because of a breakdown in a transport vessel, and it never seems to have occurred to him to commandeer another one. This comic opera nonsense actually decided the Suvla campaign. For when he had arrived on the scene Hamilton was immediately alive to the possibilities of swift action as well as the dangers of delay, for he appreciated that no Turkish attack meant no Turkish troops — for the moment. After listening to Stopford's excuses on Jonquil, Hamilton dashed across to Hammersley on shore just in time to force a night advance which, in Hammersley's hands, proved too ill-organised and just too late. By then Kemal had been given command at Suvla-Anzac by Sanders, and he gave orders for the two divisions newly arrived from Bulair to attack. In the early light they caught Hammersley's forces in the open and drove them headlong back to their starting positions. It was 0600 hours on the morning of August 9, 1915. Sir Ian Hamilton had lost his chance to become a great general. six

Terrible plight

remained for Kemal to give the coup de grace on the heights of Sari Bair as well. At the time it did not by any means It

look like a predictable success. When he arrived at the heights just before dawn on August 10, he was greeted by men who,

much

like

been fought

their foes,

to have With some six the immediate

appeared

to a standstill.

battalions including all reserves in the area he determined to launch a frontal attack along Chunuk

Bair and Rhododendron Ridge and finally the hill against 'the Farm'. It was against all the chances of war in 1915,

down in

the

teeth

of the

of the artillery concen-

possibilities

machine gun and British

tration. Nevertheless, he had divined the moment for action with a sense of genius. He launched his impetuous attack. His

opponents could not withstand the sudden shock and despite heavy casualties the Turks pressed forward with the bayonet. They captured the lesser heights below Chunuk Bair known as the Pinnacle before they were stopped at the apex of Rhododendron Ridge by determined machine gun resistance. Pouring down the valley they cleared 'the Farm' of Baldwin's force. It was between 1000 to 1200 hours that the exhausted remnants of Kemal's force climbed back up the heights: exhausted but victorious. Nearly everyone on the ridge and a high proportion of men at 'the Farm' were killed, and Turkish losses appear to have been correspondingly high. It is true that for a time the British reoccupied 'the Farm' that afternoon but that position was so overlooked from the Pinnacle that it proved too perilous to keep.

As

'the Farm' was abandoned so the Hill Q position became redundant. Allanson's

Left:

Liman von Sanders and the Duke

of

Mecklenburg-Schwerm

set off

towards the front

Sanders' decisiveness was a key factor in the Turkish success. Top: The rugged and arid terrain looking north from Sari Bair toward Kiretch Tepe, the scene of the abortive ANZAC attack. Above: A familiar scene at Gallipoli: stretcher cases on the way back through a communication trench

and Slim's survivors still holding there slowly fell back into the now comforting folds of Aghyl Dere. Twelve thousand Dominion and British troops had become and the attack on Sari Bair | casualties, was over. Sir Ian commented in his dial \ J I that night that this effort 'U-avcs us with a ? fine gain of ground though nun us the vital crests. Next time we will gel them.' There = was to be no next time. The sad task of removing the casualties was complete by the l.'ith. From the front to the dock at Anzac the roadways were choked with dusty, thirsty, desperate :\\u\ 1057

incapacitated human beings. They filled the hospitals at base, in Egypt and Malta, and finally the Aquitania and two other liners carried the residue directly to England. Altogether some 22,000 sick and wounded were brought off from Anzac. sometimes in a state that made the dead -com fortunate. Of the latter many still lie, forgotten by officialdom, in some recess of the Aghyl note or on the outskirts of the Farm". The hospital planning" had not kept pace with the demands of disease and lighting. It had been the same at the Crimea years before. When looking back at military campaigns without responsibility for the results, it is not difficult to apportion praise or blame, but when it comes to operations that seem to have failed by a very narrow margin the task of picking the decisive factors is not easy. As already indicated, the first cause was the quality of the Turkish troops and that of their leaders. That they were aided by good fortune ought not to detract from their accomplishment. It has also been indicated that the scheme for capturing Chunuk Bair from Anzac was asking a good deal from a combination of troops that were either green or exhausted. This was especially the case when those troops were incompletely briefed and working from, and in, a confined space, and challenged with terrain that defied

uniform scheduled movement. Neither should the sheer physical strain of fighting up steep ascents be minimised. It seems fair to suggest that if the heights could not have been seized and firmly held during the first 24 hours, then the chances of success were minimal. For as soon as the first thrust was stopped the problem was to pass reinforcements rapidly to decisive points. This was made difficult by a number of factors that do not seem to have been thought out completely. First there was the imperfect knowledge of the forward area by possible support troops, and the fact that Turkish reactions and the nature of the ground made such movement incredibly difficult. Even if traffic direction had been swiftly and successfully imposed, the number of men available to pass to the front was limited by the Anzac bottleneck, which was in itself a poor reception and launching pad. This is all best illustrated by Major Allanson's pathetic request for food and drink for his Gurkhas on Hill Q after two days of fighting and separation. He was told that there was plenty back at base if he would only send the men down to get it! Therefore, taking all these circumstances into account, the assault on Sari Bair turns out to have been a curiously 'one-shot' affair, and that its desperate nature was imposed by geography. This was true, but the way to turn the position was not to rely entirely on the power of small groups of determined men to hold exposed positions without support. The extra men to do this work were already ashore at Suvla on the morning of August 7

and had they captured Anafarta Ridge and swept south towards Sari Bair, then lightly held British and Dominion positions on the latter heigh would have become tenable. The weaknt s, in short, was that the two plans were on weakly linked and not clearly marked by p iorities The two most ar, failure to estabserious weaknesses in lish and maintain overall strategic priorities and failure to exploit cha ices, were in fatal confluence here. It was tragic, for 1058

A temporary home

for Turkish prisoners taken during the fighting for Sari Bair

Hamilton had put his extra men in the only place where they could act to obtain a clear decision, and they did not know what to do in the circumstances in which they found themselves. At Suvla the denouement continued. Hamilton was not a man given to despondency and the sense of urgency he had directed towards Stopford when the situation was promising, before August 9, was not directed towards making him move in a much more difficult situation. The prospects looked good to the Commander-inChief because of the arrival of the 53rd and 54th Divisions, but the generals on the spot demurred. On the 14th a preliminary movement intended to advance protection for an attack on the following day with the fresh troops was badly shot up, so that Hamilton acquiesced in the cancellation of the offensive for the moment. Stopford, surprisingly, used the occasion to push General Mahon's forces along the Kiretch Tepe, but this move had no deeply serious intentions behind it and Turkish forces held it easily after the original momentum ceased. On this day, when Mahon's offensive was on (an attack of which Hamilton was not appraised) the Commander-inChief relieved Stopford. Kitchener encour-

aged this move and sent out LieutenantGeneral Julian Byng from France to com-

mand IX

Corps. In the meantime, this unhappy command fell to General de Lisle who up to that point had commanded the 29th Division at Helles. The first report of the new commander at Suvla detailing the difficulties in the way of a broad offensive against the Anafarta Ridge, even with the promised supporting troops from Egypt and Helles, at last convinced Sir Ian that without large-scale support of perhaps 100,000 men, he could not hope to carry the offensive, and that he had in fact failed. The home government, long fed on optimistic reports, was at last given the truth. Nevertheless plans went forward for an attack on the Hills and Scimitar Hill on August 21, while Hill 60 at the south of the Suvla position was to be assaulted by troops at Anzac. The British 2nd Mounted Division had arrived and suffered very heavily in the assault on Scimitar Hill, as did the 11th Division and the remnants of the veteran 29th Division. IX Corps, in fact, lost 5,300 men out of 14,300 committed. It was not so different on Hill 60, where a

W

combined British, Australian and New Zealand attack made hardly any progress.

'

Indeed, the decline in Kitchener's own reputation was not unconnected with Hamilton's nemesis. Churchill has claimed that the cause of Hamilton's failure was too little support from home, and that this support was generally sent too late. With regard to the quality of men and materials sent out there is something in this criticism, but with regard to quantity, not much. The fact is that Kitchener did nearly everything that could be done for Hamilton short of making the Dardanelles attack the first priority of the British government — superior even to France. While one may be tempted to agree that this was a sound course from a military and perhaps long run political viewpoint it was not possible to proceed strongly in that direction considering the political climate in London at the time. In the field it had become necessary for superb leadership to make good the lack of training in combined or special operations that characterised the British

looked like crumbling seriously. Amid these alarums and excursions in high places was introduced the growing feeling that Hamilton was no good as a Along with the Commander-in-Chief.

and circumstances had made it impossible to achieve this. Thus Hamilton's failure to provide this had sunk his own credit, and events beyond his control now influenced his future and the future of the campaign at the Dardanelles. French forces had had no serious part in the August offensive and they were likely unimpressed with what they saw. In these

to defend himself,

circumstances it is not surprising that Joffre persuaded Kitchener that the time had come for a further attempt on the Western Front that autumn. This situation, however, was complicated by the fact that French politicians, as distinct from the French High Command, were not keen on an autumn slaughter at home. Their opportunity for manoeuvre was provided by the fact that Bulgaria, her confidence in Allied success at Gallipoli evaporated, now made signs as if to join the Central Powers, and Greece trembled for her safety. Consequently the French, who were not anxious to be directly connected with British failure in the present Gallipoli operations, began to talk of landing six divisions on the Asiatic shore of the straits under the command of General Sarrail, whom Joffre had dismissed earlier in the year from a home army command, but who was of political importance for a number of reasons. The French were probably not serious about these proposed operations. Nevertheless, the fact that they were being discussed provided the opportunity for Kitchener, during the month of September, to encourage Hamilton with the promise of vast support. This daydream was ended when Bulgaria mobilised, then Greece asked for Franco-British support in her north-east and plans were concerted to send Franco-British forces to Salonika, instead of Gallipoli. Without pronouncing on the value of supporting the Greek request politically, two thoughts do emerge.

to let

armed

Exposed, short of ammunition and good guns and facing a rapidly increasing foe, the troops at neither Suvla nor Anzac were capable of decisive operations. Since the August offensive began, some 40,000 British troops

had become casualties,

in-

cluding sick and wounded.

Brave

efforts of submarines important to remember that, during the period of the offensive in August, intrepid submariners of the Royal Navy, defying mines and defensive nets, pene-

It is

trated regularly into the Sea of Marmara. They sank some shipping, but the words of Sir Julian Corbett, the official Naval Historian, must stand. 'All that we can affirm is that neither their activity nor any other

the subsidiary operations availed to prevent the enemy bringing up their reserves to the critical zone.' Meanwhile, the decisions that were to determine the future of the Gallipoli operations had begun to be taken elsewhere. Nothing in the whole campaign is more remarkable than the way in which Kitchener supported his subordinate until the whole truth of the implications of the latter's failure struck home, and even then he was slow to abandon his appointee. of

forces,

The

first is that this direct result of not

and,

second,

new

that the

menaced the whole

situation

winning at

was the

Gallipoli,

Salonika concept

principle of concentra-

tion of force at the Straits.

However, the Salonika decisions meant that another front was about to open, and it meant, therefore, that British ministers could not much longer delay establishing priorities for activity. their military Churchill's chagrin was really caused by the fact that from his viewpoint they had already chosen the wrong one. In the meantime the Western Front's priority never

August

failure,

growing conviction,

this

together with the machinations of grand strategy,

combined

to seal his

doom. Also.

Commodore Roger Keyes, this time with Admiral Wemyss' backing, was busy organising another assault on the political in favour of a purely naval breakthrough. Whether his calculations fortresses

were correct or not will always excite debate, but certainly he had seen enough to have no further confidence in the grand projects of the generals. However, Keyes did not have as his purpose the undermining of Hamilton. That work was first and foremost the result of Hamilton's own lack of success. It soon received added powerful moral assistance. First of all, Stopford was concerned and his Report, which Hamilton never saw, did nothing to increase Kitchener's confidence in the latter. Mahon, Maxwell from Egypt and Bird-

when he

got

home

wood from Anzac added their bits. Keith Murdoch, a well-known Australian journalist, had been allowed to look around at Anzac. When he got to London he gained

who acted swiftly lurid story of the in-

access to Lloyd George,

him

tell

his

competence of the generals to Grey, Bonar Law, Balfour, Churchill, F. E. Smith and Hankey. Asquith was not hard to convince. He had had his fill of unsuccessful generals. Also, a member of Hamilton's staff. Guv Dawney, went to London, without Hamilton's knowledge, to 'tell the truth'. He did so and it did not convey the same cheerful picture as that contained in Hamilton's letters and despatches. Thus the pressure on Kitchener mounted. On October 2 he warned Hamilton that unofficial reports from the Dardanelles were not ringing with confidence, and perhaps some staff changes at Gallipoli GHQ were necessary, and hinted darkly that the Chief-of-Staff, Braithwaite, might be expendable. Hamilton stood firm in his own responsibility. Nine days later he was asked by the Dardanelles Committee to report on the possibility of evacuation. He estimated that half the men and all their equipment would perish and he said this not as a solid assessment but because 'evacuation to me was unthinkable'. On the 14th Lloyd George had the opposition to Hamilton organised, threatened resignation along with Bonar Law, and so Kitchener emerged from that meeting charged with the task of firing Hamilton. Sir Ian Hamilton's successor was General Sir Charles Munro, from France. He was no Gallipoli enthusiast.

Further Reading Aspinall-Oglander, C.

mann

F.,

Gallipoli (Heine-

1932)

Corbett, Sir Julian, Naval Operations Volume III (Longmans 1923) Churchill, W. S., The World Crisis (Butterworth 1923) Hamilton, Sir Ian, Gallipoli Diary (Arnold 1920) James, R. R Gallipoli (Batsford 1965) Moorhead, A., Gallipoli (New York: Harper ,

1956)

[For

Don Schurman's

biography, see page

715.}

1059

At the beginning of November 1916 the armed British steamei

MS

Vara was sent the bottom by the 11

(

'35. a

German

to

sub-

marine which had been delivering arms to Senussi. The survivors wer over to the Senussi by the Germans saga of their captivity and final

Bingham. Below: The NJritish fort at Solium, an early target of the Senussi in their invasion of Egypt is

told

by Major

J.

*

11111:1

*

i

As

HMS

Tara steamed towards Solium on

a fine morning on November 5, 1915 there was no thought of possible disaster among her crew, who scarcely expected a naval action. She was carrying out a routine visit to the small garrison, and although German U-boats were active on the main shipping routes further north in the Mediterranean, none had so far molested the small coastal vessels being used to support the British garrisons spread along the desolate coast between

Alexandria and Solium. The Tara was one of four armed steamers entrusted with the protection of this shipping. Before the war she had been the SS Hibernia, a 1,800 ton vessel of the London

and

North

Western

Railway

Company

A

shout from the lookout on Tara gave of the torpedo streaking through the clear water, but there was no time for manoeuvre. The torpedo struck amidships, tearing a great hole in the ship's side. The Tara quickly began to settle in the water and within minutes she had dived to the bottom, leaving the survivors of her crew to struggle into three of the ship's boats. While the boats were collecting the survivors in the water, the U35 came up and then, with some of Tara''s crew huddled on the after deck, took the three boats in tow to Bardia. After handing over his captives to the Turkish commandant in the port, Kophamel left and next day shelled the two Egyptian coastguard gunboats at Solium, sinking the Abbas and damaging

warning

daily ration of about one pound of rice, a biscuit, a pinch of tea, sugar and salt, and occasional scraps of meat. Paper was also provided so that the crew could write home to their families. It was learned afterwards that these letters were delivered in February, together with another batch written just before Christmas. However, the more relaxed relationships developing with the

Turkish ber 15

officers

were changed on Novema former

when Captain Achmed,

Egyptian coastguard, arrived to take charge. At once the prisoners were ordered to move. They walked some 12 miles northwest over the rocky plateau to Maressa, where they were joined by Lieutenant Apcar, an Indian cavalry officer, and by two ship's officers and a Portuguese cook

1

Left:

The rescuer

of the

crew

of

HMS

Tara, the

Duke

of

Westminster, and

(right)

some

of the survivors, with a nurse, in hospital

carrying passengers on the run across the Irish Sea between Holyhead and Dublin. On the outbreak of war she was commissioned with her former crew, mainly Welshmen under her master, Lieutenant E.B. Tanner, Royal Naval Reserve, and armed with three Hotchkiss 6-pounder guns for war service. Later, the Tara joined the Egyptian coastal patrol under the command of Captain R. S. GwatkinWilliams, Royal Navy, who was responsible for the western section of the patrol and who had orders for one of his ships to visit Solium daily. He was to be prepared to evacuate the port if the garrison were rushed by the Senussi. The meeting with the German submarine

the Abdul Moneim. Continuing his voyage of destruction in U35, Kophamel then sank by gunfire the horse-transport Moorina on November 7, about 100 miles north.

U35 under Commander Kophamel in Solium Bay was almost a coincidence. The U35 had left her home port in Germany on August 4, 1915 to start a period of operations in the Eastern Mediterranean, mainly in the Gulf of Salonika. Then on November 1 she left the Turkish port of Budrum on a mission to reinforce the Senussi in Cyrenaica. She was carrying a party of ten German and Turkish officers and towing two schooners laden with munitions. Having delivered her charges at Bardia on November 4, U35 left the next morning and found the Tara in Solium Bay, about five miles out.

Poet rather than soldier Meanwhile, the crew of Tara spent an anxious first few days ashore, watched by fierce-looking tribesmen and protected by the Turkish officers. Of the original crew of 104, there were 92 survivors. Among them there were a few who were badly injured and Quartermaster William Thomas, who had a shattered leg, died within a few days. The Turkish commandant was Nun Pasha,

whom

in the Moorina when she was sunk by U35. Apparently one of the ship's boats had landed in Senussi territory and its occupants had been taken prisoner, but most of the men had been taken away to work for the Senussi. Lieutenant Apcar was in very poor condition and some of the others were not much better. Weak from dysentery and lack of food, and with no protection against the sun by day and the bitter cold and heavy dew at night, the tired and footsore sailors made their way westwards beyond Tobruk to the Well of El Zebla, a journey of about 120 miles. To make up for the irre-

who had been

Tara's captain described as a 'impressed one more as a poet a soldier'. Certainly, the captives

than were not unkindly treated. GwatkinWilliams said that the Turks were 'kind and compassionate', for some of them had also known the privations of being prisoners of war in Bulgaria, but they could do little to help. There were no medical supplies, little food and no replacements for clothing

gular supplies of food, the prisoners ate the large white snails which were found on the desert scrub, and the sick received some aid on their journey from Mahomet Effendi, a Senussi officer with the escort After resting a day at El Zebla the prisoners moved again on November 24, but this time southwards, and two days later arrived at the Wells of El llakkim Abbvat (Bir Hakeim). This was their des

or boots. The prisoners' plight was made no easier by the stories told of what the Senussi had done to Italian prisoners sent far into the interior. On the third day ashore some Arab clot hing and shoes arrived for the Tara's crew, with some provisions, this giving them a

mat ion, but any visions of a lush oasis were dashed by the sighl of a small stone block bouse with the usual mounds marking two Roman wells in a wide expanse of flat, stony and wmdy deserl relieved only In a small and solitary da palm. The prisoners could now, however, set about building

man who

t

•

LU61

shelters with stones and tent canvas, and at last their meagre food supplies hecame a little more regular. In Cairo, the British authorities could learn nothing of the fate of Tora's crew. At first the Grand Senussi himself professed ignorance oi' the affair, hut the sinking of the Tara and the activity of U35 so close

Cyrenaica were to he sparks which kindled the outbreak of hostilities. Eventually, adopting an attitude of injured innocence, the Grand Senussi admitted in January that the prisoners were being held at an undisclosed place, but he refused to hand them over as they were hostages entrusted to his care by the Turks. The prisoners at Bir Hakeim remained in isolation. Captain Achmed soon left them, promising to seek an interview with Nuri to

behalf. He also promised arrange more plentiful supplies

Pasha on their to try to but. like

many

other promises, there was never any sign of their being fulfilled. The Senussi guards who remained in charge were joined by their families and, in what became a friendly atmosphere, the prisoners were allowed considerable freedom of movement within about a mile from the camp. Escape from the fastness of the desert seemed impossible, and the days settled into a simple routine of collecting firewood, snails and edible roots, cooking, washing, improvised mending and search-

The Rolls-Royce Armoured Car was invaluable the desert, where its speed and mobility, combined with its firepower, were greatly feared by the Senussi. Weight: 3.5 tons. Length: 16 feet 7 inches. Width: 6 feet 3 inches. Height: 7 feet 6 inches. Speed: 50 mph. Armour: 8 maximum in

mm

Tripod for machine gun (stored) 2 Tools 1

Swing seat for optional fourth crew member 4 Lee Enfield -303-inch rifle (one of three) 3

24

1062

2120

2i

23

ing clothes for

lice,

while a working party to clean out old

was sent on most days

wells before the rains started.

Gnawing hunger But there was no relief from the gnawing and permanent hunger. The staple diet was rice, sometimes exchanged for barley flour or dates, while meat was provided when available — which was not often. The Senussi may have been satisfied with such a diet (the guards were not much better off than the prisoners), but for Europeans it

sick

in their weakened suffered even more.

rife.

There were no medi-

was inadequate and,

condition,

the

Dysentery was

cines of any kind and all had to have the same food, or go without. During January and February four of the 95 who had arrived at Bir Hakeim died and were buried with simple ceremony by their comrades. News of the fighting in Egypt filtered through to Bir Hakeim, for there were frequent visitors as tribesmen and passing caravans stopped for water. These visitors were usually friendly to the British captives. Some of the news was not encouraging, for they were told in December that there had been a big battle near Matruh with heavy losses to the British soldiers. However, spirits were quickly raised by positive assurances that an armistice had

Can of water for machine gun cooling Vickers -303-inch machine gun Ammunition feed box Ammunition boxes slung round turret rim Straps for passenger back rest 10 Rolls-Royce engine 5

6 7 8 9

1

Armoured

radiator doors (controlled from

inside car) 12 Magneto 13 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost chassis 14 Steering box

been arranged and that negotiations were in hand at Solium between Nuri Pasha

and the British for the prisoners' release. Gwatkin-Williams was sometimes asked by his guards to write letters and reports to Nuri Pasha, to the Commandant at Solium and to the Admiralty about the condition of his men and asking for food, medicines and clothes. The letters went ostensibly to Solium and Gwatkin-Williams did, indeed, receive an acknowledgement to one addressed to Nuri Pasha, but there was no other response. There was no knowing whether any of these letters, or those sent to relatives at home, ever got past the censor, Captain Achmed. In this 'web of falsehood, mystification and con-

was difficult to know what to whether anybody outside Bir Hakeim knew or cared what happened to

cealment'

it

believe, or

the prisoners.

Throughout, however, Gwatkin-Williams believed that British troops were still in Solium, and he resolved in February to to reach help. When two Indian soldiers arrived to join the sailors at Bir Hakeim in mid-January he was able to gather a little more information for his calculations on the relative positions, and he estimated that Solium was about 80 miles away in a direct line. (The two Indians had been in the Moorina and were among those who had been captured and

make an attempt

15 Handbrake 16 Gear lever 17 Driver's seat 18 Gear box 19 Wooden floor 20 Armoured petrol tank 21 Locker for chains, ropes, personal items etc

22 Cooker 23 Blankets 24 Tow rope 25 Fire extinguisher

taken to work as camel drivers for the Senussi, but most of the prisoners had escaped during the battle near Matruh.) On the night of February 20, GwatkinWilliams slipped away, but the escape was brief. After walking for two nights and covering about 50 miles he was picked up

by nomadic tribesmen and returned under escort via Achmed's headquarters near the coast west of Tobruk. The reaction of the guards was mainly one of relief rather than anger when the

captain returned but soon afterwards the situation became more unsettled as the arrival of supplies became even more infrequent. It was obvious that something was afoot, but no one could say what it was likely to be, not even the guards, whose commander disappeared in the direction of El Zebla to obtain money and provisions. In this desperate plight GwatkinWilliams and his officers could have taken matters into their own hands and marched away with their men, but they were too weak to go far. They had to stay where they were. Then on March 15 instructions were received for Sub-Lieutenant Dudgeon to go to Tobruk with lists of food, boots and supplies needed for a journey, and he left with Vasili Lanbrimis, the interpreter

(known as Basil). What this really meant and where they might be going was a mystery, but at least the hope of action served to relieve their sufferings. Meanwhile unexpected help was at hand. On the same day, March 15, British forces reoccupied Solium, and the armoured car unit under the command of Major the Duke of

Westminster advanced westwards with

orders to pursue the enemy 'with reasonable boldness'. Moving fast in their RollsRoyce armoured cars over the stony plateau, they overtook and routed the remnants of the Senussi force about 25 miles west of Solium. Exhilarated, they returned next morning to the fort on the plateau above Solium with prisoners and guns. During the occupation and search of the town a letter from Captain GwatkinWilliams was found in an Arab house. It had been addressed to the British commander, whom he believed to be still in occupation, and the letter gave the first firm indication of the prisoners' position at El Hakkim Abbyat. Even so, the exact position of the wells was still not known and Captain L. V. Royle of the Egyptian coastguard interrogated the Arabs who had been brought in. One old man claimed to know Bir Hakeim, having been there as a

boy when shepherding his flocks; he thought that it was about five days' march by camel and he was ready to act as guide. At once the Duke of Westminster offered to take his armoured cars to rescue the prisoners, and throughout the rest of the day the force at Solium feverishly assembled the relief column. The distance to Bir Hakeim was estimated to be about 120 miles and armoured cars and tenders were loaded with food and reserves of petrol, while every available ambulance was called in for the rescue operation. Eventually the column was assembled — nine RollsRoyce cars and a number of light armoured cars, tenders and ambulances, numbering 45 in all. In the dark at 0100 hours on March 17, the rescue force moved out of Solium fort and started along the road leading northwestwards through Bir Waer to Tobruk.

The road was hardly more than a rough and stony track but the cars made good progress, only stopping for breakfast at Ali, the guide, was travelling in one of the leading armoured cars driven by Corporal S. C. Rolls, and after going about 50 miles he drew the Duke's attention to a camel caravan moving westwards well off the track. Ali seemed to be trying to please his new masters, for he assured the Duke that the camels were carrying supplies for the Senussi. Investigation proved him to be right. The goods were confiscated and the men taken prisoner, but this incident took up valuable time. It was nearly midday before the column set off again, and then the cars drove on along the road as fast as possible to make up for lost time.

dawn.

'A throng of living skeletons speaking

with breaking voices' When

they had" covered about 100 miles suddenly directed Corporal Rolls to turn off the road and to go southwards across the desert. Rolls says that he obeyed the instructions mechanically, but the atmosphere in the leading cars seemed to change at once. They had left the security of the road, such as it was, and were now moving over unknown ground, like ships in uncharted seas. Doubts arose as to whether the old man really knew where he was taking the column, or whether he Ali

might not be leading them all into a trap. Frequent halts were called to check the position, but always Ali pointed ahead and cried 'Yalla! Yalla!'

The

cars

went on, the

crews tense and sweltering in the early afternoon heat. As faith in the old man

waned, so his own self-confidence and determination seemed to increase, but at 1500 hours, when the cars had travelled over 120 miles from Solium, a halt was called turning back. It was late and the journey back was long. The rest was suddenly cut short by a shout that Ali could see Bir Hakeim. The Duke looked through his binoculars but all he could see was two small humps on the skyline. Ali insisted that the wells were there. The armoured cars advanced, spreading out as they approached, and soon the crews saw figures with rifles running up onto the mounds. Racing forward they saw the

for rest before

figures scatter to flee across the desert. Soon others, not dressed like Senussi, were seen. Even before the cars had stopped by the wells they were surrounded 'by a throng of living skeletons' who spoke 'with breaking voices in the English tongue',

and then the tenders and ambulances rushed forward to bundle out food to the starving men. While the Duke sought out the captain of the Tara, the armoured cars moved away behind the mounds. Revenge, not mercy, was in the hearts of their crews after seeing the condition to which their compatriots had been reduced, and when they saw the figures of the guards running for their lives they opened fire with their machine guns. At the sound of the guns GwatkinWilliams ran up the mound, shouting 'Save them. They have been kind to us.' But it was too late. He wrote afterwards: The garrison

(I

suppose nine soldiers) had been

wiped out in a few seconds. Unhappily with them perished many women and children, who had run out with the soldiers and could not be distinguished from them in the heat of the action. Our guards had died like the brave Arabs they were, with their arms in their hands, and 'in death they were not divided'. If only they had told us the truth sometimes; if only they had not always lied to us, their lives would probably have been saved, for we would have realised that England was still at war with the Senussi, and could have interceded on their behalf. It did not take long to pack the survivors of the Tara and Moorina into the ambulances and cars, after their hunger had been satisfied. The Duke of Westminster boarded the fastest car and drove off to report the news to Solium while the convoy of cars and ambulances followed the way they had come, stopping occasionally to gather the column together. It was a luxury for the joyous sailors to be smoking and eating as they bumped over the desert and sped along the road over a land where they had suffered and walked in pain and weariness. When the sUn set, the cars went on by the light of a nearly full moon and at 2300 hours the first cars arrived at Bir Waer, now an outpost of the Australian Camel Corps. By 0100 hours all were in camp, to be greeted with warm food and comfortable quarters.

Next morning the survivors made the last stage of their

journey to the

fort at

Solium in ambulances, through a thick sandstorm that almost obliterated the way. From there they were taken on camels down to the port and were soon aboard the hospital ship Rasheed which brought them into Alexandria on March 20. Ninety-one survivors of the Tara and Moorina had been rescued in the dash across the desert to Bir Hakeim, and all were now put into hospital to be nursed back to health and strength. Yet one more

man died in hospital as a result of longstanding dysentery and starvation, but the rest made a rapid recovery and it was a happy day when they learned that Dudgeon and Basil, the interpreter, were safe, having been conducted by Turkish officers to Tobruk and handed over to the Italians on March 22.

Further Reading Corbett, Sir Julian, Naval Operations III (Longman, Green & Co.)

Gibson,

R. H.,

Volume

and Prendergast, M., The War, 1914-1918

German Submarine

(Constable) Gwatkin-Williams, Mrs R. S., In the Hands of the Senoussi (G. Arthur Pearson Ltd.) Military Operations, Egypt and Palestine

(HMSO) C, Steel Chariots of the Desert (Cape) Wilson, H. W., The Great War Volume 6 (The Amalgamated Press Ltd.) Rolls, S.

MAJOR J K W BINGHAM was commissioned from RMA Sandhurst into the Royal Tank Regiment in 1938, and during the Second World War he served the major theatres of war in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. Since then he has travelled widely, serving with his regiment and in staff in

appointments in Germany, Australia, Canada and Kenya. He is married with two daughters and a son, and now lives in England's West Country. James Bingham has written, in conjunction with the German author Werner Haupt, a history of the North African Campaign, 1940/43, and has written articles on tanks in the Armour in Profile series

1

063

Am

i

i

i

Encouraged by the Turks and-armed with the help of the Germans, the Senussi tribe invaded Egypt from Italian Libya in November 1915. The British had only unseasoned reinforcements and troops recuperating from the Gallipoli campaign to oppose them, but after a slow start the British succeeded in driving back the Senussi. Gregory Blaxland. Above: A camel patrol of the Dorsetshire Yeomanry ceming

_„_e

o\'

November

we-i

e

Turks in ldll dded temporal spiritual power by uniting all the ted the

i

I

.

Gallipoli the situation was rd Kitchener was on his

Turks. At

decide whether

.

1

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sup.

into

.

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M h

d battalions with mpt the Turks rial.

Sultan

,

Britain on ind Briti

i

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ainst follow

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Althou

John

Sir

of

to

mon

ving th al

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om

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and

.

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with cartrid and

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10,01

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ided

influ

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with the prospect of the humiliations at the

British

pre 30"u)d

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.

gypt beexpei he had to

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a few

But, the in

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Where the going was good enough, armoured cars became the new ships of the desert'

quick

Turk

Go

man

in

urk-

his mid-forties, h<

immedai

.,

•sert in

vvith

tl\

k

artil

Vuri

the path
N

Belatedly, Maxwell entered competition

and as second-in-command he had a keen student of war from Baghdad, named Ja'far Pasha, a German-trained officer troops,

in bribery as the best means to obtain the release of the sailors. His answer was a

report that an attack on Solium had been made on the night of November 17. Next night the Senussi's regular troops, the

who was

a brilliant linguist. 24, Italy declared war against Austria, putting the Senussi's deadly enemy on the same side as Britain. The Italians did nothing as yet to tighten the net around him. They had no post east of Tobruk, more than 50 miles from the

On May

Muhafizia, appeared in force at Sidi Barrani, 48 miles further along the coast, and took up position around a Senussi hostel, one of three in Egypt. The policy of diplomacy had failed. There was nothing left for Maxwell but to scrape together what troops he could and rush them to Marsa Matruh, the furthest harbour westwards to which the navy could guarantee protection of supply ships. All planning had to start from scratch, even that of a com-

Egyptian frontier harbour of Solium. German submarines found it easy enough to land on this barren, unguarded coastline, because the British navy was fully committed to the defence of the Gallipoli beach-head. The mere fact of their coming was damaging to Britain's reputation as ruler of the waves and undoubtedly did as much to influence the Senussi as the gifts they brought. While well aware of the menace, General Maxwell offered no counter to all this wooing except for courteous diplomacy through the Coastguard commander at Solium, Lieutenant-Colonel C. L. Snow, who was well versed in desert lore and a good friend of the Bedouin. Despite reports that the Grand Senussi had accepted the title of Vizier from the Sultan and was circulating leaflets proclaiming a jehad, Snow was admitted to his camp on September 30, having come a few miles into Libya across a border that had nothing to denote the straight, arbitrary line marked on the map. He found the berobed Grand Senussi the soul of affability in his elaborate tent, to which thousands of tribesmen had brought their gifts, and lavish with assurances of his friendship. Snow then had lunch with his Turkish opponent, Ja'far, and had a friendly talk on the problem of controlling the impetuous tribesmen soldiers in battle. They had gained recent

mand organisation. On November 20

the Western Frontier Force was born. Command of it was given to Major-General A. Wallace, whose 10th Indian Division had recently been disbanded. As infantry he was allotted a hastily formed brigade consisting of three battalions — the 6th untried territorial Royal Scots and 2/7th and 2/8th Middlesex — which had been in or around Cairo since their arrival

An

artillery

observation post, with a signaller in a forward area in the desert

and heliograph,

successes against the Italians, and Snow could see that their morale was high and their equipment good.

The

final

push

Probably a tap was still needed to sway the see-saw of the Senussi's neutrality, and on November 5 a German submarine provided it by sinking an armed steamer, HMS Tara. Having rescued 92 of her survivors, the captain handed them over to the Senussi and, as if to provide final proof of the collapse of the Royal Navy, shot up two Egyptian gunboats in Solium Bay. Captain Gwatkin-Williams of the Tara was released from the clutches of his guardians by Nuri, who treated him very civilly and clearly made him out to be an admiral of the highest importance. The Senussi called on his prisoner, having himself announced as his own uncle — presumably as part of the sham that he had no knowledge of the capture. Gwatkin-Williams described him as a powerfully built man with a greyish beard, carrying the eccentric implements for a holy man of a rifle in one hand and a whip in the other. He amused himself

two months

earlie»\

and a

seasoned regular battalion, the i -th Sikhs. As cavalry, three regiments were formed from the details of 20 Yeomanry regiments left behind with the horses while then comrades fought in Gallipoli on foot, and a fourth was similarly drawn from the Australian Light Horse. The artillery consisted of the Notts Battery, RHA. armed with 13-pounders, and Egyptian labour

Captured Senussi watch as the their

British

search

encampment outside Solium

during the interview by taking pot shots at objects outside the tent, and when he left he took swipes with his whip at various minions in the way. Shamelessly obsequious in his presence, the Turkish officers jeered at his departing figure.

took the place of non-existent military engineers. It was a weird mixture to commit to battle without any collective training.

Marsa Matruh was no more than a fishing village with an attractive little harbour, 120 miles east of Solium and 75 miles west of the nearest railhead, which was a further 85 miles from Alexandria. While the cavalry went by rail and march route, the infantry took ship from Alexandria, and on the morning of November 24 the first party, 300 men of the Sikhs, arrived at Matruh in three trawlers. On this same day Colonel Snow also sailed in, bringing 100 men of his Egyptian Coastguard evacuated from Solium. A bedraggled column of coastguards also arrived, by camel, having pulled out of Sidi Barrani after beating off one attack. They brought news that another contingent, numbering 134 Egyptian officers and men, had des erted to the Senussi. The Egyptian army troops garrisoning Matruh wore at once removed. Most of its inhabitants had already fled. The Senussi could claim to have gained 120 miles of British-held territorj in the course of a week, and the fad that thenadvance had not been disputed could have little effect on the impact of the new.-. Refugees and Bedouin wore spreading rumour fast, and ov< n when reduced to the 101)5

to

Bu Hakeim

Mar 17

Halazin

Jan24

ad ^ Senab '

Dec11

Top: Training in desert conditions for men at a remount depot on the Egyptian coast. Above: of operations against the Senussi. Conditions were very bad, and despite its grandiloquent name, the Khedival Motor Road was little more than an improved track

The area

'.^

The long dry chase, punctuated by short, vicious and hard-fought little actions truth of the desertion of the coastguard contingent it was alarming enough. In Cairo many a British face was disfigured by a frown. If organised and disciplined bodies of men could go over to the Senussi 'as easily as that, what might not the indisciplined rabble do, and how was order to be preserved in Cairo with the bulk of the British garrison gone?

k

The

British counterstroke Although the build-up of Wallace's force was retarded by bad weather, it was not molested by the Senussi. Nuri concentrated his "regulars, over 1,000 of them, around Duwair Husein, 16 miles west of Matruh, on top of a slope which is near the coast here but slants inland nearer Matruh itself. Wallace obtained information of them from two aircraft he had, as well as of other groups, either regular or Bedouin, on the plateau south-west of Matruh. Realising the danger of continued inaction, he sent Lieutenant-Colonel Gordon with half his 15th Sikhs forward on a fighting reconnaissance, giving him also a composite Yeomanry regiment, two 13pounders and four heavy armoured cars of the Royal Navy. The date was December 11, which was none too early for the first counterstroke to an invasion launched on

November Gordon

17.

took

infantry along the his cavalry and cars diagonally inland along what was grandiloquently styled the Khedival Motor Road but in fact was merely a track levelled through the rock, scrub and barren gluey soil to be found inland of the sandy coastal belt. The cavalry climbed the slope some five miles inland and had gone nine miles in all, with the main body eagerly pressing the advanced guard, when hot rifle fire fell on them at short range from the right. The Senussi were in a wadi — the Wadi Seneb — which formed a typically rugged, cavernous gash in the slope towards the coastal track

\|*

»

his

and sent

proved hard to winkle them out. cavalry squadron attempted a charge, with disastrous results, and the armoured cars tried a flanking movement, only to get stuck in the sand. Not until the 13pounders came into action and the arrival of the Australian Light Horse from Matruh did the Senussi make off, leaving 80 dead, seven prisoners and a weird variety of coast. It

A

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weapons, from modern Italian rifles to muzzle loaders and elephant guns. Fifteen troopers and one officer had been killed. The latter, sadly, was Colonel Snow, who

4

•%

1

*

*

was attached

for Intelligence duties and, trusting in his long preserved immunity from Arab hostility, was shot dead while trying to persuade a Bedouin lying in a cave to surrender. As the wounded were bumped back by armoured car to Matruh, the yeomen led their now exhausted horses down the slope and joined up with Gordon to bivouac near the coast. After a day of recuperation, the advance was resumed on the 13th, the column swollen by two companies of the 6th Royal Scots. The cavalry led, spread over a wide frontage, but did not spot the Senussi lying up in another deep wadi running across the ridge on the left. The latter gave a platoon of Royal Scots, acting

as flankguard, a rough baptism of fire. They killed the platoon commander with their opening fusillade and drove his men down the slope towards the sea. Watching their skilled advance, Gordon at first thought that the attackers were British troops who had mistaken their foe, from which it is to be assumed that they wore rough European style uniform. There was a company of Sikhs ahead and this was now in danger of being cut off. Gordon ordered the reserve company of Royal Scots to gain the ridge and the

cavalry and leading Sikhs to attack round the far side of the wadi. They encountered such difficulty that soon he sent a message to camp by heliograph asking for all the men that could be raised. For six hours there was confused and critical fighting, with the Senussi making good use of three machine guns and wild use of two medium guns. At last a shell from one of the British 13-pounders, firing at extreme range, landed where the Senussi were at their thickest. They lost heart and withdrew, leaving Gordon's men in possession of the ridge but in no condition to exploit their success. They returned wearily to Matruh. This policy of returning to base was as practised on the North-West Frontier of India, and its result was that the Senussi returned to the high ground in greater strength and nearer to Matruh, undismayed by the bad weather that prevented Wallace from resuming operations until Christmas Day. However, he struck a heavy blow on this day. Advancing up the Khedival road before daybreak, the Sikhs gained the first, predominant hill soon after dawn without opposition. They then drove a large Senussi force out of the Wadi Medwa, ably supported by the newly arrived and inexperienced 1st New Zealand Rifle Brigade and of the guns both of the Notts Battery and the sloop HMS Clematis. Caught off balance from the start, the Senussi left some 300 dead behind them, a number of them being recognised as Egyptian Coastguard deserters. Their loss would have been even greater it the cavalry, making a wide circling movement round their right flank, had not arrived too late to cut off the retreat. The loss on the British side was 13 killed and 51

wounded.

Arabs halted This 'Affair of the Wadi Medwa' - none of the actions in the Senussi War receives higher rating than 'affair' in the British Official History — scotched the march of Bedouin and Senussi past Matruh across the desert, and British columns sent to scour this area found plenty of tents, goats and cattle without meeting opposition. On January 19, 1916 the ever-prying eyes of an airman spotted a huge encampment at Halazin, 22 miles south-west of Matruh. Three hundred tents were counted, and among them, the airman correct l\ claimed. was that of the Grand Senussi himself. They were on the side of a hill facing eastwards, with spurs sloping down on cat her side like the wings of an amphitheal re. Wallace

now had some complete Yeomanry ments,

which

regi-

had

been freed from the agony of the Gallipoli beaches at the end of

i

^

•T.

1067

October, and a battalion of South African infantry, the first o\' four in process of arriving from England, where they had

completing their training: Augmented marched the hulk of his force off to camp ten miles from the SenUSSi encampment during the night of January 22.

and an escort force of three battalions. He then sent through the now complete South African Brigade, with the Dorset Yeomanry and the faithful Notts Battery under command, to attack the latest camp spotted by the airmen, who kept pace with the advance by using improvised airstrips.

rescuers of Ja'far, but Nuri was rescued and carried off on a camel, just as the machine gun section of the Dorsets arrived to sway the desperate grappling finally and decisively in their comrades' favour. When at last they called off the pursuit and rallied, they found their ranks

Ram

This

camp was 15 miles south-east of Sidi Barrani, by some pools named Agagiya, and after marching 28 miles in two days the brigade group, under Brigadier-

reduced by 58

h\

these, he

fell in

torrents, calling for

man

haul-

practically every vehicle next morning and enforcing the return of the armoured cars to Matruh. The advance continued, undeterred by the squelching glue

age

o\~

underfoot. Again the loth Sikhs bore the brunt of the assault. After the cavalry had located parties o\ the enemy some two miles ahead ot their camp, the Sikhs steadily pushed them back, in the face of mounting shelling and machine gun fire, into the 2-mile width of the amphitheatre. Colonel Gordon, commanding the column, put in his supporting infantry as the pressure mounted on the flanks, first two companies of South Africans on the right, then a company of

New Zealanders on the left, then one on the right, followed by a company of Royal Scots. The cavalry column, covering the left flank, now came under heavy attack from over the spur on this side, and as the infantry pressed on the remainder of the New Zealanders had to be turned about to go to the cavalry's aid. Things were hectic on the British left. Some cavalrymen were dismounted, trying to get two machine guns of the Buckinghamshire Yeomanry into working order, and others were galloping to their aid, with Senussi swarming ever further round their left flank and loosing off a great deal of ammunition. The guns of the Notts Battery, hauled forward by combined human and equine effort, kept firing ahead, though they were in danger from behind, and the Sikhs staunchly strove forward towards their falling shells until at last they burst through the main defence line and everywhere the Senussi streamed back, through and past their multiple rows of tents. The exhaustion of the attackers and the quagmire underfoot once again precluded pursuit.

was

a hard and costly fight and was followed by a wretched night, with hardly any food and nothing but muddy rainwater to drink, with no greatcoats and no warmth from the blaze made of the Senussi camp, since the troops were withdrawn. The British lost 21 killed and 291 wounded, and as most of the latter spent the night on the field it is amazing that so many survived. The Senussi loss was put at 200 killed and 500 wounded. The troops again returned to Matruh, heaving stretchers and vehicles through the mud to begin with but arriving in sunlight and better spirits. Now there was a change. The evacuation of the Gallipoh It

beach-head

weeks

had been completed three and Egypt was crammed

earlier,

with troops in various stages of recuperation The navy could extend its bulwark to Solium, and Maxwell therefore ordered its reoccupation, decidi g there was less risk in a land advance th in a landing. Wallace opted out of the venture, being troubled by an old wouii and command of the Western Force passed to a cavalryman, Major-General W. E. Peyton, who had commanded the hard-fought 2nd Mounted Division at Gallipoli. Peyton first established a base 45 miles west of Matruh, with the aid of 800 camels

1068

General Lukin, bivouacked within eight miles of it on February 24. The Grand Senussi was reported to have removed himself to a more remote oasis, leaving Nuri in

command. Surprise impossible Lukin aimed to make a surprise dawn attack on the 26th, but changed his mind when shells and machine guns bullets screamed into his camp at dusk the evening before. Retaliatory fire put a stop to that, and at dawn the Dorset Yeomanry

moved cautiously out to find that the Senussi had made no general advance but in position on some large sand dunes commanding the approach to their camp. Lukin ordered the Yeomanry to make a right flanking movement and occupy some hillocks, from which to distract the enemy

were

and be ready

to cut off his retreat.

Lukin

then brought his South Africans up for a frontal attack, supported by machine guns

and his

six 13-pounders. transpired that there were 1,600 regular Senussi troops on the dunes and It

close

behind them. Although new

to action,

the 3rd South Africans led the assault without wavering, and the 1st scotched Nuri's predictable counterattack against the left flank. After a three-hour struggle on the sand-enshrouded mounds, with the clatter of Senussi fire gradually receding, Lieutenant-Colonel Souter, commanding the Dorset Yeomanry, saw the Senussi emerge from their defences, camels, baggage and Bedouin first, followed by the regular infantry making an orderly withdrawal. He kept pace with them 1,000 yards to the flank, scanning the ground for obstacles. Two armoured cars that had been with him had to be left stuck in the sand. For an hour the yeomen shadowed their retreating enemy, dismounting at intervals to rest their horses and to harry the opThen Souter position with rifle fire. ordered his three squadrons to form line and led them at a steady gallop towards the slight, bare ridge along which the Senussi were toiling in groups stretching over a mile. lined

He had some 180 horsemen

in

all,

two ranks over a frontage of about 650 yards, and there was half a mile of open desert to be covered. The Senussi opened up with three machine guns and numerous rifles. The sand flew up around the Dorsets and gashes were cut in their ranks, but soon the bullets were flying over their heads and they galloped the last 200 yards almost unscathed. Then they were in among them, lashing out with their sabres. There was wild confusion. in

Some Senussi calmly picked off the easy targets around them; most ran yelling in panic or begged the English for mercy. Souter's horse was killed in the melee and he was catapulted to the ground to find himself lying next to the wounded and desperately distraught Ja'far. Nuri was in similar plight nearby. Souter drew his revolver and drove off some would-be

officers

and men and 85

Of the

58, 32 (five of them officers) killed, many without doubt when

horses.

had been lying wounded. The South Africans' losses* were 15 killed and 111 wounded, a normal ratio.

Having recovered his composure next day, Ja'far admitted the devastating effect of the charge and reckoned 300 of his men had been sabred. Keen military student that he was, it hurt his pride to have been capsised by such foolhardy audacity. 'C'est magnifique,' he complained, 'mais ce n'est pas selon les regies.' (It's magnificent, but it's not in keeping with the rules.) Not yet realising the moral impact of the blow and not wishing to be caught at disadvantage, General Peyton chose to advance on Solium along the heights curving towards the port from inland. He thus set himself some tricky problems of supply, and not until March 14 did the South Africans and some cavalry enter Solium, having met no opposition. A force of armoured cars of the Cavalry Machine Gun Battery, which had replaced the heavier, floundering naval ones, was now sent on to pursue the retreating enemy 'with reasonable boldness'. Its commander was Major the Duke of Westminster, and finding the going better than in Egypt he rapidly caught up with the Senussi 25 miles inside Libya, put them to flight at once and returned to Solium with a haul of 30 prisoners, three 4-inch guns, nine machine guns and 250,000 tactical

rounds of ammunition. An even more urgent task was awaiting him. A message had been discovered from Captain Gwatkin-Williams, saying that he and his captive sailors had been taken 120 miles inside Libya on an inland route. What then happened is told in the previous article.

The

deficit

had been

fully

wiped

to celebrate the occasion the troops

and paraded

out,

Solium and gave three cheers for the King. The Egyptian people did not celebrate, nor did they greatly care. To the relief of the British residents and the exasperation of the Turkish agents, they had remained apathetic throughout, for keen as they were to be rid of the British, they had no wish to see the Turks in their place, in the name of Mohammed or anyone else. The Senussi had yet to accept this, and with optimism restored would soon be planning another attempt — but by a route affording less risk of a head-on clash with the British and of detection by aircraft. at

Further Reading Dane, E., British Campaigns

in the Near East, 1914-1918 (Hodder&Stoughton 1919) Elgood, P. G., Egypt and the Army (OUP 1924) Ewing, J The Royal Scots, 1914-1919 (Oliver & ,

Boyd 1925) Gwatkin-Williams, Captain G. W., Prisoners of the Red Desert (Thornton Butterworth 1919) Military Operations, Egypt and Palestine

(HMSO

1928)

Thompson, C. W., Records of the Dorset Yeomanry 1 91 4-1 91 9 (Bennett 1921) [For Gregory Blaxland's

page

449.

]

biography,

see

/-O

BULGARIA JOINS

THE WAR

Above: A French cartoon deriding the Kaiser's latest ally,

King Ferdinand

of

Bulgaria. Its caption reads: The last card — a knave!'

D. R. Shermer

As the war continued into 1915 both the Allies and the Central Powers exerted increasing pressure on the various Balkan states to induce them to declare in their favour. Serbia was already in the Allied camp,

but Bulgaria, the most populous of the Balkan states, bided her time and waited for the highest offer of territorial aggrandisement. By the end of 1915, however, the pressure of bribe and threat was becoming so intense that Bulgaria was obliged to choose one side or the other. In the light of her rivalry with Serbia and of KingFerdinand's pronounced proGerman sympathies, it was perhaps inevitable that her choice would lie with the Central Powers .()(>!

The Balkans were of great importance in the context of the First World War for several reasons. Each nation was still in a state of flux, for each had only relatively recently become independent of Turkey. Each had an irredenta (unredeemed territory) of many nationals and co-religionists beyond its borders, and the patchwork arrangement of these nationalities created ambitions and rivalries which could be — and were — exploited by outside Powers under the formula of 'divide and rule'. A few examples may be given. Beyond Serbia itself, the Serbs were widely spread over Bosnia-Herzegovina and the hinterland of what is now Yugoslavia. There were Bulgarians and Turks in Rumania, Rumanians in Hungary, and Greeks and Albanians beyond the confines of their small

states.

Finally,

all

except Serbia

and Montenegro had alien royal houses, a factor which, although it did not automatically create divisions, was in fact a source of trouble in the period under dis-

cussion. If

one were

confusions,

it

to pick

a focal point for these

would be Macedonia, which

Buchan had described as

'this

alley

—

country which has been littered with fragments of all the Balkan races'. Serbs associated Macedonia with past glories; trading Greeks pushed in towards it from the coastal ports; and Germans, Hungarians, and Italians saw this area as the key to the peninsula. Here as in many other areas, national ambitions have been linked with the quirks of geography. The seafaring Greeks tended to extend along the coast and outwards across the Aegean to the opposite shores of Asia Minor. For Bulgaria, the southwards route seemed particularly natural, as her two main rivers, the Maritsa and Struma, both flow into the Aegean. Also, Bulgaria has felt constricted by her small coastline on the Black Sea, tbe entrance to which is controlled by her ancient rival, Turkey. Thus she has consistently reached across Macedonia towards an Aegean window to the world beyond. Landlocked Serbia wanted a southwards outlet for her commerce, which otherwise travelled through the lands of .

1070

.

.

tariff competitors. Failing

a first-class port such as Salonika, she sought an Adriatic route to the Mediterranean and beyond. Thus for the various uplanders, Macedonia represented the easiest path to the sea. This produced a problem. If Serbia aimed for an Aegean outlet, she must have south-east Macedonia; if she sought an Adriatic port, she must control northern Macedonia districts. Eastern Macedonia was necessary for Bulgaria to reach the Aegean, for Thrace had no good harbours along its coast. Greece kept a wary eye on Bulgaria. The pro-German King Constantine, a former general in the Balkan Wars, was an admirer of Prussian militarism, but the dynamic

Prime Minister, Venizelos, was pro-Allied. Constantine's followers were mainly from the sections of Greece that had gained independence in the early 19th century, whereas the Cretan Venizelos's supporters were more from the islands and outlying territories.

Venizelos's position

complicated by his

many enemies

was

also

in Estab-

lishment circles, for in the past he had reformed finance, the army, and the constitution. Constantine resented the important career which Venizelos had already had, and others were alienated by his often over-bearing manner.

A focal position Greece was satisfied only with her fronwith Serbia; or, at least, she felt a need for good relations with Serbia to tier

mutual protection against Bulgaria. Across the Aegean, Greece wanted a sweeping Turkish recognition of Hellenic rights on what she regarded as a Greek lake. Greece resented the Italian occupation of the Dodecanese Islands, and wanted in addition the islands of Imbros (Imroz) afford

and Tenedos (Bozcaada). Her

maximum

ambitions included eastern Thrace, Constantinople, and a large enclave on the coast of Asia Minor, where much of the population of Smyrna (Izmir) and other cities was ethnically Greek. Many Greek irredenta also lived in Albania.

King Ferdinand's character was complex and further obscured an already tangled situation. His talkativeness, sentimentality and ostentation were legendary and the object of much ridicule, and to many they concealed impenetrably the monarch's essentially calculating mind. It was rightly said of Ferdinand that 'A fool's cap covered a very shrewd and persistent brain.' Moreover, there was no Venizelos to take his measure and oppose his will. According to certain sources, Ferdinand was also among the aspirants to Constantinople. Russia, with her own ambitions, would have opposed this as much as any Greek attempt, and Ferdinand's southwards gaze provided a further obstacle to reconciliation with Greece and Russia. Thus, for reasons of location, size, resources or manpower, each of the Balkan states was useful as a prospective wartime ally, although this was appreciated by the British and French far more in 1915 than earlier in the war. The focal point remained Bulgaria, contiguous to Serbia. Rumania. Greece and Turkey and straddling the

most convenient route between Turkey and

Bulgaria —

In Bulgaria,

ded.

situation

Vasil Radoslavov, Bulgaria's

Some important

politicians such as

Gueshov leaned towards the Allies, although the government of Radoslavov, which came to power on July 16, 1914, was

tangled Balkan

left:

pro-

nounced German sympathies, although the Bulgarian masses seem to have been divi-

focal point of the

Top

King Ferdinand had

considered pro-Austrian. Yet these factors could have been swept aside overnight if one set of belligerents or the other seemed poised to achieve decisive victory, for selfPrime

Minister. Although he tended to be proAustrian, under his direction Bulgaria's foreign policy was essentially chauvinistic.

Centre left: King Ferdinand of Bulgaria- A fool s cap covered a very shrewd and persistent brain. Centre right: The caption with this British cartoon reads Very well, but father,

interest was a particularly prominent part of the Bulgarian mind in 1914. Bulgaria's earlier breach with Russia and Russia's intense interest in Serbia were

important factors in influencing Bulgaria towards the Central Powers, although certain obstacles would have to be overcome

how about fitting the pieces together.' It exemplified Germany's dilemma that as her conquests multiplied so would her problems. Top right: Sergei Sazonov, Russia's Foreign

before a lasting alliance could be forged: the Central Powers' treaty with Rumania, renewed in 19115; a Bulgarian accommodation to the Central Powers' friendship with

Minister; he tried to exploit Balkan nationalism as a permanent check to Austrian ambitions in this area

of Constantine's closeness to Berlin.

Turkey (Bulgaria and Turkey shared rivalry with Greece), and Ferdinand's jealousy

her partners among the Central Powers. The process of persuading these states either to join the war or observe benevolent neutrality towards one side or another involved particularly tortuous diplomacy. The Central Powers earmarked disputed Russian and Serbian territory for Rumania and Bulgaria respectively; and Vienna had to find a way to quash Serbian dynamism which threatened the stability of the Habsburg edifice. Conrad, the Chief of the Austro-I lungarian General Stall', proposed outright ^annexation of both Serbia and Montenegro. This idea was self-defeating; the Slavs at present within the Dual Monarchy were troublesome enough, and the plan was opposed for this and other reasons by ho Hungarian Minister t

President. Tis/a. Tis/.a wanted to annex only a part of Serbia, leaving the rest for

Bulgaria and awarding Montenegro to Albania, hoping meanwhile to lure the Bulgars and Albanians into the orbil ol the Central Powers. An alternative plan was to make these states economic satellites

10,1

Serbia: committed to the Allies. Greece: which side

would she join?

Above: Venizelos. the Greek Prime Minister. pro-Allied, and felt the need for good relations with Serbia to afford mutual protection against Bulgaria. Centre: King Con-

He was

stantine of Greece-pro-German, his ideas conflicted with those of Venizelos. Right:

Crown Prince Alexander of Serbia (right), regent to his father. King Peter, talking to the Prime Minister. Pasic: both feared the continuation of Austrian and Bulgarian expansion

The Russian Foreign Minister, Sazonov, had ideas of a different order. He intended to

use the principle of nationality as a per-

manent check on Austro-Hungarian ambitions in this area, and hoped to form a Balkan bloc to achieve this. Serbia would receive Bosnia-Herzegovina and thereby an outlet to the sea; Rumania would acquire Transylvania, or at least those parts containing a majority of ethnic Rumanians. In return for Bulgaria's reversion to the favourable status given her in the 1912 treaties, Serbia would receive compensation in northern Albania and Greece in southern Albania. These ideas were still being formulated in the summer of 1914 and did not officially represent Tsarist policy. Obviously, however, they presupposed a crushing defeat of AustriaHungary, a policy which was officially desired lest the Teutons and Magyars achieve hegemony over the Balkans.

Waiting on events When war broke out, Rumania quickly decided that the casus foederis of her alliance with the Central Powers had not arisen. On August 2 these Powers had promised her Bessarabia in return for her intervention in the war, but at the Crown Council of August 3, King Carol received only scant support for a declaration of war against Russia. Bratianu and the majority of the leaders present decided to observe neutrality while waiting upon events. On August 7, apparently without consulting Britain or France, Sazon iv offered Rumania Transylvania and a Russian guarantee of Rumania's frontier with Bulgaria if she would declare war on Austria-Hungary. This ot sr was also turned down. On October however, the Rumanian minister in Pet* grad sign >d a ]

1072

treaty with Russia in which Russia recognised, and promised to try to obtain, British

and French support for, Rumania's irredenta in Hungarian Transylvania. In exchange Rumania pledged merely benevolent neutrality and a prohibition of transit supplies from the Central Powers to Turkey. This agreement on transit was substantadhered to until Serbia's defeat late 1915 opened up new transit routes for Vienna, Budapest and Berlin. On October 10 Carol of Rumania died and was succeeded by his nephew Ferdinand. Ferdinand and his clever and resourceful wife Marie were pro-Allied, although the new king lacked experience in foreign ially

in

and seemed pleased to leave them mostly to the dexterity of Bratianu. In August, Carol had promised never to agree to a Rumanian declaration of war against the Central Powers; it was significant that, on his accession, Ferdinand refused to renew this pledge. At the same time Bratianu informed the Central Powers that, again in contradiction to what was said affairs

August, Rumania could no longer give Bulgaria carte blanche to- attack Serbia. For the moment Rumania sat comfortably apart from the battlefield. In December she refused to help the sorely pressed Serbs against Austria, and French remonstrances were dismissed with the remark that Rumania was securing her own interests by her October 1 agreement with Russia. Meanwhile Germany had been pressurin

ing the Dual

Monarchy

to

make concessions

Transylvania in order to prod Rumania into action against Russia. Without wholly closing the door on future negotiations, Bratianu said that such concessions as were offered were insufficient. Germany favoured far-reaching concessions on the points in dispute, but the Hungarians refused. From archival research it appears that Bratianu in

decided after the Battle of the Marne that ultimately the Entente would win, whatever reverses occurred in the interim. He did not give up this idea even amid serious Entente reversals, though of course he was careful to keep this information from the

pant. In these circumstances, the maintenance of genuine neutrality became a steadmore difficult task. In any event, ily Ferdinand preferred to await the outcome of the Central Powers' negotiations with

Rumania and Turkey. For her part, Russia wanted Bulgaria

to

receive the borders of the 1912 Balkan treaties, with Serbia receiving compensation in the Habsburg lands. At the end of August Pasic, the Serbian Prime Minister, informed the Russians that Serbia would satisfy Bulgarian claims in Macedonia after the war if the Serbs in turn received at least most of the coastline of Dalmatia. Yet the Serbs' insistence on secrecy meant that this offer could not be made to Sofia.

Russia's efforts to woo Bulgaria continued. In the second week of August Venizelos had proposed to Demidov, the Russian ambassador in Athens, a general realignment of Balkan frontiers under which Rumanian and Serbian interests in Mace-

Central Powers. A consultative agreement, which could provide for joiiVt> 'action if necessary, was reached on September 23 between Rumania and Italy. This further buttressed the Rumanian position. Both sides sought Bulgarian entry into the war, although in August Sazonov had thought of compensating Turkey at the expense of Aegean territory from Greece and Bulgaria, and was prevented from doing so only by Britain and France. In the same month the Central Powers agreed to guarantee Bulgaria's 1914 frontiers, with the proviso that, in the event of a Central Powers victory, Bulgarian irredenta would largely be redeemed at the expense of states not joining the Central Powers. One might underline at this stage the obvious point that all these promises were based on victory for the side which made them. The more attractive offers a country obtained from one side, the more it came to have a stake in the victory of that alignment and a vested interest in doing what it could to help as a benevolent neutral or a partici-

donia as far west as Monastir (Bitola) should take precedence over those of Serbia. When Turkey joined the Central Powers, Bulgaria was additionally promised part of Thrace. These proposals were quite moderate and received the support of Grey, but Sazonov felt that Bulgaria was still not receiving enough gains, with the result that by the second week of September Venizelos was threatening to resign if Russia did not abate her pressure for Greek cession of the port of Kavalla to Bulgaria. In November the British minister in Sofia, Bax-Ironside, promised Bulgaria the Enos-Midia line and the left bank of the Varda River in Macedonia if she would fight the Turks; at the end of November the Allies made rather vague promises of gains if Bulgaria merely remained neutral, and of even more territory if she sided with them. In the circumstances, it was significant that in mid-November Radoslavov intimated that Bulgaria would march with those Powers which immediately consented to total realisation of Bulgarian national unity. In this context, the British offer

was

not nearly enough. Nevertheless Radoslavov again assured the Allies that Bulgaria continued to observe a strict neutrality. The Allies replied in equal generali-

ties

on December

7; if

Bulgaria remained

neutral, after the war she would receive ameliorations in territorial 'equitable Macedonia and the Enos-Midia line in Thrace as her border'. Radoslavov no doubt drew a moral from the fact that now the Allies were offering Bulgaria for neutrality much of what they had offered a month earlier for intervention: until a defeat of the Central Powers looked more certain, .

.

.

Bulgaria would wait and watch the bidding her favours rise.

for

The greatest Slav power at least possible that Sazonov's coolness towards these negotiations with Bulgaria arose from an unwillingness to see the rapprochement with Bulgaria achieved under British rather than Russian auspices. The Russians were very sensitive on the point that, being adjacent to the Balkans and, moreover, the greatest Slav power, they had a greater political stake than the Allies in the Balkans and knew their neighbours better than did Powers on the other side of Europe. As it was, however, Austria's conquest of Serbia by the second half of November impressed Bulgaria with the Central Powers' military might, an attitude which was not greatly affected by the Serbian defeat of a large Austrian offensive It is

on December 7 and 8. Meanwhile, events had been taking then course in Athens. On August 8, 1914 Venizelos had managed to prevent Constant ine from accepting the Kaiser's offer of an

accommodation on the

German

in

return for participation On August 23 Venize-

side.

los had offered the Entente a comprehensive and unconditional alliance which the em barrassed Powers had to refuse. (Const an

tine probably agreed to this oiler only be cause he was afraid that the Turks would take advantage of the outbreak of hostilities to attack Greece.) In any event, the offer was turned down because Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, feared thai at this stage Creek entry into the war would immediately force Turkey and Bulgaria to align themselves with the Central Powers Moreover Russia, already aiming al Con Stantinople herself, did not want to be indebted through ( '.reek aid towards a rial LOX1

I

with similar ambitions on the BosphorilS. As a gesture, however, the Greeks were permitted to occupj southern Albania (or northern Epirus. as they called it), and Italy took advantage of the merry-go-round in Albania to occupy Yalona (Vlone). In January 1915. Turkey having entered the war in the meanwhile, the Allies offered Greece recognition of her right to \er\ important concessions on the coast ot Asia Minor' - meaning, above all, Smyrna and some hinterland — if the Greeks would co-operate with Bulgaria by conceding parts of Macedonia and by attempting to revive the Balkan League. The plan foundered on the rocks of Bulgarian caution and Greek monarchist hostility, and Venizelos

»

B

Bulgaria: the time for decision

was imminent left office. Now Russia pressed her own claims to Constantinople and the Straits, and by April 10 France had joined Britain in consenting in principle to Russia's demands, with important reservations and naturally postulating an Allied victory. Greek hopes were thus dashed in this

respect. At this stage the Allies' negotiations with Italy were successfully concluded. Italy's

rewards impinged significantly on the Balkan states' ambitions, for among her spoils were to be the following: on the Adriatic, Istria and Dalmatia, as well as the strategic Albanian harbour of Valona (which she had already occupied), and an Italian protectorate over a shrunken, neutralised Albania; and just beyond the inner confines of the Aegean, Italy was to be granted full sovereignty over the Dodecanese Islands (Sporadhes Islands), as well as a just share' of the Mediterranean region adjacent to Adalia (Antalya) in Asia Minor. While Serbia, Montenegro and Greece were to receive slices of northern and southern Albania respectively if this was necessary

them into entering the war, the Serbs, Albanians and Greeks in particular detested the other provisions, for they meant that further hundreds of thousands of their compatriots would be placed under alien tutelage. Furthermore, many Serbs were bitterly disappointed by the firm words of the Russian Ambassador in Paris, Izvolsky, to the Croats on May 2. Izvolsky stated that Russian policy rested on Greek Orthodoxy, and it would be contrary to this policy to permit the union of the Catholic to cajole

Croats and Slovenes with the Orthodox Serbs. On the other hand, the terms of Italian entry were such as to make Austria-

Hungary want to forestall effective Italian participation by concentrating her forces against Italy. To do this, Vienna needed to secure her other fronts, and became willing to make peace on terms quite generous to Serbia. If Serbia ceded her north-eastern region to the Dual Monarchy, Vienna would allow the Serbs to annex northern Albania and Montenegro. Nevertheless, the Serbs decided to fight on.

Bargaining for gains Early 1915 had seen the opening of the Dardanelles campaign. was hoped that this campaign would leaa the capture of Constantinople and the su nder of Turkey. The Balkan neutrals v. dd probably i

j

1074

L.

...

-

be impressed by the success of the Allied cause. Above all, it would open a route to Russia's ice-free southern ports through which badly-needed arms and supplies from Britain and France could be sent. In January Venizelos proposed an Anglo-French landing at Salonika to mount the assault on the Straits. This would be accompanied by the entry of Rumania into the war. By mid-February, however, the idea of attacking via the Dardanelles and the peninsula of Gallipoli had gained precedence, for Rumania had not promised to enter the fray and Russia had only half-heartedly approved of a scheme involving Greece, however indirectly. Only Britain had really wanted Greek participation, and in the end Constantine vetoed the idea and Venizelos resigned again. With Allied troops involved at the Dardanelles, Bulgaria's transit value continued to increase. Bulgaria was still holding out for an ideal offer, which naturally caused great difficulties for both sides. The Central Powers could now offer Bulgaria

\<)TM her approximate demands against Serbia, which would have to be compensated in Albania, Montenegro and some Habsburg territories; but it was harder to square Bulgarian demands with those of Greece, Rumania and Turkey. Moreover, the Central Powers now insisted that Bulgaria actually enter the war to receive these gains, whereas Ferdinand was hesitant as long as the Allies had a chance in Gallipoli. The Allies had the advantage of being

able to offer the lands Bulgaria coveted in Turkey-in-Europe. A definite Allied offer was made in May, 1915, but was offset to some degree by the fact that Allied commitments to Greece and Serbia meant that these states had to be persuaded into ceding territory to Bulgaria in return for compensations elsewhere. In Greece, King Constantine was still not sure that the Germans would not win, and when Venizelos returned to effective power in August, the Greeks were still divided, but with the strength of the pro-Allied faction waning somewhat in view of the Allied reversals at

Italy. However, by the time of Italian entry in May, Bratianu was demanding all of Transylvania, the Banat, and a western frontier 'running past Szeged and Debrecen to the Carpathians, then East to the line of the Prut, including the Bukovina'. Huge Magyar populations and many Slavs would have fallen to Rumania under this claim, and it was able to be made only in the circumstances of the disastrous Allied setbacks of 1915. Sazonov was pressured into waiving Russian objections to Rumania's gaining northern Bukovina, but at first Russia would not compromise on the predominantly Serb-populated western Banat, which had already been promised to Serbia. However, in late July, France and Britain persuaded Russia to yield even on this, provided that Ru-

most simultaneously with

*z

mania would not enforce assimilation of the Serbs. Sazonov tried to insist on Rumanian entry into the war within five weeks, but Bratianu managed to hedge his way around

<.

this.

With disarming candour the Rumanian Prime Minister admitted the existence of such negotiations to the Central Powers, explaining them as being due to the pressure of warmongers, but on June 26 Germany and Austria-Hungary at last lost their patience and told Bratianu to name

As the prethe Central Powers' mili-

his price for transit of goods.

mier

still stalled,

tary victories now enabled them to dispense with the appeasement of Rumania. Clearly Rumanian intervention on the Entente side was sooner or later almost inevitable, for now practically all of Ru-

mania's demands were being offered to her. Her entrance was merely postponed when the time seemed opportune in view of the Russian reverses and the Allied quagmire at Gallipoli.

The German and Austrian successes

in

were also bringing Bulgaria into the war. On September 6, in a series of treaties between Bulgaria and Austria, Bulgaria undertook to invade Serbia and was apparently to receive all of Macedonia, and even an Adriatic outlet and 'a link along the Danube with Austria', which seems to have comprised part of north and east Serbia. If Greece or Rumania attacked Bulgaria without provocation, Bulgaria would gain territory at their expense. Also orl September 6, Turkey yielded to Bulgaria territory on both banks of the Maritsa River. The battle

A very nubile 'France' threatens Bulgaria (in the green tunic) with 'Notre 420' (the standard French bayonet) for joining the Central Powers

As

he firmly refused to Bulgaria's Macedonian demands; he would only agree to part of her claims there, and this was conditional on satisfactory compensation and no loss of face. Russia had already promised Serbia her original aims of Bosnia-Herzegovina and an Adriatic port, and Sazonov had been able to see to it that Italy did not get southern Dalmatia. Yet now Pasic demanded in addition certain parts of south Hungary and Croatia- Slavonia that were ethnically south Slav, though the exact extent of his claims was somewhat obscure. Pasic also resented Rumanian claims in the region of the Banat. On August 17 the Allies offered Serbia Bosnia-Herzegovina, south Dalmatia and certain of her other claims if she would surrender the minimum Bulgarian claims in Macedonia and yield to Rumania over the Barat. To save face, Pasic agreed to surrender part of Macedonia to the Allies, who would then hand it over to the Bulgars. Serbia was also promised Allied help in securing a union with Gallipoli.

re-cede

all

for Pasic,

Croatia

the latter so desired' (a process likely at the time, as Croatia was incensed at Italian gains and was not in a receptive mood ). 'if

which did not seem

Meanwhile Russia had become furiously impatient with Serbia's delay in co-operating with Bulgaria. In July Russia went so far as to propose that the Allies occupy Dubrovnik and Split and threaten to cut Serbia off from the Adriatic unless she yielded over Macedonia. In early August, largely at British initiative, a new series of proposals to Bulgaria was put forward, merely annoying the Greeks still further. In the interim, Italy had become vexed by reports of Allied promises of large compensations to Serbia in Bosnia-Herzegovina and elsewhere on the Adriatic. By September 1 Grey was giving assurances that 'provided Serbia agreed, Bosnia-Herzegovina, south Dalmatia, Slavonia and Croatia should be permitted to decide their own fate'. In late March, 1915, both sets of belligerents had reason to expect that Rumania would enter the war on the Allied side al-

direction of Bulgarian policy

vocably

set,

and on October

was now 5,

irre-

without de-

claring war, Bulgaria attacked Serbia. On October 4 the Allies had demanded that the now considerable number of German officers in Bulgaria be removed within 24 hours. When this was not done, the Allies broke off diplomatic relations on October 5. Shortly afterwards all the Entente Powers were at war with her; Britain declared war

on October

15.

Further Reading

Anderson. M. S., The Eastern Question (Macmillan 1966) Buchan, J., A History of the Great War (Thomas Nelson 1921-22) Gottlieb, W. Studies in Secret Diplomacy during the First World War (Allen & Unwin

W

.,

1957) Miller, W.,

The Ottoman Empire and

its

Suc-

cessors, 1801-1927 (Cambridge University Press 1927)

[For D. R. Shermer's biography, see page 407.

1

107:")

w%

V

•

f

^r .*,

J^ m

m %

**

i

Able to mobilise an army of 850,000, Bulgaria was undoubtedly a valuable addition to the strength of the Central Powers. Her army was well up to comtemporary standards of training and equipment, and it had recently had the useful experience of fighting in the Balkan Wars of 1912/13. Yet in terms of fighting qualities Bulgaria's armed forces were not nearly so formidable: morale was low, and the prospect of helping Teutons fight against fellow Slavs did nothing to help. But the die was cast and Bulgaria mobilised

BULGARIA'S FORCES Jan Berdnek

mm

*

A*

The 'Prussia

of the

Balkans' — strong on paper but weakened by low morale Below: Bulgarian soldiers, with a heavy Maxim gun, train in the novel techniques of antiaircraft fighting

General Todorov, commander of the Bulgarian Second Army, which was deployed for operations in Macedonia, the pivotal point of Balkan politics in 1915 Opposite right: General Zhekov, the Bulgarian Commander-in-Chief; he tried to counteract low morale with harsh discipline

Opposite

left:

ment, then, was even at that time roughly as follows: 20 age-groups totalling 445,000 men in the standing and reserve armies, and six age-groups totalling 72,000 in the home guard, in all 517,000 soldiers. The state also spent considerable sums of money on these forces. In the financial year 1912-13, for example, nearly a quarter of

The anxiety of both sides in the war, the Entente and the Central Powers, to have Bulgaria on their side was due not only to that country's crucial geopolitical position in the Balkans but, no less, to the strength

Not for nothing was Bulgaria Prussia of the Balkans', for amongst other similarities it had the largest armed forces of any state in the Balkan peninsula. Despite a certain weakening as a result of the two Balkan Wars and a considerable shortage of equipment (though the military experience gained by her soldiers in those wars was a compensation) Bulgaria brought a sizeable access of strength to the Central Powers when she joined them in 1915. They in turn soon began to make up for Bulgaria's weakness in war material by rapidly furnishing her, in particular, with firearms. of its army.

called

'the

The negligible Bulgarian fleet, as we shall see, played no role at all in the First World War. The land army, however, had been capable of taking part in warfare long before the outbreak of conflict. As soon as the Principality of Bulgaria had been set up after the Treaty of San Stefano a militia was formed with the help of Russian officers. Through the Army Laws of 1880 and 1891, and, finally, the 'Law on the Organisation of the Armed Forces of the Principality of Bulgaria' in January, 1904, this militia was gradually converted into a permanent mass army on modern lines. It was brought up to size by universal conscription and shaped much as we find it at the beginning of the First World War. From this point on Bulgaria's forces consisted of three elements: a front-line army, a reserve army and a 'home guard' or narodno opolchenie. Of the 70,000 men called up on an average each year, 25,000 to 30,000 were selected for active training. The period of service was, in the infantry, two years in the standing army and 18 months in the reserve, and in the other arms three years and 16 months respectively. All able-bodied men from the age of 21 to that of 40 or 39 respectively were liable for service. In the home guard the length of service was six or seven years respectively, extending from the age of 40 or 41 to 46. These figures alone imply thai the Bulgarian forces could call upon 16 to 18 annual age-groups for active service far more than any other army on the European continent at that time. Thus with a population of less than 6,000,000 she could, in the event of war, field an army of several hundred thousand. Up to 1908 a yearly average of 22,250 men were called to the colours and 12,000 transferred to home guard service. The military establish-

the budget was accounted for by military expenditure. It is worth considering at this point how the Bulgarian army was prepared for the contingency of war. Even in peacetime it was so organised and deployed, from the High Command down to the level of infantry and cavalry divisions and their regiments, that it could be put on to a complete war footing by calling up reserve groups, that is, by fairly simple expansion. Expansion was carried out on a territorial

principle,

assigned its the country

own

each division being clearly defined area of

from which it could draw reserves to complete its numbers. Such a reserve area comprised an average of 200 villages. In peacetime the regiments of the division in question would normally be deployed within the same area. The system had a number of advantages, facilitating mobilisation and associating military with regional loyalties. In the event of war, then, Bulgaria could produce a land army of ten infantry divisions, one cavalry division, and various technical and auxiliary units. During the mobilisation of September, 1915, a further infantry division, the 11th, was created: it consisted almost entirely, men and officers alike, of refugees from Macedonia who had volunteered to serve under the Bulgarian colours. The infantry division was the largest unit and was capable of independent operation. Each one had approximately the following composition: two infantry brigades, that is, 16 battalions, of regular troops, and one infantry brigade, or eight battalions, newly formed upon mobilisation. To each such division belonged also two squadrons of cavalry, one regiment of quick-firing field artillery comprising nine batteries of 1904Schneider-Canet 75-mm guns, another field artillery regiment of six batteries equipped with 75- and 87-mm Krupp guns, and two to three batteries of

M

mountain

artillery.

These

last

employed

old material in the shape of the Krupp '85 as well as up-to-date quick75-mm firing mountain guns, such as the Krupp

M

M

1904 and Schneider-Canet

M

1907 of

the same calibre. Finally, the division also included such technical and auxilian troops as sapper companies, signal companies, medical and supply units Such an infantry division was practically equivalent, then, with its 21 battalions of infantry, two cavalry squadrons, 17 or 18 artillery batteries and the rest, to a Ian sized army corps, certainly by the standaids of the German or Austro-Hungarian forces. As regards fighting power, it comprised 24.000 front-line infantrymen and 24 machine guns, two cavalry squadrons (250 horsemen), and 72 pieces of field artillery plus eight to 12 mountain guns The infantry was equipped with he Mannlicher 8-mm automatic- rifle with five rounds to the magazine: about half of these were of the older 1SSS or the more recent 1895 model. NCO's and men of the machine gun companies had the 1891 Mannlicher carbine. These companies were I

L079

also equipped with the

Maxim

pin, mostly

8-mm

made training harder for the more specialised branches of the army such as the artillery and the technical units. An attempt was made to compensate for this disadvantage by the long period of conscript service — three years for all but the

water-cooled

mounted on wheeled

less often with tripods. Every had an automatic pistol and sabre. Since two cavalry squadrons formed an

carriages, officer

integral part of each infantry division, only one ca\ airy division was created as an independent formation. It consisted of two cavalry brigades with two regiments each, and four squadrons to the regiment. The

wartime complement five officers.

of each

— and by the organisation of numerous short-term special courses, particularly for NCOs. infantry

It is

squadron was

rank-and-file cavalrymen and their NCO's. Finally, the equipment of the machine gun companies was the Maxim gun as used by the infantry. The infantry divisions and the single cavalry division, then, were the highest independently operating units of the Bul-

garian army.

Good equipment and The

training

was not organised into independent formations, but was integrated artillery

into other divisions, notably those of the infantry. An exception here was the heavy artillery with its 120-mm and 150-mm howitzers. This was under the direct orders of the High Command, which also assigned howitzer batteries to individual divisions according to the situation on the front. On the eve of the First World War, then, the Bulgarians had a grand total of 944 pieces. Technical and auxiliary formations integrated into the land army included, first and foremost, nine battalions of sappers, each of two companies; a pontoon battalion of two companies and nine independent halfcompanies; a signals battalion; a railway battalion of four companies; a searchlight section, balloon section and motor car section. Auxiliary formations included 12

pay companies and 12 medical companies (one to each division) as well as military police, few before the war but increasing steadily as it went on. A peculiarity of the Bulgarian army was that there were no independent transport formations. The baggage train and pack-horse sections were an integral part of each different kind of unit, whether infantry, cavalry or artillery. If we add together all these formations — ten regular infantry divisions plus the

Macedonian

and one cavalry the artillery and technical and auxiliary units, and throw in the 70,000 members of the home guard (destined for service on Bulgarian soil onlv), we find that the country called to arms a total of 850,000, of whom 500,000 division,

division,

along

with

were fighting men. A few words must be devoted

to the Bulconsisted of the Danube itrol boats and gunflotilla with a few minelayers, and the boats and two ancien Black Sea flotilla of onj training cruiser (717 tons) and six mine vers (97 tons), a few cutters and a small number of auxiliary vessels. Clearly a fleet of this size could not hope to play any sign cant part in World War, operations during the Firs even in the Black Sea.

garian

1080

fleet.

It

NCOs and

was a further asset. Good training and good equipment are

and men

M

officers,

of the Bulgarian army was on the whole high, and the varied experience which a very large number of them had only recently acquired in the Balkan Wars

and 130 horse. The establishment of this single cavalry division was thus, 16 squadrons with 2.400 cavalry and 16 machine gunners, plus one or two batteries of quickfiring field-guns and a few squads of despatch riders on motor cycles. Personal arms consisted of the traditional sabre for officers alike, the automatic pistol for sergeant-majors and buglers, and 1891 Mannlicher carbine for the 8-mm

among

men

125 cavalrymen. 17 auxiliaries

officers,

true to say that the state of military

preparedness

On

the right, the Bulgarian General Savov

The foregoing review of numbers, organand equipment gives an idea of the

isation

quantitative aspect of the Bulgarian forces as an addition to the strength of the German-Austro-Hungarian command on the

Balkan

front,

and as an instrument

for

achieving Bulgaria's own war aims. We must also consider, however, the fighting qualities of those forces: the standard of command and training, the effectiveness of the equipment and the morale of the conscript troops themselves. The corps of regular officers were for the most part products of the Sofia training college. The training manuals and tactical and operational methods prescribed in them, on which these officers were brought up, were pretty well up to the standards

European military science. Such was the unanimous assessment of Russian and French commanders and indeed of the German General Staff, which of contemporary

spoke particularly highly of the level of training of senior Bulgarian officers. A certain number of these officers had been educated not in Sofia but abroad, especially in Russia: this was particularly true up to the time of the Balkan Wars.

A

smaller fraction of them, both before that date and more especially after it, had passed through military schools in France, Belgium or even Italy, while an increasing number were to be found in German academies. An important role in the Bulgarian officer corps was played by officers of the reserve. Most of those of lower rank were trained at a special one-year course in Knyazhev (Knjazevac); others again were former regular officers who had transferred to the reserve. In contrast to most continental armies, most Bulgarian officers came from the lower strata of society and so had much more in common with the rank-and-file than their colleagues in, say, the Russian, German or Austro-Hungarian armies. The great social barriers found in those armies were unknown here, which naturally benefited the training of the other ranks. These were largely recruited from the rural population and included a number, albeit dwindling, of illiterate citizens. These soldiers of peasant stock, inured to hard work in the open air, found it easier than town dwellers to survive the extremely hard conditions at the front. The backward state of Bulgarian industry on the other hand, and the consequently small

number

of

technically

skilled

soldiers,

of

course important factors for success in war. But one must not underestimate the role of such imponderables as the morale of an army as it goes to war, and indeed of the general attitude of the public. In this last respect the prospect was less favourable. In the First Balkan War the Bulgarians, fighting side by side with their allies against the traditional Turkish foe,

had proved brave and

skilful soldiers,

stood up well to the great privations of the campaign and achieved considerable successes. But then the Second Balkan War came, in which Bulgaria was rapidly and fairly easily defeated. The Bulgarian ruling circles had spared no effort to persuade the people that in this

new war,

into which they were entering brand-new allies — Germany and Austro-Hungary- their task was to wipe away the stain of defeat and above all to liberate Macedonia, to which the country had long laid claim, and annex it to Bulgaria. This chauvinism had a certain impact, but only a temporary and dubious one. For the mass of common soldiers were far more influenced by other considerations. First and foremost, as with most of

with

the Bulgarian populace, came Slav sentiment. The ordinary Bulgarian felt a very natural attraction toward Russia, which had played the chief part in liberating him from Turkish domination; he also sensed a kinship with the other 'Slav brothers', especially those of the Balkans. He had not joined in the Second Balkan War in his own interest: unlike the First Balkan War,

he had never regarded it as his own cause and had soon realised that Bulgaria had been manoeuvred into it by the policies of

Germany and Austro-Hungary among others. And now he was being called upon once more to fight, alongside those same Great Powers, against Serbia. This thought undoubtedly had a great effect on the spirit of the Bulgarian army. Another factor was the socialist movement, which in this predominantly agricultural country had been going from strength to strength since the start of the century and had been as divisive an element for the Bulgarian army as for any other. Its importance is shown not only by the researches of contemporary Bulgarian historians but also, for example, by an official

document

of the Austro-Hungarian this period. It was in

army dating from

1912 that a compendious manual on Die Bulgarische Arrnee was issued for senior Austro-Hungarian officers, not only dealing with the composition and equipment of the Bulgarian forces but expressing admiration for the technical and military competence of both men and officers. The textbook nevertheless notes in this con-

nection that 'socialist ideas are attractive in Bulgaria to the lower strata of society, and these may have a very damaging effect on the army'. The mobilisation of such a large mass of the population, moreover, which thereafter consumed without being able to produce, hung like a millstone round the necks of the remaining workers. A severe shortage of manpower immediately became evident, especially in agriculture; in the second year of the war nearly 359£ of the arable acreage was left uncultivated. All these considerations weighed upon the ordinary Bulgarian in uniform. He realised more and more clearly not only that he was being asked for a tribute of blood in a cause that was alien to him, but that he had left his kith and kin uncared for. It was not surprising, then, that signs of dissatisfaction arose in the army from the first days of the September mobilisation. Within a few days a confidential report was issued by the High Command which read: 'The mood of the rank-andfile is dreadful. They are all waiting till they get their rifles; then they will know who to aim them at. There will certainly be insurrections.' A coded telegram from the commander of the 2nd Division to his army staff, dated September 9, 1915, stated that 'on the night of September 4 several reservists in the 7th Company of the 27th Battalion tried to start a mutiny. On the

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY '

MILES

1

OKMS

50

200

RUMANIA

HQ Ruschuk(Ruse)

THIRD ARMY,

SERBIA

j

HQ

ARMY

'FIRST

\

• Sofia

— SECOND • MACEDONIA

ARMY

A/

Black

Sea

armies. Here we read: T must draw your attention to the importance of longlasting and highly effective measures for raising the morale of the soldiers and reinforcing strict discipline in all units under your command.' The nature of the 'highly effec-

Philopoppel

HQJ Plovdiv)

;

This was in marked contrast, of course, propaganda about the 'splendid military spirit' of the Bulgarians marching to a 'just war for the liberation of the Macedonians'. The Bulgarian General Staff itself was naturally well aware of the facts, and promptly sought an escape from a situation that was embarrassing to say the least. This can be gathered from another confidential despatch sent in October, 1915 — before operations started — by the Bulgarian Commander-in-Chief. Zhekov, to the commanders of all three to official

GREECE

tive measures' is made clear, for example, in an order of the day from the Chief-ofStaff of the Third Army issued just after

night of September 7 thirteen men in the 5th Company of the same battalion, no doubt in league with the instigators of the earlier affair, fled with their arms.' A large number of similar despatches testifying to the low morale of the Bulgarian forces could be quoted.

he received the Commander-in-Chief's message. The order empowered subordinate commanders, in cases of indiscipline or bad behaviour by an NCO or private, to inflict corporal punishment on the culprit up to 25 lashes without regard to possible court

A Bulgaria's strategic position, and the

which could be multiplied clearly enough that the fighting spirit of the Bulgarian army as it prepared for action was far from ideal. It contrasted particularly, for example, with

deployment

armies

These

1915 V^he organisation of the Bulgarian army. The Prussia of the Balkans' could mobilise 850,000 soldiers from her 6,000,000 population of her

martial

in

trial.

details,

indefinitely,

show

Infantry Division Infantry

3

1000

24 battalions

Brigades

rifles

1

machine gun

total rifles in

infantry division: 24 000

t

Cavalry

2

Artillery

1

Regiment

75mm 1

Regiment

squadrons

125 horsemen

9 batteries

4

4

4

quickfiring

guns

guns

guns

6 batteries

75mm

field

2 batteries

75mm mountain Auxiliary technical

:

sappers, signals, supply, medical

Cavalry Division Cavalry^

2

Brigades

4 Regiments

16 squadrons total

7*

Cavalry division:

Artillery

2

75mm

men 2

1

1

25 h/men

5 officers

17 auxiliaries 130 horses

in

352

batteries

quickfiring

4

guns

10S1

that of the Serbs,

who

after their success-

engagements with the forces of the Hapsburg monarchy were now readying themselves for an unequal contest with a ful

greatly superior foe. Despite its large si/e. adequate equipment and good training, then, the Bulgarian army was not in the best of heart for the impending campaign. Two pieces of evidence may be quoted to show that the military leaders of the Central Powers were well aware of the situation. The Ger-

man and Austro-Hungarian General

Staffs,

needless to say. had been familiar with the si/e and capability of the Bulgarian forces long before the war. Yet when the military agreement was concluded at Pless on September 6, 1915 between Germany, AustroHungary and Bulgaria, represented respectively by General von Falkenhayn, General Conrad von Hotzendorf and Lieutenant-Colonel Gatchev, Bulgaria was asked to supply only a minimum of four divisions for use against Serbia within 35 days, and to send one further division against Serbian Macedonia. Field-Marshal

army in alliance with the Central Powers. Evidence that the second explanation is the true one comes from another interesting measure undertaken by the German command. Soon after the agreement in question the Germans sent two mixed infantry brigades into Bulgaria, one to Varna (Stalin) and the other to Burgas. The official explanation was that the Germans wished to establish submarines in those two ports, which would then operate in the Black Sea mainly for the protection of the Bulgarian coastline. In his war memoirs, however, von Falkenhayn casts a different light on this episode, explaining that by locating German units inside Bulgaria the Germans hoped to exercise a favourable effect on the population, which had so far failed to take up a satisfactory attitude toward the Russians'. In plain language, the Prussian general was saying that the Germans were afraid of the Bulgarian people's sympathy toward the Russians and, by deploying their own troops inside the country, were securing the Bulgarian army's rear. reliability of its

von Mackensen, who was in supreme com-

mand i

six

of all units operating against Serbia six Austrian and the four

German,

Bulgarian ones) was either unaccountably modest in his demands, seeing that he too

w as well aware r

of the size of Bulgaria's

he realised the inner weakness of the country and especially the unforces, or else

Bulgarian expansionism The motive for Germany's rather moderate demands on Bulgaria (for here, as elsewhere, Austro-Hungary was soon playing second fiddle) is clear enough. Of course, considering the military plight of the antagonist, Serbia, the requirement was adequate indeed. At the start of the war Serbia had possessed 12 infantry divisions and a cavalry division, but she had already suffered severe losses during the autumn campaign of 1914. Even though she had managed to summon her strength again and to partially replace the lost men, she still had an acute shortage of artillery and, above all, ammunition. On the eve of the 1915 campaign the German October, General Staff estimated the actual size of the Serbian army at 190,000 to 200,000 men at the most, and these men had to face the combined German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian forces mentioned above. In the plan of operations for the Serbian campaign, even though a maximum of five divisions was expected from Bulgaria, a total of 330,000 effectives on the attacking side was reckoned with. The disproportion of such things as artillery and mortars was even greater. The superiority on the Central Powers' side was thus so marked as to guarantee their success. Despite this situation, we have noted that the Bulgarian High Command mobilised practically its entire fighting strength. The reason for this must be sought in the intentions of the Bulgarian ruling circles themselves, intentions not always quite in harmony with those of the Central Powers. Bulgaria did not want only to erase the defeat she had suffered in the Second Balkan War and to regain the territory which, only recently acquired in the First

Balkan War, had been promptly taken away from her by the Treaty of Bucharest. With the ambitious King Ferdinand at her head she also doubtless aspired, with the help of Germany and Austro-Hungary, to her ancient desire for a 'Greater Bulgaria'. That of course would have meant not only acquiring the whole of Macedonia but also Thrace, and greatly enlarging her hold on the Aegean coast (along which she still had a narrow strip including the minor port of Dedeagach [Alexandroupolis] ), at the expense of Serbia, Greece and Turkey, fulfil

1082

and furthermore expanding her territory northward at the expense of Rumania. An attempt to realise this ambition seems the only

explanation

for

Bulgaria's

total

mobilisation.

We must now

consider how the mobiliproceeded and how Bulgaria deployed her troops. In the military agreement described above Bulgaria undertook to have four divisions on a war footing ready at Serbia's doorstep within 35 days; by not later than September 21 she was to have these divisions called up. Finally, she had undertaken to be prepared to attack Serbian Macedonia with a further division. Bulgaria accordingly took steps to mobilise, but only made the announcement on the final day, September 21, and then proceeded toward total mobilisation. Although the reserve areas for most of the divisions were, as we saw, in the neighbourhood of their peacetime garrisons, the mobilisation took longer than planned, no doubt because the entire army was being called up instead of only four or five divisions. At the same time as mobilisation was taking place the question of the supreme command over the Bulgarian land forces was being settled. In accordance with the military agreement the German Fieldsation

Marshal von Mackensen had assumed control of all. units directly committed to operations

against Serbia.

He

therefore

also assumed command of the five — or six, as they were when operations began — Bulgarian divisions. Von Mackensen was authorised to issue orders completely binding upon all units assigned to him, to re-

deploy them

if he wished, to determine the and direction of attacks and so forth. But at his side, as Commander-inChief of the entire Bulgarian army-inbeing, was the Bulgarian General N. Zhekov with General Zhostov as his Chiefof-Staff. Zhekov for his part had exclusive control over all other Bulgarian divisions, from their deployment to the

initiation

actual

direction

of

military

operations.

This subordination of nearly half the Bulgarian forces to a purely Bulgarian command was confirmed in a secret protocol to the above-mentioned military agreement both by Germany and by Austro-Hungary. In this way Bulgaria was virtually granted the right to undertake independent military operations, not necessarily in complete accord with the Central Powers' basic plan of attack against Serbia. In the last phase of the mobilisation, which saw most of the Bulgarian troops transferred to the Serbian frontier, they were organised into three armies. The First Army, commanded by General Boyadzhiyev, was entrusted with operations against Serbia. It consisted of the 6th (Vidin) Division under General Papadopov, the 8th (Tundzhe) under General

the 9th (Plevna) under General Mitov and the 1st (Sofia) under General Draganov. These were further reinforced by the 1st Independent Cavalry Brigade commanded by Colonel Stoikov. This entire force now took up positions of vantage along the Serbian frontier from the northernmost point down to the town of Belo-

Mitov,

gradchik.

The Second Army, commanded by General Todorov, was deployed to the. south of the First with a view to operating in

Macedonia. It comprised the 3rd Balkan Division under General Ribarov and Colonel Vasilev's 7th Rilo Division, together with the Cavalry Division led by Colonel Tanev. Liaison between these two armies was entrusted to the 26th Infantry Regiment, detached from the Second Army, and the 1st Cavalry Brigade, detached from the First. Both of them were fully subordinate to Mackensen's command. In the period between the announcement of mobilisation and the declaration of war on Serbia (October 13), however, the Bulgarian High Command created a Third Army under General Toshev. This consisted of General Kiselov's 4th (Preslav) Division and General Kolev's 10th Division. Units of this Third Army were concentrated to the south again of the Second and were clearly destined for operations in Thrace. Two other divisions, moreover, were brought up to strength, namely the

Danube) Division under General Varnev and the 11th Macedonian Division,

5th

i

commanded by Colonel Zlatarov. Both these divisions were deployed prior to the Bulgaria of operations within start proper. Like the whole Third Army, they did not fall under the command of Bulgaria's allies but were entirely at the disposal of the country's own High Command. The success of the Central Powers in winning over Bulgaria as a further ally in 1915 immediately changed the whole position of the Balkans to their advantage. They now had a direct line of communications with Turkey, but above all conditions were henceforth ideal for an attack on Serbia. They acquired, moreover, the considerable access of military strength which the Bulgarian army represented. As we have seen, this was alone twice as large and twice as heavily equipped as the Serbian army, which was about to be faced by a crushing combination of German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian divisions. However, a much larger Bulgarian army was raised than its new allies required and the question arose, what Bulgaria proposed to do with this vast force. Would she try to implement her own aggressive plans? Or had the Bulgarian leaders realised the (hitherto concealed)

weakness of their own army, especially in morale, and sought to compensate for this defect by the sheer magnitude of the levy?

Opposite left: A Bulgarian infantryman. There were considerable variations both in the way that the uniform was worn and in the parts of a uniform issued to each man. This illustration shows the brown fatigue uniform, the standard Bulgarian

field service

uniform of the

First

World War. Boots were worn, but characteristic of the Bulgars were the opankers, national peasant footwear. Equipment was usually of the pre-1908

German

pattern (leather).

Opposite right: A Bulgarian officer. The tunic was grey-brown, the trousers grey. Right: The Schneider-Canet M 1904 75-mm field gun, the standard Bulgarian field gun in 1915. Range: 8,230 yards. Weight in action: 2,32o lbs. Rate of fire: 20 rounds-per-minute. Crew: 6

1083

A

1084

GUNBOATS ON THE DANUBE

1

Having beaten back two Austrian invasions, in 1915 Serbia set about preparing her defences against a third onslaught. The British naval mission to Serbia, under Rear-Admiral Troubridge, was intended to help her in these preparations, and to prevent the Austrians using the Danube as a means of communication and supply to Bulgaria. To this end minefields laid, torpedo tubes sited and gun batteries placed, yet when the Austrians decided to move the British defences proved wholly useless: after a two-day bombardment the Austrians successfully crossed the Danube to invade Serbia. Peter Kemp. Below: Austrian river monitors trapped behind Belgrade by British picket boats.

were

Left: Rear- Admiral

Troubridge

Prince Alexander of Serbia

*j^^

{right)

{left)

and Crown

By ho end of December 1914, the Serbian armies had twice driven the Austrian invaders out of their country and once again were standing upon the hanks of the Danube, their northern frontier. Belgrade, the capital, had been reoccupied, and to it Britain sent a Naval Mission to advise the Serbian government and army on the best means of defence of the great international waterway which was the Danube. As head of the mission was sent Rear-Admiral E.C. Troubridge, recently acquitted by court-martial of the charges brought against him after the escape of the Goebcn and Breslau in the opening days of the war and now relegated by the British Admiralty to what was expected to be an operational backwater. It was a small mission in comparison with those appointed to other nations, consisting of some 40 seamen and 30 marines. In addition to Admiral Troubridge, and acting as combined flag lieutenant and chief executive officer, was Lieutenant-Commander Kerr, while the marines were under the command of Major Elliot and Lieutenant Bullock. In SeptemTroubridge's request, another ber, at Lieutenant Hilton Young, was officer, t

A Admiral Troubridge s defensive preparations V One of the Royal Naval Vedettes (picket boats) which Troubridge used on the Danube. Here it is shown fitted with torpedo launching devices, one of which is swung out for dropping The Vedette was 56 feet long and was armed with a 2-inch Nordenfeldt cannon

added

to his staff.

The main military purposes for which the mission had been sent to Serbia were to

prevent

Danube

as a

enemy from using the means of communication and

the

supply to Bulgaria and from bringing up their river monitors to bombard Belgrade.

1086

The

first purpose had been achieved by sealing the river with guns, mines, and torpedo-tubes; in the case of the river monitors, they lay disconsolate behind islands far up the river beyond Semlin, having been discouraged by the loss of two of them when they first ventured forth to

battle.

These two had been sunk by Kerr

a picket-boat fitted with torpedo-dropping gear, and the remainder seemed to in

have no heart for further action. They were visible from the naval posts through a telescope, and a close watch was kept upon them for any signs of their raising steam. They remained quiescent throughout the whole remaining period of the mission's occupancy of the Danube's southern bank. The war situation in the Balkans was complicated at this period by the neutrality of Greece and Bulgaria. Greece had, indeed, a pact of mutual assistance in the event of an attack on Serbia bj a second Balkan power, but had little heart in implementing it. Bulgaria, however, was frankly hostile although amenable to territorial bribery. She coveted from Greece the port of Kavalla and its hinterland, and from Serbia that part of Macedonia which lay to the south of a line running from Lake Ochrida (Ohridsko) to the Bulgarian frontier near Kustendil (Kyustendil). Heavy pressure from the Allied powers, including Russia, on both Greece and Serbia to make these territorial concessions were strongly resisted by both countries, and with this form of bribery obviously of doubtful 7

Bulgarian hostility hardened. It was only slowly that it dawned upon the Allies that the German war aims had changed since the days of August 1914. Then it had seemed that the Channel ports were to be the main objective. The War Council in London awoke to the change in German objectives in the late spring of 1915. But as events unfolded in the Balkans it became more and more certain that the German aim was to consolidate their hold in that troubled corner of Europe and to open the road to Constantinople for largefruition, the attitude of

expansion beyond. This road lay through Serbia and Bulgaria. Bulgaria scale

was already

;

The British naval mission an impossible task? A Setting up the British naval gun battery on the Danube just beyond Belgrade V British and Serbian artillerymen on the Danube

in the

German

pocket; Serbia

remained as the sole stumbling block to the German dream. As this new aspect of the war dawned on Britain and France, Serbia became of critical importance. She was no longer merely the gallant little ally fighting her own little war against the Austrian invaders; she was the strategic key to the whole outcome of the eastern war. Should Serbia go under, the Allied task n the Balkans and in Mesopotamia would be made vastly more difficult.

As all this became apparent in Britain and France, steps were taken to bolster up Serbia against the onslaught which was inevitably to come. But already it was too The German summer campaign late. against Russia had been vastly successful. The whole Russian front had been broken, and Germany was able to move a sizeable force from Russia to reinforce the Austrians on the Danube. They concentrated at Orsova, at the 'Iron Gate', where the frontiers of Austro-Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Serbia met. There they served a double purpose, forestalling any possible moves by

Rumania to come to the help of Serbia and threatening the latter country with extinction as soon as Bulgaria could be persuaded to declare war and march against Serbia, attacking her on her eastern flank. Guns, mines and torpedoes It was against this ominous background that the British Naval Mission to Serbia Belgrade itself, where most operated. o( the mission was concentrated, stands on the confluence of two rivers, the Save (Sava) and the Danube, and it was on these that the main British responsibility for defence rested. The mission had eight 4.7inch naval guns disposed in four two-gun two up the Save and two on the Danube. British seaman gunners and marines supplied the key personnel for the guns; the main bulk of the crews and also the officers commanding the batteries were Serbian. All lived in huts and dugouts on the hills above the river, being visited occasionally by the Admiral and his flag lieutenant. In addition to the gun batteries, and forming the main defence against any water-borne invasion, were the minefields in the river. There were three main minefields, one across the Save, one across the Danube just above the city, and a third 40 miles down river at Semendria (Smederevo). Each main field consisted of several lines of mines, both contact and observation, and their upkeep and renewal was the responsibility of the mission. Each minefield was backed up by torpedo tubes erected on the the river bank. Those men of the mission who were not with the guns batteries,

lived in Belgrade and most of them worked in a disused factory which had been taken over as a British arsenal, where spare mines and torpedoes were kept, their job being to assemble the mines for the continual renewal of the fields and to keep the torpedoes in full running condition. The

remainder manned the torpedo-tubes on the banks and kept watch over the observation mines and indicator loops which would give warning of any enemy movement on the river. A smaller detachment kept watch over the torpedo-tubes and minefields at Semendria, which guarded the river a mile and a half above the town. A similar distance below it was the Grad, a mediaeval fortress with immensely thick in which were stowed two torpedoes and their spare warheads, 40 mines, and 20 boxes of guncotton with which to charge them. The long summer days passed eventlessly. Although the Austrians held the northern bank of the river in force, their troops hidden in the heavily wooded plains and ridges across the river, they made no offensive move. The Serbians in the Belgrade area had such faith in the ability of the British mission to hold the Austrians at bay that they kept only a small force of soldiers round Belgrade and moved the main bulk )f their army down ier and on the to the Bulgarian fro Danube around Posha atz (Pozarevac) to cover the mouth of th Morava valley. There they were keen to ack the Bulonly hope of garians, realising that the ive strike survival lay in a pre-er* but were against their long-time enemi 11 hoped, held in check by a Britain who against all the evidence, to a elude a bargain that would bring Bulgarit ito the war on the Allied side or at least would

walls,

f

.

1

088

keep her neutral. The Serbian disposition argued a sublime faith in the ability of the British navy to defend some 50 miles of river with so tiny a force of guns, mines and torpedoes. It was, no doubt, more the commanding personality and calm assurance of Rear-Admiral Troubridge than the actual strength of the mission which aroused the Serbian's confidence, for Troubridge was immensely loved and respected by the Serbian army. They had no apparent qualms in leaving the defence of the river frontier in the hands of the mission. Minefields were laid, and renewals made, always at night. The one picket boat owned by the mission normally towed a flatbottom lighter loaded with mines out into the river, and the lines of mines were laid by pushing them overboard by hand. Although each line had to extend the whole

Failure, as the mission's defences are swept aside width of the river, ending close to the Austrian bank, the mission suffered no casualties during these operations. The work continued through the summer and

autumn, the fields getting larger and more densely packed with each lay. The German troops which were moved

into the

down from the Eastern Front reached Or§ova early in September, but their arrival caused no undue apprehension in Britain, which was still labouring with her attempt to

buy the neutrality of Bulgaria. The hint of danger came in mid-September

first

with a Serbian report to the effect that Bulgarian troops and munitions were being concentrated at Vidin, just below the 'Iron Gate' and in the north-west corner of Bulgaria. There were rumours, too, of a Bulgarian mobilisation. It was this rumour which set in motion the complicated moves in the Balkans which were ultimately to engulf the British Naval Mission. By her treaty with Serbia, Greece was bound to come to her assistance if necessary, but it was a condition of their defensive alliance that Serbia should provide 150,000 troops against any Bulgarian aggression. Threatened from the north by the Austro-German forces, this was far beyond Serbian capacity. The naval mission, it is true, had freed a large Serbian force by taking over the responsibility of defending the Danube, but this force was required to guard the Or§ova valley and was not available for operations further south against the Bulgarians. Both the Greek and the Serbian Prime Ministers appealed to Britain and France to supply the 150,000 troops required to deter a Bulgarian attack.

A small token force Events now moved too fast for the Allies, and for Serbia. The joint Greek and Serbian request for 150,000 troops was discussed in London on September 23, and although a delaying reply was made, the government agreed, under heavy pressure, to contribute a small token force. On the 24th, on the news that Greece had agreed to a general mobilisation 'as a measure of precaution', Britain and France decided to go ahead with intervention in the Balkans and to commit themselves to a large-scale landing

at Salonika. France fairly quickly laid her hands on 64,000 men; Britain, scraping together her share, was 20,000 men short. On the 25th, Bulgaria ordered a general mobilisation, and few could now doubt that,

within a week or two, Serbia would be attacked simultaneously on two fronts; the Austro-German forces crossing the Danube in the north, the Bulgarians advancing in the south-east. An attempt across the Danube in the vicinity of Belgrade, where the main strength of the British Naval Mission lay, was unlikely both on account of the minefields in the river and the difficult nature of the ground, but at Semandria, where the second British minefield was laid, conditions were much more favourable. Beyond the river lay the great Banat plain, well afforested to provide cover for an advancing army. On October 13 Great Britain broke off relations with Bulgaria. The news was telegraphed to Rear-Admiral Troubridge, and the naval mission braced itself to withstand the shock of invasion, though there was little more that it could do than had already been done. On the 14th Bulgaria declared war on Serbia, and on the 15th, following an announcement that a blockade of the Bulgarian Mediterranean coast would be enforced, a British declaration of war followed.

There was

little

activity

at

Belgrade

apart from an increase in aerial activity, but at Semandria a heavy bombardment from Austrian batteries concealed in the woods across the river was opened. The detachment of the naval mission there which operated the minefield and the torpedo tubes was forced to leave its headquarters and find a more sheltered position under a culvert which passed under the coastal road. Fortunately the culvert was within a few yards of the torpedo tubes, and a close watch on the river was maintained in case the enemy should try to cross or, equally, should try to bring up a river monitor. For two days and two nights the bombardment continued unabated. There was still no movement across the river, but the intensity of the shelling damaged the mission's torpedo tubes. When the Germans and Austrians began to cross before dawn on the 17th an attempt to fire the torpedoes failed because of the damage they had sustained. The crossing, on both sides of the town, soon swamped the defence, and there was nothing to be done but to retire and try to link up with the remainder of the mission, which had itself left Belgrade and was making for Chupria, near Nish (Nis), in the south-east of the country. With the successful crossing at Semandria threatening Belgrade, the bulk of the naval mission there had withdrawn with the Serbians, and the German forces had got across the Danube without much difficulty. The task of the Naval Mission was over, having

ended

in failure.

Further Reading Corbett,

Sir

Julian,

Naval Operations, Vols.

(Longmans, Green 1923-1928) Public Records Office, Despatches of RearAdmiral E. C. Troubridge Young, E. H., The Crossing of the Danube (Cornhill Magazine) Young, E. H., By Sea and Land. Some Naval Doings (T. C. & E. C. Jack 1920) Ill

&

IV

[For Peter Kemp 's biography, see page 52.

]

Nearly

all

the

official histories of the First

World War have ignored or minimised the

role of Intelligence. Indeed, the suppression of the facts about it was the deliberate policy of governments, with the result that myth and fiction have proliferated, emphasising treachery

and skullduggery rather than the more important but mundane hard work and sound judgement. Compared to the sophistication of

modern Intelligence-gathering techniques, the resources of 1914 seem crude and puny, yet in some of the early battles Intelligence played a decisive part. For example, the costly Austrian defeats by Serbia were based on information about Austria's war plans given by an

Austrian

traitor.

Donald McLachlan

(opposite the East Coast naval bases) and saw submarines as threatening battleships rather than merchant shipping. If German naval Intelligence was poor throughout the war, the work of the Admiralty's Naval Intelligence Department (NID) was at the outset far below the excellence which it achieved later. The escape of the new battle-cruiser Goeben from Messina to Constantinople in the very first week — a fiasco which infuriated First Lord Churchill, dismayed the British public, and helped to bring Turkey into the war on Germany's side — was partly owing to the inaccurate intelligence about her speed, endurance and fighting capacity which inspired the cautious orders sent from the Admiralty to Admiral Sir Berkeley Milne, who was trying to intercept her.

On land there were at the outset similar serious failures of Intelligence collection and assessment in the general staffs. The French misjudged the direction of the main German attack on their country, largely because they had long brooded over plans for an immediate offensive towards Alsace and Lorraine when war started. 'We were within an ace of being ruined by the poverty of our strategic intelligence,' wrote Repington, the military correspondent of The Times about Allied planning at the time.

INTELLIGENCE In one of his last despatches from London, only five days before Britain declared war, the German Naval Attache warned his masters to be 'prepared for an immediate attack by the English fleet at the moment of the outbreak of war between Germany and France'. The Chief of Naval Staff in Berlin underlined the key

French estimates of German front-line strength were little higher than when he had been at the War Office years before, and the German strategy of holding the Eastern Front with the smallest possible forces while the French army was enveloped in the west by the Schlieffen Plan was misunderstood and its speed

words in Captain von Mueller's message, for they confirmed its view. The scenario of the High Seas Fleet manoeuvres in 1913 had shown the Grand Fleet storming into the Heligoland Bight, and setting up a close blockade of Germany's bases and ports on the North Sea coast. Mines and torpedoes were ready, on a scale beyond the imagination of the British Admiralty, to counter these Nelson tactics and to cause such damage to British dreadnoughts and battle-cruisers as would level up German chances in the big fleet action everyone expected sooner or later. It was a shrewd plan, if the intelligence supporting it was right. In fact, however, Mueller and his predecessor, Widenmann — who had given excellent service between 1907-12 — were wrong. They did not know that in 1912 the Admiralty had switched to a plan of remote blockade in the North Sea which would serve three purposes: protect Britain against invasion (for which the Germans had in fact no plans — so there was a British intelligence error too), control the exits to the Atlantic through which commerce raiders must pass, and strangle quickly the overseas trade

underrated. Yet, in the event, it was the German army that suffered strategic disaster on the Marne, partly because of its ignorance about the British forces opposite its right flank, partly because of its fear of British landings on the Belgian coast behind it. As if this was not enough to endanger von Kluck's success with his onward rushing First Army, there was the optimistic advice of High Command Intelligence to help him into error. In establishing that Intelligence work, good or bad, played a decisive part in these early battles on land and sea there is a risk of overrating its importance and of underrating the factors of courage, training and leadership, and of efficiency in weapons, transport and communications. For this the historians, biographers and memoir writers of the first war must share the blame. Almost without exception official histories ignored or played down the role of Intelligence, in every form. Suppression of the facts about it was the deliberate policy of governments and their advisers. The motives, were — and still are — various: the hope that a particular trick might be played successfully again, or that such and such errors by the enemy might be repeated, or that personalities and methods should be protected from journalists and authors. There is, it is true, a genuine risk that those working in Intelligence, if they see the work of the past being freely described and discussed, will become less discreet and cautious. But caution has gone to the extreme of omitting all use of the word Intelligence, even in indexes. Fortunately, such useful and detailed revelations as the books of Colonel Nicolai, head of the German Secret Service during the war, and of Admiral Sir William James, who worked with 'Blinker' Hall in Nil), have made it possible to make useful rents in the cloak of secrerx

own

of all hostile Europe. To be certain before war breaks out what will be the main strategic plan of a great power either the help of a traitor or outrageous luck is needed. Neither was available in August 1914: whether to the French trying to find out whether the Germans would come through Belgium, or to the Germans guessing the speed at which the British Expeditionary Force would get across the Channel to its allotted station on the French left, or to the British wondering whether Italy and Turkey would be enemies or neutrals in the eastern Mediterranean. (The Germans deduced,

but did not know, the French would at once attack in Eastern France.) What could the German Naval Attache hope to find out in a capital where the First Sea Lord at one time kept his war plan secret from his own War Office? The gossip of British politicians, officials and officers, and of fellow attaches from other countries would reveal many important details, but not the master plan known only to very few. As for the argumentative and inquisitive London Press, a valuable source for foreign embassies, it had been encouraged to write what it wanted to believe: that the Royal Navy would at once take the offensive in the short war for which it had been expensively prepared. British Intelligence too, was failing in the same context. It had not even thought of doing the hard economic research and calculation which would have shown the disastrous effect on Germany in a long war of cutting off her overseas trade by blockade. If it had, then the deadly success of the U-Boats in 1917 against Allied sea-borne supplies — which at one moment made Jellicoe despair of winning the war — might have been foreseen. Instead, in 1914 the Admiralty were much more anxious about

the operations of the great Zeppelin airships from

Cuxhaven

Miscalculation and misunderstanding Historians have to accept the rules of the Intelligence game as governments play it; but one consequence has been that much myth and fiction have accumulated around the subject, turning quite unimportant spies into heroes and heroines, and exaggerating the importance of treachery and skulduggery at the expense of hard work, scrupulous judgement and brill iant invent ions. To gaurd secrets before and during war was as important a part of Intelligence work as to ferret them out. Everywhere, whether in staff headquarters or governments, counterespionage and secret Intelligence services worked together. If the tour ureal continental powers were more security-conscious than the British, it was perhaps because they shared long frontiers and planned battles on old and long-studied battlefields. There was elaborate and incessant Intelligence activity along the Franco-German border, as along the Russian frontiers with Germany and Austin Hungary and in the Balkans. Deserters from (he German arm\ were in peacetime picked up by French security agents in the ,

10S9

fortress towns o( Alsace and Lorraine and their papers were then used by agents of the Dcu.xiime Bureau to get back into Germany. German counterespionage arrested 66 spies in 1908 and 346 in 1913. Most of those sentenced were Germans and a third of them came from Alsace and Lorraine. Both sides spent money, the Russians rather more than the Germans, to discover and conceal tacts about railway timetables and train movements on which estimates o( mobilisation and of the concentration areas of corps and divisions could be based. (The first German offensive required over 4.000 train movements.) The British kept a close

who was the enemy. In 1906 their Military London, Huguet, went back to Paris and told the Deuxieme Bureau that the British were at last agreeing to military conversations with France, in the spirit of the Entente. He found them, to his surprise, engaged in an 'academic exercise'

watch on the rather crude German spy rings in their own country and Ireland, directed chiefly at the dockyards and naval stations; spied themselves on the North Sea and Baltic coasts; countered the elaborate network of consuls and observers that the Germans had created overseas with the help of banks, shipping firms, traders and paid agents. In the Middle East the travellers, archaeologists, oil technicians, Zionists and consuls of the rival powers were already keeping tabs on one another.

thought of cavalry and the navies of cruisers and submarines as the gatherers of facts about the enemy. Air reconnaissance over the battlefield was in its infancy. Pilots and observers still carried revolvers to defend themselves against enemy aircraft and were liable to be shot at by their own troops. The interception and reading of wireless traffic was only just beginning at sea and on land; radio direction-finding, by which the positions of enemy stations and ships using wireless could be pin-pointed, was still

Numerous

secret police The vast territory of Russia was hard to penetrate because of its numerous secret police, well trained in work against its own nationals and their allies in exile. It needed a horse-and-cart trader — so the story went — plying between East Prussia and Russia to bring the Germans the concrete evidence of Russian mobilisation at the end of July 1914 which the Kaiser had demanded—a printed proclamation removed from the wall of a local post office. Yet the English spy Sidney Reilly (born a Russian Jew) could establish himself in Moscow as agent for Hamburg shipbuilders Blohm und Voss, and pass to London copies of German warship plans submitted to the Russian navy. Russia's neighbour, Austria-Hungary, with her minorities of Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians and others, had perhaps the most elaborate security network of all, extending right into the Balkans and into Italy. Her Intelligence about Russian and Pan-Slav activities was shared with her pa "on and ally Germany. Throughout Europe t French were regarded as the real professionals at secret serv work, with a reputation stretching back to Napoleon's days. 11 smarting from the defeat of 1871, she had a security service Ahich was an integral part of local government, and Intelligence agencies with their tentacles outside Europe in north and west Africa, the Levant and Egypt. Like the British and the Germans, the French were prepared Intelligence-wise for world war Yet they had not been always •

1090

certain between wars

Attache

for the

in

invasion of the British

Isles.

To the Intelligence man of 1970, who uses

satellite television,

long-range radar, fool-proof cyphering machines, computers to estimate enemy capabilities, and every kind of electronic device to listen-in, the resources of 60 years ago seem puny. The armies

still

being worked on by Marconi. Both techniques were to become warwinners. Agents were still the main source of tactical Intelligence, but only where there was a war of movement, as in the Middle East or East Africa. Where trench lines were formed Intelligence had to be gathered by trench raids to capture prisoners or by telephone tapping. Wherever there was civil war, or what we now call resistance, agents were plentiful: among the southern Irish, Alsatians, Arabs, the minorities of Austria-Hungary; but communications with them were by modern standards primitive and their information travelled slowly. In the neutral countries bordering the area of war, spies were almost falling over one another: through Holland, Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries information could be smuggled both ways. They were the chief channel for Intelligence about weapons, explosives, gas and other items of equipment. The German press was studied there within a few hours of publication by Allied experts; and German experts studied the Allied Press. In neutral United States, the Germans sought information on supplies to Britain and France which they hoped to sabotage on land or destroy at sea. The outbreak of war removed what was often the best professional source: the service attaches. Most of them were picked men, with staff training and some speciality or expertise. In the busy social life of a capital in which they entertained and were received as members of the privileged Diplomatic Corps, they would pick up much useful professional and political information. They were supposed to have nothing to do with spies, but most Russian

attaches ignored the convention. In a free country the press

Throughout Europe the French were regarded as the real professionals of secret service

was found to be a useful source of revealing details, conflicting views and indiscretions. Most capitals arranged matters in the manner of London, where the German Naval Attaches would be under the supervision of the Director of Naval Intelligence, who would arrange facilities asked for, such as visits to ships and establishments. It was his business to ensure not merely that no crucial secrets were revealed but also that foreign observers should see for themselves the excellence of the Royal Navy — if only in the hope of selling warships or equipment. Once war began, of

work

Opposite left: Colonel Hivert, chief of the Deuxieme Bureau. Opposite Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, Director of Naval Intelligence, London. Above left: Colonel Nicolai, chief of the German Secret Service. Above right: Colonel Ronge, chief of KUK Intelligence (Vienna) To the contemporary Intelligence man who uses highly sophisticated equipment such as satellite television, computers to estimate enemy capabilities and ingenious 'bugging' devices, the resources available in 1914 might seem ludicrously meagre. The armies still thought of cavalry, and the navies of cruisers and submarines, as the main gatherers of information about the enemy; air reconnaissance over the battlefield was in its infancy, as was the interception of wireless traffic. Yet Intelligence work in 1914 called for a high degree of experience and expertise. For example, only a specialist could have

recognised that the marks on the cross and the circle (bottom left) are really a message, or that a seemingly innocent musical score (bottom right) was in fact a coded message. Similarly with the interception of wireless and telephone communications, a practice which soon grew to have great effect on diplomatic and military events. There was much expert work to be done on the raw material of the intercepts. First it had to be translated by someone with a knowledge of technical military language; then studied by someone who knew the context of the signals and the background of the formations sending them; then interpreted by someone who could see the broad strategic or tactical picture; and then turned into advice for those in charge of operations. And then, finally, it was for the commander to decide whether to use the Intelligence or to act on a 'hunch'.

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1091

ANATOMY OF A SPY Top row: Three Frenchmen who disguised themselves to escape from a German camp (left): confiscated from a Dutchman, when this cigarette case was X-rayed it was found to contain a hollow cigarette with a message inside (cent re) a button which splits in half to reveal a message (top): a coded message pricked out on the teeth of a comb (bottom)

prison

:

Centre row: Rolled carefully, it was possible to hide a four-yard long piece of very thin paper in the cavity in this set of false teeth (left); a cheque (right) made out by von Papen, the German military attache in WashJngton, to Bridgemen-Taylor, alias Horst von der Goltz. Papen was arrested by the British while carrying the cheque, which was then used as evidence by the British tribunal which tried von der Goltz when he turned King's evidence

Bottom row: A Russian spy whose tattooed secret was revealed when his head was shaved (left); this glass eye served as a hiding place for a message (centre left); a lace handkerchief embroidered with a message (centre right); the perforations on this Austrian stamp form a cipher with which to decode the letter contained in the envelope (right)

1092

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1093

Troops

of the

German occupation

searching Belgians

in their fight

force against Belgian spies

or document. Third, the observation from aircraft of troop movements on road and rail, of fortified positions and of artillery targets. Photography from the air was not of high quality before 1915. The commanders' problem was, as cavalry reconnaissance quickly became obsolete, to get information from as close to the enemy as possible: from above his head, from his own mouth, from his own handwriting even. And as the speed of events increased with more aircraft, more motor transport, longer-range weapons, faster wireless communications, speedier submarines — so information had to be obtained, processed and its meaning passed on, more quickly. For Intelligence which did not reach one's own forces in time and in a form that could be instantly

understood was useless.

4&>

course, the work of attaches could continue only in neutral capitals. There each side increased its embassy staffs and hoped that the attache of, say, Sweden, returning from Berlin would have a titbit.

Name, rank and number From the prisoner of war the interrogation officer hoped to get at least the name of his battalion (or ship) and the number of

The traitor in high position — a fairly rare bird — is not easily placed in the Intelligence hierarchy. To one Intelligence service he is an unpredictable bonus; to the other an uninsurable liability. The most notorious prewar case was that of Colonel A. Redl, Chief-of-Staff of the Prague Army Corps, a very important formation of the Austro-Hungarian army. For a number of years he earned ten times his officer's salary serving Russia, notably when he was head of espionage and counterespionage under the chief of the Vienna secret service. Thus he was able with one hand to pass Austrian strategic plans to his employers and with the other to prevent information he obtained about the Russian armies from reaching the General Staffs in Vienna and Berlin. When Redl was caught in 1913 by the strict postal censorship imposed in Austria-Hungary five years earlier, his Commanderin-Chief, Conrad von Hotzendorf, was appalled; for he was unable to changt the main features of the war plans against Serbia which Redl had obtained; with the result that in the first stages of the war the S »~bian Marshal Putnik was able to inflict costly defeats on the Ai lians. Indeed, the German Secret Service chief, Colonel Nicolai, s gested that the chiefs-of-staff of the Central Powers would have idvised in July 1914 more strongly against war had they known ^at Redl knew — but did not pass on — about the Russian army. Once operations in th ieM began it was quickly obvious what urces for the future. First the interwould be the most fruith ception of wireless and t jhone messages — information from ore later. Second, the captured man the horse's mouth — of which

his division (or squadron), so supplying a location which could be instantly put on the Intelligence map as another item in the mosaic which showed the total picture, or as much of it as was known. To the French officer trained in studying the German order of battle, or to the Austrian acquainted with the Serbian organisation, such details were immediately significant. How much more was obtained from the prisoner about intentions, equipment, morale, losses, personalities of officers and so on depended on his attitude, and on whether the camp to which he

10-1

was sent had

overhearing and recording what its one another. It was from prisoners that the Germans got their first inklings, hard facts about the British presence on the Western Front in August; and it was from a German staff officer, captured in his car shortly after leaving corps headquarters, on September 1 that the Allies first confirmed all the other evidence that the German armies on their left were swinging south-east and so opening their flank to the French and British attacks from the direction of Paris which led to victory on the Marne. This was, indeed, a 'pinch' in a thousand such as Intelligence chiefs dream about: up-to-date marked maps showing the line of march and timing of a huge formation for the next 24 hours. It offered instant proof of a view which Commandant Girard, head of the Deuxieme Bureau in the French Fifth Army had been painfully building up. Vividly Sir Edward Spears desit was won- j cribes this brilliant officer and his staff at work: derful to see growing out of his labours, from information coming] from all sources, air observations, cavalry reconnaissances, secret c

inmates said

facilities for

to

\

.

.

.

"^

I

from GQG an analysis of the situation, astonishingly complete. This was embodied on the map in ever-

service reports, or messages

lengthening red lines, called at the time chenilles (caterpillars), representing the German columns spreading out in a gigantic movement which grew and amplified with each new report, until they seemed to change into long, blood-red snakes spreading over the face of Belgium like a plague. And always Girard's eager clutching hand was tearing down the veil of secrecy hiding the movements of the German armies, until his piercing eyes were able to discern the secrets of the overwhelming turning movements. The moment was still to come when, either side might think twice about such a prize and suspect a 'plant' by the enemy. But neither the staff work of Intelligence nor its contact with those in charge of operations and plans was yet sufficiently advanced to produce the elaborate deception plans of later years.

Air reconnaissance What observers from the

air could contribute,

taking great risks

marked their maps by flying low and at the limit of their range, was detail of the build-up of reserves, of the enemy's use of roads and railways, of the speed of advance of marching men and horse-drawn guns. The part played by the stripling Royal Flying Corps in estimating the rate and direction of the German advance from Belgium was warmly praised by Joffre on September 5. With only four squadrons of 63 aircraft, they had operated for the first time from Maubeuge as early as August 19, two days before the BEF itself was concentrated and ready to move forward. Had the Germans used aircraft with similar imagination, what could they not have discovered to their advantage? The absence of any sign of British landings in Belgium and of any great sally as they

into the Bight, to say nothing of information about the rear communications and dispositions of the Allies. No method of Intelligence-gathering has been more closely enveloped in secrecy than the interception, recording and decoding of wireless and telephone communications. Yet its development, as we shall see, had a profound effect on the course of diplomatic as well as military events. At its most efficient it meant the regular, detailed betrayal of movements and intentions and orders by one party — in all ignorance — to another party listening, recording, and assessing what was heard. The impression has sometimes been given that this Intelligence was presented 'on a plate'; but more often than not there was hard and expert work to be done on the raw material of intercepts. First it had to be translated by someone with a knowledge of technical military language; then studied by someone who knew the context of the signals and the background of the formations or units sending and receiving them; then interpreted by someone who was seeing the broad strategic or tactical picture; and then turned into advice to those in charge of operations. Such work was possible only in highly organised headquarters; and material

of such value could not be circulated outside the highest level of command. So, incidentally, it came about that the more firstrate Intelligence was secured by this most secret means, the more certainly control of operations was centralised in the hands of the highest commands. This was not yet obvious in 1914; but the first experiences of Room 40 in the British Admiralty, of the B Dienst (listening service) in the German High Command, and of the French (intercepting German messages by listeners in the Eiffel Tower) quickly pushed the combatant staff in this

GQG

direction.

At

most traffic intercepted was in clear; then, as the dangers became more apparent, code and cipher were used more and more. The more ingenious became the Intelligence men devising a disguise for words, the more determined became first

of interception

the rival Intelligence men devising ways of penetrating it. Now the amateurs — the mathematicians, the dons, the schoolmasters and the intellectuals — came into their own. Little wonder that the closest secrecy surrounded this work, that officers were forbidden to refer to it by name, lest somehow or other the enemy should learn that his codes had been mastered or that his lines of communication were being tapped. Even more important was it to ensure that an enemy should not know that his changes of code and cipher never perplexed his opposite number long enough for the delays to matter. The Germans knew — or had guessed — that the Admiralty in London were intercepting and probably reading their most important naval signals; but they believed that it was taking Room 40 too long for the results to be useful for operations. They noted for example that during the bombardment raid of their battle cruisers on Scarborough and Hartlepool in December 1914 it took the Admiralty 90 minutes to relay to the British commander at sea what had been learned from the scanty signals of the German ships he was seeking to destroy.

Yet, if Hipper's five battle-cruisers had been caught and destroyed on their way back to base — as they might have been if the weather had kept fine — the chief reason for the British success would have been that Room 40 had discovered that a task force was leaving the Jade early on December 15 and would return late on the 16th.

A revolution in Intelligence not be thought that the Germans, any more than the Ausand others, were backward in their understanding of the revolution in signalling and Intelligence made possible by wireless. They had begun watching British naval traffic as early as 1907-8, not for Intelligence purposes but in order to compare British technical progress with their own. Their listening was based on Heligoland and in a fishing protection vessel called Zieten. Over three or four years they learned enough about call-signs, recognition signals and other conventions of the British traffic in clear to give them valuable clues to solving codes when war brought them into use. The Austrians, by the same methods, were watching all moves in the Mediterranean, including those of their distrusted Italian allies, and the results were passed on to the Germans. A previous article in this History (Volume 1, Number 9, page 225) has shown what part was played by wireless Intelligence in the Battle of Tannenberg, where Russian carelessness contributed as much to the German victory as German ingenuity. As war developed, especially at sea, more and more care was taken to maintain wireless silence as far as possible during operations and before them. For even if an enemy could not decipher the signals of a fleet or army, he would notice any unusual increase in signal activity arising from the complicated orders and movements needed to bring men and ships

Let

it

trians

and guns

into action.

Among most commanders

in the early months of operations there seems to have been some suspicion of Intelligence staffs. Every ambitious sailor or soldier preferred fighting to the desk; and if he had taken a staff course he would normally prefer plans and operations to Intelligence. When war broke out Colonel Nicolai in Berlin lost his best officers — he had remarkably few — to the field divisions. The few able men in the newly formed Naval Staff in London were champing to go to sea. At the War

Office

young Major Archibald Wavell found himself

in

August

alone in charge of M05, supervising security, secret service matters, ciphers and the general network of Intelligence for the whole British army. For his chief, Colonel McDonogh, and his best officers, had gone off with the BEF. It was Wavell who founded on his own that motley formation of all talents which was the Intelligence Corps of 1914. If this was the attitude to Intelligence work of most professional soldiers and sailors it is not surprising to find that its practitioners suffered difficulties in headquarters. Officers planning operations could not understand why those studying the enemy required to know the dispositions and intentions of their own troops. It needed some subtlety of mind and special experience to understand that Intelligence about a move being made by the enemy might reveal the enemy's knowledge of a move being planned by one's own headquarters. It needed even more subtlety to grasp that immediate and thoughtless use of first-rate Intelligence by those planning operations for a commander in the field might reveal to the enemy a leakage of their most precious secrets. Intelligence officers, on the other hand, could be just as unreasonable and secretive about their material, hoarding like squirrels details which might make more sense to an operations man than to themselves. 'Different branches of the staff', wrote Spears, 'behaved as if each thought the other only wanted information for the sake of passing it on to Berlin.' The French Troisicme Bureau (Operations) would adopt a view simply because the Deuxieme Bureau (Intelligence) had taken another. The obsession of secrecy for a long time went on 'clogging machinery, obstructing co-ordination and narrowing vision'. It is, unfortunately, a principle of Intelligence work never entirely to trust an ally, who may well one day become the enemy, so it is not surprising to find that allies did not readily share secrets.

1914

left

A personal hunch Some commanders

resisted the advice that the Intelligence staff offered them. Just as Stalin rejected first-class evidence that the Germans were going to attack him in June 1941, so headquarters and their political masters would sometimes persist in wishful thinking. John Connell has told the story of how young Major Wavell was sent for late in September, 1914, by his Commanderin-Chief, in France. Having been told that Wavell had lived in

Russia, attended

its

manoeuvres and occupied the Russian desk 1095

office, Sir John French wished to consult him on the strategic problem of the moment. Allied estimates of the strength that the Germans could still bring to bear against their line in France depended on the progress that the Russians might be expected to make in the east. For it was now realised that the Germans calculation for a war on two fronts had been to roll up the western one a matter of weeks and then to use their excellent railwaj system to switch forces back against the powerful but slow-moving Russian steamroller. Now that the German stroke in France had been held, how

in

DMI's

vita]

1

m

soon would tlu Russians begin to take pressure off the west? 'Our information,' said Sir John, 'is that the Russians will reach Breslau (Wroclaw) by October 15. Do you agree, Major Wavell?' 'No' was the reply from the junior staff officer; moreover, he did not expect the Russians to get that far before the end of the winter just beginning. He explained to the dismayed French and his Corps Commanders that the Russians could use virtually only one railway line across Poland and a poor road system to itner the 450 miles to Breslau. Moreover, the Germans were able to threaten Russian communications from a northern flank in East Prussia, which must be cleared before the Russians could threaten Silesia. General Rawlinson, however, was not to be convinced. Pulling out a letter from someone in London he said that well-informed people there expected the Czar's troops to reach Breslau in two or three weeks. Like other staff officers before and after him, Wavell saw an Intelligence opinion, carefully collected and considered, rejected in favour of a personal hunch. What of the British Secret Service at this stage of the war? Did it deserve the reputation it then had and later steadily improved? It is difficult to judge with certainty. We know that MI6. the forerunner of the Secret Intelligence Service of our own day. was only three years old in 1914, with a modest budget and a small staff. Its main task was to recruit and direct agents, not to conduct the kind of work so far described in this chapter. Yet in the First World War foreigners attributed the whole British Intelligence effort to 'the secret service', and there is little doubt that some credit went to 'C and his men which properly belonged to service headquarters and personalities. Moreover, there is some reason to believe that the almost legendary reputation with which Buchan, Kipling and other authors were able to credit 'the secret service' was partly, if not wholly, based on the successes of the political service in India. For many years some of the best brains in the elite ICS and some of the most enterprising soldiers in the Indian army had been encouraged to travel, to study native languages, to explore and otherwise counter what was believed to be the deadly threat from the Russian Empire to the sub-continent's security. Information in India and the adjoining states could be bought cheap; the agents of Intelligence could operate more freely and adventurously than in Europe; India w as continuously an operational' theatre in a way that England in peace never could be. This, let it be said, is a personal theory which can be proved right or wrong only when the papers and records of this period of Indian history have been worked through. But it is difficult to explain in any other way the sudden celebrity of that mysterious personality called the 'British Secret Service', which some in the 1920's were to credit with winning the war. In fact those three words covered, in foreign eyes, a mass of informants, agents, collaborators and advisers from Britain's worldwide interests in trade, mining, banking, finance and shipping. Much more than is generally realised, the Secret Intelligence Service (known also in those days as MI6) was merely the control office for any army of amateurs, recruited through university, City, Service, professional and even club links. Just as Territorials were needed to provide reserves for a Regular Army, so an old-boy network was needed to reinforce Britain's small regular Intelligence services. 1

r

Further Reading Connell, John. Wavell: Scholar and Soldier (Collins 1964)

Henderson, Lt-Col D

.,

Field Intelligence

(HMSO

1904)

Marder, A. J., From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, Volume (OUP 1965) Nicolai, Col W., The German Secret Service (London 1924) Spears, Maj.-Gen. Sir Edward, Liaison 1914, 2nd edition (1968) II

DONALD McLACHLAN was

born in 1909 and was educated at the City of London School and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he gained a First in PPE During the Second World War he served in both Military and Naval Intelligence He was Foreign Editor of The Economist, Deputy Editor of the Daily Telegraph and first Editor of the Sunday Telegraph. His publications include Room 39

Naval Intelligence

1096

in

Action 1935-45.

A Polish spy suffers the traditional punishment

MACKENSEN' The First World War had broken out over a Balkan quarrel; yet it was not till a year after the outbreak of the war that the Germans became seriously involved in the Balkans. They became involved for a variety

of

reasons.

In

the

first

place,

Austria-Hungary had failed to deal with Serbia — her two attempts to invade Serbia in 1914 were disasters, a Habsburg version of the Russo-Japanese War. In 1915, the Austro-Hungarian army, pinned down on the Italian and Russian fronts, had no resources left with which to fight Serbia;

German

help was badly needed.

The Balkan other

reasons.

situation

Since

was the

German Balkans

'presence'

spring,

for

the

was neces-

swing the balance the other way. Similarly, Germany needed a through-route to Turkey. So far the Turks had held out in the Dardanelles, but they lacked munitions. Germany could not send them, Rumania allowed no war material to go through on the Danube, and Serbia to

VICTORY With the end

of her offensive

against Russia, critical

Western Powers had been fighting in the Dardanelles and very few people in Europe seriously held that the Turks would win. In these circumstances, it was quite likely that various Balkan powers, hitherto neutral, would ally with the Entente and seize part of Turkish territory. From this point of view, a sary in the

BALKAN Germany

began to formulate plans for an attack on Serbia. For this she needed — and obtained — the support of Bulgaria, an ambitious Balkan power who saw in a defeated Serbia the chance to expand her own boundaries. Serbia had few resources with which to meet the onslaught: her army was desperately short of weapons and thousands of her soldiers were dying of typhus. Norman Stone Below: Serbian soldiers bring heavy batteries into action against the Austro-Hungarian Third

Army

blocked the alternative routes. Thus. 600 trucks of war material were clogging up Hungarian railway-sidings waiting to go through to Turkey. A certain amount was passed through Rumania in crates marked 'piano spare parts': Rumanian customs-officials were bribed to let them through, though often enough they were again confiscated by officials paid by the other side. Since November 1914 the Germans had been thinking of occupying the north-eastern tip of Serbia — the Negotin area — so as to clear a way down the Danube towards Turkey. This plan had had to be dropped because there was never enough strength to realise it. Besides, the Germans had their hands full elsewhere. They were subjected to great strain in the West, where the British army was expanding and the French con-

Austria-Hungary was Germans and their allies were in the middle of an offensive against Russia, which ended only in the later summer. And there were many other e factors that combined to keep the Germans | out of the Balkans. The Austro-Hungarian J commander, Conrad von Hotzendorf. was | jealous of the Balkans, which he regarded 75 as his province and did not want the Ger- s mans meddling in Austrian affairs, even I stantly

tied

attacking;

down by

Italy; the

those affairs wore in a mess. Besides, May 1915 the Italians had threatened war if Conrad attacked Serbia; and after May their military intervention tied Conrad's hands entirely. Thus, until the Germans had broken off their offensive in Russia, the Balkans were left alone. Men in Berlin and Vienna could only cross their fingers and hope that the Turks would hold out. The Serbian theatre itself was quiet. Conrad withdrew divisions in great numbers from there to face the Italians, leaving only garrison troops. On their side, the Serbians could not think of an offensive: not only were they short of munitions but — worse — their army was affected by a typhoid epidemic that put at least 50,000 Serbian soldiers in hospital each month, in a country that had only 350 doctors. A French general, Pau, visited the country and wrote, 'These people are truly admirable, brave without boasting, absolutely confident in their future, sublime in their self-sacrifice and devotion.' Few countries could have withstood the devastations of this period. They rejected all the peaceoffers made to them by the Germans, and to show the Italians their teeth, occupied northern Albania as well. Serbia was not if

permanent threat

until

miles

an easy conquest

for

anybody.

The Germans could not solve this problem on their own. They needed an ally — Bulgaria.

to Serbia, only a few from the vital Serbian railway; and she had a permanent grievance against Serbia: Macedonia, though generally believed to be Bulgarian by culture

Bulgaria lay in a position of

Mud and cold added to the miseries of the fighting. Serbian soldiers on the move huddle togetherand joke to keep theirspirits up. Below: Austro-German forces cross the Morava river. By the time the snow fell victory was theirs Above:

and

race, had been seized by Serbia in 1913. The Bulgarians also regarded themselves as the most worthy of the Balkan peoples; they did not want to be a small country, on the same level as Albania; and they hoped, through alliance with Germany, to win back their position as the most important power in the Balkans. Germany, likewise, hoped to solve her own Balkan problems by calling in the Bulgarians, and negotiations for co-operation began in July 1915. At this time, Sofia became a centre of rival intrigues between the envoys of the Great Powers as they fought for the Dardanelles, both sides hoping to involve the Bulgarians with them. The King of Bulgaria, Ferdinand, held his cards closely and watched the two sides bid, behaviour which did not belie his reputation for deviousness and doubledealing. He began life as a German prince, serving in the Austrian army. His actions as ruler won him a reputation for extreme political subtlety: he came to power through a patriot, Stambulov, and then had Stam-

bulov murdered; he was allowed to marry into the Bourbon-Parma family on condition that the children be baptised Roman Catholic, and then had them baptised Orthodox so as to gain recognition from Russia; in 1912 he allied with Greece and Serbia against Turkey to seize Thrace, and in 1913 allied with Turkey against Greece and Serbia to seize Macedonia. Now, in

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1915, he waited to see which side would him the most. And the Germans won. Serbia would not give up Macedonia, although the French and British pressed her to do so, the Germans promised Ferdinand not only Macedonia, but much else. By autumn 1915, it looked as if the Central Powers would win the war, or at least force the other side to a stalemate. The King of Bulgaria therefore looked to Germany. It was a long time before these negotiations bore fruit. On the German side, there were difficulties: Conrad disliked German involvement in the Balkans, and would have preferred to continue his offensives against Russia; he also disliked Bulgarian involvement, because Bulgaria — a Slav state — was potentially as hostile to the Habsburg Empire as Serbia. Above all, Conrad did not want to see a German Austro-German commanding general forces in the Balkans — he was alone in offer

wanting an Austro-Hungarian commander, and he fought a strong but fruitless rearguard action before he accepted German command. The Bulgarians also had cold feet from time to time. They began negotiations with the Germans in July, sending Colonel Ganchev to Pless, the German headquarters; but although several drafts of an agreement were made, the Bulgarians delayed throughout August as they hoped for a good counteroffer from the Entente. Besides, there were various setbacks for the Germans — diplomatic crises with the United States over submarine sinkings, and the Suvla Bay landings — that deterred the Bulgarians. However, at the end of August, they again proposed a full-scale political alliance; and the Germans gave virtually all they asked for — Macedonia and further parts of Serbia, plus guarantees against attack by neighbouring powers, a loan, and part of Turkish Thrace, around the River Maritsa. Big Bulgaria was to come into existence by grace of Bismarck's heirs. On September 6 the Bulgarians formally agreed to come into the war on Germany's side. The Central Powers and Bulgaria were each to give six divisions for a campaign against Serbia; Bulgaria would mobilise her army within a fortnight; and Marshal Mackensen would

command an Army Group

in

an offensive

against Serbia. Thus a Serbian

army of 1 1 typhoid-ridden divisions with weak artillery was threatened by 18 divisions with the most powerful artillery of any army in Europe. Clearly Serbia could not stand alone. But Russia could not help, being herself militarily weak, and Rumania had guaranteed neutrality. Only the Western Powers, and Greece, could save Serbia. Many people in the West felt they had to do something, and the French promised some divisions to the Serbians. These divisions could only go to Serbia through the Greek port of Salonika, and so Greece would have to be involved on the side of the Entente as Bulgaria had been involved on the Central Powers' side. Greece was neutral, but this neutrality was qualified. Greece had an alliance with Serbia, by which she promised 150,000 men if Serbia were attacked by a Balkan power; further, an international treaty had guaranteed British and French right to intervene through Greece in the event of Balkan upheavals; and the Greek Prime Minister, Venizelos, strongly favoured intervention on the Allied side: indeed he was the first to suggest to the

use Salonika. But the King neutralist, even pro-German; and so were the more conservative sections of the upper classes. A vicious quarrel broke out between these two, which the King won in early October. But the Western Powers refused to make their policy dependent on a minor ruler who could not make up his mind and landed troops in Salonika intending to help Serbia. But they did not appear committed to the cause. The French were keen on helping Serbia, whom they regarded as their client, but did not have teeth to match their appetite. Thus, the British had to give help. But the British regarded Salonika as a tiresome diversion from Gallipoli, itself a tiresome diversion from France. Some British politicians saw in Serbia a way out of the western deadlock, but they were frustrated by the generals, one of whom contemptuously remarked: The Chancellor of the Exchequer has discovered the Bal-

Entente that

of Greece

it

was a

in an atlas.' The British had few troops to send to Salonika, and sent them there only because the French insisted. They thus violated Greek neutrality for no particular gain. It was as if they had taken great trouble, and gone to great expense to seduce the Greeks and then did not know what to do.

kans

But unfortunately

for her, Serbia

was

dependent on these futile manoeuvrings and she based her strategy on the expectation of help from the West, unaware that the Salonika landings were nothing but a gesture. Meanwhile, the Germans and their allies gathered their troops. There was a last-minute hitch: the AustroHungarian army was badly defeated in Russia in September, and could send only two of the promised six divisions. The Germans sent more, mustering altogether 11 divisions for the attack. But the Germans were not ambitious. All they wanted to do was to cut a way through to Turkey and to prevent other Balkan states from

against them. They intended to smash Serbia by sheer material weight, not by complex strategy. They put Field Marshal Mackensen in charge of their forces — an expert in this kind of warfare who had already proved his worth several

going

times against the Russians. Mackensen's methods were simple: he amassed a great weight of shells and heavy artillery, forced the enemy by constant infantry attack to draw in his reserves, and then wiped them out with an intense bombardment. This had been the pattern on the Eastern Front in 1915 and it was unbeatable except by an army backed by first-class industrial power. Mackensen was good at getting the best from his technical experts, and thus

had a smooth flow of supplies; his campaigns resembled an 18th-Century setpiece campaign, only much greater in size and much bloodier. The Germans could sustain this text-book warfare better than anyone else. In these circumstances, the Germans' plan was simple: they would attack along the only suitable railway line, that running from Belgrade up the valley of the

Morava towards Nis and Salonika — about the only non-mountainous part of Serbia, and certainly the only first-class supply route. The Austrians had formerly tried a bold method, an attack over the river Drina from Bosnia; they had been ruined by supply difficulties, and their army corps de feated piecemeal. Their defeated commander, Potiorek, had warned his succes-

'Next time do it by Belgrade.' On the it looked more sensible to have the Germans invading from the west, Bulgarians from the east; and although Conrad would have preferred this, Falkenhayn regarded it as too complicated and told sor:

map

to mind Germans decided

Conrad

his

own

business.

to place the

The

bulk of their

divisions on the northern frontier of Serbia, to cross the rivers Sava and Danube, and press the Serbian army back up the Morava valley. Perhaps the Bulgarians would then take the Serbians in the rear. It was an unambitious plan, reflecting only the German leaders' lack of

imagination.

'A

way to Bulgaria'

Two

armies were mustered on the northern borders of Serbia: the Austro-Hungarian Third Army (Kovess) with three corps north-west and north of Belgrade, and the German Eleventh Army (Gallwitz) with three corps east of Belgrade along the Danube. Third Army was to occupy Belgrade and then move on Kragujevac, the Serbian munitions town; of its three corps, XIX Corps (Trollmann) lay at Kupinovo on the Sava, with the German XXII Reserve Corps (under General Eugen von Falkenhayn, a brother of the German supreme commander) on its left; opposite Belgrade, based on Zemun, was the Austro-Hungarian VIII Corps, a force of specially chosen Hungarian and German troops under Feldzeugmeister Count Scheuchenstuel. The corps of the German Eleventh Army were to advance into the Morava valley. Of its three German Corps, /// (Lochow) stood opposite Semendria, about 20 miles east of VIII Corps, on the Danube; to the east were IV Reserve Corps (Winckler) on the Temes Reserve island, in the Danube, and then Corps (Kosch) opposite Ram. There were troops covering both the west and the east flanks of these forces: in Bosnia, there were a few Austro-Hungarian troops, weak and under-equipped, unlikely to take any important part in the fighting; and east of Reserve Corps there was a group under General Eiilopp, expected to advance towards the Iron Gates and open a way to Bulgaria. In all this, Eleventh Army was to take the main role. It had 74 battalions and 126 batteries, 31 of them heavy, and five very heavy. Third Army had nearly twice as many battalions, but only slightly more guns — a sign that German divisions had virtually twice as much artillery as

X

X

Austrian divisions. The Serbian army had a difficult problem, being attacked from north and east The Serbian commander, Voivode Putnik, hoped that the French and British would help him out. He even suggested attacking Bulgaria before she had finished mobi-

an idea foolishly rejected by the Entente. As it was, Serbia spread her forces along the 600 miles of frontier. She had nearly 300 battalions and 159 bat teries (700 guns). These were split up into First Army (Voivode Misic, a hero of the Balkan Wars and of 1914) with three divisions covering the Belgrade area and the Maeva, a plateau west of Belgrade; these forces were wrongly concent rated more to the west, as the German attack was expected there, so that in Belgrade itself there were only 20 battalions and 75 guns facing forces four times as powerful. The Serbian Third Army, with two divisions under a former German officer, Jurisic. lisation,

L099

front o\' the German enth Army. The rest of the army was either in reserve or included in the various croups facing the Bulgarians the Timok Group, under General Gojkovic, in northeastern Serbia, the Second Army (two divisions, with cavalry) under General Stepanovic, and a weak force covering Macedonia. In the west, the Montenegrin

Sturm, covered the

arm) covered Herzegovina: about 80 weak with pitifully lew guns, but cover the weak forces occupying Bosnia. On the northern front, the Serbians had 120 battalions and 330 guns facing 180 battalions and 900 guns of Mackensen's two main armies. In all. the Serbian army had only one strong point: the morale of its men. Man for man, the battalions

enough

to

Below: Watched by Serbian

villagers,

cavalry cross the River Drina

in

German

southern Serbia

Serbians

may

well count as the best the First World War; they fought in very harsh conditions, and were

soldiers

of

much less well-equipped than soldiers of other armies. But they had shown since their revolt against the Turks an extraordinary resilience and toughness, and in he 1915 they showed these qualities again. Outsiders often scoffed at the Serbians as a remote and barbarous people. In fact they were among the first nations to display that tough peasant nationalism that has brought down more powerful empires than that of the Habsburgs. This time they might even have fought the Germans to a stand-still if they had been given help instead of futile advice from their western allies, Britain and France. t

Mackensen's attack was prepared in great detail and very efficiently. The German troops arrived by rail as planned and the Kragujevac arsenals were bombarded, though to only limited effect. There were a few collisions with the Austro-Hungarian military authorities, who behaved with that peculiar obstinacy and touchiness they inherited from Spain. The German heavy artillery expert, Colonel Berendt, arrived to co-ordinate the infantry action with that of the heavy guns: he was the witch-doctor behind the Mackensen miracles. The initial obstacle, a very important one, was the river barrier: the Sava was between 300 and 700 yards broad, the Danube twice as wide; there were islands that had to be captured; and for most of

way the Serbian

side dominated the and some of the German troops — in particular XXII Reserve Corps — were not equipped for mountain warfare. The best crossing-points were at Belgrade and Ram, to the east, and Mackensen

the

Hungarian

side;

decided to force these crossings, letting through the inner flanks of the two armies once they had been overcome. The attack was to begin on October 7; beforehand there would be artillery action. The Bulgarian attack was to follow within a week. The river-crossings were not easy. The weather was atrocious: the Kossaua wind whipped up the rivers, lashed the attackers with rain and made visibility for the gunners very poor. The Germans and their allies mustered in marshy country, the

swampy ground, and Just the same, the various corps managed to make a crossing of some kind, though they often suffered considerable losses. XIX Corps on the right, for instance, lost almost all its boats in the crossings, as they were sunk by machine gun bullets whipping across the River Sava. XXII Reserve Corps took the island of Gypsies after a tough fight, and waded through to the Serbian side; but the bridges they established were ramshackle and unsafe. The Austro-Hungarian VIII Corps, just opposite Belgrade, was mustered by steamer, and despite the sinking of some of its transports, managed to set up a bridgehead east of the Kalimegdan, the old Turkish citadel in Belgrade — here the guns often firing

sited in

blind.

Serbian guns had been rather few in number, and the Serbians had not even dared to betray their positions by putting out of action the searchlights with which the Austro-Hungarian commander illuminated the crossing. In any case, the

caused so

many

fires in

bombardment

Belgrade that the

crossing was carried out in the light of these flames reflected from the water; but only a third of the pontoon bridges survived the first attempt. There followed a period of furious street-fighting in Belgrade. When a German nurse arrived with the first supply-columns, she was appalled at the sight of the bodies heaped up in the streets of the Serbian capital. This continued on October 8, and on the 9th Belgrade was taken, and the German flag

hoisted on the Konak, the chief adminis\ e building, lack of 11111111110118 held up the action with XIX Corps still only just across the river, and the other two corps of Third Army just established in Belgrade with the Serbians holding the ridges south of Belgrade. The Serbian General Zivkovic, commanding the area, brought up one of the reserve divisions to hold these. On Eleventh Army's front, the crossings were somewhat easier in that the Germans' artillery was more concentrated, and the

ground somewhat easier. Kosch's German Corps got across at Ram after a very powerful bombardment, to which

X Rescne

the Serbians could hardly reply; but the

two corps west of this force (TV Reserve on the Temes Island and /// Corps at Semendria) had a more difficult time, losing quite heavily. The Germans attempting to cross at Semendria lost all but eight of 53 boats, and had to give up their attempts west of the town. But a successful coup de main on the eastern side resulted in the capture of important heights, and, under cover of a thick river fog on October 8 and 9, the Germans established a bridgehead just east of Semendria. Thus Eleventh Army had set up three bridgeheads, each about six miles broad, between Semendria and Veliko Gradiste. Fiilopp's Austro-Hungarian group probed along the Danube to the east. At the same time, the various

Austro-Hungarian groups in Bosnia tried to advance, rather unsuccessfully: the 62nd Infantry

Division

by

Visegrad

under

General Kaiser tried to cross the Drina, but had very poor bridging equipment and few guns; for a time, the bridges broke down under the strain and the only communication over the river was a wire rail. Everything depended on the success of the two armies in the north, and for a time 7

this success

was

in doubt.

These armies had to conquer the supply problem before they could go on. Of course, the Serbians were outnumbered and outgunned, and they were in the middle of complicated manoeuvring as they had to bring much of their First Army east from north-west Serbia. But the Central Powers were not able to take advantage of this. By October 10 not one of the vital heavy batteries of Third Army had crossed: the bridges could not take the weight. The Austro-Hungarian VIII Corps in particular suffered, since, lacking the guns of the Germans, it often had to do by infantry attack what the Germans did by gunnery. It lost 7,000 men in the Belgrade fighting, whereas the German XXII Reserve Corps lost 3,000. In these circumstances, Third Army could only nibble at the Serbian positions; the ridges south of Belgrade, by Avala, fell only on October 17, and even then the inner wings of the two armies did not meet. On Eleventh Army's front, the worst problems occurred as the Danube was twice as voluminous as the Sava, and was running swift and high with the almost permanent autumn rains. However, the German heavy guns could operate at a long range; they pounded the ancient mediaeval walls of Semendria, wh: h fell to Lochow's III Corps on Octobe. 11; likewise, Pozarevac fell to TV Reserve >rps, while Kosch's Reserve Corps adva, d from Ram in quite good order. By Octo r 15 the army had linked up its bridgehe. and was pressing south against a new "erbian position, h of the rivers, likewise along ridges s protecting the Morava v ley. The supply

X

;

i

1102

was bad. On the 15th, not a single crossed the river; munitions' columns stuck in the slime on the north bank. By the 16th the Germans had advanced a mere eight miles on a 40-mile front and had lost 5,000 men. The two armies were still separated by ten miles — not an impressive performance in view of the numerical and material superiority of the Germans. Third Army was now paralysed by fear for its right wing. XIX Corps had suffered badly and had only just lodged a bridgehead; it now feared that the Serbian First position float

Army commander,

Voivode Misic, would

repeat his manoeuvre of 1914 and strike them in the flank. The whole of XIX Corps was therefore left as a flank-guard, its important mountain-trained troops hanging back in the rear because of a wholly imaginary danger. Over the next few days this nibbling went on. On the front of Third Army guns ran out of ammunition; XXII Reserve Corps put off any serious attack until the 20th and then later, though it proceeded with infantry attacks. Along with VIII Corps, it was stuck on a Serbian line running from Nis to Krajkova, unable to advance without help from their flanks: yet XIX Corps had problems of its own, and Eleventh Army made slow progress. Certainly the two armies made touch on October 18 as the Serbians retired from the rivers; and an improvement in the weather enabled the supplies of this army to move more smoothly. It used its artillery to the full, brutally blasting its way up the valley of the Morava, bombarding the Serbians out of position after position and dealing them terrible blows. They retreated, sometimes abandoning important railway installations, exactly as the Russians had done in the summer, under German gunfire. By October 22 the Germans had established a new line running from west to east between the rivers Kolubara and Pek. They had 13 divisions along this line, now stretched out to the full and with no reserves; the Serbians now had eight. The Germans hoped to sweep forward towards Kragujevac and trap the Serbians there. Their chances of doing so depended on the Bulgarians. Bulgaria had mobilised on September 22, and declared war on October 14. She had prevaricated a great deal. She was surrounded by potential enemies, and her army was in poor condition. She did, however, mobilise some 450,000 men — an extraordinarily high number for a country whose population was just 6,000,000, and earning her the name 'the Balkan Prussia'. However, there were not enough officers, or NCO's for this force, and it possessed little

artillery.

Each Bulgarian

soldier

was, however, of high quality; and the Bulgarians hated the Serbians with a Balkan intensity. In the Serbian-Bulgarian conflict, prisoners were often killed or mutilated. Militarily, Bulgaria was not in an easy situation, despite the proximity of the Serbian capital and railways to the border. Mountains and fortresses stood in the way of a successful advance everywhere but in Macedonia. The Bulgarian First Army, under Boyadiev, and part of Mackensen's Army Group, contained four divisions — 91 battalions. Destined to co-operate with the Germans in attacking towards Nis, it was placed east and north-east of Sofia. The main route to Serbia was the Sofia-Belgrade railway, blocked on the Serbian side by the fortress of Pi rot; a second way into

FIELD-MARSHAL AUGUST VON MAC-

KENSEN was born in 1849 in Saxony, the son of a lower middle-class land agent. He enlisted as a private in the Death's Head Hussars in 1869 and was commissioned in the field during the Franco-Prussian War. His skill as an amateur steeplechase jockey helped overcome social prejudices in the acutely class-conscious society of Bismarck's Germany and his incisive administrative ability gained him admission to the General Staff in 1882. This combination of daring horsemanship and intelligence appealed to Kaiser Wilhelm II. When, in 1898, the Kaiser went on his famous visit to Palestine and Turkey he appointed Mackensen an aide-de-camp, a distinction reserved hitherto for members of the Prussian aristocracy. When the First World War began Mackensen was on the Eastern Front, having served on garrison duty in Poland since 1905. In August 1914 he suffered a setback when units of his XVII Corps broke and fled under Russian artillery fire at Gumbinnen; but he checked the rout and effectively contributed to the encirclement of the Russian Second Army at Tannenberg. In November 1914 he succeeded Hindenburg as commander of Ninth Army, receiving as chief-of-staff the shrewd and methodical General Hans von Seeckt. Together Mackensen and Seeckt organised a successful winter offensive on the Vistula,

Antagonists in the Balkans advancing 40 miles in four days and reaching the outskirts of Warsaw. Subsequently in May 1915 they achieved the brilliant breakthrough at Gorlice which enabled Mackensen's new command (the joint Austro-German Eleventh Army) to advance nearly 100 miles in a fortnight, clearing the Russians from Galicia. These victories won Mackensen a marshal's baton in June 1915 and he soon followed them up by another offensive which struck north-eastwards to capture Brest-Litovsk and Pinsk. On September 20 he established headquarters in southern Hungary and (again with Seeckt as his mentor) commanded the Germano-Austro-Bulgarian Army joint overran Serbia in October and which Group

November

1915.

Further Reading Falkenhayn, Erich von: General Headquarters and its Critical Decisions (Hutchinson,

London, 1919) Francois,

Hermann von: Gorlice 1915

Leipzig, 1922) Falls, Cyril: Military Operations,

(Kochler,

Macedonia

(H.M.S.O., London, 1933) Adams, John Clinton: Flight in Winter (Princeton Univ. Press, New Jersey, 1942) Palmer, Alan: The Gardeners of Salonika (Deutsch, London, 1965)

Vol

1

The Serbian Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Putnik. Below: Field-Marshal von

Right:

Mackensen

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MARSHAL RADOMIR PUTNIK was the outstanding Serbian commander in the Balkan Wars and in the campaigns of 1914-15. He was born in 1847 at Kragujevac, in the heart of Serbia. He first saw service in the predominantly Russianled Serbian armies which fought against Turkey in 1877-78 and he also participated in the ill-fated campaign of 1885, when the Serbs were disastrously defeated by the Bulgarians at Slivnitza. These experiences made him highly critical of the Obrenovic dynasty which ruled Serbia at this time and, although he served both on the General Staff and as instructor at the Military Academy, his advancement was hampered by political intrigues. After the murder of the last of the Obrenovic kings by young army officers in 1903, he was appointed Chief of the General Staff and held office as Minister of War in 1904, 1906, and 1912. He re-equipped the Serbian army with French rather than Austrian weapons and prepared military

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liberate rule. In

southern Serbia from 1912 he gained striking

victories against the Turks in the First Balkan War at Kumanovo and Monastir and was rewarded by the rare distinction of

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being proclaimed a Voivode — a courtesy rank equivalent to Marshal. His foresight saved the Serbs in June 1913 when they were suddenly attacked by their nominal allies, the Bulgarians, and his counteroffensive contributed to the rapid collapse of Bulgaria in the Second Balkan War.

Ill-health forced him to seek a cure at an spa in the summer of 1914.

Austrian

When war

broke out he was interned but released through the old-world generosity of the Emperor Franz Josef. Assuming effective command of the Serbian army, he concentrated his reserves south of Belgrade so as to meet an Austrian threat at any point on Serbia's 250-mile frontier. This mobility allowed him to counter the first Austrian offensive on the river Jadar at the end of August and the second offensive in the same region in September. He made brilliant use of the natural obstacles of Mount Cer. A third offensive in November forced him to retreat to the high ground covering the Morava valley but, again taking advantage of the terrain, he unexpectedly on Decounter-attacked cember 3 and completely defeated the Austrians on the river Kolubara. When, however, the combined Army Group of Austrians, Germans and Bulgarians attacked Serbia in October 1915, be was forced to retreat across the kingdom. He twice saved the Serbs from encircle-

was

ment, once at Kragujevac and again at Blace. Rather than surrender, he ordered the army to seek safety in the Albanian mountains and reach the Adriatic coast He was himself so ill that he was borne across the mountains in a sedan-chair. His outstanding characteristics were indomitable will-power and a supreme gift for making his enemies give battle on terrain illsuited to their equipment.

I

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a. further north, lay through the fortress of Zajecar Since the Bulgarians lacked heavy artillery to force these fortresses, their High Command, under

General Jekov, decided that the army would have to go through passes north and south of the fortresses and try to out Hank them -the Sveti Nikola Pass 3,000 feet high towards Nisand the Kadibogaz Pass towards Knjazevac, not much lower, were the obvious ones Boyadiev thus put one of his four divisions directly on Zajecar and north-west towards Negotin, another one with all the heavy artillery against Pirot, and the other two at Belogradchik, ready to go through the two passes. The Bulgarians' transport was made up of ox-carts, the only way by which supplies could be carried through the trackless mountains. Further south, they had an easier task; they mustered two divisions and the cavalry to form Second Army iTodorov), together with the 'Macedonian Legion', a corps of embittered volunteers. Here they faced only the weak Sei'bian Second Army, largely composed of middle-aged volunteers and territorials, with somewhat easier ground to pass over. They intended to march into Macedonia and cut the railways to Salonika. On October 1 1 they broke off diplomatic relations with Serbia, arranged a frontier-in.

cident as 'provocation', and declared war.

Slow pursuit Their offensive began at once. They crossed the river Timok in north-eastern Serbia and encountered the two divisions of the Serbian Timok Group; the various passes on the frontiers fell into their hands. However, only a few miles over the border, the usual terrible problems of supply held up their First Army. There were very few roads, and these few rapidly became unusable: the

German

liaison officer,

Massow,

reported to Mackensen that ox-carts designed to take supplies for two whole companies were taking two days to cover five miles. Light guns alone needed four oxen and infantry help to go any distance. Lorries could not even begin to move. The Bulgarian advance, such as it was, was marked all the way by gun-carriages stuck in slime. The Serbian resistance was very tough, and the fortresses of Pirot and Zajecar held out against all attacks. Muni-

began to run out, and by October 22, with the Germans held in the north, the Bulgarians were only a few miles into Serbia. Only in the Sveti Nikola Pass was there any progress, and this as it turned out was illusory. Unless the Bulgarians could break through these terrible mountains, the Serbian army would be able to escape from the threatened envelopment. Only in the south, on the front of Second Army, was progress of a serious type made: the Bulgarians swept into Macedonia, broke the railway at Vranje on October 16, and pushed on to Kumanovo and the valley of the Vardar. They seized in all some 60 miles of the railway-line to the south and broke Serbia's contact with the Entente. The Germans were trying to surround the Serbian army by Kragujevac; yet the Bulgarians' failure to advance from the east made this unlikely. It was important to send munitions to the Bulgarians, and to achieve this the Germans decided to cut a way through. Falkenhayn, knowing that things were going badly, travelled himself to the headquarters of Heeresgruppe tions

1104

Mackensen in Temesvar, and agreed to send reinforcements — a Bavarian division, known as the Alpenkorps (Krafft von Dellmensingen) and skilled in mountain fighting. It was to be thrown in on the front of Eleventh Army. The supply-lines were continually improving, the more so as parts of the Belgrade railway lines were in German hands, and the weather calmed down. Two bridges were built over the Sava and the Danube by the Austro-Hungarian engineers, able to take the heaviest transport.

The Germans would not now

suffer

from lack of munitions, and Eleventh Army could go on up the Morava in the hope of catching the Serbians in the north-east before they could retreat. Mackensen hoped to pin down the Serbians in the north until the Bulgarians could take them in their rear. It was vital to press on as the French had now landed, by reports from Salonika, a force of 50,000 men with 240 guns. On the Serbians' side, there was nothing to be done but fight on in the hope of help from the West. All the divisions were now committed — seven against the Germans, four against the Bulgarians, with irregular forces and cavalry covering Macedonia,

which virtually had to look after itself. The government had sent its archives out of the country on October 16 but still hoped for Anglo-French help. Salonika was in fact a scene of confusion. The Western Powers had few troops, these few illequipped for mountain warfare, and ignorant of the terrain. They were hedged about with innumerable political difficulties: the new Greek Prime Minister, Skuludis, was an avowed neutralist, and even threatened to attack the Western Powers in Salonika. The Bulgarians had already collided with French troops in Macedonia, and had moved into Greece, thus complicating the Greek attitude still further. The French cared little for Greece, and much British did not much bother about Serbia, but they rated the Greek highly — Greece had a position very strategic position and a fleet worth a great deal more in British eyes than Serbia. Yet they did not want to upset the French by washing their hands of the whole business. British generals squirmed with embarrassment at their involvement in Balkan affairs, and on the spot behaved with unattractive hypocrisy. The Serbians' only hope was the geography of their land. Mackensen had directed his armies 'to press the main Serbian forces back into the interior of the country and decisively defeat them there'. Just south of the river line the Germans could move quite well, as they now had properly functioning supplies. Their advance for a few days after October 22 was remorseless: Eleventh Army ground forward, taking ridge after ridge. Third Army, less wellsupplied, had a more difficult time; some of the Austro-Hungarian troops went down with frostbite (and were treated by British Red Cross Missions attached to the Serbian army, and now overrun). The rain started again, and roads became difficult; horses broke down with exhaustion. The Serbians stood well by Palanka and Rasavac, in the mountains between Kragujevac and Belgrade. Only Eleventh Army, in the relatively easier Morava valley, worked forward with any speed, constantly turning the flank of the Serbians' Belgrade Group opposite Third Army. Technically, it should have been possible, as Conrad for Serbia.

The

wanted, to set a 'pincer-movement' going from Bosnia and Bulgaria; but the forces in Bosnia were too thin, and soon withdrew over the Drina again, while the Bulgarians were too slow. However, the blasting operations of the German Eleventh Army were achieving results; the Serbians were constantly pressed towards the southwest, away from the rivers. The Timok Group had to withdraw from the Negotin area for fear of being surrounded, and Fulopp's Hungarians advanced down the

Danube

as far as Orsova and the Iron Gates. However, on the front of the Bulgarian First Army little progress was made — the two wings were stuck as before at Pirot and Zajecar, while the centre likewise was literally bogged down before Knjazevac. All that the Bulgarians could hope was that their Second Army, further south, would turn north and thus envelop the Serbian defenders of the frontier areas. It was clear at any rate that the Serbians had a good chance to escape towards Salonika, to the protection of the AngloFrench Armee d'Orient, as it was (rather fraudulently) called. The Germans' intention was to catch the Serbian armies around Kragujevac before they could escape to the south. They were unable to achieve this, try as they might. Mackensen's dispositions had been wrong virtually since the beginning. The Austro-

Hungarian Third Army was expected

to

penetrate the Serbians' western flank; but in fact this army had too little artillery and was spread out too far for its weight to tell. As well, it was moving through immensely difficult country, and its troops were not of the same quality as the German ones. The Bulgarians were held up by their crippling lack of artillery, and also by supplytroubles. The real weight of the offensive lay with the divisions of Eleventh Army, in the centre of the Central Powers' front;

and the best that it could achieve was simply to push the Serbians back into the valley, blasting them out of their positions by the weight of their extremely powerful and well-directed artillery. Third

Morava

Army, which ought to have been more powerful, was not in the same state at all. Towards the end of the month, it was expected to make a decisive breakthrough towards Rudnik to roll up the Serbian left; but the commander of XXII Reserve Corps reported that his corps would have to stop, since the supplies are not certain to if it stops where it is; 90 carts

come up even

are lying wholly immobile in the area of the Avala mountains south of Belgrade. This situation became even more pronounced as the Germans threw in the Alpenkorps on the front of Eleventh Army, not that of Third Army: all the time the Serbians were thrown back in the centre, not on the wings. Of course Mackensen had good reasons for behaving as he did; but even so his conduct shows great lack of imagination. The Serbians naturally suffer-

ed from this wearing-down process; they began to surrender rather more often to avoid bombardment; one of Kosch's divisions took 1,400 prisoners on October 27, a record for the campaign. By the evening of October 28, the front ran only fifteen miles from Kragujevac, along the Trivunovo mountains and Zlatovo. The Serbians had been thrown out of the north-eastern

and contact was now made between Germans and Bulgarians along the Danube. The transports to Turkey and

corner,

Bulgaria were set in motion. On the Bulgarian side, things went on much as before: at the cost of immense effort, the centre moved forward to Knjazevac, though the

wings remained as before, by Pirot and Zajecar, where fighting of indescribable ferocity went on. Now the Bulgarians made a decision that was fatal to their campaign. They were depressed at the infinitesimal progress of their First Army; and swung their Second Army north, to outflank the Serbian defence against First Army. In consequence, the Bulgarians lost their chance of cutting off the main Serbian armies before they could retreat to the south. The chance was never regained.

'Temporary setbacks' October 31, Putnik ordered a new rethe Bulgarian into Kragujevac; Second Army had made too dangerous an advance, and he heard also that the Turks had mustered an army in Thrace. Besides, the neutralists in Greece appeared to be winning, and Sarrail, commander of the Armee d'Orient, personally opposed any attempt to open the railway, describing this as an 'aventure'. The Serbians therefore withdrew in good order. Third Army, clumsily moving over the Maljen and Rudnik mountains, was too slow to stop them. At the same time, the Serbian Timok Group had clearly been weakened by the pressure of Eleventh Army, and in the

On

treat

I

Above: Troops of the Serbian Third Army struggle with a pontoon across a ford Below: Flooding momentarily halts the German advance near Belgrade

~

***V

|

*t*

in

southern Serbia.

the Serbian defenders of Piroi and Zajecar now bad to withdraw, lest they be caught by the advance of the Bulgarians from the south and the Germans from the north They too fell back on the Morava, towards Nis and Aieksinac, concentrating three divisions for the defence of these. The Bulgarian Second Army, having diverted itself north for Boyadiev's sake, was now operat ing round Iskub (Skopje) and Vranje, too late to make the decisive stroke against the Serbian rear, by Pristina. that might have encompassed the ruin of Serbia. In any case, the Bulgarians were now having to send troops into Greece to cover the Anglo-French front. Even so, if the Serbians escaped from the Kragujevac pocket, they would do so only towards the inhospitable mountains of Albania. Mackensen hoped that they would surrender; and indeed, certain Serbian politicians were already in touch with one of his staff officers, the Prussian Count Alvensleben. These negotiations came to nothing: the Germans would not sacrifice their allies, and the Serbian government believed that the Western Powers would win in the end, and therefore would not be blinded by temeasl

porary set-backs. In any case, the Serbians escaped towards the mountains in the south-west, towards Prizren and Dakovica on the Albanian border and Pristina, a historic town in Central Serbia. Kragujevac itself fell early in November, but the Serbians kept a front running roughly south-east, always escaping before the Germans' wings could envelop them. The Germans' main weight was in the centre, doing nothing more positive then driving the Serbians back; even so, supply-difficulties were such that even Eleventh Army could manage only four miles a day. There were even a few cases of typhus. The Central Powers pressed on to Kragujevac and Cacak, their 14 divisions strung out against seven Serbian divisions, which had lost only a tenth of their men as prisoners. On Eleventh Army's left there was a gap of some 70 miles to the Bulgarian First Army, whose four divisions had reached a front from west of Zajecar to Vlasotince; the Bulgarian

Second Army was now well into Macedonia, on both sides of Veles and Stip, blocking the passage of the French from Salonika. The Serbians were now cut off in three directions. Two escape roads were now open to them; they could either try to cut their way out to the French or retreat towards Albania, via the 'Field of Blackbirds', the historic Kossovo Polje, where the Serbian Empire had been destroyed by the Turks in the Middle Ages. Mackensen's troops had failed to surround the Serbians at Kragujevac in late October; but Mackensen now hoped to surround the Serbians by Kraljevo, by operating across the Western Morava. Third Army must try to turn the Serbian left, advance to Kraljevo and thus block the retreat of the Serbians to the south-west. In particular, Mackensen wanted to catch the Timok Grou^ then retreating from north-eastern Serb before it could escape to Pristina. This wa. ried in the first days of November. As usua., Mackensen's hopes for surrounding the Serbians were vain. Third Army, which had the decisive role, was too weak and slow. XIX Corps and the forces in Bosnia were moving along at a pathetic speed; VIII Corps and XXII Reserve Corps were now stopped in their ,

1106

racks by a furious Serbian counterattack, launched by Putnik on November 4 to give himself freedom to retire. These two corps then found that they were stuck on I

the Western Morava and at Cacak as their bridging material was too poor. In the same way, the Bulgarians were able to advance towards Nis but not with any speed; they were held up by November 7, on the eastern side of the Morava. Thus the German Eleventh Army came up against the Serbian centre, as usual merely pushing it back by weight of guns, but in many cases the pursuit broke down on account of supply troubles as the Germans moved away from their railheads. A Bavarian division even had to leave several batteries behind and bring up the rest by a long detour through the mountains. Even hay for the horses could not be brought up in time. The muddy roads were almost impassable. The Bulgarians did better, reaching Nis which they took on November 5; but they were then held up by the Morava, which they could not bridge, and the Serbian north-eastern group withdrew in time. The Serbians had suffered a great deal, but their army was still intact. The strength of the Serbian national feeling held them together in

they were becoming huddled together in the region Kraljevo — Krusevac — Aieksinac, and Mackensen hoped to surround them there. Kraljevo fell to Third so,

Army on November

Krusevac

6,

Aieksinac on November

and

together with much artillery and rolling-stock that the Serbians had been unable to withdraw in time. The Serbians had escaped, but their army was badly hit — many of its soldiers, unwilling to leave their farms, reverted to being peasants, and thus avoided capture as prisoners of war. The army retreated towards the 'Field of Blackbirds' and Pristina, hoping to cut its way through to the French. With this, the Germans regarded the campaign as ended. The first munitions transports for Turkey had now passed the Danube to the Bulgarian ports, and Falkenhayn did not want to be drawn into a campaign against Greece, whose neutrality he was anxious to preserve. He and Mackensen were happy to see the Serbian army retreat into Albania, an experience it was unlikely to survive, and they decided to withdraw five of the German divisions. This did not suit Conrad at all, and there was a period of bitter 7,

wrangling between him and Falkenhayn. Conrad wanted to finish with Serbia and occupy Albania, as well as Greece. He raged on the side-lines, foreseeing that the Entente would save the Serbian army and retain a 'presence' in the Balkans in

The

relations of the three complicated: the Germans were anxious to be quit of the Balkans; the Bulgarians were content to exploit

Salonika. allies

were

what they had won

in

Macedonia and

north-western Serbia without worrying too much about events further west; and the Austrians at bottom did not want to help

up a 'Big Bulgaria'. In its later stages, the Serbian campaign was therefore marked by a vicious wrangling and a deep suspicion that prevented any harmonious exploitation of Mackensen's victory. Falkenhayn and Conrad in particular never forgave each other: Conrad saw Falkenhayn as unimaginative and crude; Falkenhayn saw Conrad as light-minded and fanciful. set

first

week

of

November, Conrad

heard -through his liaison officer with Heeresgruppe Mackensen — that the Germans proposed withdrawing five divisions for service in the West; he at once protested, and threatened to denounce the military convention. Falkenhayn gave way, somewhat dishonestly, and then settled for an inadequate compromise by which some of the divisions were left in Serbia. The wrangling went on: Conrad wanted the Germans to send forces south to help the Bulgarian Second Army; Falkenhayn refused to countenance any attack over Greek territory — ostensibly because he did not want to offend the Greeks, in reality because he was bored with the Balkans and did not want to see any

more German troops laying down lives for other people's interests.

their

He was

worried at the continual transport problems and the danger of typhoid fever; he was perhaps also worried that, if he made Austria-Hungary strong again and satisfied her Balkan interests, she would drop out of the war. No one really knows. At all events, three German divisions were now withdrawn, with another two to follow

as soon as they could be freed. As a compensation, the Alpenkorps was set moving

towards Third Army.

this terrible test.

Even

In the

It was too late. The Serbians were escaping to the 'Field of Blackbirds'. By November 11, after the usual slow, grinding progress through the bleak mountains, the line ran from Visegrad in the west to the mountains south of Ivanjica, and thence to the Western Morava and then to the Bulgarian front on the Southern Morava. Logistic problems were immense: Falkenhayn was informed that 'heavy artillery can be brought forward only with great numbers of oxen yoked together, and only very slowly'. The roads were often so muddy that carts sank to the axles in slime; and the mountains were now covered in snow and smooth ice. Maybe the Bulgarians could have changed the situation, but they were held up by a Serbian counterattack by Leskovac as they tried to cross the river; and the Serbians were able to retire from the east and north-east towards the 'Field of Blackbirds'. There followed a period of ten days, to November 19, while the Serbians retreated, a day or so ahead of their pursuers. On the front of Third Army, progress was infinitesimal as this army moved into the valley of the Ibar. Eleventh Army, reduced to three divisions under Kosch, pressed on to Prokuplje and turned the flank of the Serbian Third Army, opposing the Bulgarians. The Serbians now planned to concentrate in the area of Pristina, transfer troops from north to south and force a way through the Bulgarian front to the south. Putnik intended to hold the entrance to the great plateau of the 'Field of Blackbirds', at Gnjilane, while the rest of the army made for the Karadag Pass, intending to cut a way out to Skopje and Sarrail's Armee d'Orient. This led to the Battle of the

'Field of Blackbirds', between November 19 and 24. The Serbians had only 200

The map shows the movement of Austroforces through Serbia and the retreat of the Serbian army. Bulgarian forces, coming from the east, were vital to German strategy, forcing the Serbian Third Army to flee into Albania. The futile manoeuvrings' of Serbia's Right:

German

western allies did little to save her from defeat and indeed gave her false hope

sava

ELEVENTH

THIRD

Vl\

XIX

»

XRes

Sen^'# Belgrade

^

Kupinove #

'"%

HUNGARY

IV Res

III

Veliko Gradiste

RUMANIA

0rsova_

AAvala

October 10 c/ October 17

Smederi

,

*Sfc

V

Palanka

THIRD

y

Petrovac

*

BOSNIA Arandelovl

^O

W/

H/3

October 30

xxi^es

X)X

vim

m rnvunovo

Kragujevac(

62Div

*

ivanjica

Vidin<

V

I I

r

HERZEGOVIf

October 30

jodma

Cacakl Cacakl

Visegrad «

Negoti

,

I .Kraljevo

\paraci Paracin

I

{

u

ROUP

Jfusevac*

N\lovembeM5^-

Kadi

RMY

j^^s^

#

• Lorn

Tl TIMOK

(

BogasPa

Aleksinac Sveti Nikola Pass


THIRD

FIRST

(AUSTRO

^HUNGARIAN)

,

(Bulgarian)

Raska Prob

ELEVENTH NovuJezar

MONTENEGRO

>logradch«k

Knjazevac

GE/MAIM)

SECO k

Pi rot

•

BULGARIA

19

jsotince

iMitrovica

•Andrii

SECOND .Pristma

Sofia.

(Bulgarian) Vrar

Podgorica*

• Dakovica

^

S.

• Kyustendil •

Prizrer

Macedonian

Uski

Legion

^

October 22 Stip

ALBANIA

IND Adriatic

• Debar

Sea

• Strumica Krusovo*

•Tirana

MILES

•Pnl(

25

KMS

50

•

ARMIES

GERMAN ELEVENTH AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN

Ohrid

• Monastir THIRD

BULGARIAN FIRST & SECOND SERBIAN FIRST/THIRD/TIMOK

A-G

FRENCH & BRITISH GREECE

RAILWAYS

Ay

Salonika

1107

— guns

n floods as downpour coincided with thaw. Howewr, the Serbians could not risk being cut oft' from their only line of retreat, into Albania, and on November 21, Putnik gave an order to retreat there. French officers attached to his staff" reported home how the Serbians, officers and men, regarded themselves — not without justice — as having been betrayed by their allies. The Serbian army began to move >ss the frontier into Albania, making for the ports some 100 miles west.

their forces were on half-ra and typhus had broken emt*atfjtiti. The Germans were pressing from the northr and the Bulgarians from the east and left,

at best

.

south; in particular, the troops intended to defend Gnjilane were only 2,500 strong, ?»presenting two divisions, under General ivkovic. These forces were defeated by' the Bulgarians, and the entrance to the 'Field of Blackbirds' was lost. The troops that tried to cut their way through to Skopje were crippled by lack of artillery, while the two armies of the Central Powers jyflfl probing the north and west. Even the forces in Bosnia, so long passive, took Visagrad, crossed the Drina and went alon^ the Albanian frontier towards Nivob#zar, thus severing Serbia from her ally, 1 1 u j 1 waiF-*inmmfnMimi idi/vmvfivm ihvj i ituio Mitrovica and Pristina, as Mackensen ordered, so as to reach the 'Field of Blackbirds' as soon as possible. Naturally the '

»

1

Further Reading Ducasse, Andre, Feyler, et

with whole teams of oxen submerged in Below: Germany's hopeful ally: Bulgarian troops advance over the top of a hijl in Macedonia Right: A Serbian rear guard battery. The Serbians fought on in the empty hope of.help from the west

1

-

F.,

Les

d

'

Serbie 1914

1915 (Paris/

nd der General

i

Larcher,

X7.

..

(Paris JSj Lon, M., f

Germans' an* Austrians' advance was not fast, but it was remorseless. By November 16 the forward line reached Uyac, Raska and Kursumlija; on the 17th the weather

^

74-7978 (Paris

1964)

rid

les

Balkans

uerra Europa (Mad-

192U)

Palmer, A. W., The Gardeners of Salonika (London 1965)

i

p. 465.]

J

MS-

'&£*

X

'

4»

%

#

The material of Serbia;

of the last

Germany had

uniforms, Serbia had few Above: The Schwarzlose8-mm Mo7/12 machine gunthe Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World Wa the Serbians in the Balkan campaign. Right: (Top) The fv short rifle 'Stutzen'. (Centre) The Mannlicher M88/90 8-r semi automatic. (Bottom) The Mannlicher M95 8-mm pouch and clips of five bullets. This clip was inserted v the magazine and was automatically rejected after the Bottom right: (Top) The Serbian mauser Milanovic 10.' (Bottom) The Serbian Cavalry carbine 7-mm, an obscun by Steyr in Vienna. Below: Austrian small arms: (1) Fl; I

Steyr 8-mm pistol M 1907 with holster. (3) 9-mm Ste^ holster and ammunition. (4) Rast-Gasser revolver 8-mm

used for trench warfare with scabbard. Left: A Germar These troops, often specially recruited from units in Bav played an important part in the Serbian campaign. Th simple and functional and unique in the German serv standard bergmutze with hooked up side curtains and t\ in the front, the tunic and trousers were always grey, wc

j

|

|

'

.

|

1110

invasion

guns and T

of either

favourite

weapon

of

rand used against lannlicher

nm

rifle,

rifle

vith

M95 8-mm

converted to

with cartridge the bullets into

round was fired. rifle M78/80. gun, manufactured

ast

15-mm 3

are pistol ix

pistol

(2)

Roth-

M 12 with

model 1898. (5) Knife mountain soldier, 'aria or Wurttemberg, leir uniforms were ice. The cap was a no fastening buttons l

>rn

with heavy boots

^•Ai"***' w

MMtt^^M

_.„_

^ A

mi

;

r

t i

)

.--.

1112

*•

m* &' •**>

SERBIA I HE

LONG

RETREAT In freezing weather, ragged, hungry and ill, the Serbian Army

turned its back on its own country and began a slow, agonising journey over the mountains into Albania. Behind them, the Austro-German and Bulgarian forces followed in pursuit. K. Peball Below: Soldiers carry the dying Putnik over a snow covered bridge

**T

Ll 13

\

r

the battle of the 'Field of Blackbirds' 19. \9\r>. the Serbian army

on November faced

Mackensen's

defeat

Army

had

achieved its objectives in the Balkans and he could with confidence state that: 'the great operation against the Serbian army has now ended." He had succeeded in opening up communications with Turkey -his primary objective, and the fate of the Serbian army, ragged, hungry and stricken with typhus, was scaled. The Serbians could see only one way to avoid total annihilation: flight — across the mountains to North Albania. Recognising this, the army issued the necessary orders on November 21. First of all, the troops were to be concentrated round Ipek, Djakova, and Prizren: following this, each army received instructions on November 23 for the route that they were to adopt on the retreat across the 160 kilometre wide chain of mountains. The intended routes

Serbians

Ml

FIRST Jl 71 Jl

Austro-Germans/Bulgarians Belgta

.!.-

tTtTtTtTtTtT THIRD

M MM MM MM Ml MM THIRD Jl Jl

manpS

N Ea

1

TIMOK/SECONDJl

Jl Jl Jl

Nic

MACEDONIAN FORCE

Jl Jl Jl

Skopj e

ttffttttttttt approx 220,000

Jl Jl Jl Jl ELEVENTH

Jl Jl Jl Jl FIRST (BULGARIAN)

Jl Jl

JlJl SECOND (BULGARIAN)

MMMMMMMMM approx 300.000

each figure represents approximately one division no figures for

approx 100,000 Jl Jl Jl Jl Jl Jl

Bulgarian casualties

were as

follows: First (Misic) and the Belvrmy grade Group (Zivkovic) was to follow the

• The

A

road from Ipek to Andrijevica. • The Third Army (Jurisic-Sturm) was to follow the road from Rugova to Andrijevica.

• The Second Army

(Stepanovic) was to follow the road from Plaw to Andrijevica. • The troops from Aka I (Popovic) were to make their way through Dakovica to Spas

and Skadar. • The Timok Army Group was

to follow a route from Prizren via Ljum Kula, Piskopeja, Debar, Elbasani to Drac. From Prizren there were only muletracks leading across the mountains to Albania, and so troops crossing by Ipek and Andrijevica were ordered to abandon any spare artillery guns before reaching Andrijevica. Special mountain artillery was to be carried with them on the retreat,

and used whenever possible. If it proved impossible to take the guns the whole way, they were to be burned or spiked. The decision to retreat, also prevented the Serbian army from being encircled on the 'Field of Blackbirds'. Fighting there degenerated into a series of bloody rearguard actions as the Serbians moved back towards Mitrovica and Pristina in the face of Austrians, Germans and Bulgarians pouring in from the north and east. Conditions were becoming significantly worse, and the troops were having a very hard time. Reports reaching the High Command from the army and divisional commanders stated that the outlook was bleak, but added that the situation was still by no means desperate in all the

On November 20 Voivode Misic, commander of the First Army had been forced to report that his army now had only units.

the

15,381

rifles at their disposal,

but he also

commented that troop morale, though not perhaps as high as might be desired, was Top: The approximate strengths of Serbia and her enemies at the outset of Mackensen's campaign. Not only was she outnumbered on almost every front, but her supply of weapons was wholly inadequate for the demands made upon her army. Centre: A French cartoon depicting Serbia's 'martyrdom'. Germany and Austria confront her, while Bulgaria stabs her in the back. For her part in the war Bulgaria hoped for territorial concessions that would make her the most powerful country in the Balkans. Bottom: A contemporary painting of Serbian soldiers and their wagons during the long retreat towards Albania

1114

1

nonetheless good. Their spirits, he explained, are low, and it is difficult to maintain good discipline. This is chiefly due to exhaustion and a lack of regular supplies, but it also stems from the fact that they are uncomfortably aware of the great advantages enjoyed by the enemy as regards

Shortly before the Army High Command and the Serbian government left Ipek on the morning of November 26, Prime Minis-

superiority of numbers, and better equipment, especially artillery. But other units sent back much gloomier reports, revealing that the number of deserters was steadily increasing, and that some soldiers had even

Salonika. The despatches began with

turned to plunder. Sickness was

they

rife,

claimed, and supplies of food and clothing were so totally disordered that many units

were even without bread for days on end and were forced to march barefoot and halfnaked through the bitter weather.

ter Pasic sent despatches containing the facts set out above to the Military Attaches in Russia, France, England, Italy, and Rumania, and also to General Sarrail

in

the following words: In view of the intolerable situation, we have been forced to withdraw our army to the Adriatic coast. We have been driven to adopt these drastic measures by the ceaseless attacks of the Germans, Austrians and Bulgarians, and by drastic shortages of supplies, arms, munitions and equipment within our own army. The indecision and inactivity of allies has proved the determining factor our decision. We intend hereafter to reorganise our armies, and hope that in conjunction with our allies we shall be able to institute a fresh offensive when

our in

A national necessity On November

25

at

2300

hours,

the

army High Command at Ipek issued what were to be their last orders on Serbian soil. The orders were intended for the commanders of all fighting units, and they stated that the army would now have to march right through Montenegro and north Albania to the Adriatic coast. Commanders were asked to ensure that troop Serbian

discipline should not be allowed to slacken on this final retreat. Convince your troops, they were ordered, that this retreat is a national necessity. Make it clear to them that our only salvation in these fateful days lies in patiently enduring all hardships; let them march onwards in the belief that this shall be their greatest sacrifice. Above all, tell them that our salvation will come when our allies carry all before them in the final victory. The commanders were also

emphasise strongly that surrender was of the question, because surrender would mean that we could expect no more help from our allies — it would be the end of Serbia as a nation. to

out

Final orders A few hours before

this, the commanding generals had received their orders regarding the final routes that their units were to take on the retreat. The routes were set out as follows:

• The

First,

Second

and

Third

Army

together with the Belgrade Army were to set out from Pec, and continue to Skadar via Andrijevac and Podgorica. • The troops from the Aka I units were to march from Prizren to Skadar by way of Ljum Kula, Spas, and Puka. • The Timok Army Group were to leave Prizren and strike out for Elbanasi by way of Ljum Kula, Debar and Struga. In doing so, they were to link up with the troops

from Bitolja

division.

the First Army under Misic was to cover the retreat. In the south, the Timok Army Group under Gojkovic were to cover the flank, diverting the enemy by making small forays in the

•

In

the

north,

direction of Gostivar. Troops from Bitolja division were to be diverted by way of Prilep to maintain contact with the 56th French Infantry Division. Special instructions issued to the Generals emphasised the importance of destroying any equipment still in serviceable condition that would not be needed on the march. Guns in particular were to be broken up, or secretly buried. They added

that the Army High Command would leave Ipek on November 26, intending to reach Skadar by November 30.

conditions are more favourable. The decision to withdraw the Serbian Army to the Adriatic clearly shows the political attitudes of both the government under Alexander, the Prince Regent, and also of Nikola Pasic, the Prime Minister. Their official policy was to maintain the Serbian army as a political weapon, and they acted accordingly. They realised that it would be impossible to win back the Serbian territory lost without the active support and co-operation of the lawful Serbian army. However, their cruel de-

more than 200,000 exhausted and half-starved troops and civilian

cision to force sick,

refugees to march across well-nigh impassable mountains in the depth of winter, proves that they cannot have given much thought to the political gains that might have been achieved by pursuing either one of two alternative courses. Firstly, the army could have been used to break through to the Allies on the Salonika front, thereby forcing the Greeks to decide once and for all whether they would support the Entente Powers or not. Secondly, the army could have been used as a means of exerting pressure on the enemy to ensure that the Serbians were offered acceptable terms in a possible peace treaty. Had the Serbian government been willing to consider surrendering, a strong and effective

army would have added

significantly to

powers, especially if used to exploit the already tense situation caused by Germany and Austria-Hungary's widely-differing war aims in the Balkans. Perhaps the most tragic aspect of the decision to retreat is the way in which it echoes the proposals made by the German Foreign Office to the Serbians through the medium of the Greek government in early October. At that time, it was suggested that they should withdraw the army to Montenegro and north Albania, just as they were now doing, and begin peace negotiations with the Central Powers. their

bargaining

Violent fighting Further developments had also taken place in the purely military situation.

German

side,

On

the

General Falkenhayn had

already given orders for eight of the 1 divisions fighting on the Serbian front to be transferred elsewhere. From November 25 onwards, the Serbian troops were in general only involved in a small number of rearguard actions on the outer ring of their encirclement. Encounters with the Bulgarians near Prizren, Dakovica, and

in the valley of the White Drim resulted however in violent fighting. Units of the 3rd Bulgarian Infantry Division led the attack, and a veritable bloodbath ensued as they moved their way through a confused mass of civilian refugees, Serbian soldiers, guns,

and wagons. The Bulgarians

this indiscriminate massacre until recalled by their commanders, who sent them southwards to attack French and British troops retreating to Salonika. The

continued

Serbian army High fit

to consult their

Command had not seen army commanders

in

the field about the routes to be taken on the retreat over the mountains to the Adriatic coast. They were confronted with a fait accompli in the orders issued on November 25 and 26. Voivode Misic, the Commander of the First Army, was among those who protested against the orders to retreat, fearing that this could only spell

doom

for

thousands of soldiers. He conit would be far more practical

sidered that

withdraw the greater part of the army and determined to achieve this. If the proper time and place were chosen, the army was still capable of attacking the Bulgarians and thereby pushing their to

to Greece,

way

to Greece. Misic therefore arranged a meeting of the commanding Generals to discuss the situation. The meeting took place in Pec, on November 29, between 0800 hours and 1200 hours. Those taking part were Misic himself Voivode Stefan Stepanovic, the Commander of the Second Army, General Mihaljo Zivkovic, the Commander of the Belgrade Group, and General Paole- Jurisic-Sturm, the Commander of the Third Army. Their situation was disastrous. The number of deserters was increasing and it was impossible to locate or distribute provisions. The soldiers were living in a state of unmitigated misery; exhausted, they struggled on in temperatures as low as — 20 centigrade, and many of them had already succumbed to typhus. Diseases of all kinds were taking a heavy toll. There was no winter clothing available, either for them or for the civilian refugees who had joined the exodus. In such circumstances, it was impossible to say what would happen to the troops if they should be forced to add to their sufferings by marching through the wintry mountains. No supplies of any kind would ever reach them there. If they were to march through the mountains, they would also be exposed to constant harassment from the Albanian mountain tribes, especially the Arnauten. In their despei ation, the Generals even considered making a counter-offensive, but they were forced to the conclusion that their troops were incapable of such action. Reluctantly, after prolonged discussion, they agreed that the only course left open to tbem was to follow orders, and retreat into Albania. Thus it was settled that the army should regroup on November 30 on the right banks of the Isloca and the Drim, the regrouping to take place in the following way. The First Army should regroup round Hozaj. the Belgrade Group should regroup in the area between Vrela and the White Drim, east of the village of Stari Durana, the Third Army in the area between the White Drim and the village ofPetrid on the left bank of the Pecer Bistrica, and the Second Army between the village of Petri c and the village of Lugaca. Each division was only allowed to take one field battery from the artillery,

and one munition wagon from 111;,

supply corps on the retreat. The remaining oxen and horses were to be divided into two lots, the first to be slaughtered to provide food, and the second to make up a baggage-train. Everything was to be loaded onto two-wheeled carts, all other wagons to be burnt. Any guns still in serviceable condition were to be taken on the march, but should be burnt rather than fall into enemy hands. Final arrangements were also made for the marching order to be taken on the retreat. The Second and Third Armies were to follow a route from Rugova via Velike to Andrijevica, with the Second Army preceding the Third Army. The First Army and the Belgrade Group had to follow a route over Rozaj and Berane to Andrijevac, with the Belgrade Group leading the column. The artillery were to march together from Rozaj onwards in the following order: First Army, Belgrade Group, Third Army, and finally the Second Army bringing up the rear. The Third Army was also to provide the First Army and the Belgrade Group with the necessary supplies. But scarcely had the conference ended before a despatch from Cetinje arrived with news that the Germans were pulling their divisions out of Serbia. A fresh conference was convened for 1500 hours. the

The information received was quite corThe German High Command had

rect.

Above: Footsore Serbian prisoners, wearing the remnants of their uniforms march toprison .

Below: Thousands of Serbians never finished the journey, but died of typhus or exhaustion

achieved all that was necessary to ensure the success of their Balkan campaign. In a letter written on November 22 to Conrad, Falkenhayn clearly that every

had stated coldly and

man now

available in Serbia must be transferred to fight on other German fronts. He went on that he felt in no way bound to allow our German troops in Serbia to starve or run the risk of contracting typhus any longer than is strictly necessary. With this, he ordered eight of Mackensen's 11 divisions to be transferred. Conrad fumed with indignation at Falkenhayn's decision, seeing all too clearly that Falkenhayn had no intention of undertaking any joint operations in the Balkans in the next few months. He himself had long been cherishing plans of his own for continuing the campaign against Montenegro, thereby administering the coup de grace to Serbia. He therefore sent an immediate reply on November 25 to Falkenhayn in wbich he stated that, under the present circumstances, Austro-Hungarian troops under the command of Field-Marshal Mackensen were to be released from their

Mackensen's mandate should now officially be considered withdrawn. The two Chiefs of General Staff had effectively violated the Military Convention of September 6, 1915, agreed on by the Central Powers, and as a result it was difficult to avoid a split between the Aus-

trian

and German High Command. But in man-

the course of the next few days they aged to patch up their quarrel.

This abrupt change of mood was caused by the news that General Sarrail was making preparations for a fresh relief offensive to help Serbia. Falkenhayn ordered that the transfer of German divisions be cancelled, and in a meeting with Conrad on November 27, Mackensen's mandate was revalidated. Units of German troops were sent to support the Bulgarians: as a result the Bulgarian Second Army under Ribaroff drove Sarrail's troops back to the Greek frontier. There, the units of the Bulgarian Second Army involved were ordered to halt by the Germans, who had perceived that further progress would be impossible in view of the increasing exhaustion of the Bulgarian troops. Conrad was not to be satisfied with such paltry measures, and again rescinded Mackensen's mandate. He then began regrouping the Austro-Hungarian troops on his own initiative, still intending to carry out his plan for an attack

in Bucharest, and so they had assumed that the Germans were in the process of withdrawing about six divisions.

Attache

their conference in the afternoon of 29, in Pec, the generals concluded that the time was ripe for a counterattack. They decided unanimously to concentrate their troops round Pec, empowering Voivode Misic to undertake the necessary preparations for an attack. Misic had begun his preparations when General Mihaljo Zivkovic sent in a report on November 30 saying that his troops of the Belgrade Group had already set out on their route through the mountains, and that there was now no way of stopping them. The soldiers of the Belgrade Group In

November

had been severely pressed over the last days. The Divisional Commanders' reports were depressing in the extreme. On

few

November

manoeuvres of

no knowledge of these political manoeuvres. The contents of the despatch from Cetinje had been confirmed by a further despatch from their Military course,

morale of the soldiers has sunk so low thai I

to the fact that the

and junior

officers

He

contin-

same

vein: desertion and refusal to obey orders are now so common, that the officers are powerless to act against such abuses. He ended with the heartfelt

ued Political

General Zivkovic himself

can no longer answer for them.

against Montenegro.

obligations.

The Serbian army commanders had,

29,

had sent in a report in which he stated that it was his painful duty to draw attention

in the

plea: No one can expect these troops to go on fighting, even less can they be expected to launch an offensive attack. They are too

they would find supplies waiting for in Montenegro. He suggested a possible alteration in the route agreed on for the retreat. His despatch reached Pec on December 3. When the generals met to discuss it, they unanimously condemned his suggestions, finding his route even worse than the previous one. The whole army had already begun to retreat along the preordained route two days beforehand, and it would have been impossible to divert them. that

them

They were marching to their doom. Events now took on an ominous course when Voivode Stepanovic, the

Commander

of the

Second Army, received a further despatch addressed to him personally. It arrived at 1200 hours, shortly after Prince Alexander's, and had been sent by the Montene-

All

that

remained

after defeat: the long line of tired troops

winds

its

way

into exile

grin High Command. It completely contradicted all that Prince Alexander had said, and was couched in terms calculated to annoy and insult the recipient. The Montenegrins poured scorn on the Serbian army, claiming that We are reliably informed that the enemy has quitted the front. Your deluded Serbian army has retreated for nothing, scared by a bunch of old wives' tales. Kindly organise a fighting force of about 4,000 men and attack immediately. Success is unavoidable. Stepanovic's reply was brief and to the point: Impossible. Serbian soldiers follow orders from High Command, not one of them would so much as listen to idle gossip. Besides, we can

hardly rely on you for supplies.

number, their clothes are in rags, they have no boots, and they are starving. I must beg you, the army commanders, to allow us to follow orders from the High Command, and begin the retreat. If we do not set out soon, our scanty stock of supplies will give out. Let us retreat now, for few

in

otherwise all hell will break loose. Upon receipt of this report, the generals called a further conference for the morning of December 1. In desperation, Misic sought to persuade his colleagues to stand by their decision of November 29 and organise a counter-attack. He urged that, in spite of everything, the most sensible and honourable course open to them was to stand their ground and fight. They could then conclude a truce with the enemy; any other course of action would condemn not only the army, but also the nation itself to an unknown fate. As he said in his own words: Events are now in our favour; let the

army now remain on Serbian

soil,

and

our nation shall not be destroyed.

But this time, Misic's arguments impressed no one. The generals knew that they were no longer masters of the situation. Hours of fruitless discussions resulted only in Voivode Stefan Stepanovic — the oldest and wisest of the generals present — having the final word. He proposed that they should first seek the approval of the actual commanders in the field before inUntil this stituting a counter-attack. approval had been granted, the commanders should go ahead with their preparations as before. This feeble conclusion was the beginning of the end. Time had run out for preventing a retreat. The generals now found that it was impossible to contact their own Army High Command. They therefore sent a despatch to the Montenegrin army High Command at Cetinje, requesting them to pass it on to the Serbians at Skadar. The nature of the despatch may be judged from the following extract. The situation of our troops 1118

desperate, both morally and physically. It is pointless to try and stop deserters, for they will be deserting in thousands. The average regiment now consists of only a is

We have only enough supplies for four days, five at the most. Our delegates in Cetinje say that we shall not find any more when we reach Montenegro. Most of the soldiers are in rags, and have to go bare-footed. The routes that the army have chosen are suitable only for packanimals and foot-soldiers. In many places they are so icy, and so covered with snow as to be unusable. We cannot get through. The despatch ended with the request that immediate assent be given to the decision to stage a counter-attack. The Army High Command had not yet reached Skadar. King Peter was now so old and infirm that he had to be transported in a special twowheeled cart. He, and his son, the Prince

few hundred men.

Regent Alexander, had set off in company with Voivode Radomir Putnik, Prince Trubetzkoj, the Russian Ambassador and a few staff officers. Guarded by a small detachment of soldiers, they had set out on November 26, hoping to take the shortest route possible from Pec to Skadar. The path they had chosen was precipitous in the extreme. It swiftly turned to ice, snowstorms raged around them, progress was slow and painful. Prince Alexander split off from the main group in Puka, and made his own way to Cetinje, arriving there on December 2. Radomir Putnik was close to death and had to be carried in a litter; this added encumbrance slowed the group down yet further with the result that they only reached Skadar on December 7. Radomir Putnik immediately sent in his resignation, alleging that ill-health rendered him incapable of going on. Meanwhile, Prince Alexander had received the despatch that the commanding generals in Pec had sent to Cetinje. His reply followed instantly. He forbade them to attempt a counterattack, assuring them

Into exile

The 'Great

Retreat' of the Serbian army to north Albania now began in earnest. It is an irony of fate that the last fierce battles of 1915 should have taken place on the historic soil of Kosovo Polce, 'The Field of Blackbirds', a name carved deep in the hearts of all true Serbians. This was the site of the greatest battle fought on Serbian soil in the late Middle Ages. Here on June 28, 1389, the last epic battle had been fought by the southern Slavs against the

Osman

invaders, and had been lost. The whole of the Serbian nobility had been

slaughtered, or condemned to slavery. This epic battle marked the beginning of first Osman and then Turkish rule over Serbia, an ignominous bondage that had lasted until the beginning of the 19th Century. Beaten on all sides by the combined forces of the Germans, Austrians and Bulgarians, the Serbian army bade farewell to this historic spot, marching onwards into exile, bereft of all hope for the future. Only a small number of units had been left behind by the Central Powers to harrass the demoralised Serbians. After the fighting on the 26th, they had halted in the mountains west of Kosovo Polce and 'The Field of Blackbirds'. On November 30, the Austro-Hungarian 62nd Division had succeeded in occupying Plevlje, a town on the north of the Montenegrin front. From there they built a bridgehead on to the south bank of the Cebotina, completing this operation on December 3. But from here they were still unable to attack the retreating Serbians. The division was too enfeebled to stage any major attack. They suffered continual harassment from the Montenegrins, who exploited to the greatest possible advantage their knowledge of the terrain, maintaining a heroic resistance until December 24. Only then did the Austro-Hungarian 62nd Division succeed in landing on the strategically vital south

bank to

By then it was too late pursuing the Serbian army

of the Tara.

think

of*

to march across the coastal plains of Albania. At the beginning of December the AustroHungarian Third Army (Kovess) moved down through the middle of the front to pursue the retreating Serbians. After fierce rearguard fighting they captured Pec on December 7. Following this success they joined forces with the Bulgarian 3rd Infantry Division marching up from the south after capturing Gjakovice, Prizren, and Ljum Kala. As the last Serbian defenders slipped through Rugova to Plav, the troops of the Central Powers reached the lower slopes of the mountains, where they finally called a halt to the campaign. All fighting died out. The main body of the Serbian army

which had already begun

marched onwards along snow-clad paths and tracks through the mountains that climbed as high as 2,000 metres. Leaving two or three relatively strong divisions to cover their rear, they made as much speed as possible along the ordained routes. An army of ghosts, an apocalyptic vision of suffering, they trudged on. A confused mass of frozen, starving, dying men stumbled across the snow, lashed onwards by the few officers that had not crumbled beneath the strain. These men could not fight. It was all they could do to keep going, as interminable days following interminable nights in a blinding glare of snow and ice. They could not fight, but they could curse their betrayers. Their curses were not directed against their government, nor against their army leaders. Serbia's socalled allies alone were guilty, and they alone were roundly damned for their part

causing such intolerable anguish and army vented the any of the allied liaison officers they could find. Furious and resentful troops rounded on the unfortunate officers, abusing them cruelly and vinin

suffering. The retreating full force of its spleen on

dictively for their 'failure'.

'You betrayed us! You swine, you betrayed us!' were but a few of the curses that a French liaison officer noted down in his diary, desperately trying to modify the coarseness of the abuse hurled at him throughout the retreat: it was lucky for him that he could understand but little of this virulent cursing. His humiliation was complete when the troops even began to jeer at him in German. A few weeks later a Serbian emigre added his voice to the clamour: The so-called Allies, and especially the English, whom we trusted and called on for help, deserted us in our greatest hour of need. Had they but answered our pleas when we cried out from the depths of our despair, we could have won through. These Allies have nothing to offer us, they cannot help: all these Western friends have never done anything except further their own ends, stabbing each other in the back in their efforts to grasp any advantages going. By the middle of December, the Serbian army had reached the limit of its endurance. To take but one example from the hideous whole, the First Drina division lost 981 men between December 12 and 14. Starving troops, driven to plundering the mountain villages were involved in constant skirmishes with the Arnauten tribes living in the mountains. The Arnauten cherished a deep grudge against the Serbians for the violence they had suffered at their hands during the Balkan Wars

A

family of the Arnauten. the hostile tribe

in

Montenegro which attacked the

now exacted a cruel and Civilian refugees and young recruits who had joined the exodus were slaughtered in their thousands, corpses of women, children and old men littered the mountain paths. Some had died of hunger, some had been frozen to death, but the greater part had been mowed down by the Arnauten. By December 15 most of the Serbian army had crossed the mountains and were regrouping as ordered in Podgorica, Skadar, and Elbasani. Some troop divisions of 1912-1913; they

bloody

revenge.

had even managed

to break through to General Sarrail's Army in the south-east. Others stayed behind in the mountains to

up their own resistance groups. The Serbian army High Command now resumed supreme command of the regrouping units on December 8 in Skadar,

set

only to find themselves faced with an impossible situation. The provision and allocation of supplies still presented the greatest problem. Voivode Radomir Putnik had been replaced by General Petar Bogovic, who tried his utmost to ensure that both troops and civilian refugees received at least the basic necessities. No matter how hard they tried, the officers of the Army Commisariat could only manage to distribute a few thousand bread rations daily. For lack of anything else the bread was made out of cornflower. The bread ration per person per day was only 400 grams, and some did not even receive that. There was no meat to be found anywhere, and so many divisions simply slaughtered their pack animals and artillery horses in their desperation. The situation was made worse by the Montenegrins who appeared to have forgotten their promises about providing supplies for the regrouping troops. The situation deteriorated daily and only began to improve with the arrival of Italian warships. These supply convoys had set out on December 15, carrying supplies of food, medicines, and other necessities, chiefly

retreating

army

drawn from stockpiles that the French had organised at Brindisi. The lot of the Serbian army on the Adriatic coast of Albania improved slowly and painfully. The Serbian peoples had been brave indeed to challenge the might of the Central Powers. They had stood their ground nobly, only surrendering the sacred soil of Serbia after savage and bloody battles had crushed their tiny army. The losses they sustained tell their own story. At the beginning of Mackensen's offensive in 1915, the Serbian fighting force amounted to 420,000 men. At the end of 1915, official figures put their total losses at 94,000 dead and wounded. About 70,000 were reported wounded at the end of the campaign, and most of these were taken prisoner. The Central Powers had taken prisoner at least 120 officers and 124,000 soldiers; the Bulgarians had captured about 50,000 soldiers. Serbian losses of guns and armaments were high too. By the end of the campaign the Central Powers had captured 397 guns, some of them very modern, 48 machine guns, innumerable mortars. 12 trench mortars, and 208 munition wagons The Bulgarians had gained about 200 guns, amongst these some of recent design. Over 200,000 Serbian soldiers managed nonetheless to survive the campaign, together with 81 guns, 179 machine guns. and 55,000 rifles. The Serbian army saved itself from annihilation by the Central Powers.

Further Reading Austria-Hungary's last war 1914-1918

(Vol. 3.)

(1932)

Rumpler, Helmut. Austro-Hungarian war aims in the Balkans (Vienna 1965) Zelenika, M. Rat Srbije, Crne Gore 1915 (Belgrade 1954)

[For Kurt Peball's biography, see page 255.

1119

A

guarded the stores with a rifle, swept up the from the exploded ammunition dump and directed the sisters to the nearby farms most likely to sell che extra nourishment for their emaciated patients. At Krushevatz, wards designed to accommodate 150 patients had to take in 500. The long skirts the nurses wore hampered their debris

BRITISH

progress across the mattress-strewn

floor,

where three men shared one mattress and two men one blanket. In the 'priviliesta' or dressing-room, Sister Hawkins was envied her rubber boots since those in leather constantly from wet feet. She remembers holding oxygen bags over grey faces and bandaging on papier mache splints, made and sent by Queen Mary's for

suffered

guild of needlewomen. She

moving

bullets,

cloth

remembers reand shattered bits

bone from gaping holes in the wounded she remembers the bravery of the soldier, his scowl to cover the fear he felt, and how the local whisky — given to deaden the pain — never did, and how later on in the retreat, when there was nothing to give, a folded bandage was put between the men's teeth to be clenched and bits of her own petticoat wiped the sweat from their of

flesh;

IN SERBIA assess the motives of the band of British women who volunteered for service on the Balkan front and as a result found themselves nursing the soldiers of Serbia's stricken army in the long retreat; compassion certainly inspired them and an incredible determination urged them on. Pamela Bright. Right: A party of British nurses in Serbia It is difficult to

Among

the members of the Scottish Womens' Units who helped the Serbians in 1914 was Sister Hawkins. Motivated by patriotism and a thirst for adventure, she and her companions gave all their energies to the Serbian cause; they endured much and yet were buried with little acclaim. Educated at a time when Florence Nightingale was a favourite heroine of the rising generation of Edwardian women, Sister Hawkins was a keen member of the National Union of Suffragettes. And it was this society which mobilised women and equipped hospital units to help in all the fronts during the First World War. Sister Hawkins was a professor's daughter. She had red hair, and bright blue eyes. The uniform of the — the voluminous hat with tartan band, the long, grey-green jacket with large pockets and shapeless skirt — flattered no one, but her blue dress with its buckled belt, the collar pinned high by the Edinburgh Infirmary badge and the flowing head veil suited her well. Her recollections are vivid and commence at Waverley Station, where, with a crucifix round her neck, a Red Cross band

SWU

around her arm, a woolly mascot in her pocket and money sewn into her stays, she joined the ten other nurses, three doctors, several women drivers and a vicar's wife en route for the Balkans. Her arrival at Valjevo in April 1915 was a shock to her. The streets were potholed tracks and the pavements were cobbled; the only form of transport was the bullock cart, open drains the only source of water. But against the squalor of the town was a stark and beautiful mountain background. As pigs scratched in the bones of typhus victims lying in too shallow graves, they were silhouetted against glorious sunrises. Serbia in 1915 was in a pitiable state.

1120

The Serbian Army was facing the Austrians over the river Danube, both reluctant to resume a conflict for which neither side had the men or material. Serbia had been devastated by three wars in quick succession and was at this moment gripped by an epidemic of typhus. It was imperative to eradicate this disease, and to this problem the Scottish women first directed their enthusiasm. A new method of drainage and a system that would give every town and village an adequate supply of drinking water were essential if the epidemic was to be curbed. These were planned by a Colonel Hunter and carried out by the persistence of three women, Dr Hutchinson, Dr Holloway and Dr MacGregor. By the summer of 1915 the epidemic had abated and a fountain at Mladanovitaz was especially erected for in saving lives. the work done by the The new offensive began in October, when the Serbian Army defended Belgrade, street by street. At this time, Sister Hawkins's unit was making strategic plans at Lazaravatza. It appears that there was no building big enough for a hospital in this town and small houses had to be taken over and used as wards; likewise, the small rooms of a school were used as a fever

SWU

hospital.

When

not

Army

casualties were light. nursing typhus cases, Sister

Hawkins's unit washed patients' clothes in the river and helped in the construction of a bath house. Then they went to Krushevatz, where Sister Hawkins remembers especially a khaki-clad Canadian girl who did so much to alleviate the bad sanitary conditions at the hospital. She carried endless buckets of hot water across the fields from pump to bath centre, cleaned the hurricane lamps, equipment, dried

sought the sodden

the

scattered blankets,

foreheads.

Throughout this time, the Serbian authorities repeatedly urged them to send the troops back to their units before they were fit for discharge, in order to make room for others. She remembers the unceasing rain which fell upon the refugees and POW's huddled in the yard of the hospital, their terrible cries for bread and the more terrible answer: 'neraa' (there is none).

By November 1915 Serbia was being overrun by the Austro-German armies in the north and by the Bulgarians from the south-east. But Sister Hawkins's admiration for the Serbians, led her to join the retreat, in the hope of a return to the elusive Allies, rather than remain behind with the wounded or follow those sisters who wished to return to Britain. As an advance guard of German soldiers entered Krushavatza at one end, plastering walls with printed orders demanding co-operation, the deportation of young boys and old men, the 'gift' of 20,000 winter shirts, pants and woollen stockings for the 'Victorious army' facing a severe winter, a small procession was slowly moving out of the other. A rumour then began to circulate that the German High Command had asked the SWU to run a brothel. Horrified, Sister

Hawkins joined a Mrs Stobbart's proceswoman known as maika or 'Mother' who had been attached to the Third Army sion, a

with an emergency field hospital. She had been responsible for many of the station soup kiosks, First Aid posts and roadside tent dispensaries, where free medicine and immunity injections had been available to the ever-moving populace. Now, wearing a black felt hat and riding a white horse, she led the unit of two doctors, several nurses, some male drivers with ambulances, 60 orderlies, 12 ox carts and a few cows. They were attached to the remnants of the Shaumadin Division, who had fought so desperately for every acre in the three-month withdrawal over several

hundred miles.

The retreat across the mountains of Montenegro and Albania to Scutari was never forgotten by Sister Hawkins. Her reminiscences begin with a valley choked with soldiers, refugees and fugitives as the slowly moving River Morava was choked with beech leaves. The 'privilesta' was an ambulance: an empty house: a maize field: a hastily erected tent: a moving bullock cart, or merely a shatorski creela — a square of canvas used by a soldier to sleep in. There was never any time to seek or to

the wounded, nor were there the implements to bury the many that died from exhaustion, starvation, sepsis, or over-exposure. The rain streamed down; the suffering faces were not easy to forget. But it was no soulless mass that wound its way over the alien peaks of Ibek that shut off the plains of their country. It was an optimistic, if tattered remnant of a proud army. On their backs they carried small arms and ammunition; in their eyes they showed the deep hurt suffered by the temporary loss of their country, more than the physical suffering they had to bear. collect

Nightmares At one kilometre an hour, the everdwindling mass inched its way. When the rains ceased, the mists came: when the mists cleared, there were mountains behind other mountains and another perilous, boulder-strewn track. Snow fell, followed by blinding fog, fine sleet — all penetrating, like human sorrow. With the bitter cold. Sister Hawkins remembers, came the nightmares, half struggling to escape into

an outside world where hope hardly existed. The narrow valley, she mused, was full of jumbled colours, like a damaged kaleidoscope: the scarlet stain on a bandage, the rusty drops on virgin snow, the yellow cap on a dead baby, still in the drooping arms of a bemused small brother, the ashen face of an old man, the brown nudity of a soldier's shoulder, his coat too tattered to

hold around his chest, the toes of a foot sticking out like wax candles, and the dark figures etched against the perilous slopes. But the white silence, the unbearable dignity of the retreat was its most moving aspect. How hideous it was — that terrible silence when no one laughed or sang. It was like the silent shuffle of a funeral procession, where even the creaking of a cart was muffled in the drifting snow. At last the small convoy, much smaller

now than when it had set out, crept down towards the sea. Finally, like some exhausted insect, the steady procession of lonely Serbians, old in body but young in years and deadly weary, glimpsed the ship movements of the Royal Navy as they edged towards the shore. Almost apologetically, they slid into the boats. Further Reading

McLaren, Elsie tish

Women's

Inglis,

A History

of the Scot-

Hospital

Sanders. Flora, The Autobiography of a

Woman

Soldier

[For Pamela Bright' s biography, see page 804.]

1

12

1

NAVAL ADRIATIC Bulgarian intervention against Serbia meant more than an additional congregation of strength on her eastern flank, it effectively cut her supply lines from Salonika.

Her army now looked

to Italy to ship vital

supplies across the Adriatic from her southeastern ports to Albania. Early in December, Austrian ships mounted a raid on two Italian supply ports. In the weeks that followed a naval war developed in which Allied shipping was attacked not only by the Austrians but by German U-Boats. Peter Kemp

On September

21 Bulgaria mobilised her

army against

Serbia,

and on October 16 Britain and France declared war against her. The effect of the Bulgarian intervention was soon felt in the Adriatic, for by November the Serbian lines of communication with Salonika had been cut. The only alternative means of supply was through Albania. Food and war materials were ferried across from Brindisi under naval protection, while Austrian prisoners who had been captured by the Serbs were evacuated from Valona. The ports of supply for the northern area of Albania, in which the majority of the Serbian army were penned, were San Giovanni di Medua and Durazzo, and the single port of Santa Quaranta was used for the supply of the southern area. The work of Serbian supply was seriously hindered until midDecember by an Italian decision to fortify Valona first. An expedition, consisting of 5,000 troops, 500 horses and mules, some cattle,

two batteries of artillery and a mountain battery, and provisions for 30 days, sailed from Brindisi on December 1 but became widely scattered during the short crossing of the Straits of Otranto. Fortunately for its fate, the Austrians were unaware that the movement was taking place and the various ships and transports were unmolested. Nevertheless, it was not until 11 days later that the whole force was anded and established and Valona could be con]

sidered secure. In the meantim on December 5, with the Italians still preoccupied with the irtifications of Valona, an Austrian force raided the supply pc of San Giovanni di Medua. The force consisted of the 7,100-t cruiser Sankt Georg, the light cruiser Helgoland, and seven troyers, and they sank a few steamships and small craft, blockii. he harbour. They also raided Durazzo, but without causing muc lamage, and got safely back to Cattaro (

without being brought to ion. Three weeks later, on ember 28, the Austrians mounted another raid on Durazzo. B> is time the Serbian army was being evacuated from the port am aost of the Allied naval forces in c

1122

the southern Adriatic were engaged in escorting the troopships. Duramo was no more than 80 miles from Cattaro, the Austrian base, where a fairly considerable force was stationed under the command of Vice-Admiral Fiedler. The orders for the operation were for the raiding ships to rendezvous off Durazzo at daybreak and if no Italian destroyers were found on patrol outside, to enter the bay and sink all shipping. The force consisted of the light cruiser Helgoland and five destroyers. By midnight the whole force was under way. It was a clear night, and at 0230 hours the periscope of a submarine was sighted in the wake of the Helgoland by the destroyer Balaton. It was the French submarine Monge, keeping watch to the south of Cattaro, and she was rammed and sunk by the Balaton. This episode delayed the force by an hour, but by 0330 hours they were again steaming south, with two French officers and 25 men from the Monge as prisoners on board. Just after 0600 hours they were off the entrance to Durazzo Bay. There were no Italian patrols: indeed, little sign of activity at all. At 0730 hours the whole force, except for one destroyer left outside to watch for submarines, steamed into the bay. None of the coastal batteries opened fire, and one steamship and two sailing vessels — the only occupants of the port — were sunk. As the Austrian destroyers left, one of the coastal batteries at last opened fire, and to clear the Helgoland's line of return fire, the destroyers turned to port. This brought them into the minefield laid across the entrance and the destroyer Lika struck two mines in quick succession, burst into flames, and sank. A second destroyer, the Triglav, also struck a mine but remained afloat. A third destroyer, the Czepel, was ordered to take her in tow but only succeeded in getting the towing wire foul of her propeller. A fourth destroyer, the Tatra, eventually got the Triglav in tow, and the

Austrians withdrew. The adventures in the minefield had occupied a couple of hours, and it was 1000 hours before the raiding force was at sea again. The Triglav was entirely out of action, the Tatra was unable to fight while she was towing the Triglav, and the speed of the Czepel was much reduced by the towing wire round her propeller. Meanwhile, news of the attack had reached Brindisi. Admiral Cutinelli ordered HMS Dartmouth, the Italian light cruiser Quarto, and five French destroyers to proceed and cut off the raiding force. Shortly after 0800 hours the two light cruisers were clear of the harbour but the French destroyers were not ready; Captain Addison, of the Dartmouth, gave them orders to follow as soon as they had steam up. Captain Crampton, of HMS Weymouth, went to see the Italian admiral as soon as he could to ask permission to join in the hunt, and when at 0900 hours Admiral Cutinelli received a further signal that the Austrians were still off Durazzo, he. sent out the Weymouth, the Italian light cruiser

Nine

Bixio,

and four more destroyers.

Captain Addison, first away, decided to steer for Cattaro to be certain of getting between the Austrians and their base. As the speed of the Austrian squadron was now no more than six knots, because of the need to tow the Triglav, it was reasonably certain that this course would achieve its object. Later signals from Brindisi to the effect that the Austrians had not left Durazzo until after 1000 hours and that they had one destroyer in tow enabled Captain Addison to steer a more easterly course and thus to make an earlier contact. Unfortunately the same signals did not produce the same response from Rear-Admiral Bellini in the A^mo Bixio, with the Weymouth under command, so that he continued his more northerly course.

Five against two At about 1320 hours the Dartmouth sighted the smoke of the Helgoland to the southward, and a few minutes later, the Tatra with the Triglav in tow. Ordering the five French destroyers, which had now joined him, to engage the two Austrian destroyers, he settled down to his maximum speed to close the Helgoland. The Austrian commander, Captain Seitz, at once ordered the Triglav to be sunk after her crew had been taken off, and by the time that the French destroyers arrived, the Triglav was at the bottom of the sea and the Tatra had rejoined the Helgoland. Captain Seitz's chief worry was the Czepel, whose captain reported that his maximum speed was 20 knots. This meant that the difference in speed between the two squadrons was about five knots in the Allied favour, and it seemed certain that the Helgoland and her three remaining destroyers must be brought to close action. But by some means the Czepel managed to work up her speed far in excess of what she reported, and as the chase developed, it was the Austrian squadron which proved the faster. Nevertheless, Captain Addison had placed himself in a very

advantageous position. He was still between the Helgoland and her base, and by cutting the corners he could still drive her southwestward towards Brindisi where, he hoped, Admiral Cutinelli would be at sea. But the Italian admiral had had other thoughts; he decided to remain in harbour. The Dartmouth was within range at 1345 hours and hit the Helgoland ten minutes later. At about this time Captain Addison noticed that the Czepel was falling astern of the Helgoland and detached the Quarto to engage her in battle. But once again the Czepel managed to pick up speed and saved herself. Throughout the afternoon the chase continued, with the Helgoland being hit on occasions and being driven all the time nearer and nearer the Italian coast. And as the afternoon wore on, Admiral Bellini's squadron, working down from its more northerly course, caused the Helgoland further anxiety and drove her still further to the west. HMS Weymouth, slightly to the southward of Admiral Bellini in the A^mo Bixio, opened fire on the Helgoland shortly before 1600 hours, but the Austrian cruiser was out of

miles from the Italian coast, but by then her lead over the Dartmouth and Quarto was such that the range was clear and Captain Seitz was able to swing round to the north-westward. This course brought the Helgoland closer to the Weymouth and the Nino Bixio, but dusk was now gathering and there was a chance that the British and Italian gunlaying and rangefinding would inevitably falter in the growing darkness. As it happened, the Weymouth hit the Helgoland once again, but in the poor light the spotting officer in the Weymouth could not distinguish the fall of shot and was unaware of the accuracy of his fire direction. The Weymouth therefore ceased firing. Both she and the Nino Bixio-had a further chance at about 1715 hours, when the range was down to 8,000 yards and, for a few moments, the Austrian ships were silhouetted in the glow of the sunset, but by now rangefinding was no more than guesswork in the growing darkness. B> 1800 hours the Helgoland had all her pursuers abaft the beam and her escape route to the north was olear. Thankfully, Captain Seitz altered round to the north and was soon lost to view in the darkness.

range.

Captain Seitz was now in a difficult position; his only hope remained in increasing his lead on the Dartmouth and managing to work round to the northward as the light failed and the winter's day drew to a close. At 1625 hours the Helgoland was heavily hit amidships by the Dartmouth and the fires in two of her boilers put out; nevertheless she was able to maintain her speed and continued to draw away. By 1650 hours she was no more than 12

U-boat successes Although the patrol

of the Straits of Otranto had so far succeeded keeping the Austrian fleet within the Adriatic and away from the main Mediterranean trade routes, it proved to be no bar to German and Austrian U-boats, which had no difficulties in penetrating it at will. With a view to restricting their movements into the Mediterranean the British Admiralty offered to the in

Top: The the UB 9

UB

14,

one

of

German submarine class who made frequent raids on Allied shipping carrying supplies from the Italian Adriatic ports to Serbia via Albania. It was manned by a crew of 14 and had a maxi-

mum speed of 7.5

knots.

ft/ghf.TheDukeof Abruzzi, Commanderin-Chief of the Italian Navy. Left: Site of the new s*upply routes to frail Serbia after Bulgaria had cut the route to Salonika

Alexandria. '^'BrP


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e£&C**S Raids on Allied shipping bound for Albania were not the prerogative of the Italians 50 trawlers equipped with anti-submarine nets to supple-

ment the blockade. These trawlers, in fact, never materialised as the Italians were unable to man and arm them, but in September the British Admiralty took steps themselves to fill the gap and sent out 60 drifters. Forty more followed in November, but even when these joined the patrol, the U-Boats were not deterred. Losses of nets were high, some being swept away by the U-Boats when they became entangled with them, others being slipped by the drifters when a U-Boat was sighted in order to give chase. The nets were not heavy enough to stop a U-Boat, and even when one was chased on the surface, she always carried a heavier gun than could be mounted in a drifter. Although the losses in drifters was not heavy, it was soon apparent that even the small German U-boats which had been sent overland and assembled at Pola feared neither nets nor drifters. German U-Boats at large in the Mediterranean impeded Allied manoeuvres, especially as large numbers of troops to feed the Dardanelles were continually on the move. U 21 commanded by Hersing, which had been the first to enter the Mediterranean by the all-sea route through the Straits of Gibraltar, left Cattaro on May 20 on her way to Constantinople and sank the battleships Triumph and Majestic en route. It was a foretaste of what was to come, and though the loss of these two battleships was a grievous blow, it was the safety of the troop transports which caused most concern to the British Admiralty. This concern was, to some extent, accentuated by General Sir Ian Hamilton who insisted that all transports and military supplies should be sent first to Alexandria, there to be transhipped and sent on to Mudros, an arrangement which not only lengthened considerably the time the ships were at sea and thus liable to attack but also added substantially to the difficulties and responsibilities of naval protection. On July 4 the first transport was sunk off Seddul Bahir. This was the French Carthage, victim of a torpedo fired by U 21. Five weeks later the 11,000-ton British transport Royal Edward was torpedoed and sunk with heavy loss of life in the Aegean Sea, the culprit this time being UB 14, one of the small submarines assembled at Pola. But by this time U 21 had been reinforced by four more large boats which had made the sea passage from Germany, U 34 and U 35 which reached Cattaro in August and U 33 and U 39 which arrived in September. These last two had signalled their entry into the Mediterranean by sinking three ships on their passage from the Straits of Gibraltar tc Cattaro. A sixth, U 38, arrived in November. ,

Record sinkings At the end of August

U 35

began her first Mediterranean patrol, and among the three ships she sank was the transport Ramazan carrying Sikhs and Gurkhas from Alexandria to Mudros. U 34, on patrol at the same time, sank two ships, of which one was the French armed merchant cruiser Indien at anchor off Rhodes. UB 14, which earlier had sunk the Royal Edward, followed up her success by torpedoing another transport, the 12,000-ton Snath 1124

German

U-boat; the Austrian Fleet (above)

made

several attacks

land, also carrying troops from Alexandria to Mudros, though in her case the loss of life was relatively light. These sinkings, however, were no more than a hint of what was to follow. By the end of September the Germans were deploying their full operational U-Boat strength in the Mediterranean, with five large and two small U-Boats working from Pola and Cattaro and five small U-Boats working from Constantinople. Two of them, 33 and 39, alone sank 18 ships between September 28 and October 10. There was a temporary lull in the submarine campaign during the last half of October, but by November 3 it was in full swing again, with 38, which passed through the Straits of Gibraltar on November 3 and thus added one more large U-Boat to the operational strength, sinking no less than 14 ships on her passage to Cattaro. 34 and 35, both operating in the eastern Mediterranean between November 3 and 22, between them sank 17 ships. 33, patrolling in the western Mediterranean between November 15 and December 6, accounted for 16 ships, while 38, during a cruise in Egyptian waters, added three more to the total. 39 found nine victims in the same waters; 34, carrying arms to the Senussi to encourage their revolt, sank four more ships on her way home to Cattaro. Although the smaller U-Boats operating from Cattaro were less successful than their bigger sisters, their sinkings were by no means negligible. This emergence in the Mediterranean of the same pattern of submarine warfare as was taking place around the coasts of Britain was a particular embarrassment to the Allies at this time. By the middle of August, with the ending of the Siivla battle, it was obvious to the whole of Europe that the Allies had come to the end of their resources in Gallipoli. It was equally obvious, as the Bulgarian attitude hardened into full alignment with the Central Powers, that new Allied intervention in the Balkans would become necessary. By arrangement with the Prime Minister of Greece, who was flirting with the idea of intervention in the hope of receiving Macedonia from the Serbians as the price of entry into the war, Salonika was offered as a port of entry provided that Britain and France would guarantee the despatch of

U

U

U

U

U

U

U

U

U

150,000 troops. Agreement was quickly reached to this effect, but the landing of 150,000 British and French troops together with their essential supplies called for a massive force of transports and supply ships. Even if navally unopposed it would be an operation of considerable magnitude; but with U-Boats active on the supply routes it was no wonder that the admirals of both Britain and France faced the new commitment with some fear.

Further Reading Chatterton. E Keble. Seas of Adventure (Hurst and Blackett 1936) Corbett. J S and Newbolt. H., Naval Operations. Vols 2. 3 and 4

(Longmans Green) Marder, A. J From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow (OUP 1965) Naval Staff Monographs (Historical). The Mediterranean 1914-15 (1923) .

[For Lieutenant-Commander Peter

Kemp's biography,

see page 52.

SALONIKA INTERNMENT CAMP FOR THE ALLIES

In a desperate effort to aid the retreating Serbs in October 1915, the Allies sent an expeditionary force of 185,000 men to Salonika, despite the fact that Greece was a neutral country and that political agreement for the action had not as yet been reached. The British and French then advanced into Serbia to try to link up with the Serbs, but a combination of foul weather and skilful action by the Bulgars drove them back to Salonika, where they proceeded to construct a huge entrenched camp. Alan Palmer. Below: A section of the British lines in the camp of Salonika

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Hie winter of 1914 5 brought a lull in the alone both the Eastern and rig 1

Western Fronts, and perceptive critics began to ask if there was not some other route, a \va\ of avoiding a frontal assault on heavily fortified lines or an exposed advance across the Polish plains. Diplomats opened negotiations to tempt Italy to join the Allies and thus establish a southern front. But there were other observers

who

looked farther atield. In the 16th and 17th Centuries the Turkish hordes had twice struck into the centre of Europe by thrusts up the Danube, carrying the crescent Hag from the Balkan mountains to the hills around Vienna. And as 1914 drew to a close the possibility of an expeditionary force which would roll northwestwards as the Turks had done seemed attractive. Already the Serbian army was sustaining the Entente cause along the middle Danube; but the Serbs were not by themselves powerful enough to advance across the Hungarian plain towards the

twin capitals of Franz Josef's monarchy. With Allied help, however, the Serbs might become the vanguard of retribution. Here was an opportunity of striking at Germany's principal partner, perhaps even of prising open Germany's back door, of marching on Berlin by way of Prague and Dresden. So reasoned General Franchet d'Esperey,

commander of the French Fifth Army in Champagne. The general, who had travelled extensively in south-eastern Europe before the war, put his ideas on paper in a memorandum which he despatched to the French President, Poincare, on December 1, 1914. Franchet d'Esperey proposed that an inter-Allied force of 185,000 men

should be shipped to northern Greece and transported by rail to the Serbian Front so as to mount a spring offensive in 1915 against the Austro-Hungarian armies along the Rivers Sava and Danube. The President was attracted by the idea of a Balkan offensive and discussed it with a number of senior French politicians, but Joffre and other French commanders were unwilling to support a diversion of this kind so long as a tenth of metropolitan France was in enemy occupation and German command posts less than 60 miles from Paris.

There were also champions of a Balkan in London. At Christmas 1914 Maurice Hankey, the secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, drew up a memorandum on methods of overcoming the deadlock in the west and emphasised the advantages of 'some co-operation with Front

the Serbian

army against Austria'. And same time, Lloyd George

at precisely the

(who was both Chancellor of the Exchequer and a member of the War Council) favoured a joint offensive in which the British would support a combined army of Serbs, Rumanians and Greeks in a massive onslaught on the Austrians and the Turks. In a note circulated to the War Council on January 1, 1915 he wrote: 'It might be advisable to send an advance force through

But neither Hankey nor Lloyd George were able to Salonika,

to

assist

Serbia.'

carry the British Ge\ ral Staff with them. It was foreseen that re would be difficulties in inducing the Greeks to permit troops to land at Salonik. for Greece was still a neutral country. loreover the railway from Salonika to the Serbian positions on the Danube was asm;. link track 1

1

1126

through difficult country; 300 miles of mountains and ravines which could easily be blocked by landslides, either natural or induced by enemy raiders. The project looked better on the map than it could ever be in reality: 'The lines of communication would be long and difficult,' wrote Sir John French. And within a fortnight of Lloyd George's

memorandum,

had begun

the

War

Council

to consider the expedition to

an undertaking which any other operations in south-eastern Europe. Little was heard of the Salonika project in the spring and summer of 1915, the months when the words 'Gallipoli' and 'Dardanelles' dominthe

Dardanelles,

effectively postponed

ated the front pages of the newspapers.

Reassessment needed But in the early autumn

of 1915 the general situation in south-eastern Europe deteriorated so rapidly that the tentative plans for an inter-Allied army in the Balkans were hurriedly taken from the files and re-examined. By the fourth week in September it had become clear that the Bulgars were about to launch an attack on

Serbia

German

in conjunction with an Austrooffensive on the Danube, and on

September 22 the Serbs telegraphed an appeal for 150,000 French and British troops to be sent immediately to Salonika and moved by train to Serbian Macedonia in order to prevent the Bulgars from isolating the Serbian army as it resisted the attack in the north. The Serbian appeal embarrassed both the military and political leaders in Lon-

don and Paris.

It

was

difficult

enough

to

men

for

even harder

to

find the

such a large force. It was understand the political

in the Balkans and virtually impossible to decide how the Greeks would react if their old enemy, Bulgaria, marched against their old ally, Serbia. There was no doubt that the key to the Balkan puzzle lay in Athens but it was anyone's guess whether the key was in the hands of the Greek Prime Minister, Eleutherios Venizelos, or of the king, Constantine I, the former of whom favoured the Allies, the latter the Central Powers. The political uncertainty in Athens was made worse by two international obligations, both of which were ill-defined. The first of these was a claim by the British,

situation

French and Russian governments that, as the 'Protecting Powers' of the Greek kingdom created in 1829, they had a right to send troops to Greek territory; and the second was the Greco-Serbian Treaty of Alliance of 1913, which was so vague in character that the Greeks maintained they were only bound to assist Serbia against Bulgarian attack if the Serbs themselves put an army of 150,000 men into the field against Bulgaria alone. King Constantine and the Greek army leaders denied that the Protecting Powers had any right to land troops in Greece and maintained that the military conditions of 1915 did not require Greece to assist Serbia against Bulgaria. Venizelos, on the other hand, believed that by intervening on the side of the Protecting Powers, Greece would gain additional territory from Turkey at the eventual peace settlement,

and

territorial

aggrandisement

was

a

Above left: As the Allies were pushed back towards Salonika, further reinforcements were shipped in. On November 28, 1915, the 5th Battalion, the Connaught Rangers, part of the 10th (Irish) Division, landed and were rushed up to the front.

Above:Two Bulgarian machine gun

crews. The Bulgars fought with fanatical courage and forced the Allies to fall back on Salonika, which they proceeded to develop as an enormously strong defensive position stretching from the Gulf of Salonika to the Gulf of Orfano

major part of Venizelos' programme. On September 25 the British and French governments determined on an expedition to Salonika in order to safeguard communications with Serbia and in the hope that the Greeks would be induced to assist in securing the Serbian flank against attack by Bulgaria. It was resolved to send the 10th (Irish) Division from Suvla Bay, Gallipoli, and a French force specially constituted from units serving at the Dardanelles and subsequently known as the 156th Division. They would, in due course, be backed up with other divisions assembling in Egypt and southern France. The Greeks were informed of the decision but equivocated for more than a week. Even when Brigadier-General A. B. Hamilton arrived at Salonika with the British advance party on October 1 the position of the Greek authorities was far from clear; and two days later Venizelos personally declared to the British and French diplomatic representatives in Athens that he was anxious for the arrival of Allied troops, while formally reading out a solemn protest at the breach of Greek neutrality which this action implied. It is hardly surprising

if

the

War

Office

London began

to

and the Foreign Office in regard the whole opera-

tion with considerable mistrust. The first French and British troops disembarked at Salonika on October 5, having come from Gallipoli by way of Mudros. Their immediate objective was obscure: it was by no means clear if they were to remain in the vicinity of the port of Salonika and protect its installations or move into

the highlands towards the Serbian frontier,

some 50 miles to the north. The mayor of Salonika and the gendarmerie were uncooperative from the start and their attitude hardened when news came from Athens that, after a stormy audience with King Constantine, Venizelos had resigned. The new Greek premier, Zaimis, snared the King's dislike of the Entente Powers. Disembarkation continued under a cloud of political uncertainty.

As soon as Kitchener, the British War Minister, heard of the resignation of Venizelos he sent an urgent cipher telegram to Mudros to halt the movement of more troops to Salonika. For 24 hours the whole expedition hung in the balance, and had it been left to the British there is little doubt that it would have been abandoned. But the French were unwilling to back out merely because of political complications in Athens. On October 7 the despatch of British troops to Salonika was resumed. It was the very day on which the German and Austrian forces crossed the Danube in earnest. If the Salonika Expedition was to succour the Serbs, its commanders would have

more speed and resolumain Serbian Front lay more

to act with far

tion; for the

than 200 miles to the north, across three ranges of mountains bleak and inhospitable in these first weeks of winter.

The

British contingent

was commanded

by Lieutenant-General Sir Bryan Mahon. He was an Irish landowner, popular with his men and held in high regard by Kitch ener. Fifteen years earlier it had been Mahon's flying column — for he was a cavalryman — which had relieved Maleking. But the distinction which he had won in Africa had as yet eluded him in this grim contest on the fringe of Europe. His hesi tancy at Suvla Bay in early August had aroused criticism and he had left Gallipoli for Mudros and Salonika under a cloud of official disapproval. His instructions from London accorded well with his cautious temperament: he was to establish the 10th near Salonika until it became whether or not the Greeks would assist the Anglo-French forces in rescuing the Serbs. The directive was hardly an inspiring document; and it seemed far more likely that Mahon would he asked to evacuate the division rather than commil it to a mountain campaign for which it was Division

clear

singularly ill-equipped.

The French Commander-in-Chief was a more formidable personality, General Maurice Sarrail. Before the war Sarrail had become well-known in political society

far

in Paris as a stolidly republican soldier in

an army little

command

which,

m

general, had

sympathy with the French

Kst.ih

His contacts with radical poli ticians fed his ambitions and won him distrust from Joffre and the more orthodox members of the French General Stall. They lishment.

127

2/1 1/7/5

CavDiv

lODiv

BULGARIANS

57/12211 56 Div

BRITISH FRENCH

NOVEMBER 12 DECEMBER

7

Gulf

of Orfano

RNDiv

GREECE

less anxious than the Radical Party that Sarrail should have a high command, but preferably as far from Paris as possible. Unlike Mahon, however, Sarrail was eager to make his reputation by posi-

were no

tive action. Sarrail, however, could not sail from Toulon until October 7 and, though the destroyer which conveyed him to Salonika

made good

speed, he did not reach Macedonia until a week after the initial landing. Until he arrived, the French 156th Division was commanded by General Bailloud, an energetic officer who despatched the first units of his force towards the Serbian frontier within 30 hours of their disembarkation. To his chagrin he received orders from Paris to halt all movements until reinforced by the 57th Division which was on its way directly from France. The delay was of great significance. It was not until October 14 that the first French troops crossed into Serbian soil, and by then the main AustroGerman offensive was already under way and the Serbs were beginning to fall back, acutely conscious of the Bulgarian threat to their right flank.

Offensive action planned The British and the French governments declared war on Bulgaria on October 14/15. Sarrail was anxious to make early contact with the Bulgars and at once sent a regiment of infantry, with supporting field guns, to defend the railway through the

1128

Vardar valley, the only route northwards to Skopje, Nis and the battle-zone already receding from the Danube. Mahon, however, was still restricted by his orders not to leave the vicinity of Salonika; and with each day that passed the attitude of the Greek civil and military authorities was becoming more and more uncooperative. Although it left the heavyhanded Sarrail unconcerned, Mahon found the passive obstructionism of the Greeks a vexatious embarrassment. The first French skirmish with a Bulgarian column took place on October 21 near the railway station of Strumica, which was in Serbia even though the town of Strumica was a dozen miles away, in Bulgaria. The French found little difficulty in repulsing the Bulgars and pressed forward up the railway valley as far as Negotino, a village 45 miles north of the Serbo-Greek frontier and more than halfway to Skopje, the principal town in Serbian Macedonia. It was hard going. The roads were almost impassable, in many places unrepaired since the Balkan Wars. At Negotino the bridge was in ruins and the French were

delayed while sappers threw pontoons across the Vardar. The Bulgarian Second Army concentrated north of Negotino and the French were able to make only slow progress. Eventually on November 16, after three and a half weeks of intermittent fighting, they reached the point at which the river Crna flows into the Vardar, nine miles above Negotino. The re-

Above: The Anglo-French advance into Serbia and retreat into Salonika. Above right: British troops check passes in the camp at Salonika. Security was always a problem, particularly before the Central Powers' consulates were closed. Below right: General Bailloud, in command of the French 15th Division, on his way out to the transport from Gallipoli treating Serbs were little more than 40 miles to the west, but they were separated from the French by a grim wall of mountains and it was impossible to make contact with them. The confluence of the Crna and Vardar proved to be the limit of the

French advance, slightly less than 100 miles from Salonika. The British had not, as yet, been heavily engaged with the Bulgarians. On October 22, General Mahon was authorised to send troops inland from Salonika, but not to ross the Greco-Serbian frontier. He found the Greek authorities highly suspicious of every move and his planning was restricted by orders from London that he was to render the French every assistance but not alienate the Greeks. At the end of the month he was authorised to cross the frontier and on November 10 the 10th (

Division took over a sector of the front facing the Bulgarian village of Kosturino. There was little sign of the Bulgars: there was, indeed, little sign of anything. The mountains are huge treeless slabs of rock, with deep ravines and some scrub on the lower slopes. Roads did not exist and the tracks seemed deserted and barely visible

within a few days the French had sounded out their Russian, Serbian and Italian allies and presented the British with a joint plea to keep open a Balkan Front. Reluctantly Kitchener, who had himself

weather became rapidly worse, a blizzard sweeping down on November 26, and for a week the sentries of the 10th Division, peering through the snow for an elusive enemy, looked like ghosts from Napoleon's Grand Army falling back from Moscow a century earlier. The division, battle weary from the sweltering heat of Gallipoli in August, was decimated by frostbite. In one week more than 1,500 men were brought to improvised camp hospitals south of Salonika, casualties not of the enemy but of the treacherous climate of

The

Salonika and Athens briefly in November, advised that the good feeling of the Allies must be retained; and, for the moment, the British accepted the need for a Salonika Army. But they were not convisited

vinced of its usefulness. Sarrail, meanwhile, was turning the scattered camps of Salonika into a vast defensive bastion. He was a difficult man to have as a colleague, as poor Mahon found on numerous occasions, and his arrogance and ambition alienated many other senior officers. But he ruthlessly pressed forward with any policy he believed to be right; and the defects of his character served the Allies well at this point in the campaign. Salonika was a base in which more than 200,000 civilians, of differing national origins, could watch all that the soldiery were doing. The city was riddled with spies and, since Greece was still a neutral country, the German, Austrian, Turkish and Bulgarian consuls were able to function, their agents openly listing the supplies landing on the quays. A train, carrying privileged diplomatic mail, actually ran daily from Salonika across the Turkish frontier until the end of 1915. But on December 30 Sarrail put an end to all this nonsense. The staffs of the four Central Powers' consulates were arrested and expelled from Greece. Despite protests from Athens, Sarrail virtually usurped control in Greece's second city. Without it the Allied presence in the Balkans would

Macedonia.

Meanwhile the French, alarmed at their narrowly extended position on the Crna, were in retreat. The order to fall back had been given on November 20, not by Sarrail, secluded in Salonika, but by the senior commander in the field, General de Lardemelle.

It

was a sensible decision which

enabled the French to save their equipment from a powerful Bulgarian force of four crack divisions, already elated by their successes against the Serbs. But Sarrail, distrusting de Lardemelle's aristocratic connections, sent him back to France in disgrace and pursued a vendetta with the highly gifted young commander for long afterwards. The dispute casts a bleak shadow over what was, in effect, a remarkable feat of arms. For the French, too, had been caught by the blizzard. Allies driven back Then, unexpectedly, on December 3 the The thermometer weather improved. climbed suddenly above freezing point, and the Bulgarian troops pressed forward on

the Allied rearguard. The heaviest fighting was in the sector held by the 10th Division, between Kosturino and Lake Dojran. The

have been meaningless.

From December 1915 to April 1916 the British and French concentrated on making Salonika an entrenched base. A defensive line was established along a 20 mile radius from the port, from the Gulf of Arfano in the east to the marshes of the Vardar estuary in the west. The line was slightly more than 70 miles in length. It

Hampshires, Munsters and Connaught Rangers were caught in grim bayonet fighting with the Bulgarians on December 7, the attackers taking full advantage of the fog which swirled over the ravines. Gradually the 10th Division was pushed back through hastily erected fortified posts. The Bulgars showed almost fanatical enthusiasm both in this sector and against the French west of the Vardar. By dawn on December 12 the British units were south of the Greek frontier and all the French troops were withdrawn from Serbia before the end of that same day. With the combined British and French forces back on Greek soil, political questions again came to the fore. Would the Bulgars continue the attack, carrying the war into Greece and therefore forcing the Greek army to participate in the operations despite the hostility of King Constantine and his ministers in Athens? Sarrail thought that his adversaries would respect the Greek frontier, and he was right. But there had been much heartsearching between the German, Austrian and Bulgarian commanders before the decision to halt on the frontier was conits

The Austrians wanted Salonika and so, too, did the Bulgarians. The Germans, however, were more circumspect. They saw that an advance to the Aegean firmed.

would cause friction between their allies over division of the spoils; and they also sensed that it would drive Greece into the Entente camp despite King Constantine's pro-German sympathies. Salonika was a talisman for the Balkan nations, and it had been Constantine's army corps which had captured the city from the Turks in the

was covered by machine gun emplacements, dugouts and barbed-wire entanglements in the British sector. The French, on

Balkan Wars. He was unlikely to permit such a trophy to pass into other hands. The German view prevailed. By Christmas 1915 there were 150,000 Allied troops in Salonika, comprising five British and three French divisions. They had relieved the pressure on the retreating Serbs but had failed to establish a front of significance in the general strategy of the war. It was by no means clear what should be their next task. The politicians in London, and their military advisers, had no doubt of the answer. The troops should be withdrawn, preferably to Egypt. At an inter-Allied conference in Calais on December 4 the British Prime Minister, Asquith, read out a formal statement that 'in the opinion of the military advisers of the British Government, the retention of the present force of 150,000 men at Salonika is from a military point of view dangerous and likely to lead to a great disaster'. Asquith believed that the French had accepted the principle of withdrawal. But

the other hand, concentrated on sinking concrete positions in the treacherous soil along the banks of the Vardar. With defences such as these, Salonika would be impregnable. German satirists ridiculed the Allied effort. Normally, they scoffed, prisoners of war were confined in barbed-wire cages only when captured: Salonika was unique, for here an army had gone into a cage made by itself and bolted the door behind said, was it. Sarrail's achievement, they the creation 'of the greatest internment camp in the world'. It was, of course, an unfair gibe for this laborious task made it certain that the Allies would never have to undertake a hurried re-embark. it ion. They

were

in

Salonika

to stav.

Further Reading Hankey, Lord, The Supreme Command (Allen & Unwin 1961) Military Operations: Macedonia (HMSO 1933) Palmer, A., The Gardeners of Salonika (Deutsch 1965) Sarrail, M.,

Mon Commandement en

Orient

(Paris: Plon, 1920)

I

For Alan Palmer's biography, see page

60.]

12!)

GALLIPOLI EVACUATION

AND WITHDRAWAL The

failure of the Suvla landings once again brought up the question of whether or not it was worthwhile persevering with the Dardanelles adventure. Sir Ian Hamilton was recalled, and Sir Charles Monro was sent out to investigate the situation. Amid a welter of political and military recrimination and confusion, the decision to evacuate Suvla and Anzac was finally taken, and the possibility of considerable losses accepted. The evacuations went smoothly, however, and it was then decided to abandon Helles too. Again the Turks were fooled, and the Allies escaped unscathed. Alan Wykes. Below: Early evacuees leave Turkish shores at Suvla

Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Carmichael Monro arrived at Imbros on October 28, 1915. He had left his Third Army in the charge of another commander in France and sailed to Gallipoli to deal with what he thought of as a 'sideshow', his brief from Kitchener having been to advise on the practicability or otherwise of continuing the battle for the Dardanelles and direct the to subsequent operations. Twelve days earlier his predecessor, General Sir Ian Hamilton, had been recalled by Kitchener with the euphemistic phrase 'The War Council wish to make a change in the command which will give them an opportunity of seeing you.' Monro was a tough, genial, singleminded commander, 55 years old with 36 years' soldiering behind him. He had been in France since the beginning of the

war and his single-mindedness was directed at beating the Central Powers on the Western Front. He believed the Gallipoli campaign to be a side issue into which Churchill had inveigled the government and which was draining off essential men and supplies from France. His loyalty to his military and political superiors was, however, unwavering. Having been appointed to succeed the luckless Hamilton, he gave his resolute attention to the task before him. Unlike Hamilton, who had been sent to Gallipoli knowing nothing but what an outdated map of the defences, an equally outdated Intelligence summary of the 1903 Turkish army, and a tourists' guide could tell him, Monro primed himself with all that five days' research at the War Office could reveal. And by October there was much to be revealed of tragedy, bungling

and cross-purposes. Unwavering though his loyalty was, his temperament, plus his opinion of the

campaign and

his study of the information available, predisposed him to recommend complete withdrawal of all forces from the peninsula. But as soon as he arrived at Imbros he went as thoroughly as possible into the prevailing situation, for he was too good a general not to keep an open mind until he had the views of the Gallipoli

men on

the spot.

Those views were given him by the General Staff, the three corps commanders at Suvla, Anzac and Cape Helles (who met him at Imbros), and the divisional generals at each of the three bridgehead beaches, which he visited by boat on October 30. The General Staff's bleak memorandum told

him that the Dardanelles

forces con-

men, 14,000 horses and mules and 400 guns. To capture the straits, the memorandum continued, would need 400,000 men and no operation could begin sisted of 134,000

until the spring. On the other hand, if evacuation were to be carried out, a loss of 50% of the men and two thirds of the artillery might be expected. The generals on the beaches were equally discouraging. There was an acute shortage of ammunition, officers and winter equipment; the troops were worn out and dispirited; and the entry of Bulgaria into the war almost certainly meant an improvement in supplies for the Turks. The generals' opinions were unanimous: if ordered to stand they would stand; but they saw no major victory ahead unless immediate reinforcements of at least six divisions were forthcoming. It is true that the corps commanders — Sir Julian Byng, Sir A. Godley and Sir Francis Davies — had been somewhat less gloomy when they had conferred with Monro upon his arrival at Imbros, and he had wired to Kitchener accordingly. But Kitchener, harassed by the Dardanelles

Committee and faced with a new plan

of

attack persuasively presented by Commodore Roger Keyes, had irritably wired Monro on the 29th: 'Please send me as soon as possible your report on the main issue at namely, staying or Dardanelles, the leaving.'

Ramshackle conditions That impatient demand, coupled with Monro's predisposition to end the Gallipoli affair as speedily as possible and with his assessment of the situation after he had visited the beaches, left him in no doubt as to the advice he would cable to London. He had seen for himself the ramprevailing on the shackle conditions beaches, where improvisation had since the very beginning been a necessary substitute for organisation. He certainly had no doubt of the morale of the troops or of their adaptability: their low spirits would be raised immediately if they knew that reinforcements were on the way and a triumphant stand could be made. But there were no reinforcements to be had without robbing the Western Front. Also, winter was setting in. Besides this, both Byng and Davies bad been unable to hide the fact that in spite of their conscientious presentation of every fact in favour of staying they strongly supported evacuation. On October 31, therefore, Monro cabled to

London

his

recommendation: abandon

the peninsula. He added that he himself estimated that 40,000 men would be lost in the operation. That was the decision that brought down upon his head Churchill's bitter comment: 'General Monro was an officer of swift decision. He came, he saw, he capitulated. He reached the Dardanelles on October 28; and already on the 29th he and his staff were discussing nothing but evacuation.'

Hamilton, perhaps more understandably, also made a later scathing reference to Monro as 'A General of the most blameless, sealed-pattern type [who] was ordered out from France to assure the sailors and soldiers on the spot that they were licked.' Having thus been asked for his assessment of the situation and given it, Monro now awaited further orders from Whitehall.

He knew full well that his recommendation would arouse a great deal of ire among those on the Dardanelles Committee who urged the continuation of the campaign. Before leaving London he had been told threateningly by Churchill that 'a withdrawal from Gallipoli would be as great a disaster as Corunna'. And the terrible record of confusion and incompetence that had attended the campaign since its inception revealed all too clearly the uncertainty of Kitchener's mind and the corresponding schism that had riven the Committee. Also, Monro had a belligerently forceful opponent of evacuation in

Keyes, who, having been given permission by Admiral de Robeck to visit London and propose a plan of attack by the navy, had arrived at the Admiralty on the same day that Monro reached Imbros. It was as if fate had determined that the schism should continue. Hamilton having been sacked because he had confidence in continuing operations on the peninsula, Monro was now sacked by Kitchener for giving the opposite opinion. He was to be sent to Salonika and Birdwood of the Lieutenant-General ANZAC Corps was to replace him. But Birdwood, ruthlessly ambitious though he was, suppressed the announcement of his appointment while he appealed to Kitchener to reverse his decision. He had opposed Byng, Godley and Davies on the desirability of evacuation; but his lovaltv to

Roger

B

•

.

I

***

Me

was intense, li overcame even the knowledge that there had already a ragic number of orders and counter.

wr\

t

orders.

Ami indeed Kitchener did reverse his decision— though not as a result of Birdwood's appeal. His vacillating mind was affected mainly by two people: Marshal

who was

forever acting like a prima and delivering ultimata; and Roger Keyes, who from the tirst had been appalled by the idea of evacuation and now, in London, was rapidly winning over the First Sea Lord 'Admiral Sir Henry Jackson to his notion of a new naval attack on the Narrows, leaving the army 'hogged down in its own incompetence". But there was also public opinion to contend with. And public opinion, expressed by the Coalition Ministry, was that any further attempt to secure Gallipoli sbould be abandoned and troops sent instead to Salonika, where the Allies were attempting Joffre, ria

1

hold a long front against the Bulgarians. It was also tbe opinion of the testy Marshal •Joffre. who was demanding the immediate despatch of 150,000 British troops to that to

front.

Kitchener prevaricates Faced with almost equal outer pressures on his own indeterminate mind, Kitchener evaded a decision by declaring himself horrified by Monro's advice to abandon the peninsula and blusteringly informing all and sundry of the opposite persuasion that he would refuse to sign any order for evacuation until he had visited Gallipoli and consulted the generals himself. Meanwhile he wired to Birdwood that he was 'uncertain whether the navy would play up' in supporting Keyes' plan, and that therefore he, Birdwood, had better consider his appointment as Commander-in-Chief cancelled and start quietly 'investigating

the possibilities of evacuation'. Thus did Kitchener run with the hares who saw no profit in staying, and hunt with the hounds who saw only disaster and indignity in fleeing.

He dissembled During

for

another fortnight. he conferred with

that time General Maxwell (Commander-in-Chief in Egypt and the Egyptian High Commissioner about the safety of Egypt; dallied on the island of Lemnos while a plan for a feint attack to cover evacuation was i

worked out (and Stall at the

War

rejected by the General

Office);

and solemnly

visit-

ed the three bridgeheads to talk with the divisional generals and hear from them precisely the same opinions that Monro had relayed to him a fortnight earlier. But still he did not make up his mind. He merely cabled to London the stale news that the troops' hold on the bridgeheads was precarious, the terrain difficult, and the onset of winter imminent. He made no recommendation as to whether the Gallipoli forces should stay or go. For four more delaying days the statesmen in London peered into this worthless communication as if it were a well at the bottom of which lay some startling truth.

On November 19, unsurprisingly having found none, they cabled Kitchener and asked for his considered opinion on whether or not a plan of evacuation should be made. The old women of Westminster, dozing over their knitting, had suddenly remembered the original question. Needless to say, Kitchener needed further time for pondering his answer. Keyes, having successfully persuaded the French naval chief to reinforce the British fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean with six warships, was hammering again at the army generals to accept his plan of attack. Birdwood, always with him on principle, was encouraged by his ANZAC officers to plump for staying rather than withdrawing. But at last, on November 22. Kitchener sent a reply to the Cabinet. It was as usual equivocal. He advised that Suvla and Anzac should be evacuated and Helles retained, that Birdwood should be in charge of the evacuation, and that Monro should remain as Commander-inChief of the Eastern Mediterranean forces. Thus the see-saw game of the commanders seemed at last to be settled, with the evacuationists at the winning endChurchill and Lord Curzon, the heaviest opponents of evacuation, having been flung from the newly reconstituted War Committee, leaving only light-weights like 7

Keyes at that end of the see-saw. The meteorologists had reported that November in Gallipoli was 'a fine month'. Natuially it proved to be otherwise. There had been some stormy seas on the 17th and Beach and Anzac Cove the jetties at were washed away; but there followed a period of balmy weather during which the

W

and camps were rebuilt and stores During those few days Kitchener prepared to sail back to England, and de Robeck was replaced as naval chief by Rear-Admiral Wemyss. Of the top brass who had been there since the beginning, only Birdwood and Major-General Paris of the Royal Naval Division were left.

jetties

replaced.

'Clear out the old, bring in the new', ANZAC officer wrote in his diary. 'Last week the 24th I watched Kitchener taken out to his ship in the pinnace. Next day de Robeck went. And orders have come from Asquith that we are to leave Gallipoli altogether, not just here I Anzac and at Suvla Bay, but at Helles too. Already we are dispersing surplus stores and the top dogs are being summoned to conferences to work out how four corps of men, animals and equipment are to be got off without the enemy seeing anything.'

one

|

I

1

Government in two minds Not knowing, he could not mention that, during the week after the arrival in London of Kitchener's cabled advice to evacuate, the government had once again begun the see-saw game, influenced in a final downward heave by Curzon, Keyes and now Wemyss — who cabled to the Cabinet that it was too late in the year to attempt evacuation and he therefore considered that the whole question should be reopened. His Majesty's Ministers therefore continued to waffle up and down and round about until at last, on December 7, they

commanded

the distracted

Monro

to

go

ahead with the evacuation. Wemyss, to be sure, had had good reason to state that winter had clamped down on the notion of withdrawal. On November 27 the calm weather that had followed the storms of the earlier part of the month was broken up by torrential rain, hail,

thunder and lightning. The temperature fell and the rain poured endlessly down for 24 hours. 'My dizentry gone,' one laconic soldier wrote home, 'becourse the flys drownded with the downpor and nearly me to with the rain up to chest hiy in the trench and dead TL'RKS swimming by also drownd. It is wet wether as you see.' Tents, stores and field kitchens were swept away; scores of mules were drowned as lakes formed in the hollows where they sheltered;

guns sank into the

mud and

First and last-the SS River Clyde, which arrived in the first landings, was still there as Helles was evacuated A Turkish shell is bursting just in front of her

AThe Beetle' armoured landing craft, useful in the final evacuation VThe evacuation of Anzac. After months of terrible hardship in the most primitive conditions, the 'cliff-hangers' were pulled out by despite the protests of their commander

December

19,

V

Although high hopes had been entertained by the commanders when the Suvla landings went in, the attack soon bogged down. The troops here were finally withdrawn with those at Anzac and, as at Anzac, surprise

was complete

1133

dob':, from the ramshackle huts and defences on the hillsides was carried away in the torrents. Then, at the end of 24 hours the wind changed, the temperature fell again this time to below zero — and the

drenching ram turned to snow. Flooded trenches froze, guns and rifles jammed, the men's sodden clothing termed into sheaths o( ice enveloping their numbed bodies. h\ blankets were stood on end and used as it' the\ were sheets o( corrugated iron to make shelters. But such puny contrivances were of no avail against the blizzard, which howled across the peninsula for two

more dreadful days. It was an added disaster that many of the troops had not been issued with winter clothing. That was no fault of the Quartermaster branch, which had landed supplies and distributed them to regimental dumps; but in the long spell of warm weather preceding the rains there had been no obvious need to issue overcoats and extra blankets. And now the dumps had been soaked by the rain or obliterated by the snow. In their light summer clothing hundreds of men froze to death as they huddled behind parapets and ten-foot snowdrifts or attempted to make new dugouts in the ironhard ground beneath the snow. The exposed animals — particularly those in the unsheltered parts of Suvla Bay — met equally grim death. Their pitifully frozen bodies w ere walled in by snowdrifts and it was said by some soldiers that their cries could be heard even above the blizzard winds. When at last the blizzard abated and the reckoning could be taken it was found that 16,000 men had to be shipped to hospital suffering from frostbite and exposure, and that 273 men and 580 animals had been frozen to death. It was a grim realisation that came to the commanders, that if the bitter weather had continued there would have been no need to make further plans for evacuation. Now, however, a week after the blizzard had died, they had to implement the tardily reached decision of the vacillating r

government. There were still gome 80,000 men, 5,000 animals, 2,000 vehicles, 200 guns and immense stockpiles of stores to be got away from Suvla and Anzac. Monro and Birdwood had assembled their General and Quartermaster staffs and delegated the detailed planning of the evacuation to Brigadier-General Sir George Macmunn and Colonels Aspinall and White from the General Staff. Their plan was to organise the evacuation in three stages. Macmunn writes in his reminiscences:

The Preliminary Stage was definite

duration,

and

during

to

be of in-

which

troops,

required for

a defensive winter campaign should go. The Intermediate Stage would be that in which troops and guns not essential to the

animals

stores

not

withdrawal could go. The Final Stage would be actual tactical withdrawing of the essential unencumbered

tactical

fighting

troops,

who

might,

if

need

be,

abandon one-third of their guns. These were to be merely marching men with arms, equipment, blankets and ground sheets. We recommended that each stage should be independent, and capable of being prolonged

if

need be without throwing the

next stage out of gear

.

.

.

No harm would

thus ensue if a bout of bad weather it ted between two stages. We further postulated that every transport

134

Above: Aftermath of the great storm: men lay out their sodden blankets to dry in the sun. Note the dump of stores behind the men. Most of the stores were moved out, but those which could not be moved in time were blown up to prevent the Turks getting them. Below: The last evacuation, that at Helles. Right: The army order for the evacuation of the Helles positions

the rendezvous to the forming-up bodies. They should be grouped, places will as far as possible, in units of 100, 200 or 400. Headquarters of divisions and other formations are included in the numbers given in the Appendices and commanders are responsible that their parties arrive punctually at the appointed forming-up places, where, for purposes of embarkation, they will come under the orders of G.O.C. Embarkation

the Mediterranean must converge on and that the Mudros fully equipped mass of troops must be taken on board from the carriers and small craft in which they had left the beaches and be sent away to At least 45,000 men Egypt or elsewhere

Withdrawal from

must be received on board at once.

APPENDIX

20

81

moving from march as formed

All parties

Appendix 20

the Front Trenches.

The withdrawal of the last troops from the front trenches be begun simultaneously at an hour which will be notified concerned. In order to provide the number of men required for the second trip, divisional commanders will arrange to thin out the troops in the firing line and reserve trenches until there is only left a proportion of scouts, grenadiers, and rifles averaging about one man to 6 yds. of trench. These men will maintain the normal action against the enemy until ordered to withdraw, when they will move quickly and silently through the controls and thence to their respective forming-up places. Care must be taken in the case of controls in or near the firing line, that no loud talking on telephones can be heard by the

in

.

.

.

.

.

.

5

CORPS ORDER FOR HELLES EVACUATION

will

to

Army Corps Order No.

VIII

32

Gallipoli Peninsula,

'

6th January, 1916.

VIII Army Corps Order No. 31

1.

is

hereby cancelled.'

Evacuation.

The

the evacuation of Cape Helles will be carried out in one night, the date of which will be notified later. The evacuation will be carried out in accordance with instructions already issued with the following modifications, which will apply on the night on which it is decided to carry 2.

final stage of

out the operation.

Embarkation

will

be in

all embarkation operations of both British and French Detailed arrangements and the names of Naval and troops. Military Embarkation Staff will be notified later.

charge of

Troops

Evacuated.

The

numbers to be evacuated from each beach are given

Table attached. The hour at which each party is to reach its appointed forming-up place is given in Appendix "R", attached. 1 The attached diagram 3 shows the positions of rendezvous forming-up places, divisional headquarters, and the routes and beaches to be used. in

This order provided for the Not reproduced.

1

*

The up

400

will

final

stage to be carried out in *

two nights. See Sketch 33.

ceed

will

be responsible for the discipline on board. must be cleared as ex-

arrival at their destination ships

peditiously as possible.

Defence of Beaches.

The General

8.

Weston

1

Commanding

29th Division will

ranks, with three machine guns to Beach from the sea to Hunter

all

"W"

covering

line

Hill

Officer

600

detail a garrison of

hold the

inclusive.

Officer Commanding R.N. Division will deall ranks, with three machine guns to hold the line covering "V" Beach from Hunter Weston Hill 1 (not inclusive) to the Dardanelles. These two garrisons will be under command of BrigadierGeneral A. W. Tufnell, who will establish his headquarters with the General Officer Commanding Embarkation. The General Officers Commanding 29th and R.N. Divisions will arrange for telephone communication to be established between the commanders of the above garrisons and the and "V" Beaches respectively P.M.L.O.'s at "

The General a

tail

garnson of 400

W"

The above troops will be in position by 1800 and will be withdrawn by order of Brigadier-General A. W. Tufnell, each garrison leaving a party of one officer and 25 men, who will be withdrawn later under the order of General Officer Commanding Embarkation. Officers in command of all parties which are to be withdrawn by the order of the General Officer Commanding Embarkation will be responsible for maintaining communication with the P.M.L.O. at their respective beaches. Keeps.

be found that, at daylight, there are men ashore, a Keep will be prepared Beach by General Officer Commanding 29th Division in which men could maintain themselves until embarked later. It will not be used until it is certain that there are no means for immediate embarkation. It will be provided with supplies of food, water and S.A.A., under arrangements to be made by General Officer Commanding 29th Division. If possible, supIn case it should 9. a certain number of

still

"W"

1

at a faster

pace than a walk.

will also make arrangements for destroying guns which cannot be evacuated on the final night.

all

Embarkation

Troops will be embarked on motor-lighters, each of 7. which holds 400 men, and also in other craft provided by the Navy. As soon as each lighter or boat has received its full complement it will be despatched to a troop carrier under the orders of the N.T.O. The senior officer in each lighter, or other form of craft, charge of the transferring of troops to the carrier. at once ascertain who is the senior.

will take

on embarking must

Officers

n

G

Hill 138.

Destruction of Stores.

already issued. The General Officer Commanding 13th Division will be responsible that arrangements are made whereby the firing of stores and material at Gully Beach does not become effective until 5 A.M. on the morning after evacuation. Should the embarkation at all beaches be completed before that hour, the N.T.O. will arrange to land an officer and small party to set fire to these stores. The N.T.O. will also arrange to take off a small party from "V" and Beaches after all other troops have left, who will be required to put in hand the destruction of the stores on these beaches. or Bakery No stores for destruction will be placed at All stores, material and vehicles which cannot be Beaches. destroyed, prior to evacuation, should be so placed and marked that they can be easily distinguished from the sea and can be destroyed by the fire of ships' guns on the following day.

"W"

"X"

Stragglers.

Divisional Commanders will take every possible pre11. caution to avoid straggling, and to have every man of each party checked for embarkation. As speed is essential this can only be achieved by careful preparation and organization beforehand. On no account will there be any delay if parties are not complete. Absolute punctuality of arrival at the forming-up places is essential. An officer from each division will report at 1700 to the P.M.L.O. at the beach at which troops of his division are embarking. He must be fully acquainted with the detail of parties of his division embarking at his beach, and will at once report any discrepancies ixi numbers. Destroyers will be stationed off both beaches in use as well as off De Tott's Battery and " Y " Beach and will endeavour to take off any stragglers that

headquarters will remain in their present position until 1900 when they will be transferred to H.M.S. "Triad", winch will be connected by telegraph with divisions and the General Officer Commanding Embarkation. Divisions .ind General Officer Commanding Embarkation will report by tclcgrjph at every clock hour whether progress is normal, and at any time should anything unusual likely to delay the progress of embarkation occur. Divisional Commanders will report their embarkation to Corps Headquarters. Time.

0800 and 1600;

will all

be circulated from Corps Headquarters watches are to be carefully synchronized.

at

The

"W"

BlACH.

r trip

H N

ind

Miuiion

#.

trip

Artilirry

I

as »!'43

3->4)

JOO

-1

'

Butt DtlaUi 1

7th Stationary Hoipltal I multy rlrartni Station

nth

30

i

Supply IVrwjnnH VIII Corp* Hri.loii.imn N *<>d M Boa b Sttffll !"<"" '.
3

9* 140 JO

'

3"

Ur-rkmit iMMv, H \ D Party, iglh Mniunn WnrkiiiK Party, IWd Uivuion Railway Unit

Workm*

Working on Pitt*

:

3t

—

Company, R N.D.

S3

Monjnuuth ! i')ii "mpiny 4>nd Jnviiion, ft E. iMd FortrUi I ompany Ne •found and Contingent

It

3« 16

16 '.1

f

I

Moo

Iklftl trip

».79J

1,14ft

l,6ll

».»*

await orders.

10.4,(1

— «O0

possibility of

Re-Landing of Troops. 16. Should it be necessary, at any time, to re-land troons which have already been embarked, they will proceed under the orders of the General Officer Commanding Embarkation to the same forming-up places as they embarked from and there

„„

3rd

trip.

1.443

jth Division

Gutty Riaek,

an attack by the enemy must never be forgotten throughout the operation, and Divisional Commanders must be prepared, at any time, to hold any of the lines of defence. Should an attack take place, divisions will report at once to Corps Headquarters repeating the message to all other divisions. On no account must small attacks be allowed to delay progress of embarkation.

20

ird

Total

Possibility of Attack.

to the shore.

,„„

i

Time

way

Table showing Numbers to be Evacuated from each Beach during last night.

trd Field

15.

find their

12. The medical arrangements for the final stage have already been notified to all concerned. Arrangements will be made to put the reserve of medical

I

14.

may

Medical.

Position of C-vps Headquarters.

The Corps

83

10. All stores and material of every kind which cannot be evacuated will be destroyed in accordance with the instructions

APPENDIX

personnel, for the two hospitals which may have to remain open, on board a hospital ship on the afternoon of the final day. All ranks are to be warned that on no account are wounded men who car walk to be accompanied by other men to the rear. Divisional Commanders will take special steps to prevent this. As, however, it is particularlv desirable to remove all wounded, medical officers may call on the infantry to assist the R.A.M.C. personnel in the remov.il of wounded, provided the permission of the officer in command on the spot is obtained.

20

should be so placed that they can easiU be distinguished and destroyed by the fire of the ships on the day subsequent to evacuation. plies referred to

GALLIPOLI

84

13.

Gully Beach.

The B.G.R.A.

APPENDIX

transfer of troops to the carriers must be conducted as expeditiously as possible. The senior officer of the first party to board the ship will act as staff officer on board. The senior officer on board the ship will be Officer Commanding Troops

The

On

at

6. A certain number of guns, both British and French, will in position until dusk when some of them will be withdrawn and embarked under the orders of the B.G.R.A., VIII Corps. During the withdrawal artillery will have precedence on roads over other troops, but guns must on no account pro-

GALLIPOLI

82

and

be embarked

Withdrawal of Guns.

vol.

at

of the 13th Division to leave the trenches

last parties

to a total of

completely

to be

4.

enemy.

remain

Staff.

Major-General the Hon. H. A. Lawrence

3.

all

Grand Total

!..«.

1

Include*

GtniHai

.,6.,

el Ileach

""" DrfriuM

3.»4*

i.S«n

10,01"

Estimated losses — 25,000 Naturally all the stages had out at night and with great

to be carried

stealth.

And

even though the General Staff had revised their original estimate of loss of half the evacuees they still predicted a loss of 25,000 of the remaining 80,000 men. It was never supposed that such a degree of stealth could

be achieved that the Turks would be unaware of the departure of such a huge force. Such ingenious ruses as could be adopted to overcome the obviousness of the diminishing size of the army were expected only to delay the Turks' realisation that withdrawal was taking place. In fact, however, they were very successful. Guns were kepi firing at the same intervals: men not being till the last stage were made busy building new defences and repairing those demolished by the blizzard, all in apparent preparation for a winter stand; tents were left standing after they were empty; the derricks at the jetties were as active as ever and presumably it never struck the Turks that they were loading instead of unloading stores and equipment. Nearer the front lines various ingenious devices were used to keep rifles firing after men had been withdrawn from trenches which in many cases were separated from the Turkish lines by only a few yards. Typically, the simplest was the most effec-

withdrawn

tive: it

was

with, at

its

a string attached to the trigger other end, an empty tin that

gradually filled with water dropping through a hole from a second tin placed above it until the weight overcame the trigger resistance and fired the rifle. To add to the illusion of undiminished activity, every morning hundreds of fires were lit by specially detailed fire parties. And men still remaining were endlessly marched about for no reason but deception. At night hundreds of small boats slid silently up on to the beaches, embarked thousands of patiently waiting, completely silent men whose feet were wrapped in canvas and whose routes down the hill sides had been carpeted with layers of flour and salt to muffle the sound of their marching, and took them out to the ships. Mercifully, this time the weather played no cruel tricks. Each night remained mild, calm and dark except for the starlight. The beachmasters shepherding the men aboard signalled only with white flags; no commands were spoken in the darkness. The wounded — who were natural ly the first to go — were given sedatives; and the prisoners of war were gagged until they were safely out to sea. The enterprise was hazardous enough without any unneces sary risks being taken. And gradually, during the second and third weeks in December, half the ghostly army vanished from the scene without a whisper of their departure reaching the Turks. 'The ghosts of those earlier dead kept vigil on the shore and watched us go': SO wrote one officer in a letter home.

was afterward said by the critics of he campaign that if the invasion had been planned with one tenth of the care and It

H. E. Street, Br. -General, G.S., VIII

Army

Corps.

1

Gallipoli

CO-OPeration

given

to

the

withdrawal

I

it

135

would have been a success. That was a capsule judgement which took little account of all the complex circumstances; but there was some justice in it. By December 18 only the final stage of withdrawal from Suvla and Anzac remained to be completed. (The evacuation at Helles was still being pondered in Westminster in spite of Asquith's earlier attempt to settle it. There were still a few in the government who thought face should be saved at all costs.) On that night of the 18th another 20,000 were got away. Those who now remained were in a great state of strain. It seemed hardly credible that the Turks were not preparing some diabolical trap that would bring the entire flotilla of transports back to the peninsula to disgorge the whole force once more upon the bloody shores. But no trap was sprung. And in the morning the fire parties rushed with almost demented speed from one part to another, lighting the supposed breakfast fires of departed men and resetting the self-firing rifles.

Turks completely fooled During the rest of the day the mines and ammunition were fused and the last preparations made to blow up the dumps of stores that could be abandoned. Tension rose as the day approached its end. Sporadic firing from both sides continued throughout the daylight hours. Astonishingly, the illusion of an army still in oc-

cupation seemed to have been maintained. As dusk fell and the guns fired their final shots the last silent battalions their way to the beaches and onto the

fretful

made ships.

By dawn the last of the little boats slid quietly away from Anzac Cove. No one had been left behind. A chill rain was falling, and as the boats neared the waiting ship a

was heard. Ashore, the ammunition dumps were going up

series of explosions

food and

1

1

in flames as the preset fuses fired. Rockets scored the darkness and great clouds of smoke rose from the flames and billowed up

from Suvla and Anzac. There remained now only the four

divi-

Cape Helles to be withdrawn — if indeed the government in their endless sions at

vagueness could bring themselves to make yet another decision. Another week passed before they did so; but at last, on December 27, knowing of the success that had attended the withdrawal from Anzac and Suvla, they loftily agreed that 'a similar withdrawal should be carried out at Cape Helles' — their asinine reasoning being that success could be thus easily repeated. They returned Admiral de Robeck to the Dardanelles as it were with their compliments, summoned Monro to take over the First

Army in France, and ordered Admiral Wemyss to the East Indies. So that at the crucial moment when, as it were, the horses were in midstream three important changes were commanded. It was fortunate that Birdwood and Keyes also remained, for upon them who had seen out the whole campaign now fell the final organisation. No one really believed that the Turks could be outwitted so easily the second time. There was, however, no alternative to a repetition of the scheme for deception. Daily as 1915 became 1916 the same devices were out into motion. And miraculously they worked again. In the light of later evidence from Turkish and German historians it seems that the evacuation completely bewildered the Turks. They could not make up their minds whether or not the withdrawal was a strategic manoeuvre in preparation for a new Allied attack. And by the time they had made up their own minds to launch an attack at Helles it was too late. The Turkish attack began on January 7 and was repulsed so ferociously by the re-

Above: The tragic desolation of the last withdrawal. French dead among the wreckage of carts and limbers which could not be taken off. Right: Stores burning at Suvla, the last sight from HMS Cornwallis of the expedition which had landed with such high hopes on the beaches of Gallipoli only eight and a half months before

maining British troops and by naval shellit ended bumiliatingly for the Turkish forces and with only 134 British casualties, killed or wounded. That night and the next the remaining 20,000 men were taken off in weather conditions that were gradually worsening. But there were no disasters; and in the early morning of January 9, 1916 the last boats slipped away from the southernmost tip of the ing that

Gallipoli peninsula in the glare of flaming ammunition dumps. The rising wind fanned the flames and sudden squalls of rain beat down on the unconquered waters of

the Dardanelles.

Further Reading Aspmall-Oglander, C Roger Keyes (Hogarth Press 1961) Churchill, W.S.. The World Crisis (Four Square) Hamilton, Sir Ian, A Gallipoli Diary (Arnold ,

1920)

Hankey, Lord. The Supreme

Command (Allen

&

Unwin 1961) James, R. R., Gallipoli (Batsford 1965) Mackenzie, C, Gallipoli Memories (Cassell 1920)

Macmunn, Sir George. Behind Many Wars (Murray 1930)

the

Scenes

in

Military Operations: Gallipoli (Heinemann 1929) Moorehead, A., Gallipoli (Hamilton 1956)

Nevinson,

H.

W

,

The Dardanelles Campaign

(Nisbet 1918) Wemyss, Lord. The

Navy in the Dardanelles Campaign (Hodder 1924)

[For Alan Wykes' biography, see page 773.]

36

_i

It

might have been'

GALLIPOLI JUDGEMENT Were the

Allies right or wrong to try to force the Dardanelles?

The controversy

continues, but here the late Captain Sir Basil Liddell Hart reduces the problem to its basic factors and sides with the German -essment. Right: The Australians storm ashore at Gallipoli still

The Gallipoli campaign was one of the most moving and tragic episodes in all history. Although the Dardanelles Commission of Enquiry in 1916 made known in a general way the blunders which marred the execution of the plan, it is even more depressing to consider the opportunities thrown away in the actual landing. The blunders of the preliminary phase included, of course, the lack of the adequate machinery of war control and the failure by Kitchener to repair that which the Allies did have. Kitchener's mind, like that of Sir John French in France, wobbled more than that of any politician. Churchill might well have carried his bold project to success if his hands had not been fettered; but of all the servants of the British government only Maurice Hankey had a clear grasp of the situation — and unhappily he was only secretary to the 'War Council'. The statesmen simply did not fully understand war. Unlike the great statesmen of the past, they had not considered the study of war a necessary part of their equipment, and so they had not the confidence to judge between the conflicting advice of the experts, to decide upon a policy and to maintain Britain's historic strategy against the continental delusions by which many of the

experts were ensnared. Almost the only statesman who comes out well from the story of Gallipoli is Churchill, and he was one, significantly, who had studied war. Of lesser but equally important blunders in the preliminary phase it is worth recalling that no one seems to have realised that the only munitions factories in the Turkish Empire lay on the shore close to Constantinople, open to easy destruction by any warship which penetrated there; and that the one admiral who had any local knowledge of Turkish waters, RearAdmiral Limpus, chief of the prewar British naval mission to Constantinople, had been withdrawn from the Dardanelles in September 1914 and sent to manage the Malta dockyard! Of the tragedy of the first landings on April 25 it must be said that Sir Ian Hamilton's oft-criticise choice of landing place, embracing six poii. s on the southern peninsula, was not only in accord with the profounder truths of military history, but could hardly have been improved on if, by supernatural power, he had been able to know the opposition's mind and dis1

positions. It was not until at last decided to

1138

March 25 that Enver had form a separate army for

the defence of the Dardanelles and put Li man von Sanders in command of it; but it only numbered five divisions in the whole area. Then came the question of where to expect a landing. Liman von Sanders himself wrote later: 'From the many pale faces of the officers reporting in the early morning [of April 25] it became apparent that, although a hostile landing had been expected with certainty, a landing at so many points surprised many and filled them with apprehension [because] we could not discern at that moment where the enemy were actually seeking the decision.'

Commonplace generalship By avoiding the natural

line of expectation, the pitfall of commonplace generalship, and by distracting the Turks' attention to that line, Hamilton ensured his own troops an immense superiority of force at the actual landing points — although his total

by the sporadic Turkish counterattacks and were only prevented from an ignominious evacuation by Hamilton's famous 'Dig, dig, dig'

The

message.

lesson of the

ANZAC

landing seems

delayed the redeeming effect of the second landings. The ill-effects, accumulating at compound interest, of a government policy which was so indeterminate and confused as to be no policy at all, now took

to be, above all, the importance of training, for even the difficulties of the ground might

their

have favoured more than

A dilatory government By the beginning of May the government knew that the first attempt had failed,

handicapped such skilled skirmishers as the Australians proved themselves later in the war. As for the landing at Y Beach — there is the example of an even more heaven-sent opportunity thrown completely and unjustifiably away. Hunter-Weston deliberately concentrated the efforts of the greater part of his heroic 29th Division on the bloody beaches where the Turks

were better prepared. And this in spite of the fact that 2,000 men of the division

had been safely disembarked 'without a hitch and without

at Y Beach opposition',

as the official historian says. Those 2,000

toll.

mainly as a result of inadequate force. Yet two months passed before the government decided to reinforce Sir Ian Hamilton with five divisions, and enable him to make an effective fresh attempt. And even this reinforcement was not wholly available when he made his attempt in August. By then, naturally, the Turks had been reinforced, so that the British had once again to attack without a fair, far less a decisive, margin of superiority This political fumbling is to some extent explained by a change of government — to the first Coalition Ministry. Another factory was the way the British command in France begrudged and resisted any diversion of force from the theatre where nothing could yet be achieved to the new theatre where immense opportunities were offered. Still stronger was the obstruction introduced by the French. Joffre had extensive influence, and his obstinate folly caused the Allies irreparable harm in West and East. Much of Kitchener's apparently feeble wavering is to be traced to the necessity of waging war with an ally who required so much conciliation and onesided concession.

Nevertheless, when all allowance has been made, the root of the trouble still lay in the government's failure to understand war. Only Churchill knew his own mind. He alone foresaw what the Turkish leaders feared. It was as a result of his exertions that Sir Ian Hamilton was sent the force

that would have fulfilled those fears. But it was because of the government's disregard of Churchill's insistence and emphasis on the time factor that the force was sent too late. Meanwhile, far greater force was being spent in France on a futility

which he had also foreseen. In the early summer more men were actually

sacrificed

in

vain

assaults

in

France than the total that need have been employed to open the Dardanelles. In the A typical

Gallipoli

scene with the sea on one side and cliffs on the other, as British troops and a Turkish shell explodes in the sea behind them

rest in the lee of the cliffs

force

was

Turks.

He

far smaller than that of the so fixed the Turkish commander-

in-chief's attention and person feint attack on Bulair that the

on the Turkish

defenders at the main points of attack were denied reinforcements for two days. The ANZAC landing, despite inevitable hitches, placed 4,000 men by surprise, before 0500 hours, and another 4,000 before 0800 hours, on a shore guarded by only one Turkish company. The next Turkish company was more than a mile to the south, while the two battalions and one battery in local reserve were four miles inland and still farther away was the general reserve of eight battalions and three batteries. Part, but not all, of these were used for counterattacks before nightfall, by which time 15,000 ANZAC troops had been landed. Yet the opportunity went begging because the country was rough and the troops so raw that they were bewildered

were Turks,

left

entirely

whom

undisturbed

by the they outnumbered by at

least six to one, for

11 hours. 'It is as certain as anything can be in war that a bold advance from Y on the morning of the 25th must have freed the southern beaches that morning, and ensured a decisive victory for the 29th Division.' But no word of any kind reached Colonel Matthews, the commander of the Y Beach force, from

Hunter-Weston, who completely ignored Matthews' appeal for reinforcements and tardily turned down Hamilton's offer of trawlers in which to land them. Thus, through inept generalship, the Y Beach landing, which could have been the key to success, was abandoned next morning after it had been held for 29 hours. The force reembarked when the Turks has actually been evicted. The first landings having so tragically failed, further government blunders

late summer double that number -250,000 men — were freely thrown away as sheer loss in France. And eventually, when Gallipoli

was abandoned

in

deference to the

catchword of 'concentration against the main enemy', a total of 400,000 men was still kept away from the battle in France as a necessary guara against the new activities of lesser enemies. This was as many as had been sent to Gallipoli in all, as many also as would have been required for a third effort to open the Dardanelles. For, by the failure there, the British set free their first enemy in the area, and added a new one — Bulgaria. They also sacrificed a small ally — Serbia, and ensured the ultimate downfall of their largest ally — Russia. 'Too late' is the verdict not only on the Gallipoli campaign as a whole, but on almost every step in it, the minor tactical ones included. For the failure of the statesmen was unhappily paralleled by that of the military leaders on the spot, with loss excuse — and more incompetence in their proper task.

1139

Courage and tenacity in the face of great odds — on both sides rhe military leader who oomes out best, b\ no means unscathed, is Sir Ian Hamilton. He was the man to whom most may be Forgiven, both because he was so hindered by the government's procrastination and because his handicap was augit'

b\ his own loyalty to superiors desired to economise in Gallipoli in order to concentrate in France. What a contrast of spirit there is between Hamilton's unselfish reluctance to demand forces that would make his prospects more sure and the jealous way in which General

mented

who

Headquarters

in

France begrudged any

help being sent to him even when they had come to realise that their own prospects were nil! Yet despite all his handicaps, in April and again in August he achieved a real tactical surprise.

His plan, helped by sea power, turned a hare equality of force into a potentially decisive superiority at the critical points. Success was within easy reach and had only to be grasped. Indeed one can go further and say that he had ensured such an advantage that even if nine out often chances went begging success was still sure. By any calculation that was an ample margin. But the incredible happened — his subordinates succeeded in bungling ten out of ten. It was an amazing chain of 'irresolutions' by

which Stopford, Hammersley, Sitwell, and lesser commanders forfeited the chances and frittered away the hours while opportunity yawned on a Turk-deserted shore. There could hardly be anything more grimly comic than the spectacle of Stopford, governed by a newly acquired but second-hand pedantry, cogitating on the necessity of a deliberate trench-warfare attack on trenches which he had every assurance did not exist. How incredible, if it were not fact, the 'action' of this elderly general when, after arrival in Suvla Bay on the night of August 6, he settled down to sleep on board without sending anyone ashore or wondering why no news came from the shore, and then on the afternoon of the 8th was still on board — not having once been ashore to see even his divisional commander! We know nothing from official sources of how he spent his time during those 40 hours; but we know all about how the Turkish reserves were hurrying to the scene, and about Mustapha Kemal's driving energy. Yet if the failure was that of individuals, the fault was that of a system — that system which chose leaders by seniority and preferred safe men to men who were bold in

thought and action.

We know, too late — and not only by the character of his plan — that Hamilton's character was different. But his influence was cramped by the nature of war at that time and by other factors. Compelled to -tay back at Imbros, his intention was first delayed too long by his disposition to trust his subordin ites too mucb. Another vital delay was cau ed by the British force having to be concenti fed in Egypt because of the tardy and haph zard way in which the troops and tools of war from England had been sent out, distributed in transports without regard to tactical requirements. 1140

Next came the delay caused by de Robeck's hesitancy in coping with the hazards of the weather. Then, from the time Ian Hamilton arrived on the scene, the fault would seem to have been that he was not ruthless enough in using his power to remove incompetent subordinates. Later assaults not justified But by that time opportunity had worn thin, and within a few hours the last thread had snapped before Hamilton's eyes. And from then on 'the defects of his qualities' seem to have become uppermost. For it is difficult to feel that there was justification, even in his own information, for his later assaults. They were proof of resolution, but hardly of calculation. Yet if they were

a useless cost, they were at least a much smaller cost than was incurred many times in France. The essential difference might be expressed thus: Hamilton erred in pursuing aims, which his plans had made possible, after they had become impossible; the commanders in France had a far more expensive persistency in pursuing aims that had never been possible. He was a 'hopeful' general,

even

if

too hopeful.

may

be more ground, even if of less import, for criticism of his abortive attacks at Helles in June and July, especially the last on July 12/13. In view of the imminence of the large-scale attempt, it

There

seems to have been unwise to have exhausted the already tired troops at Helles and to have blunted the newly arrived

were as fantastic in ideas as they were costly in lives. But for these delusions not merely the 52nd but the veteran 29th Division might have been fit and available for the crucial Suvla landing, where the inexperience of raw divisions was an adverse factor only second to the incapacity

commanders. The chances then

of the

lost were never redeemed, but fresh officers had a chance, and took it, to redeem the name of British leadership. For while the evacuation of Gallipoli was a problem of organisation more than tactics, the skill with which the British forces were extricated is the one

thing that extracts the sting of defeat. Thus ended a sound and farsighted venture which had been wrecked by a chain of errors hardly to be rivalled in British history.

What its success would have meant at minimum to the Franco-British cause

the

best shown in the testimony of the is directing head of the German alliance. For it was Falkenhayn's verdict that 'If the straits between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea were not permanently closed to Entente traffic, all hopes of a successful issue of the war would be very seriously diminished. Russia would have been freed

from her significant isolation which offered a safer guarantee than military that the forces of this Titan success would eventually and automatically be crippled.' And Hoffmann, the guiding brain .

Above left: Between Helles and Gully Ravine The horses are tethered close under the cliff to protect them from shellfire. Below left: An old-fashioned British 5-inch howitzer In the foreground shells are being fused, and between them the sight setter holds his dial sight. Above: Succour for the wounded. An Australian carries a wounded comrade back to a medicaJ post. Gallipoli was the theatre in which Australians and New Zealanders proved themselves as first class fighting men, determined and cheerful in the most adverse circumstances Above right: The last attack at Anzac. on December 17, as the Allies strove to maintain an atmosphere of normal combat while most of the troops were evacuated. Below: The final victors Bemused by the plethora of deceptive devices used by the Allies, the Turks did not realise they had gone until it was too late Here they inspect the backwash of evacuation

52nd Division in a premature local effort. Although the Turkish dispositions seem to have lent it some justification, one would

.

.

.

German campaign against Russia, declared that its success depended on keeping the 'Dardanelles firmly closed

reasonably calculate that as a means of fixing the Turks' attention in a false direction, four abortive attacks on one sector would suggest that the next big

of the

attack would not come there. And, tacticthese attacks at Helles had all the vices that the Suvla-Anzac plan so ably avoided. But one surmises that Hamilton's decision for these Helles attacks was influenced by the even more buoyant corps commander on the spot. Hunter- Weston, to whom the tactical vices were due. History shows that from April onwards he showed a confidence in bull-headed assaults which

Further Reading Hamilton, Sir Ian. A Gallipoli Diary (Arnold 1920) James, R R., Gallipoli (Batsford 1965) Kannengiesser, H The Campaign in Turkey

ally',

.

.

,

(1928) Military Operations: Gallipoli

Moorehead,

(Heinemann 1929)

(Hamilton 1956) Sanders. L von, Five Years in Turkey 1928) A., Gallipoli

(

[For Captain Sir Basil biography, see page 121.

Liddell

Hart

's

]

II

ended

THE MESOPOTAMIA miAl C] lrfTn T A ,\ ^^ 4^1 r\ k>Jl X

T

1 Vyl 11 1V/1 l1

Britain's first objects in

If I II w

Mesopotamia had been reached by securing the Basra area, but there still remained further objectives, and the British were lured on to bite off more than thev could chew. Lieutenant-Colonel A. J. Barker \

in a near disaster. No official despatch on what happened has ever been published but it appears to have been a

pretty sorry business. Two battalions of infantry, a platoon of the Dorsets and a couple of mountain guns were shipped off up the Karun to show the flag and to 'stabilise' the position early in February. The fact that the force was a hotch-potch from different formations did not make the task of its commander, Brigadier-General Robinson, any easier in the action which was to follow. Nor does the choice of the

commander seem

to have been ideal. Ahvaz in March, word came in from the locals that the rumoured Turkish-Arab concentration was indeed massing in the hills north-west of the town. Robinson, briefed to act quickly and decisively, decided that a prompt reconnaissance was called for since this would

On

arrival at

demonstrate his strength of purpose. Leaving only a small reserve to garrison the town he sallied forth with the rest of his column. In a defile, about eight miles from the town, the column walked straight into an ambush. Suddenly, at the same time as they came under heavy fire from both sides and their front, Arab cavalry were seen to be deploying with the obvious intention of cutting them off. When, from the hills on both sides of the pass, a howling mob of Arabs descended on them and Turkish artillery opened up, Robinson decided the time had come to pull out. It was not a

moment too soon and but for the gallant behaviour of the Dorsets, who acted as rearguard, and the fact that the Turks in their enthusiasm shelled their Arab allies by mistake, the force would never have survived. By the time it did get back to the

General Gornnge (front row, second from

left),

who

After the capture of Qurna there had been no important action in Mesopotamia until

the battle of Shaiba. In mid April the Turks were disposed on three rivers, their right on the Euphrates, their centre on the Tigris and their left on the Karun (Khersani. For five months the Tigris front was quiet — but for a reconnaissance in force which established that about 5,000 Turks and Arabs were holding a position about seven miles north of Qurna. But early in February there were reports that another

Turks and Arabs was concentrating near Ahvaz and causing the local tribesmen to be restless. Ahvaz in mixed

force of

Persian Arabistan lay within the territory of the pro-British

and 1142

it

Sheikh of Muhammerah, if the Turks

was considered that

led the expedition to Ahvaz, with his staff

were allowed to overrun this region it would mean the defection of those tribes who remained loyal to the sheikh. If this happened there was every possibility of a general conflagration in western Persia, entailing the loss of the oilfields and the pipeline to Abadan. Reinforcements had arrived in the theatre during March and by mid- April it was considered that the sending of troops to the Karun was of para-

entrenched camp at Ahvaz, Robinson's men had been severely mauled and both mountain guns were out of action. Too little too late — as always — brought the usual result. The oil ceased to flow to Abadan, and Barrett, the British commander in Basra, was compelled to send up another brigade to extricate what was left of Robinson's detachment. In April the Turkish attempt to recapture Basra overshadowed the business of Ahvaz and the oil. General Barrett handed over his command on the eve of the battle of Shaiba and returned to India a sick man, but one on whom fortune had smiled. To take his place came the vigorous and enterprising Sir John Nixon, who arrived with a fresh set of instructions on how to conduct the campaign. His directive had been issued by Army Headquarters in Delhi without reference to the British government in London, and — according to his evidence at the Mesopotamia Commission nearly two years later — also without reference to Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy in Delhi. A copy of it was mailed to London but as it did not arrive until the middle of May, and as those in Whitehall presumed Nixon was working on the original instructions issued to Barrett, the exist-

was

ence of Nixon's revised orders led to the authorities in London being at cross-purposes with both Delhi and Nixon for close on two months.

that immediately after the Shaiba operations most of the troops who had taken part in the battle were withdrawn to Basra preparatory to a move towards Ahvaz. Earlier, an attempt to persuade the local tribesmen that it was not worth their while to throw in their lot with the Turks had

The instructions originally issued to Barrett had contemplated only the occupation of Basra and any movement beyond the town was supposed to be restricted to what was necessary to safeguard Basra proper. From the wording of the new directive it was clear that the scope of the

mount

political

importance. Thus

it

campaign had been enlarged. Nixon was told that his first task was 'to retain complete control of the lower portion of Mesopotamia, comprising the Basra vilayet (province) and all outlets to the sea, and such portions of neighbouring territories as may affect your operations'. The safety of the oilfields was relegated to second place, and it was significant that the directive referred to the Basra vilayet which besides including both An NasirTyah and Al 'Amarah also extended to within a few miles of Kut.

Divided objectives

Had Lord Crewe,

the Secretary of State for

been aware of Nixon's directive, he might have been expected to have issued a sharp instruction to the Indian government for an adjustment in Nixon's priorities. As it was he was blissfully unaware of the fact that the Indian authorities in Delhi and Nixon in Basra regarded the oil India,

wells as a subsidiary object to the control of the Basra vilayet. Meantime, because of what happened at Ahvaz in March, Lord Crewe cabled the Viceroy in April expres-

sing the Admiralty's concern for the oil supply. Nixon was also sending cables to Delhi — asking for another cavalry brigade and a pioneer battalion, both of which he considered would be needed for the operations he now had in mind. Both these requests were turned down, and when Lord Crewe heard of them he suspected that Nixon was planning 'an important offensive movement'. In a cable to the Viceroy he demanded an appreciation of the situation be sent to London, and added 'No advance beyond the present theatre of operations will be sanctioned, although an advance to Al 'Amarah with the object of controlling the tribes between there and the Karun river might be supported because it adds to the safety of the pipeline. Our present position is strategically a sound

would remain where they were. Nothing definite could be said about the Turks on the Karun side until Gorringe got to Ahvaz. This, he maintained, was due to Tigris

the lack of cavalry — a snide reference to the earlier request for more which India had rejected and which had alerted Lord Crewe. His own preference was to push on to An NasirTyah in order to take advantage of the Turks' disorganisation which had followed on the battle of Shaiba, although he accepted that this was not practicable at the moment because of the lack of land transport and the failure, so far, to find a clear channel up the river. At the same time, however, if the western part of the Basra vilayet was to be controlled, he firmly believed that An NasirTyah must be occupied eventually. And, if there was much of a delay, the Turks might again become a formidable threat in that direction. For the time being there was no urgency for any operations against the Turks up the Tigris beyond Qurna and in any case, before they could be tackled, there would have to be a good deal of preparation. Finally, before he could decide on what was the best course of action, he must await the outcome of Gorringe's operations. What Nixon's conclusions really amounted to was that the Turks on the Karun were the only force at which he could strike- at that particular moment, and that the operation for which Gorringe

quite clear that the safety of the oil — the original object of the expedition — was the uppermost consideration in the minds of the government in London. There can be little doubt that Lord Crewe's attitude was right. The day after his telegram was despatched, the first landing in Gallipoli was scheduled, and Gallipoli was to be the main theatre against the Turks. The Suez Canal also had to be considered, and its protection was certainly more important than Mesopotamia, for the canal was a vital artery of imperial communications. Mesopotamia was third in order of importance, and, in any case, the object of the original expedition there had already been achieved. Unfortunately those who were running the campaign in this third priority theatre were to be encouraged by success after success steadily to extend the operations, at the same time without increasing the

priority.

was

It

most important that Persian Arabistan should be cleared of Turks and pacified,

pumping could be restarted at the we lis. The Turks around Ahvaz were

so that oil

not supposed to be very strong — six batand two cavalry regiments with about 5,000 Arabs supporting them, at the most — but their very presence encouraged the tribesmen in the area to disobey the orders of their rightful liege, the Sheikh talions

of of

Muhammerah. Shaiba had caused many to have second thoughts as to who

them

would be the eventual victors; nevertheless no real co-operation could be expected until the Turks had been completely ousted and the recalcitrants treated to a sharp lesson.

Gorringe's column of about 9,000 men, comprising two brigades of his own division, the cavalry brigade and the 6th Division's artillery, left Basra on April 22. Some marched, some went by river. The rain had cleared and, up to the end of the month, the weather was comparatively cool. The prediction was that the following

month would be 'hot-warm' and that, after June and July would be really hot.

that,

it turned out, with the temperature rising from 100 to 120 F in the shade — where shade existed — and the only relief

So

now came from the north-west wind which the Arabs call 'The Blessing'. Ahvaz was hotter than Basra and sudden sandstorms, eternal thirst, the infinite torment of flies

r

TOWNSHEND'S ADVANCE

• Baghdad

GORRINGE'S EXPEDITION OILFIELDS PIPELINES 50

MILES Suwayqiyah Marsh

one and we cannot afford to take risks by extending it unduly. In Mesopotamia a safe game must be played.' From this telegram, it

was scheduled deserved

'..

Kut

is

means of doing so.

%k


An

NasirTyah

~-'

Caspian Sea

Shaiba* Basra Jjr

•/Abadan

c""4

%/e * Baghdad

Mediterr

cr

a/wan Sea

Basra*

In response to the Secretary of State's telegram, Nixon started to concentrate

troops under Major-General Gorringe for an operation up the Karun, and towards the end of April the required appreciation of the situation was wired to India. Nixon's conclusion was that the Turks in Mesopotamia were incapable of undertaking any effective offensive and he thought that both those in An NasirTyah and those up the

*SGult Peisian

Gulf

<£

MILES

OKMS

500

800

he Mesopotamia situation. With the sideshows cleared up, the way to Baghdad seemed clear

l

I

13

Opponents on the Tigris: an oldfashioned Turkish gunboat and an Englishseaplane

Above: The Short 827 reconnaissance seaplane Engine: Sunbeam Nubian, 150-hp. Armament: One 303-inch Lewis gun (optional). Speed: 61 mph at 2,000 feet. Endurance: 3 /2 hours. Weight empty/loaded: 2,700/3,400 pounds. Span: 53 feet 1 1 inches. Length: 35 feet 3 inches. Below: The Turkish gunboat Marmaris. Displacement: 507 tons. Armament: Four 9-pounders and two 1-pounder cannon. Power/speed: 950hp/ 14 knots. Crew: 84 to 90 1

—ri

^f~i

1144

and the mosquitoes were

all to

combine

to

British and make the lot of the Indian alike, an unenviable one. As Gorringe closed on Ahvaz the Turks steadily withdrew north-west towards the troops,

Karkheh

river.

Every

effort

was made

to

catch up with them to bring them to battle and after a night march to the south bank of the Karkheh a dawn attack was launched at the spot where they were believed to be encamped. Daylight showed that not only were there no Turks on the south bank of the river but that none were visible on the north bank either; there was nothing but an empty desert and an unbridgeable river. By the beginning of May, Gorringe had come to realise that he was not going to catch up with the Turks, who had started to march back to Al 'Amarah. Operating away from the Karun, he was also experiencing difficulties in getting

However,

Gorringe had been given a double object and, even if he could not strike at the Turks, it was still possible to deal with the locals. One tribe, the Beni Taruf, which had added to their sins by a treacherous attack on some of Gorringe's supplies.

cavalry reconnoitring in their stretch of desert, needed a salutary lesson and. in the

middle of May, a punitive column set out administer it. For two days the troops marched across the hot uncharted desert, chasing the tribesmen, who were dotted about in small camps over a wide area. Except for the country and the climate it would have been a simple little operation, but there was the ever-pervading horror of to

the desert: thirst. Nothing

was achieved.

Oilfields cleared By the end of May the oilfields region had been cleared of Turks, and if there were any lingering doubts about the essential objects of the campaign being satisfied there was certainly no justification for them now. Oil pumping was resumed — although it was some time before the oil actually reached Abadan, because the pipe-

had been damaged and needed

to be Gorringe's operations should have marked the end of the Mesopotamian campaign. But it did not. With Whitehall's concern over the oil supplies satisfied, Nixon was anxious to turn from Arabistan to strike the Turks nearer home. Lack of steamers precluded the advance on An Nasirlyah, which he favoured, so he decided that the Turks above Qurna would be his next objective. The Viceroy lent his* support to this. Besides being a suitable location for a military outpost from which to control the tribesmen between the Tigris and Karun, on whose submission the security of the oilfields largely depended, Al 'Amarah was an important administraline

repaired.

tive

and commercial centre covering the

main gram

route to Persian Arabistan. In a teledespatched on May 23 to Lord Crewe,

Lord Hardinge outlined the commanderintention. Nixon, he said, proposed to mount an offensive up the Tigris. But he would not advance beyond Al 'Amarah without the sanction of the Secretary of State. Lord Crewe's reply, sanctioning the operation, sounded peevish: 'On the clear understanding that the General Officer Commanding Force "D" is satisfied that he can concentrate a sufficient force at Al 'Amarah to defy any attack from We can Baghdad during the summer. send him no more troops and he must clearly understand that his action must be guided by this fact. Arrangements for this move must have been made some time back and I am of the opinion that General Nixon should have submitted his proposals in-chief's

.

.

.

The Viceroy's reply was that it would be undesirable — possibly even dangerous — to tie Nixon down with precise orders, in case they might not fit in with the local situation. 'Under the original instructions he will, as soon as he is in a position to do so, submit a plan for the occupation of the Basra vilayet, which includes Al 'Amarah. We should not propose to authorise any advance beyond Al 'Amarah for which his force is not adequate.' By the time this reached London. Nixon's troops were in Al 'Amarah but even before it was penned it would seem as if the authorities in India were already contemplating more ambitious objectives. The second battle of Qurna and the capture of Al 'Amarah at the beginning of June 1915 were brilliant and audacious amphibious operations.

Nixon's next objective was An Nasirlyah, importance of which — according to Nixon — lay in the fact that it was the base from which a hostile force threatening Basra must start; that it was the centre from which influence could be exercised among the powerful Arab tribes which lived along the Euphrates: that standing at one end of the Shatt-el-Hai, it closed

before the last moment.' As Nixon had been discussing an attack on Al 'Amarah with India for some weeks, this statement seemed rather hard; it supported his suspicions that his instructions and Lord Crewe's ideas did not tally. And so, on May 25, he sent a long wire to India asking for definite orders as to

the

whether An Nasirlyah and Al 'Amarah were to be occupied or not — because the orders given him when he assumed command and the policy laid down by the Secretary of State did not seem to agree. He ended up by saying that it was not his intention to advance any further than these two places. The reply came from India — to the effect that his orders and the British government's policy were not really conflicting; it was merely that the Secretary of State wanted to emphasise that no reinforcements would be forthcoming. Mollified, Nixon continued with his preparations for attacking the Turks above Qurna In London there was still some uneasiness about what really was intended. Four-

Indian cavalry on their

days after his petulant authorisation of the advance on Al 'Amarah. Lord Crewe was succeeded at the India Office by Joseph Austen Chamberlain, and his first action was to endorse his predecessor's policy of

On May 28, Chamberlain teleknow the graphed the Viceroy: 'Till immediate objects contemplated and the force with which General Nixon is advancing, am unable to give further instructions. Our policy must depend partly on local factors, forces locally available, and partly on the situation elsewhere. should like to be informed what force General Nixon considers necessary for garrisoning Al 'Amarah, and how generally he proposes to distribute his troops during the summer if the occupation of that town is con

caution.

I

I

I

tern plated.'

way

to the front

communications between the Tigris and the Euphrates; and lastly that it was the headquarters of the a

large

Gorringe

part in

administration of Basra vilayet. With

civil

of the

command, the An Nasirlyah Qurna and fighting

force concentrated at

began on .July 5. After a stubborn resistance the Turks were driven back to thenlast ditch positions astride the river

miles below

some

An

Na§irTyah. After a night approach the decisive action was fought at dawn on July 24, and by noon. after some fierce hand-to-hand fight ing, the Turks' main position had been captured. A second strong position was earned two miles further on and by then the Turks' resistance had been broken. Five hundred dead were found in the trenches, ''"'i prisoners were taken and the Turks lost 17 guns. British casualties amounted to 533, but there was also much sickness, for between April and July the troops had been fighting in a shade tempera! lire which and in an atmosphere often rose to 113 of the heaviest and densest humidity. The latest success seemed to Stimulate both the authorities in India and Nixon to a fresh advance. On July 27. the Viceroj cabled the Secretary of State saying thai he believed that the occupation of Knt el Amara now appeared to be a 'strategic necessity', and in Basra Nixon had already decided that Townshond should resume Ins advance up the Tigris. five

1

I-'

1

14!

TOWNSHEND'S REGATTA Once Shaiba had fallen, the next Turkish position was further up the Tigris, protected by an area of flooded land. To take it, General Townshend organised an amphibious operation. But as the British advanced, they found that the Turks had abandoned their positions after a token resistance and had fled up the river. The bait was too much for Townshend. Leaving his land forces to follow, he set out in pursuit of the Turks in a great waterborne chase, which at the end resulted in the capture of Al Amarah. Lieutenant-Colonel A. J. Barker. Below: The gun crew of an armed lighter waits for the first sign of the fleeing Turks f

When he had disposed of the Turks' right and left wings at Shaiba and the Kariin and the oil was again flowing to Abadan. General Nixon turned to the Turks' centre position on

Consideration of urged a British advance in Mesopotamia, and Al 'Amarah, 87 miles beyond Qurna, became the next objective. Apart from its commercial and administrative importance, this town covered the approaches to Persian Arabistan, protected it from Turkish intrigue and incursions, and afforded a good base for the control of those tribes which lived between the Tigris and Karun on whose submission the security of the oilfields and pipeline largely depended. But the approach to the town was defended above Qurna, and this would first have to be forced. Clearly such an operation was not going to be an easy matter. The forward Turkish outposts covering Qurna faced the British

defence

the Tigris.

still

positions at a distance of 2,000 to 3,000

1146

yards on both sides of the river. Qurna itself was an island but for some distance north of it the country was completely flooded and as far as one could see there was nothing but a reedy waste of water, broken by a few low sandhills on which the Turks were entrenched. The main Turkish position at the village of Abu Aran lay just beyond the range of the British artillery, with outposts on the island of 'Norfolk Hill', 'One Tower HiU', and 'Gun Hill' on the right bank of the Tigris, and 'One Tree Hill' on the left bank. Between these undulations lay a sea of swamp up to three feet deep, intersected by occasional ditches with a depth of eight feet or more. Further back, behind Abu Aran, were the Turks' camp at Muzaibila and Ruta, below which they had blocked the river by sinking iron barges. To attack such a position demanded unusual tactics. Although the water was only three feet deep in most places, the ditches and canal intersections precluded wading.

The only way objectives was

to get the infantry to their to adopt the methods of the

amphibious natives and to use boats — the local be Hums; ten men to a boat, 16 boats to a company. Five hundred had to be commandeered and collected and as many as possible were fitted with armoured shields to give protection against rifle and machine gun fire. As soon as the troops had learned to use them, land assault tactics had to be practised in formation with every movement translated into terms of canoes. Needless to say there could be no question of using cavalry. Its place had to be taken

by the naval flotilla. (The naval flotilla consisted of three sloops (Espiegle, Clio and Odin); four armed launches, i.e. small tugs fitted with armoured shields (Shaitan,

Sumana, Miner, Lewis

Pelly);

two naval

horse-boats with 4.7-in guns, and two gun barges with 5-inch and 4-inch guns.) On the flotilla also the assault force would have to rely for artillery support as soon as

A

British

gunboat on the

Tigris.

By using these

craft,

had advanced beyond the range of the heavy batteries at Qurna. (Here the mobility of the waterborne guns gave the it

assaulting troops a valuable advantage, for although the main attack was frontal up the course of the Tigris, a creek, navigable to the gunboats of the flotilla, permitted the northern flank of the Turkish positions to be shelled.) To Major-General C. V. F. Townshend, newly arrived from India to take command of the recently formed 6th Indian Division, Nixon committed the planning, conduct and organisation of the operation. As the odds seemed to be all in favour of the Turks, Townshend considered the task 'more difficult than that facing Wolfe before Quebec'. The attack was planned for May 31, to coincide with a move by MajorGeneral G. F. Gorringe, suggesting that he was advancing on Al 'Amarah from the direction of the Karun. Townshend's idea was to attack the Turkish positions metho-

the British were often able to bring

fire

on the Turks from the flank

by stage; on the first day he would take the outposts, on the second the main position, and then finally he would pursue the Turks up the river, making the maximum use of his ships. To support the operation there were mountain guns and machine guns on rafts, field guns in tugs, barges and steamers as well as the warships, and artillery dug in at Qurna; never before in Mesopotamia had there been such an assembly of fire power. The operation against the Turkish posidically, stage

tion above

Qurna

got off to a good start. At 0500 hours, as Clio and Espieglc steamed slowly upstream- pre ceded by the launches Shaitan and Sumana which were sweeping mines ahead of the sloops — the troops started to pole their way forward through the reeds. As they approached their objectives each island

HMS

HMS

was smothered with artillery fire from every available gun on ship and shore, and under cover of the bombardment the 22nd

Punjabis carried One Tree Hill. The Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infan try then waded on, waist-deep, to capture the trenches on Norfolk Hill at bayonet point. There was little real resistance: the Turks had been completely overwhelmed by the colossal amount of fire that was put down. As the bombardment switched to One Tower Hill and Gun Hill they could be seen scrambling into boats and paddling away as fast as they could. Then, half an hour before he* British and Indians could reach them, white Hags were seen flying over Gun Hill. By noon the first phase of the battle was over; eve ything had gone t

like clockwork.

Turks decamp But this was only the beginning What had been captured was little more than a line of outposts. The main Turkish posi tions were two miles further on, and these could not he attacked until the following

11 I.

da\

now it was extremely hot, and the were exhausted. Furthermore the nd that had been won had to be condated. Next morning, however, the

tnv

'.-

operation was scheduled to begin at dawn with a frontal attack on Abu Aran by the flotilla while the 17th Brigade made a wide sweep round the west flank. The 16th Brigade w as then to be landed at Abu Aran and together the two brigades would deal with Muzaibila. But when the bombardment started there was no reply, and it seemed as if the Turks had gone.

'Like rats'

Townshend had no aeroplanes with him; there was nowhere for one to land near Qurna. Consequently air reconnaissance had to be made by uninterrupted flights from Basra. 40 miles further back.

On

the

morning of June 1, as the troops laboriously began to make their way slowly forward through the jungle of reeds, like rats, towards the main Turkish position, one of the aircraft dropped a message to say that the Turks were in full retreat up the Tigris. It was a little late; the navy had already found this out for themselves and were getting ready for the pursuit. The brigade which had done the fighting the previous day hurriedly embarked in three of the paddle steamers and the flotilla steamed on up the river as fast as it could go. Townshend with his staff and no more than a dozen escort hastily embarked on the Espiegle, and with the Clio and the Odin

the flotilla set out in a manner more usually associated with cavalry than warships. There were mines and obstructions to delay the passage but as the Turkish officer responsible for laying them had been captured and put into one of the leading launches his co-operation helped to ensure that no time was lost in clearing a channel. The sunken lighters below Ruta were the main hold up and as the flotilla approached this obstruction the silhouette of the Turkish gunboat Marmaris could be seen hastily

making

off

upstream

in

River too shallow The sloops could go no further now; in these waters the limit had been reached and there was nothing but mud under their keels. Al 'Amarah was still 50 miles further on and the army was 50 miles behind. Yet,

A general and a motor launch chasing a beaten foe up the River Tigris

company

with other vessels. Even here the delay was shortlived. A channel — through which the three sloops could just scrape by the inshore wreck — was found, and the remarkable operation which came to be known as 'Townshend's Regatta' now began in earnest. It was a unique situation. The general with his staff was going all out after a fleeing enemy. His army was far behind and he had little idea of what lay ahead and no preconceived plan for dealing with whatever situation might arise. Everything had to be improvised. Townshend himself had never intended to pursue the Turks in person but he had little option as the Espiegle carried him on, mile after mile, round bend after bend, against the surging current of the snaking river which narrowed and became more tortuous the

further the ships travelled. Even for the Royal Navy it was a strange adventure; built for an ocean environment, their ships were irresponsibly charging up an uncharted waterway, in chase of an army in flight, into the very heart of an ancient empire 150 miles from the open sea. In the fierce shimmering heat the pursuit was a long, arduous business. Gradually the tail end of the fleeing Turkish convoy came into sight — first, the white sails of the mahelas struggling against the current: then the steamer Mosul crowded

1148

with troops and towing a couple of barges equally crowded; finally, the Marmaris similarly employed. As the sun started to go down, the leading ships of the 'Regatta' opened fire, and when the first shots whistled over them, both the Mosul and the Marmaris promptly cast off their tows and scurried on alone. In the fading light, as the graceful blue, balloon-shaped dome of Ezra's tomb in its clump of palm trees loomed up, the mahelas and barges were seen to be making for the banks of the river. The last in line of the ships, the Odin, stopped to take possession of this party while the rest continued on into the dusk, firing continuously at the two ships ahead until darkness shrouded them from the gunners' eyes. When darkness finally descended, the British flotilla had to stop for a couple of hours until the moon came up — it was just not possible to navigate at night. Then they were on the move again and in the early hours of the morning, as they rounded a bend about six miles further on, there was the Marmaris once more and, beyond her, the Mosul. The Marmaris was done for; she had been run aground and set on fire before she was abandoned. The Mosul's immediate response to a round of gunfire from the Clio was a white flag, and one of the launches went on to take possession of her.

with the evidence of the Turks' complete demoralisation and organisational breakdown all round, it was a sore temptation to press on to Al 'Amarah. Much may be dared on the heels of a routed enemy, so Townshend and Captain Nunn, the naval commander, together decided to take the risk. Both transferred to the Comet, which had joined them on June 1, and with the launches Shaitan, Sumana and Lewis Pelly — each of which was towing a horse-boat with a 4.7-inch naval gun — the chase got under way again. There were no signs of opposition or troops; at almost every bend white flags and signs of obeisance from the villagers gave a clear indication of their acceptance of a Turkish defeat. At Qal'at Salih, half-way to Al 'Amarah, which was reached in the early afternoon,

some cavalry and an infantry company .d then were dispersed with a few sheik the village notables came out to make i

their act of submission. A few miles further on the ships stopped for the night. But at daylight next morning, June 3, they moved on again, up the interminable succession of bends — less able than ever to tell what was round the next corner. Everywhere the ships were greeted with white flags. Nevertheless,

when Abu

Sidra, 12 miles short of

Al 'Amarah, was reached it was clearly necessary to move more warily. And so the flotilla was concentrated while the fastest

launch, the Shaitan, steamed three miles to ascertain whether or not Al 'Amarah was being held by the Turks. The Comet, leading the rest of the launches, and the gun barges followed. By 1400 hours the Shaitan was within three miles of the town, without having

ahead

encountered any Turkish resistance. But just as she turned the final bend which would take her into Al 'Amarah, her crew spotted a party of troops crossing a boat bridge over the river and embarking on a

barge secured to a steamer on the other bank. The bridge, was opened almost immediately in order to allow the steamer to escape. But before she could get through a shot from the Shaitan's 12-pounder brought her to, and the troops jumped ashore and ran off. The Shaitan steamed on through the bridge. As she passed it a couple of companies of Turkish infantry were seen moving down to the river, but when they saw the British ship they turned and hurried back up the narrow streets. By this time the rest of the flotilla was steaming into Al 'Amarah. There were still far too many Turkish troops in the town for the comfort of the combined force of 100 British sailors and soldiers, and only

impudence and a latter

colossal bluff saw the through. Though the tiny British

was practically surrounded and grossly outnumbered, the Turks were induced to throw in the towel — a boat which put ashore with a corporal and 12 men being greeted with an offer of surrender which was accepted. It was an amazing affair. In the barracks there was a whole battalion of the crack Turkish infantry regiment, the Constantinople 'Fire Brigade', and more and more Turks, in constant fear of the Arabs, flocked in to surrender. A town, its 20,000 inhabitants, its garrison and stores had capitulated to a general, a naval captain, a political officer and about 100 bluejackets and soldiers. On the face of it the surrender was complete and absolute. Nor was it without its lighter and more comical touches, since one Turkish officer is reported to have been permitted to send a telegram to his wife back in Anatolia, saying 'Safely captured'. force

The difficulty was keeping up the bluff. The Turks had been led to believe that the British army was only just round the next bend in the river when it was in fact still 24 hours steaming distance away. Before long they were bound to realise they had been hoodwinked and when once the troops of the 'Fire Brigade' recovered their spirit and saw what slender opposition they had to deal with there was no telling what their reaction

would

be.

The

little

band

of

conquerors breathed a sigh of relief when the Norfolks steamed in next morning. Their arrival was not a moment too soon. In the town, the Arabs had already assessed the real state of affairs and when the first of Townshend's infantry disembarked they had started on an orgy of looting. Then all was quiet; Townshend's Regatta had proved to be an unqualified success. In four days' operations, a gunboat and two steamers had been sunk, a number of other vessels, Al 'Amarah, nearly 2,000 Turkish prisoners and a considerable stock of booty had all fallen into British hands. It seemed as if the impossible had been achieved comparatively simply, but the root cause had really been the careful preparations for the first attack above

Qurna months

previously.

THE CAPTURE OF KUT The capture of Al 'Amarah, far from quenching Nixon's thirst for greater glory in Mesopotamia, added to his desire to press on up the Tigris to Baghdad via Kut. As a result of differing aims in London and Delhi, he was able to press on to meet the Turks again at Es Sinn, just down-river of Kut. The British plan of attack, as happened so often in this arid desert, went awry, and only the perseverance and courage of the British and Indian troops saved the day and forced the Turks to evacuate Kut. Lieutenant-Colonel A. J. Barker By

the end of July, General Nixon had the requirements of his original

fulfilled

directive.

The two main

objectives, secur-

ing the mouth of the Shatt-el-Arab and the safeguarding of the Persian oilfields, had been attained, and in the process the province of Basra had been occupied. At Shaiba, Qurna and An NasirTyah Force 'D' had achieved the impossible and there was no valid reason for trying to do more. The campaign could be considered to have been brought to a most successful conclusion, and Mesopotamia could have been allowed to simmer while the British and Indian war effort was employed in those theatres which were recognised as being decisive. But Nixon, backed by the general staff in Delhi, had made up his mind that the British were going to impress the East and supplant the Turk in the City of the Caliphs. Kut el Amara on the Tigris, 120 miles upstream of the most advanced British positions at Al 'Amarah, had become his next objective and although he did not actually declare that Kut was a stepping stone to Baghdad, this was undoubtedly in his mind. The Turks were concentrating at Kut for a counterstroke, he wrote; Kut was a better strategic centre than Al 'Amarah, he urged. Because it lay at the junction of a waterway connecting the Euphrates with the Tigris, when Kut was in British hands only a small garrison

would be needed in the Euphrates valley. Nixon was not the only one with an eye on the minarets of Baghdad. The Viceroy of India had been attracted to the idea of capturing it ever since Barrett had first occupied Basra, and so it was to be expected that he would accept Nixon's recommendation with barely restrained enthusiasm. Whitehall was less enthusiastic, and London's reaction to a telegram from the

Viceroy saying that he considered the occupation of Kut 'a strategic necessity' was no more than lukewarm. The role of the Expeditionary Force in Mesopotamia was seen differingly in London, Delhi and Mesopotamia. Nixon and the Indian authorities both saw the campaign as an offensive one with Baghdad as the goal; the men in Whitehall were trying to restrain and curb the operations because they believed that the safety of the oil wells was really all that mattered. As soon as Delhi had tentatively agreed that the advance should continue and that Kut would be the next objective, Nixon started to concentrate his force at Al 'Amarah. Transferring troops from the Euphrates valley was necessarily a slow business because the Shatt-el-Hai waterway to Kut ceases to be navigable after June, and the Tigris was the only available route to Al 'Amarah. Matters were not made easier by the shrinking of the Tigris

An Indian mountain

battery on the

way

to Kut.

and the intense heat. (The thermometer recorded an average midday temperature C of 113 F in the shade at this time.) Nevertheless by the end of July the laborious concentration of Townshend's force had been completed, three decrepit Caudrons of the Royal Flying Corps had flown up to a newly built airfield near Al 'Amarah and the naval flotilla had reassembled ready for the advance. Finally on August 29 Townshend was given his formal orders for the forthcoming operation. These stated that he was to 'destroy and disperse the enemy, and occupy Kut, thereby consolidating our control of the B~sra vilayet'.

After the capture of Al 'Amarah the Turks had withdrawn to the neighbourhood of Kut, and in the three months which elapsed between their reverse at Qurna and September 1915 an elaborate defensive position was dug and built at Es Sinn, eight miles downstream of the town. Gangs of Arabs under Turkish supervision constructed a trench system which stretched for 11 miles between the Dujaila depression (known usually as the Dujaila Redoubt) on the right bank of the river and the Ataba Marsh on the other side of the river. (Be-

cause the sinuous writhing of the' Tigris precluded any consistent defining of position by compass point, the old-fashioned

method

of reference to 'right'

The Indians came

in for

much undue

and

criticism

'left'

is preferable. For the reader who is not accustomed to this descriptive method, it should be explained that the banks are considered to be right or left from a startpoint looking downstream.) On this left bank, in what Townshend later described as a 'sort of Torres-Vedras like' line of earthworks running north-west from the river, the bulk of the Turkish troops were deployed. At Es Sinn, on the right bank, more Turks occupied about two and a half miles of trenches dug along the site of an ancient canal, and they were linked to the forces on the other side of the river by means of a bridge of boats. The chief feature of the left bank and the reason for the strength of the Turkish defence was the marshes, three of which broke up the Turkish positions. In the dry land between them, a line of deep and narrow fire trenches had been dug, and most of the front was covered by extensive wire

bank

MILES

Suwayqlyah Maisli

KMS TURKISH POSITIONS BRITISH

ADVANCE

MARSH AREAS

Above: The

advance on and capture of KGt. Despite the proximity of the river, the heat bearable and there was a perpetual shortage of water. Below: British gunners in action with a gun abandoned by the Turks in their precipitate retreat to Kut

was only

British

just

entanglements, some of which were hidden from view in deep depressions; lines of deep pits containing sharpened stakes and mines had also been used to strengthen the position, although this fact was not discovered till later. Between Al 'Amarah and Es Sinn the only Turkish force of any consequence during this period was an outpost at Sheikh Sa'd, 18 miles in front of the Es Sinn position and about the same distance from the village of 'Ali al Gharbi. This last place was important because it lay in the heart of the country of the powerful and turbulent Beni Lam tribe — a people who were as treacherous as they were savage and cruel. Like most of the river Arabs the tribesmen of the Beni Lam were intent on exploiting the current situation to their personal advantage and under the notorious chief Gazban — the 'Angry One' — they had been a thorn in the side of the British since the beginning of the year.

Advance authorised After the capture of Al 'Amarah, Townshend had fallen sick and it was not until August 27 that he returned from convalescent leave in India and picked up

the reins of command again. On that day, for the first time in five months, clouds were seen in the sky and for those who had come to hate the vast cloudless blue dome above them, Townshend's return seemed to be an omen. It was. Two days later came the news that an advance on Kut had been authorised; the troops were to start up-river at once. The starting point of the operation was to be 'Ali al Gharbi, and at the beginning of Delamain's Brigadier-General August 16th Brigade had been ferried there to cover the assembly of the main striking force. (At the time this was a move which Townshend — with a Napoleonic tendency to gather all his force together before making any advance at all — had considered to be most imprudent.) Behind this brigade the rest of the 6th Division was to assemble, and Townshend's plan was then to pass Hoghton's 17th Brigade through 'Ali al Gharbi and to concentrate the whole force -including

Delamain- for-

Sheikh Sa'd. Once the force was assembled, he proposed to move, lock, stock and barrel, up the left bank of the

ward

at

river. In essence the plan was simple enough: the Turks on the left bank were to be rolled up, and those on the right bank ignored. It would be a slow business,

1150

about eight miles from the main Turkish by September 16. Here the position, division bivouacked for ten days — on the right bank because the ships of the flotilla which was moving up-river with the force were compelled to moor on that side — to await some of the arti-llery which had not yet arrived from the south. During this period there was also an opportunity for an air reconnaissance. (This had not been possible for some time because there had been no aeroplanes. One of the RFC machines had come down in the Turks' lines, and the other two had been badly damaged.) Four of the seaplanes which had been engaged in the final operations against the Konigsberg in East Africa had arrived in Basra on September 5,

and now their pilots were able to provide Townshend with the information he wanted.

The

of Kut in British hands. But this was only a stage in Nixon's cherished dream advancing to Baghdad and seeing that fabled city taken by his forces

The minarets of

Townshend

he noted, but, predicted, 'how could it be otherwise' considering he had to play 'battledore and shuttlecock' with his transport and 'fetch up troops in homeopathic doses'.

By September

11

the

three

infantry

and 18th) had assembled at 'Ali al Gharbi and with the divisional troops Townshend had a total of about 11,000 combatants. The advance

brigades (16th,

17th

started next day, part of the force being

carried in ships but the majority having march. It was very hot 110 to 120 F — but in spite of the heat the troops were in good spirits and looking forward to the prospect of a battle. Meanwhile the Turks, who had been watching the growing concentration of British and Indian troops with some apprehension, withdrew their outposts as the British advanced. Practically the whole force had reached the neighbourhood of the Chahela mounds, to

battle for

Kut

el

Amara opened on

the morning of September 26 — a day when the eyes of the Western world were focussed on the titanic struggle for Loos. In so far as Townshend's plan depended on the maximum use of deception and surprise — features which had only rarely entered into British plans of attack hitherto — it was novel. To roll up the Turks on the left bank, he was relying on inducing those on the opposite bank in the Es Sinn position to stay where they were until it was too late to do anything to save the day. A feint attack was to be made on the right bank but the decisive attack would be directed against the flank positions nearest the Suwada Marsh, six miles from the river. To attain surprise, the approach to these positions necessitated a night march and, because they were so far from the river, Townshend's plan was in direct established prothe to contradiction cedure for the British when fighting a battle in Mesopotamia. In the event it appears that the Turks were taken in completely by Townshend's ruse, as Nur-unDin, the Turkish commander, had expected an advance in two columns on both sides of the river, and two separate frontal attacks. On the right bank a two-hour unopposed march brought the 16th, 17th and Cavalry Brigades to a point about two and a half miles from Es Sinn. A camp was pitched and every available tent put up to give the appearance that the force had come to stay. Before long, shells began to burst among the tents and Nur-ud-Din, believing that the main thrust was to come from this direction, marched his general resen e away from the left bank by way of his boat bridge in order to reinforce his positions against the force seemingly massing against him on the right. Meanwhile. on the left bank, the 18th Infantry Brigade which had marched to the village of Nukhailet had met with very little opposi tion and bad dug in near the village. That night, under cover of darkness, an Indian battalion and a squadron of cavalry moved across the Turks' front on the left bank and a pontoon bridge was thrown across the river; over this the majority of the force — ostensibly deployed on the far bank -crossed to swell the column on the left bank. Everything went more or less according to plan and Nixon, who had earlier announced his intention of being present at the battle, came up to stay with Townshend, in the hitter's observation post. Normally this would have been a very unsatisfactory arrangement, but Nixon

1151

had said thai he did not wish to interfere in Townshend's conduct of the battlethat he only wished to be on the spot to settle questions of policy there and then and Townshend had had to accept him. It would have been difficult to do otherwise and the situation might have been difficult it' it had not been that Townshend's personality

was such that the presence of

commander made no difference. The two columns which were to attack on

his

left hank started to form up soon after midnight on the L!7th; there was just time tor a quick meal and then they were off on what was intended to be the decisive phase. Brigadier-General W. S. Delamain

the

was in overall command, and part of his column — the Dorsets, 117th Mahrattas and a company of sappers — was to make

W

a demonstration while Brigadier-General Hoghton — with his own and the rest of Delamain's brigade — was to march on across the Turks' front to capture the redoubt near the Ataba marsh on the extreme left of their position. Once the flank attack was under way, Delamain's force was to follow on behind. Meanwhile, close to the river bank, MajorGeneral C. I. Fry's column 'B' was to press on with a frontal attack which would be F. A.

covered by the heavy guns dismounted from the gun barges during the night. The difficult part of the operation came

when Hoghton had to strike own. No reconnaissance of

off

on his

from his aeroplanes — and that was to the matters were going well. As Hoghton appeared to be making such slow progress, Delamain decided to carry on with his attack and when Hoghton saw what was happening he sent back a couple of battalions to help. For some strange reason he did not send the two other battalions of Delamain's own Kith Brigade, but the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, and the 119th Infantry from his own brigade. Once they had arrived, the Turkish trenches in front of Delamain were quickly captured and when Hoghton did eventually get into position the whole of the front line was soon rolled up. But by now the troops were pretty well exhausted and very, very thirsty. Except for the contents of their water bottles they had had no water since the night before and all day there had been a blazing sun and a hot dust-laden wind. Dead-beat and tired out, many of the men dropped and lay where they fell; thirst and exhaustion had produced such an effect that they could not understand an order. On the river bank, Fry, whose brigade had also got into difficulties, was looking for assistance from the right where, according to the plan, the Turks were supposed to collapse. In a message to Delamain he said that he would not be able effect that

to get any further unless Delamain could put in a flank attack towards the positions

turning

opposing him. Somehow Delamain's men were coaxed into a last supreme effort and, just before sunset, a bayonet charge over 1 ,000 yards of desert successfully brought them on to the Turks' positions at the limit of Fry's front. Night descended over the battlefield like a great black curtain and the troops, nearly all-in, lay down to snatch some rest. There was still no water for them; the river was over a mile away

suddenly

and the Turks lay across the direct route to Along the way they had come lay the wounded, many of them lying in long grass and spread over a wide area. Despite the

the

route

which had to be followed had been made, and yet greatest accuracy as to when to deploy and what direction to take was essential. So it was not really surprising that things went wrong. Shortly after 0500 hours Delamain wheeled off left, to face the Turks and start the attack which was to occupy their attention while the force marched on. Hoghton marched on but before long Delamain — and behind him Townshend in the divisional observation post — saw his column

veer

to

the

right.

Instead of

marching parallel to the Turkish front line, Hoghton was apparently heading obliquely away from it. What had happened was that the head of the coh'.nn had gone too far north before wheeling left and, when dawn came, Hoghton'', men were marching along the only strip of dry land between two marshes. Gradually this led them further over and further away from the Turks but unless the whole column was to be turned round there was no option but to continue and march completely round the Ataba marsh. Realising that it would be some time before the encircling attack on which Townshend had pinned his faith would go in, Delamain now had to decide whether to continue with his own attack or wait for Hoghton. The trenches in front of him were very strongly held but any delay might result in their being reinforced so there was a good case for an immediate attack. Making the decision to do so was complicated by the fact that both brigades were out of touch with divisional headquarters as well as each other. An attempt had been made to lay a telephone line behind the marching columns but the cable was constantly breaking, and the heavy mirage made heliograph communication almost impossible. There were, in fact, two pack wireless sets with the force but both of these new-fangled creations were on the ships and all the news that Townshend got came 1152

it.

general exhaustion it was essential that they should be collected and brought in or they would die. But the battle was as good as over. As soon as Townshend knew that Delamain's attack had been successful he had ordered the river flotilla to try to force a passage upstream to get at the Turks' bridge just below Kut. The difficulty was an obstruction just below the front line. Two iron barges had been run aground, one on either bank, and linked by iron cables to a sunken mahela in midstream. Turkish artillery commanded the whole reach and from trenches on the bank the obstruction itself was under point-blank fire from

machine guns and rifles. The ships steamed up under cover of darkness but as soon as they came within range the Turks opened fire with everything they had got. Steaming on at full tilt, the Comet, leading the convoy, tried to break the chains by ramming. But they held fast and the Comet's commander, Lieutenant-Commander Cookthen

ran

ship alongside the mahela to see what could be done. With his guns out of action and most of the crew wounded, Cookson himself grabbed an axe and leapt aboard the mahela to try to cut the cables; no sooner had he done so than he fell dead, hit in a score of places. For this action he was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. When it was clear that nothing further could be done a son,

his

withdrawal was ordered, and the flotilla pulled back downstream. The Turks were also pulling out. During the afternoon they had started to leave their positions on the right bank but, owing to the mirage, they had not been spotted. And on that side of the river it seems that they made a remarkable withdrawal, since they successfully got all their guns away. On the left bank, too, they had had enough. During the night most of them slipped off and, under the very noses of Fry and Delamain's tired men, got clean away. Next morning, when Townshend's troops had established that Nur-ud-Din was indeed retreating, a pursuit was organised and the cavalry was sent on to follow up the Turks. (So far they had contributed virtually nothing to the battle — although they had suffered quite a few casualties when they cantered in dense formation towards Delamain's brigade in the dusk of the previous evening and were mistaken for Turks or Arabs.) Kut was reached without mishap and found to be empty of Turks but, outside the town, just along the Baghdad road, the cavalry ran into the rearguard and its commander decided to hold off and await reinforcements. Meanwhile Townshend, who had probably anticipated a pursuit on similar lines to that in which he had found himself after Qurna, had reserved the river chase for himself; maybe he had hopes of entering Baghdad on the heels of the fugitives as he had at Al 'Amarah. If so, then he was doomed to disappointment, for on this occasion he had not taken into account the difficulties of navigating up the exasperating Tigris. With little water in the river in these reaches and many shoals to get past, his ships were stuck for two days near Kut and when they finally got off it was too late for any effective chase. Not that such a chase could have

been anything like that between Qurna and Al 'Amarah anyway; Nur-ud-Din's troops were retiring in good order along both banks and there was no rabble and no panic. The Turks got clean away. But even if the battle did not bring the perfect victory for which he had hoped, Townshend's stratagem was highly successful. (British and Indian casualties totalled 1,229

and

killed

wounded.

The

Turks

lost

1,700 killed or wounded and 1,289 prisoners were taken, together with 17 guns.) The outcome had hung in the balance whilst Hoghton was manoeuvring, but the actions of Delamain and Fry finally

brought victory.

Further Reading Barker, A. J.. The Bastard War (Faber & Faber 1967)

Barker, A. J

,

The Neglected War (Faber & Faber

1967)

Candler,

E.,

The Long Road

to

Baghdad

(Cassell 1919)

Corbett, Sir Julian, Naval Operations

Volume

3 (Longmans, Green 1923) Critical Study of the Campaign in Mesopotamia

up

to April

1917 (Government

of India

Press 1925)

Sandes, E. W. C., In Kut and Captivity (Murray 1919) The Campaign in Mesopotamia (HMSO 1923)

[For A.

J.

Barker's biography, seepage 434.

]

STEPPING STONE TO INDIA With her resources already overstretched on the Eastern Front, Russia had few men to spare for an offensive against Turkey in 1915, yet by the end of the year Russian action on the Caucasian Front had checked Turkish ambitions and removed any chance of Persia becoming a tool in the hands of the Central Powers. Eugene Hinterhoff. Above: Turkish ski troops in Persia nr>;{

Below: The first Russian armoured car to arrive in Tehran. The sudden appearance of Russian troops in the Persian capital foiled German plans to subvert the Persian government and draw her into the ranks of the Central Powers Opposite top: Kurdish cavalry. Attracted by the prospect of loot, they fought as irregulars for the Turks Opposite Russian infantry in Persian Azerbaijan

When, under strong German pressure, Turkey eventually entered the war on October 29, 1914 by bombarding some Russian ports, neither Britain nor Russia had any concrete plans for taking advantage of strategic possibilities for big scale operations, or for an outflanking manoeuvre within the triangle consisting of Armenia, Azerbaijan and the northern tip of Persian territory (Persian Azerbaijan). No staff talks between Russia and Britain, aimed at co-ordinating grand strategy in that part of the world in even the most general terms, had been held. Such co-operation developed only in 1915 and then only as a result of common fear of German subversive activities in Persia, which threatened to expand towards Afghanistan and India. As a whole, the Russian posture at the outbreak of war could be described as a defensive one, especially as the Russians realised that the Turks were not ready for offensive operations. The

Russian initiative in offensive action, undertaken by General Bergmann in Armenia, almost ended in disaster for the Russians. As far as the Turks were concerned, in their operational planning they overlooked very favourable possibilities in this area (especially along the Caspian Sea) for a deep outflanking manoeuvre, which would have cut off the Russians from Persia and from any operational contact with the British, who were operating in the south of Persia and in Mesopotamia. Enver's plans for a winter offensive, against the cautious advice of General Liman von Sanders as well as of Izzet Pasha, were based upon the classical concept of an outflanking manoeuvre by two pincers. The planning was shallow and had to be executed in difficult terrain, and his difficulties were considerably aggravated by extremely severe winter conditions. Consequently, when war broke out, and developed into a major confrontation in the Caucasus, hostilities in northern Persia were characterised h\ skirmishes between Turkish and Russian regular units, and, above all, the activities of Kurdish bands, who took this opportunity to plunder and murder the civilian population, especially Christi; ns. For many years, Kurdish tribes, on both sides of the disputed oundary, were prone to plunder, but had been kept quiet by the pi ence of Russian cavalry units stationed all over northern Azerba in. At the beginning, w. en early encounters were taking place, the 1154

Russians proved to be stronger and managed to drive the Turks out, in particular into the area of Lake Van. The Kurds, attracted

by the prospects of

loot, rallied to

the Turks, forcing the Russians

As a result of an inexplicable order, issued by General Myshlaevsky at the end of December, 1914, at the peak of Enver's

to retreat.

winter offensive, to evacuate Persian Azerbaijan, the Turks, reinforced with Turkish volunteers, entered Tabriz on January 14, 1915. The town had been evacuated by the retreating Russian troops earlier in the month. The entire area, especially the Christian community, was suddenly at the mercy of roving bands of Kurds and Turkish volunteers, encouraged by Turkish agents who distributed arms and money in order to help them.

Russian initiative Having received information about the Russian withdrawal from Persian Azerbaijan, Enver ordered two divisions (the 36th and 37th) to exploit the situation: the Turkish entry into Tabriz was hailed by Turkish propaganda as an important victory, in an to offset the collapse of Enver's winter offensive. At the time, one of the first reactions of General Yudenich, Commander-in-Chief in the field in the Caucasus, was to restore the situation in Persian Azerbaijan. On his orders, General Chernozubov, who was in command of Russian troops in Russian Azerbaijan, withdrew into Russian territory, and, on Myshlaevsky's orders, marched from Jolfa on Tabriz. During January 26/8 Turkish irregular units, some 400 to 500 strong, were trying to resist in the Sufian area, but were dispersed without much difficulty, and on January 30, Chernozubov re-entered Tabriz. In the meantime, his subordinate, General Nazarbekov, managed to push regular Turkish troops towards Baskale, and the situation was brought under Russian control, at least for the time being. Enver. encouraged by the initial successes in Persian Azerbaijan, was already busy planning a grandiose Pan-Turanian and PanIslamic uprising, a Jehad of all Moslems against the Russians, to be conducted with the full support of the Turkish armed forces. He entrusted command of this, to his uncle, Halil Bey, who, after his arrival on the scene in the middle of January, began organising the whole enterprise in earnest.

attempt

same

The defeat of Enver's winter offensive, the Anglo-French assault on the Dardanelles, and active British preparations for an offensive action in Mesopotamia, had now created a favourable atmosphere for more energetic Russian initiative. Theoretically, the area of Persian Azerbaijan afforded the Russians the possibility of an advance across Nestorian country, through Rawiindiz, into Mesopotamia, there linking with the British, after having completely outflanked the Turks in the Armenian Taurus mountains. Such a plan, if it had succeeded, would have contributed greatly to Turkey's defeat in a vast area of Asia; it would have also prevented Britain's humiliation at Kut. Unfortunately, such plans would have involved very considerable forces and great logistical difficulties. In the eyes of Russian General Staff, the Caucasian Front was always secondary, and consequently Yudenich could not have hoped to receive substantial reinforcements for such a plan; furthermore, to the cautious Yudenich, who had been watching with growing apprehension the re-organisation of Turkish army, such a plan would have appeared a bit too adventurous; he chose, instead, a more limited alternative, namely an offensive on Malazgirt and Mu^, where the main Turkish concentration was taking place. However, he decided to support his main effort by an outflanking manoeuvre from Bayazit in the direction of Van, and also from Persian Azerbaijan in the same direction. The main Russian effort was preceded by several battles in the area of Lake Van; in April 1915 Turkish troops, under the command of Halil, reinforced by Turkish volunteers and Kurds, moved in the general direction of Tabriz; in a battle at Shahpur, the Russian troops, under the command of Chernozubov, inflicted heavy losses on the Turks and forced them to retreat; the Kurds, demoralised by Russian artillery fire, deserted on the night of May 1/2. In the meantime, the exasperated civilian population rose in revolt, and took possession of the ancient city of Van. When Yudenich heard about these events, and was pressed by fleeing civilians for help, he sent a brigade of Trans-Baikal Cossacks, under General Trukhin, reinforced by several Armenian volunteers, in the general direction of Van. At the same time Yudenich despatched the whole Caucasian Cavalry Division to Tabriz and neighbouring area, aiming by this massive display of cavalry to raise the morale of the population and to restore peace and stability.

After a few more encounters, General Trukhin's forces entered (which had been besieged for weeks by Turkish volunteers) and was greeted enthusiastically by its inhabitants. During the whole summer of that year the fighting was localised predominantly n the area of Lake Van. In September, the Grand Duke Nicholas, the uncle of the Tsar, who was persuaded to leave his post of Commander-in-Chief of the Eastern Front, to the Emperor, arrived in Tiflis, to replace the Viceroy, Count Vorontsov-Dashkov, and to assume the command of the Caucasian Front.

Van

i

German espionage One

of his first decisions

was

to establish operational

contact

with the British in Persia, and then grasp the opportunity to put an end to the increase in subversive activities promoted by German agents, operating not only in Persia but also in neighbouring countries. The history of those daring and enterprising German agents is really a fascinating one yet little known in the West. German penetration into Persia began several years before the war, especially after 1909, when Wassmus, an able German agent, who was fluent in several local languages, was appointed as German consul in Persia. Entertaining lavishly, and spending money on anti-British propaganda, he organised a proGerman confederacy, with considerable success. Wassmus, who was on leave in Germany when war broke out. reappeared in Persia in January 1915, with a small party of Germans and seditious Indians. His activities coincided with those of Count Kaunitz, German military attache in Tehran, who had much greater ambitions than Wassmus, aiming at overthrowing the Persian government by a military putsch, and replacing it by another government ready to enter into war againsl Britain and Russia alongside the Central Powers. Kaunitz had organised a military force, composed of a few hundred German residents

in

Persia, as well

as several

hundred German and

Austrian prisoners of war, who had managed to escape from Russian camps in Azerbaijan. In addition, Kaunitz had succeeded in recruiting thousands of Persian 'levies', and some Swedish officers, who were employed by the Persian government as mst ructors of Persian gendarmerie.

I

L55

Kaunitz disappears: assassination or suicide? Top left: A Turkish sentry, well protected against the extremely bitter winter of northern Persia. As formidable in appearance as his fellow soldiers were in action, poor leadership was the major cause of his defeat

Bottom in

left: The area of Russian operations Persian Azerbaijan

Below: Feldmarschall von der Goltz. He planned back down the Tigris, expel the Russians and the British from Persia, liberate' Persia from British influence and form a Persian army under his leadership; such an army would have had Afghanistan and India to drive the British

as

its

eventual targets

Bottom right: General Yudenich, the Russian Commander-in-Chief in the field in the Caucasus. Lack of men and resources prevented him from pursuing an ambitious plan to drive south so as to outflank the Turks and link up with the British in Mesopotamia Opposite: Turkish cavalry

in

Persian Azerbaijan

1156 mm V

All these activities by German agents in Persia were only a part of an imaginative plan, framed at the of the German military mission in Constantinople, in co-operation, of course, with the Turks. In general terms, this plan aimed at driving the British down the Tigris, expelling the Russians and British from Persia, liberating Persia and the formation of a Persian army under Feldmarschall von der Goltz, who for this purpose left Constantinople for Baghdad in November 1915. If this plan had succeeded, then Afghanistan, where German agents were active, could have held out no longer, and India would have become the next and easy target of the victorious coalition. As Winston Churchill said in The World Crisis, 'the true strategic objectives of Germany in 1916 were in the Black Sea and in the Caspian they were within her grasp and required no effort beyond

HQ

.

.

.

her strength'. In accordance with this plan the Turks began slowly moving their troops in the general direction of Kermanshah and Hamadan, in order to support a planned German subversive coup. This meant increasing danger for the British and Russian Legations and the European residents in Tehran, and compelled the Persian government, unable to keep the situation under control, to ask the Russians for help.

Count Kaunitz disappears On orders from Yudenich, a

considerable force, consisting of a

Caucasian cavalry division, a Cossack division and two Cossack regiments, plus two infantry regiments and 28 horse and mountain-guns, under the command of General Baratov, was transported by sea and landed in November in Bandar-e PahlavT, on the southern shore of the Caspian. Count Kaunitz's efforts to forestall the arrival of the Russians in Tehran by a too hastily organised putsch misfired.

The young Shah Ahmet took refuge

in the

Russian Legation, and the pro-German members of the Mejlis (Parliament) together with some 300 Persian gendarmes fled

Qom and to Kermanshah. Thus the first task of Baratov's mission was successfully completed without a single shot being fired; the next step was to clear Qom and Hamadan of pro-German elements. An advance on these cities began in December 1915, marking the beginning of Russian operations in Persia proper. to

By the end of 1915, von der Goltz had arrived in Kermanshah to consult Kaunitz and disgruntled members of the Mejlis who had fled from Tehran before the approaching Russians. After acquainting himself with the whole situation von der Goltz must have come to the pessimistic conclusion that all hopes of bringing Persia into an alliance with Turkey and Germany must be dismissed as unrealistic. However, in order to remain loyal to his potential allies, he ordered a Turkish battalion from Iraq to Kermanshah, putting it under Kaunitz. Baratov was continuing to concentrate his troops in Qa/.vin. but before the concentration was complete, he sent one brigade to Hamadan on December 3. After a brief encounter with Persian gendarmes, the Russians took the city. Three weeks later, after a fierce battle with a Turkish battalion, which suffered heavy losses, and with Persian gendarmes, the Russians took Qom, already abandoned by pro-German members of the Mejlis. Count Kaunitz disappeared without trace; there were rumours that he was assassinated by his disenchanted Persian supporters. According to another version, he committed suicide. On orders from the Grand Duke, Baratov began to liquidate the centre of German activities in Kermanshah. He entered Kerinan shah on February 22, 1916 and by March he could count his mission, which was to prevent Persia becoming a tool in the hands of Central Powers, as completed. Yet, in spite of Russian successes in northern Persia, German agents were still active in the south in the beginning of 1916, where they had looted several banks and damaged buildings and port installations. However, these activities did not alter the fact that ambitious German plans in Persia had been brought to an end by energetic Russian action. 1

Further Reading

W. E..D. and Muratoff, P Caucasian Battlefields (Cambridge University Press 1953) Churchill, W. S,, The World Crisis (Thornton & Butterworth) Pykes, Sir Percy, A History of Persia (Macmillan 1930) Allen,

,

Sykes, C,

Wassmus-the Great German Lawrence (Longmans Green

1936)

[For

Eugene Hinterhoff's biography,

see page 502.]

1151

STRATEGY AND SUPPLY IN THE DESERT The experience of maintaining an effective fighting force under desert conditions came as a rude shock to the authorities in London and Delhi. Within a short time the problems of supply, especially of medical care, proved too great for the available resources, and as these services approached breaking point the British and Indian troops were obliged to endure appalling privations as a normal part of their everyday life. A. J. Barker. Below and opposite: The Animal Transport Cart and the mule were, after river transport, the mainstay of a grossly inadequate supply service. Mesopotamia became notorious for monotonous food and the sufferings of the wounded. To those who have never seen the country it

is difficult to

appreciate the conditions

under which the campaign in Mesopotamia fought. The whole theatre of operations was flat, and there were no trees and practically no landmarks. Consequently it was difficult to locate one's position, and this induced a sense of isolation and an impotent feeling of being lost. During the day mirages often obscured the occasional banks of ancient canals that provided such landmarks as there were. The same mirage would also distort and confuse all objects a mile or so away, giving them a false impression of movement, so that sentries and outposts reported small bushes as cavalry, and birds as infantry patrols. The only permanent feature in the area was the Tigris, 300 to 600 yards wide and about 20 feet deep in the so-called dry season and, until one was within a few yards of it, the mirage usually made it impossible to see even this great river. With the melting of the snows in the north, the Tigris was subject to rises of 20 feet or more, and between March and May — sometimes even

was

in January — it would flood the surrounding countryside. Owing to the peculiar conditions under which alluvial ground is formed, the Tigris actually flows on the highest part of the country — although the slopes are quite imperceptible. The result was that these slopes not only added to the difficulty of observation across the river from the far bank, but — as soon as the floods topped its banks — the water spilled over to form great inundations on both sides. To prevent this the Arabs often built a bund (bank) along the river's edge to help to confine it. Under the effect of rain or flood the country was turned into a morass of particularly tenacious mud. In dry weather this broke up into dust, and duststorms occurred frequently. At many places the Arabs had dug water cuts through the bund on the river bank to irrigate their fields. Such cuts offered good covered communication and a ready-made trench, surprisingly inconspicuous at a short distance. Most of the surface of the terrain remained bare throughout the year, but in the spring

W -

much of it would be covered by grass which grew to a height of about 18 inches. Here and there, especially in the vicinity of the river, there were bushes and low scrub. Tactically the most important point was that away from the river there was practically no drinking water to be found. In the winter the nights were cold — often below freezing point — and during the first four months of the year there was a good deal of rain. In the summer, however, the temperature rose to 130 F in the shade, and there was no shade. After April the persistent hot wind which is a feature of the climate brought some relief during the day, breaking the stifling stillness, and flinging sand and dust into the faces of the sweating soldiers. It was cooler, but men then ate sand, breathed sand, lay in sand, and had sand in their ears and eyes and clothes. Then, in May 1916, the fighting round Kut provided a plethora of excellent breeding places for the flies, which already existed in inconceivable myriads. When the flies disappeared at night their places were taken by mosquitoes and sandflies.

There were other kinds of discomfort, and different kinds of heat — the moist and tropical heat of the swamps of the Euphrates and the Shatt al Arab, the parched and desert heat of the Tigris and Karun. Each variety had its own attendant insects and ailments, which often took the form of boils and eruptions. On the Karun men were stricken with what was known locally

— the legacy of some poisonous the 'Baghdad boil' and the 'Aleppo date' were other ailments. as 'dog-rot' fly;

Critical shortage of transport Shortage of transport was the most

critical

campaign and a feature which was immediately and painfully impressed on every newcomer to Mesopotamia. On arrival at the front in January 1916, the factor in the

fighting man found his unit almost devoid of any means of conveyance. There were no cook or water carts, and in many cases no pack animals even for machine guns or ammunition. In the early attempts to relieve Kut many of the troops went into action with regimental reserves of ammunition man-handled by carrying parties. Such limitations imposed crippling restrictions on mobility; and the inevitable

result was that men were constantly on short rations. There was no fresh food, no vegetables and even the authorised allowance of standard ration articles frequently had to be severely curtailed. Nor was there any fuel available with which to cook the rations — a particularly serious matter for the Indian troops. The discomfort involved, and the inability to provide fires, especially in weather that was cold and wet, undoubtedly had its effects on the men's health. There were, of course, no comforts or canteens; nor would there have been any means of moving them even if they had

There were very few tents, and even the sick and wounded often had to lie in the open or dangerously crowded.

existed.

The British troops who took part in the campaign to relieve Kut arrived piecemeal from France, Egypt and India. More often than not regimental transport would not long after the units themHeadquarters were separated from their commands, and units split up. The result was that formations were hurriedly created, reinforcement drafts thrown together into units, composite battalions formed from detachments regardless of incompatibility of temperament, and staff and commands hastily improvised. And, so arrive

until

selves.

High Command was concerned, the one lesson which had been so forcibly impressed upon the Indian Corps in France — the vital necessity of comparatively young and physically fit men being in charge — had not been learned in Mesopotamia. Yet this was even more important in Mesopotamia than in France, where some relief and comfort could be obtained after periods of strain. Many of the reinforcements arrived in the rain and hail of January 1916 clad in khaki drill and there were no stocks of clothing in Mesopotamia to re-equip them. Artillery ammunition was also in short supply, and the men who came from France were armed with rifles sighted to take a mark of ammunition which was not yet available in Mesopotamia. There were no grenades, no Very lights and no periscopes for use in the trenches before Kut — although the Turks had them. Means of communication were hopelessly inadequate. As wireless was a comparatively recent service innovation, it was to be expected that radios would be available only at corps and army far as the

headquarters. The field telephone was the accepted means of passing messages; but. because of a shortage of trained signallers and cable, brigades and battalions were virtually reduced to visual methods (flags, lamps and heliographs) or to runners.

No maps, no sketches At the beginning of the year there were no maps worthy of the name, nor even reconnaissance sketches of the area in which the operations took place. Attempts were made to produce a rough half-inch map, pieced together from sketches made from .the air or on the ground by staff officers. But air photography was in its infancy, and a shortage of aircraft limited the amount of information that could be derived from aerial observation. Similarly, because the activity of the Arabs hampered ground reconnaissance and even topographical information could seldom be obtained without fighting for it, ground surveys were restricted. As a result it was not until the middle of the summer that accurate maps began to be produced. The shortcomings of the British and Indian medical services led to an official investigation; and it is sufficient to say that from the point of view of the man at the front they were appalling. Until well into 1916 the only method of removing the wounded from the battlefields was by means of springless 'A.T.' (Animal Transport) carts, and the suffering thus caused to fracture cases requires no comment.

mud the carts often stuck, reason to believe that many of the wounded who were reported as having died from exposure actually drowned in mud. Even when a casualty arrived on the river bank his condition was little better. Then, in a crowded line on the bare iron deck of a steel barge with the rain and the hail driving down on him, he was lucky if he got a share of a blanket. The number of doctors and medical orderOwing

to the

and there

is

lies available was utterly insufficient to deal with the enormous number of cases and, even if this had not been so, medical supplies were quite inadequate. Wounded often went many days without it being possible to change their first field dressings, or to replace the splints hastily improvised on the battlefield from rifles or pieces of wood; because of the climatic conditions.

1

1

59

many

of

them were

also suffering from It was a state of

diarrhoea or dysentery.

which baffles description, and one which was hound to lower morale.

affairs

A sense of impotence Then there were the taetieal difficulties: the difficulty o\ maintaining direction and o\ self-location, the dependence on compasses (of which very tew wore available), the apparent impossibility of observation, the disheartening effect of moving forward to attack an unseen enemy under a hail of bullets whose source was invisible. All these factors combined to induce a depressing sense oi' impotence. And if this were not enough, the difficulty of distinguishing friend from foe. of locating one's own flanks and of judging distances must also be compounded with it. The terrain itself was par excellence a country of the defensive. Not only did the water cuts form ready-made trenches, but digging was extremely easy and earthworks which were difficult to distinguish as such could be thrown up very quickly.

Something must now be said about the

much maligned

local

Arabs,

who may be

said to have had a disproportionate influence on the campaign — at any rate in its initial stages. Their attitude was not hostile to the British and Indian troops in particular; it was just that they objected to anyone coming to their country and attempting to control them. They were out for loot and fully prepared to pillage the losing side — Turk or British — quite impartially. A large proportion of them were mounted, and although their ponies were small they were capable of outriding the heavily burdened British and Indian cavalry. They never risked a fight with

1

lb(>

any

force that appeared to be able to look after itself, but hung around at extreme ranges, firing their rifles from the saddle at the closely-packed British and Indian cavalry units and watching for any opportunity to cut off small parties. Expert thieves, their exploits in getting through obstacles unobserved at night outdid even the best known instances of Pathan achievements on the North-West Frontier of India. Being out for plunder they had no hesitation about despoiling the dead, and corpses would be dug up for the sake of their clothing and boots; this meant that burial places had to be carefully concealed. To sum up, it can be said that fear of Arab action had a pronounced effect on the dispositions of troops throughout the operations, and the effective strength of the British expeditionary force was reduced because of the precautions that had to be taken. Had it been possible to take vigorous effective action against them it is probable that the Arabs' nuisance value would have been greatly reduced. But lack of good cavalry leadership, the political situation, and the hopeless shortage of transport precluded this. Let us turn now to the development of the administrative services from 1914 to the end of the Kut relief operations. In November 1914, when General Barrett captured Basra with the 6th Indian Division, his river transport consisted of three river steamers, 17 lighters (whose total carrying capacity was 2,540 tons) and a number of mahelas, each with a capacity of 25 to 30 tons when the river was at its lowest. At this time policy dictated that the expeditionary force was not to advance very far from Basra. However, it was recognised that operations would probably have "

extend as far as Al 'Amarah and An and at a conference in Basra on November 23, 1914 Barrett's staff urged that 12 river steamers should be brought from India. But the limited scope of the to

Niisirlyah,

operations evidently acted as a deterrent and nothing was done. Two months later, when the Indian government contemplated operations above Qurna, Barrett said that

he would need seven more steamers and two lighters as well as more troops and 500 mules. Meanwhile the Turks had advanced to Shaiba and pushed towards Ahvaz, while a British brigade of reinforcements had arrived from Egypt and the nucleus of the 12th Division from India. In May the river fleet was increased by seven steamers, four tugs and two lighters from India — bringing the fleet total up to ten steamers, four tugs and 19 lighters. No further increase took place until January 1916. Thus, because of the extra commitments and increased number of troops, the mobility of the force had actually decreased by June 1915. Before the advance to Al 'Amarah could begin, the steamers used by General Gorringe on the Karun had to be returned; the operations culminating in the capture of An Na^irTyah could not be staged until a month after Al 'Amarah, and the battle of Es Sinn was not fought until September 1915 for the same reason. There were enough troops but insufficient

steamers

to

undertake

simultaneous

operations. In July 1915 an attempt was made to remedy the situation when General Nixon's

asked India for six paddle steamers, two stern wheelers, eight tugs and 42 barges. But it was not until November that staff

the authorities in Delhi actually ordered these vessels, and the first of the paddle

steamers did not reach Basra until June 1916 — a whole year after they had been

demanded. All the others arrived in and some were not ready until January 1917. When asking for the vessels, Nixon's staff had warned Delhi that if they were not soon forthcoming there were 'grave risks of a breakdown at possibly a serious moment'. In effect a breakdown was already inevitable. At the time the demand sections

was made the strength of the expeditionary was less than half what had to be supplied eight months later, and the breakdown began in November 1915 when the available daily supply was 150 tons and the daily requirement 208 tons. The worst force

crisis

occurred in April 1916

when the daily

than half what was needed. On January 21, 1916 when the first battle of Hanna was fought there were 10,000 infantry and 12 guns immobilised in Basra; on March 8, the date of the battle of Ad Dujayl, 12,000 men and 26 guns were absent from the decisive point for the same reason. Thus, from Qurna to the attempts to capture Baghdad and again in the attempt to relieve Kut, the inadequacy of tonnage available was

less

British hospital

paddle steamer No 5 on the

Tigris.

Bottleneck at Basra But even if shipping itself had been plentiful, the port of Basra would have been

as late as July 1916 it was still quite normal for a ship to spend six weeks in Basra before it could be turned round — this, at a time when every ton of shipping was vital to the war effort. An expert in these matters, Sir George Buchanan, sent out from India to investigate, reported: 'The military expedition to Basra is, I believe, unique, inasmuch as in no previous case has such an enormous force been landed and maintained without an ade-

incapable of dealing with it. In November 1915 the facilities there for unloading seatransports were only slightly less primitive than those which had existed when the place was captured a year before. Only a few wooden piers were available and ships had to anchor in mid-stream to discharge their cargoes into the tiny native boats — necessarily a long, tedious business. Even

quately prepared base.' Not until the end of 1916, when a ship's turn-round had been cut to three weeks, did improvements at the port start to be effective and even then the river, which had to supply an army of 120,000 men more than 200 miles from Basra, was still a bottleneck. It was no better than a single-track railway which one might logically have

river transport weakened or paralysed the striking powers of the force.

By 1916 the medical service was

in

chaos

supposed would have been put in hand

much earlier. In actual fact, the construction of a railway line from Basra to An Na§iriyah had been suggested as early as February but the wherewithal for it had not been forthcoming from India. It is fair to add that the authorities in Delhi had enquired whether a light railway -for which 137 miles of material existed — would be suitable. But apart from this the idea had been shelved until August, when Nixon again asked for one. Despite repeated reminders, no reply from India was forthcoming until November, and then Nixon was curtly informed that the expense prohibited government sanction of such a project. The reply had taken three months; when it did come disaster was hanging over the army in Mesopotamia. Admittedly, if construction had been sanctioned in Febru-

some with barges tied alongside, the Tigris for the Battle of Ctesiphon

British ships,

move up

11(51

Nixon's request, since

it

was Duff who

failed to press for a railway on the grounds of urgent military necessity. Nixon prob-

ably erred in putting forward an argument which was not directly related to his own sphere, but on Duff must fall the onus of the idea's final rejection. Not until the British War Office stepped in to control operations was approval for the construction of a railway sanctioned and it took the fall of Kut for that to happen. Eventually, by late 1916, it was possible to travel from Basra to An NajjirTyah quickly in comparative comfort; and when the first train from Basra rolled into Baghdad in August 1917, it had covered the 180 miles separating the two towns in 12 hours. By river the same journey would have covered twice the distance and taken two full days.

advance post on the

At an

Tigris,

Turkish prisoners wait to be shipped to a

camp

at

Basra

River transport pre-eminent would start work

not have been possible to until the floods subsided and consequently is doubtful whether it sufficient track would have been laid in time for the railway to have had any real influence on the disasters which followed the battle of Ctesiphon. But this is about the only argument that can be found to excuse the behaviour of the government of India. If those in charge appreciated that a great war was in progress then they would appear to have been sadly lacking in sense of responsibility. Undoubtedly the perceptions of those who ruled India had been dulled by the years of stringent economy that preceded the war, and Nixon made the mistake of linking his demand with the commercial prospects of a railway in the postwar era instead of confining himself to the military requirement. To the men who regarded themselves as patriotic guardians of India's resources this was a matter of exercising their powers of curtailment, and the contemporary comments that the Finance

ary

it

still

Member made on October seem

5,

1915 would

to support this view:

/ confess to being somewhat sceptical as to the line being so remunerative as is at present represented. Apart from this, it is perfectly clear that in present circum-

stances we cannot embark on large expenditure on such a project for other than the most urgent military reasons. We have already cut our own railway programme in India to the quick. Further, we have at

Captured Turkish ration dhows used

present no right to act as if we were certain of getting Mesopotamia after the war. If, however, His Excellency the Commanderin-Chief can definitely assure me that this project is absolutely necessary for the safeguarding of our military position, I cannot of course resist a reference home. In that event it will be necessary to indicate to the Secretary of State that the cost must fall

on the

Home

Government.

The guarded reference to a postwar settlement was the key to the way the minds of the Indian government worked; nowhere in the Finance Member's minute was there any evidence of concern for the safety and well-being of the troops. If there is any excuse to be found for this attitude then it must lie in the fact that when the minute was written the advance on Baghdad was being contemplated. Once Baghdad had been taken — and success then seemed certain to those back in India

— no further geographical objectives were envisaged. Presumably it was on this basis that it was hoped the railway would no longer be necessary. Having said this, it should be remembered that many of the difficulties which faced the troops in Mesopotamia also ought

to

have been known

in

India — extreme heat in summer and the disease and discomforts which were likely to attend fit men, let alone the wounded — and a railway would have helped to alleviate these hardships. Yet General Sir Beauchamp Duff, the Commander-in-Chief, apparently was not prepared to endorse

to alleviate the British

supply problem

in

Mesopotamia

So far, consideration of the administrative problems seems to have dwelt wholly on

and rail transport difficulties when it might be expected that first thoughts would

river

be concerned with roads. In these days of mechanised movement the problem would have been very different, for there was plenty of oil available at Kirkuk, whereat the place of 'Eternal Fires' — oil had been burning for over 2,000 years. But in 1915 the motor vehicle was still in its infancy and as yet unsuited to the undeveloped regions of the East. Everything comes back to the river. From biblical times animals had provided the only means of land transport in Mesopotamia, and animals, like men. need food, and fodder had to be brought from India. Like men also, they need water, so that movement in this flat, featureless terrain was tied to the The point has already been made that in the hot weather movement was handicapped because there was no drinking arid,

river.

water to be found away from it; and it must again be stressed that in the flood season the whole plain became a morass of sticky mud, virtually impassable to land transport. Add to these circumstances considerations of the lack of roads, shortage of animals, carts, drivers, fodder and grazing, and the common denominator of the British administrative problems in Mesopotamia stands out: the only means of travel was on the rivers. The shortage of shipping reacted on the question of supply very early in the campaign. One great difficulty was the transport of vegetables in barges which were unsuitable; another, that all fuel had to be brought from India as the local palm wood was too wet to burn. Nor were the supply services alive to the local resources of the country, and to begin with all supplies came from India. Large quantities of local

were readily obtainable but it was not end of 1915 that Indian troops were asked whether they would consent to eat it. As the local rice was of inferior rice

until the

quality to that being issued, they naturally chose the Indian rice. The Indian ration itself soon proved unsuitable. It had been fixed in 1912 on a scale sufficient for short frontier campaigns and had only been slightly modified. (In 1915 it was reported that the ration had certain intrinsic defects and an enquiry was recommended into its calorific value, vitamin content and anti-scorbutic properties.) The British ration was increased

and varied more 1162

easily,

although in the

hot weather articles like butter and cheese arrived at the front in a highly active state. The original organisation of the Mesopotamia expeditionary force was on a lower basis than for a frontier campaign. The medical organisation in India did not cater in for a very rapid expansion and the Delhi kept back a reserve for frontier campaigns which might well have been used

GHQ

in

Mesopotamia.

War

Establishments pro-

vided for eight ambulance tongas (a kind of pony and trap) to be allotted to each field ambulance unit. But the expeditionary force was sent off with extra riding mules in lieu of the tongas, because it was thought that operations would only take place on the river banks and that in any case the country was unsuitable for wheels. (In view of this premise it is suprising that A.T. carts were not left behind.)

Medical services chaotic The first two motor ambulances to serve in Mesopotamia were used with very good results at Ctesiphon, where they worked between the

battlefield

at Lajj, ten miles

down

and the steamers river.

On

the sea,

hospital ship came to Basra in November 1915, and evacuated the wounded from the battle of Es Sinn in September. There was no special accommodation for sick or wounded on the rivers, as Nixon's chief medical officer considered that specially fitted mahelas would be sufficient. When an action was imminent the usual procedure was for two mahelas to be tied to the sides of the river steamer which contained the fighting troops. (The Turks often complained of this misuse of the Red Cross.) It was not until April 1916 that the first hospital river steamer, the Sikkim, came into service.

the

first

British troops cross a bridge over the

terrain

No base

general or clearing hospital

accompanied the expeditionary force to Mesopotamia and although the fighting troops had doubled their strength by March 1915 none was sent out from India. Moreover the reinforcements arrived in the theatre without field ambulances. By February 1916 the force under General Aylmer had increased to two divisions and a cavalry brigade. But for seven extra sections of field ambulances, however the medical units sufficed for one division only. In Basra, hospital comforts were, on the whole, satisfactory — although there were no fans until 1916. But want of shipping made their distribution well nigh impossible above the base. In 1915 instructions were issued to the troops on how to treat cases of heat stroke with ice baths; yet ice could be obtained only in the hospitals at Basra. In spite of all such problems and confusion, however, the medical arrange-

ments worked

fairly

satisfactorily

up

to

the crisis of Ctesiphon, and the authorities could point to the comparatively low sick rate in 1916. Improvisation — an ability at which British troops excel; the efficiency with which adequate sanitary arrangements and precautions against epidemic diseases were put into effect; the superhuman efforts of the doctors and medical orderlies in the field, and the fact that the force was composed almost entirely of regular troops whose discipline was superb, all contributed to this state of affairs. In 1916 however the real harvest of disease was reaped, when the transport, supply and medical services broke down almost simultaneously. What were the reasons for this happening? Firstly, the root of the evil lay in the failure of the men in Whitehall and Delhi to square

swampy

which bedevilled communications

J®*&jS !

political ends with military means. At the beginning of the campaign the authorities had no clear vision of Baghdad, but followed a patchwork policy which grew even more ambitious. In consequence the expeditionary force was ill-found to meet the privations and hardships inseparable from campaigning in Mesopotamia. As General Gorringe said later: 'It was believed to be a side-show'.

Secondly, the campaign was controlled by India, where the atmosphere was un-

favourable to reform or change. Thirdly, there was no co-ordination of between the civil and military effort authorities — something which had not

been

satisfactorily

much

less in India.

settled

in

England,

The Indian government

was not

fitted or organised to control a large expedition overseas; the civil executive did not understand the difficult climatic conditions of the campaign, and the military failed to press their requirements and to exploit civil resources.

Further Reading Barker, A. J., The Bastard War (Faber & Faber 1967) Barker, A. J., The Neglected War (Faber & Faber 1967) Candler, E., The Long Road to Baghdad (Cassell 1919) Sandes, E. W. C, In Kut and Captivity (Murray 1919)

The Campaign

(HMSO

in

Mesopotamia 1914-1918

1923)

Townshend, Maj-Gen. Sir Charles, My Campaign in Mesopotamia (Butterworth 1920) Wilson, Sir A. T., Loyalties: Mesopotamia 1914-1917 (OUP 1930) [For A.

J.

Barker's biography, seejpage 434.

,

t

'-*

j#

-^

-

r

-i1ii[«riiiilf

**$N*>

The Arch

of Ctesiphon, only 20

milesiotfn Baghdad, high water

mark ofTownshe*ndV^l5a^J. Here was fought a

t

'

act ically

indecisive battle in which

both sides were badly mauled, but which proved to bo'strategically disastrous forFJri tain

^*

Major-General H.H. Rich. Above:. Eighty feet high, the Arch of Ctesiphon was vfsibl for mi lew around

Ml I

The high mast of the Firefly was a ranging mark for the

Turkish gunners

V

HMS Firefly, the first of the river gunboats specially designed for Mesopotamia. Displacement: 98 tons. Length: 126 feet. Beam: 20 feet. Power/speed: 175 hp/9.5 knots. Armament: One 4-inch, one 12-pounder and five or eight machine guns. Crew: 22 D> The Firefly in action on the Tigris

The 18th Brigade, which, of Es Sinn, had embarked

after the battle in river steamers for the pursuit of the fleeing Turks,

reached Aziziya on October 5, 1914, and established an entrenched camp on the left bank of the Tigris. By October 11 the whole of the 6th Divisio mder General Towns-

hend was establisht

Then

there.

followed a p od of considerable, not to say frenzied, p*. tical and strategic confusion. All authorii s wished to capture Baghdad and all, <>xcept General Nixon, were apprehensive of the risk involved. Nixon was obsessed ith Baghdad,

1166

;

and there is no doubt that it was an important Turkish base and its capture would have had great political effect in the East. Yet it had no military value as such. Nixon always had a poor opinion of the Turkish leadership, which was right, .and of the fighting qualities of the infantry, which was wrong. In the last two battles it was the commander, not the troops, who had been defeated. Moreover, his own troops had been campaigning for nearly a year in very hot weather and in adverse physical conditions. They had had no leave, little rest and no amenities. Food

was poor, monotonous and, at times, short. Although morale was high the units were below strength and could only be made up by drafts now arriving in Basra. In the case of the British troops these were mainly new to the Middle East and its special problems. With the Indians training had been inadequate, but the worst shortage was in British officers. To a greater degree than with the British, Indian troops tend to work better with officers who know and understand their varied customs and languages. Nixon's undue optimism that he was in a position to capture

Baghdad

is

best sura-

!*

med up

in his own words: 'unless unfavourable contingencies intervene, the troops at my disposal are sufficient to occupy

Baghdad'. Major-General Charles Townshend, the commander of the 6th Division, whose troops had to bear the brunt of the fighting, considered that his force was inadequate for the task of capturing Baghdad, and believed that two divisions would be required for the battle. He made his views known to Nixon, but was over-ruled and did not press the point, in spite of having noted in his diary — 'The British troops

m

can be relied on as before, but the Indians are now shaken and unreliable.' Outside Mesopotamia, the lure of Baghdad was not so great. In India, the General Staff thought that Nixon would have to be reinforced by a cavalry brigade, two infantry brigades and 24 guns to make the operation feasible. The government of India, mindful of the beneficial effect the capture of Baghdad would have, was nevertheless aware of the necessity of having a reserve of troops outside India on which to draw. It also knew that the lack of river steamers would hamper the use of these

reinforcements. This important piece of information, although the Commanderin-Chief had made it plain to the Viceroy, was not passed on to the Cabinet in Eng land. The military advisers to the Secretary of State for India and the War Office calculated that Nixon needed reinforcements of two divisions to take and hold Baghdad, otherwise it would be a dangerous undertaking. The Cabinet was looking for a spectacular success to draw people's attention away from the mounting casualties in '.'ranee and the withdrawal from Gallipoli. It was

L167

-

1168

aware of* the great political advantages the occupation of" Baghdad would bring. Here was the Commander in the field insisting that he could occupy the city. It was a heaven-sent opportunity and one likely to catch the imagination of the public. It was no wonder that a special committee was set up to consider the matter.

Unnecessary suffering The committee reported that the capture of Baghdad was desirable, but, unless it could be held, no attempt should be made. It stressed that reinforcements must arrive in Basra within four weeks of the order for the advance being given. It made one important note: 'It is understood that the existing vessels on the Tigris are sufficient for the advance to be made and to ensure the supply of the advanced troops.' It is on the lack of these ships that the unnecessary sufferings of the wounded after the battle of Ctesiphon and the privations of the force which at-

tempted

to

squarely be

relieve

Kut

Amara must

al

laid.

Although Lord Kitchener never favoured more than a raid, the Cabinet considered that 'the advantages of the occupation of Baghdad outweighed the disadvantages of a possible eventual withdrawal'. These deliberations, together with the views of the committee, were sent to the govern-

ment

of India with these words: 'We are therefore in need of a striking success in the East. Unless you consider that the possibility of eventual withdrawal is decisive against the advance we are pre.

pared to order

.

Townshend's force at Aziziya consisted of a total strength of 10,000 bayonets (of which 2,000 had only recently arrived in Mesopotamia), 1,000 sabres and 29 guns. Estimates of the Turkish forces varied from Nixon's 9,500 men and 25 guns to Townshend's 14,000 men and 30 guns. Al 'AzTzTyah, where the striking force was concentrated, was merely a collection of mud huts on the left bank of the river and had no military value. It was a place of dust and flies and the troops suffered from fever and beri-beri, but, with the advent of the cooler weather, the diseases diminished and most of those afflicted regained their physical fitness. Advantage was taken of the halt to fit the new drafts into their units and before the force moved was, as far as the shortage of transefficient reasonably a allowed, port

machine.

The Turks began to show a certai n amount of activity and established a force of 6,000 at Zor, 12 miles from Al 'AzTzTyah, with an advanced detachment at Kutuniyah, 5 miles away. Townshend decided to evict them from Kutuniyah which he did after a small but successful operation. Although the Turks managed to get away, the engagement gave good experience to the

'A strategic defeat with far-reaching results' newly arrived

it.'

advance on Baghdad. Nevertheless, the General Staff in India had misgivings about the delay in the arrival of reinforcements and an 'Emergency Force' of two cavalry brigades, an artillery brigade and two infantry brigades was organised for possible service in Mesopotamia. Responsibility for the decision and subsequent disaster can be put on three to

On October

many of them raw. Townshend had sent a pre-

troops,

4

liminary plan of operations to Nixon. In this he visualised turning the Turkish left flank on the same lines that had been successful at Es Sinn. He stipulated that he

share; but the

wanted 21 days' supply of food and ammunition at Al 'AzTzTyah and all the transport that could be given him. At the end of the month, in his final plans he stated that his 'directing idea was to get Nur-ud-Din to fight in the open' and to do this he favoured an advance on the right bank. He had his bridging train which would give him freedom of action to attack on either side of the river as he finally thought fit. He asked for two river steamers for the wounded, whom he estimated would amount to 1,500.

Nixon's command, Townshend's striking

Turkish reinforcements Reliable information now reached Nixon that the Turks had been reinforced, but to what extent was uncertain. Rumours mentioned a new name, Halil Bey, who had lately been in command of the 3rd Division and had been recently promoted. Nixon, as usual, refused to believe that the Turks

authorities. The Cabinet, as final arbiter, its share; the government of India,

has with

its odd system of private and official, sometimes contradictory, communications, its vacillating and half-hearted views and its

acceptance of the risk, has a greater

commander in Mesopotamia, General Nixon, by his repeated insistence that he had sufficient troops and transport to capture and hold the 'magical' city of Baghdad, must bear the greatest share. On October 24, when the orders for the advance were given, the British in Mesopotamia were stretched to the utmost. Of the total of 21,500 men and 59 guns under force of 13,700 men and 29 guns Al 'AzTzTyah, 360 miles from Basra.

base

itself

was

at

At the

was one battalion of infantry

and

at Ahvaz, 100 miles away, a smail force was guarding the oilfields. On the line of communications behind Townshend,

the remaining troops were widely scattered with the only sizeable forces at An Na§irTyah and Al 'Amarah where they had formidable tasks and were not available as reserves. The reinforcements which the committee had stressed must arrive within four weeks had only been agreed to in principle and were still in France with no guarantee as to their date of arrival in Mesopotamia.

the right bank of the Tigris, finally decided to turn the Turkish left flank. On November 20 the force arrived at the village of Lajj. Next day occurred one of those unfortunate incidents so common in war. Major Reilly, in command of the aeroplanes, was sent on a special reconnaissance and was shot down on his way back, after observing that the Turks had been heavily reinforced. It is a matter of conjecture how much difference this information would have made to Nixon's plans. forces were now so close that, at least, a fighting withdrawal would have been necessary.

The

off it

.

The government of India accepted the decision and on October 24 Nixon was told

Mesopotamia, arrived in all her new glory. was at Zor that Townshend, after receiving reports of the very difficult country on

It

had been heavily reinforced — 'Tell Charles that I do not believe a word of it', was his remark to Townshend's aide de camp. In spite of this, he

now estimated

that the 12,000 men and 38 guns. (Turkish sources afterwards gave their strength as 13,000 men and 52 guns. This included the newly-arrived 45th and 51st Divisions, which were vastly superior in fighting power to those previously encountered.) Arabs, whether organised or hangers-on, were not counted. On November 19 the force reached Zor, where it received a welcome addition to the naval flotilla. HMS Firefly, the first of the river gunboats specially designed for

Turks had increased

to

The Arch of Ctesiphon When Townshend viewed

the battlefield of Ctesiphon, he saw before him what was essentially a flat open plain sparsely dotted with low scrub. Some small irregular mounds appeared to be redoubts in the Turkish front line, which ran for five miles roughly north-east from a large loop of the river. The left of the position was marked by some slightly larger mounds

which Townshend named

'VP'.

The

right of

the Turkish line was in the broken area of the old river bed on its right bank. The entrenchments were protected by barbed wire. The Turkish second line was on a slight rise about two miles in rear and stretched well to the north of 'VP'. The only other defences between Townshend and Baghdad, 20 miles away, were on the Diyala river. A curious feature marked the centre of the Turkish front line; it consisted of

two narrow ridges, 30

to

40

feet

high, joined at right angles. Townshend called it 'High Wall'. Behind it the Arch of Ctesiphon, monument of an ancient civilisation, rose 80 feet and was visible for miles around. It was from this arch that the battle takes its name. Two weak Turkish division, the 35th and 38th, held the right flank from across the Tigris to 'High Wall'. The more vulnerable part of the line to 'VP' was manned by the formidable 45th Division. Gun emplacements were mostly behind this part of the front. The Turkish mounted troops were on the left flank. The tough 51st Division was in reserve at Qusaiba where a bridge of boats kept communications open with troops on the right bank. Townshend divided his forces into four columns, and the essence of his plan was an optimistically timed converging movement with all his troops. He kept no reserve under his own control. He hoped that by using three lines of advance, instead of the two at Es Sinn, he would make the Turks deploy their reserves before the main attack went in.

Column 'C was to start at 0630 hours and hold the Turkish right by advancing on 'Water Redoubt' and the area each side of it. It was to pin down the Turks by a show of force, paralyse the greater pari of their forces and make them bring reserves to this area. No decisive attack was to he made until Column A' had captured 'VP'

Then Column 'C was to sweep southwards to assist the forward movement of the naval which had been asked to bring tire bear on the Turks south of 'High Wall'

flotilla

to

Column

'B' was to advance about 0730 hours after Column '(" had made lis pics sure felt and attack he Turkish left. I

]

L69

The Flying' Column was to move wide on the Hank of Column 'B' in the direction of Qusaiba and bring enfilade fire on the Turkish position. It was to be read} to take up the pursuit. Column A on Townshend's orders (he .

refers to it as the Principal oral Reserve in his book),

Mass or (ionwas to attack

'VP' as soon as the Turks seriously felt the effect o( Column B's' thrust. All the

embankment which Townshend had noted during his reconnaissance and deploy from that area. The night march was carried out successfully, and by 0300 hours on November 22 the British were in their assembly positions. Column 'A' -was 5,000 yards east of 'VP' with Column 'B' two miles further on and the 'Flying' Column beyond that again.

of a canal

artillery

'The battle was on'

tire to

The morning

was then to assist by bringing bear on 'VP'. Townshend established his headquarters near the artillery of Column 'C. Nixon remained not tar off, but refrained from taking executive command on the plea that he did not consider his health equal to the strain. If this was the case it can well be asked what good was he doing by being there at all. To carry out the plan. Columns 'A', 'B', and the 'Flying' Column were to leave Lajj and make a night march to the area

V British gunners firing a captured gun

1170

*

and

visibility

November 22 was misty was seriously diminished.

of

The waiting troops suddenly heard the jingle of bits as a Turkish mounted patrol stumbled on the turning column. It was fired on, but galloped off and gave the alarm. The battle was on. At 0630 hours Column 'C started a slow advance

under

cover of its artillery. Shortly afterwards the guns of the naval flotilla joined in, but, as a result of the height of the river banks, without much

effect.

this

The Turks withheld their fire and led to some wishful thinking

may have

that they had withdrawn. At 0745 hours the turning attack had not heard rifle fire from Column 'C,

but Townshend ordered it to advance. This was the first deviation from his carefully timed programme, another was to follow almost immediately. As the presence of this force had already been discovered, the to meet it, at the same making adjustments round 'VP'. These and the strange silence on the front of Column 'C, led Townshend and Delamain to believe that the Turks were retreating. Townshend ordered Column 'A' to attack. From this moment his plan was

Turks moved troops time

in ruins.

At 0900 hours the 30th Brigade und Colonel Climo began its attack on This brigade which was entirely compi of Indian troops had to advance over 5, yards of open plain to the Turkish wirl

The

first part was covered rapidly and without a halt, and thereafter it was continued in rushes of 100 yards covered by

artillery and machine gun fire. The advance was held up by the wire 40 yards from the Turkish trenches, but not for long. The Indians stormed through and, in spite of heavy losses, had captured 'VP' by 1030 hours. It was the complete answer to Townshend's entry in his diary, that the

'Indian troops are

While

this

the 'Flying'

now

unreliable'. going on, Column 'B'

and

Column had been held

up,

was

with heavy casualties in men and horses, by part of the Turkish 51st Division which had moved up from Qusaiba. At 1030 hours when mirage conditions were exerting their ftill effect, the situation was, briefly, th^Jshe turning movement had been check second line. Co but some south to a

'Some calls it Tesiphon and some calls it Sestiphon,

but

we calls it

Pistupon'

doubt'. Column 'B' managed to move slightly forward into line with the 'Flying Column'. The cavalry tried to get round the Turkish flank, but was forced back to its original position. The Turkish 51st Division now started to counterattack with heavy artillery support and was only held up after inflicting considerable casualties

on Hamilton's

force.

British pinned down By 1330 hours the Turks had evacuated their front line from 'VP' to 'Water Redoubt', but in spite of all efforts the British were unable to advance. The full effect of the numerous Turkish counterattacks was being felt and the British were forced to make some slight withdrawals. Townshend ordered Delamain to capture the Turkish second line. He managed to get together a mixed force from all three columns, but

was unable to advance

far.

On

Above: The Battle of Ctesiphon, an indecisive action. Below: The casualties

checked, had disappeared into the Turkish trenches. This fact was not known to Delamain until late in the afternoon. He himself had half the Dorsets in reserve. Column 'C was held up 700 yards from the

Turkish position. Townshend had no reserves at all. Of the Turkish forces, the 35th Division on the right bank had not been engaged and a regiment from it was on its way to reinforce the troops on the left bank. The 38th Division, in front of Column 'C, was pinned down. Further north, the 45th Division had been badly mauled and had retired to its second line. Most of the 51st Division was involved in checking the British turning movement,

but

still

at

Ctesiphon

had two fresh

battalions. arrived at 'VP' at hours he realised that the battle

When Townshend about 1100

was by no means won. The Turks, although still held 'Water Redoubt' and to evict them from this, Townshend decided to concentrate Column 'C at 'VP'. He ordered Hoghton to move to his right to support Delamain. This meant a flank march at right angles to the Turkish position at a distance of from 1 ,000 to 1 ,500 yards. The Turks took immediate ad-

driven from 'VP',

vantage of this move and inflicted very heavy casualties on the British. Eventually these, with Delamain's last reserve, the Dorsets, succeeded in capturing 'Water Re-

the other flank the Royal Navy was in difficulties. Most of the ships were unable to fire effectively over the banks of the river, and the high mast of the Firefly was a ranging mark for the Turkish gunners, with the result that she was forced to steam up and down to avoid being hit. The ships made a gallant attempt, but were unable to round the loop at Bustan. At 1700 hours Townshend decided that he could do no more that night and ordered his force to regroup in the neighbourhood of 'VP'. He hoped that the Turks, who had suffered very severely, would withdraw in the dark and enable him to continue the advance next day. The troops, unmolested by the Turks, were back in the concentration area by midnight, but they were seriously disorganised. As reports of casualties came in, Townshend realised that it would be impossible to stage a further offensive and decided to take up a restricted defensive position between 'High Wall' and the river. The British casualties amounted to over 4,000, more than one third of the force

engaged, and losses in officers had been particularly heavy. The plight of the wounded was terrible, many being left where they had fallen and not being found until daylight. Field ambulances, designed to deal with up to 400 casualties, were trying to cope with over 3,000. Those evacuated to the river had to make the

Wounded

Killed

Missing

British officers

nNN

9iHWWttttl

1:

131

Indian officers

34«IMN

nmnn\

3"

111

British rank

&

We

Indian rank

&

file

mmnmm

7QGttttttttttttfHHHHHHHHHKHHHHHHHI

861

39

vMmmmmmmmmm

3408

nmmmmnn

mnnnmnnnnnnnnn IWtlMHMHHHKHHKHHHMHHKHHMHKHHHI

wwwwwwwwwwwwwww

mnnnnnnnnnnnmn

mmmmmmmmmm

nnnnnnmmnmnnm mnnnwnnnwmnnn

c o 01 0)

followers

total British casualties

A 682

estKHHHMH 3674

82

9

€ DC

237 total

Turkish casualties

4593 6188

o 0-

1172

journey ground.

in

springless

carts

over rough

when they reached the sufferings were by no means

Even

Tigris their over, as there were insufficient steamers for the wounded. The Turkish losses were thought to be much higher.

Dawn on November 23 was ushered in by the shamal, a bitterly cold north wind, with its clouds of dust. Men were wandering about in twos and threes looking for their units. They and the animals were thoroughly exhausted and there was a complete lack of food, water and ammunition. The nearest supplies were at Lajj, 12 miles away, and could be brought only by the carts that were already being used for the casualties. Townshend's plan was for the 17th Brigade to remain at 'VP' to cover the evacuation of the wounded. The 18th Brigade was to occupy the trenches near 'High Wall' with the 16th Brigade between them at "Water Redoubt'. The one and a half battalions of the 30th Brigade were to hold a detached mound, subsequently known as 'Gurkha' mound, near the Arch of Ctesiphon. The cavalry brigade was ordered to the vicinity of the Arch until dusk, when it was to withdraw to 'High Wall' and greater safety. Because it took a considerable time to reorganise, it was not until 1400 hours that the 18th Brigade started to move to 'High Wall'. While it was on the way the Turks again started their counterattacks with the 35th and 38th Divisions on the central sector, while the 45th and 51st Divisions tried to envelop the British right. Two battalions of the 18th Brigade were stopped to help the 16th Brigade and held the trenches south of 'Water Redoubt'. The Turks advanced with vigour, but were halted after fierce fighting, although they continued their attacks until 0200 hours, when they retired to their second line. A noticeable achievement was that of the troops at 'Gurkha' mound, who beat off repeated attacks by the Turkish 35th Division throughout the night. This feat gained for them the appreciation of the Turks for their 'determination and grit'.

British morale high Nixon, after moving to 'VP', withdrew to Lajj and thence to Kut al Amara. His contribution to the battle had been nil

and he seems to have acted as the director in a peacetime 'field day' rather than as the responsible commander of an expeditionary force. The situation at the end of the second day was that Townshend's force was still in occupation of the Turkish front line. It had no fresh troops and was in no condition to resume the offensive, but, although the men were tired and hungry, morale was high. On the Turkish side, the 51st Division was full of fight, though it had suffered severe casualties. It still had two fresh battalions and these had been ordered up from the Diyala. The 45th Division had been reduced to a skeleton. The 35th and 38th Divisions were intact, but weak in numbers and morale. Early on November 24 Townshend ordered the cavalry brigade to the area north of 'VP' to cover the 17th Brigade until the evacuation of the casualties had been completed. At 1600 hours the 17th Brigade started its withdrawal and by 1800 hours all Townshend's troops were concentrated at 'High Wall'.

The Turkish commander, Nur-ud-Din, vacillated between retiring to the Diyala and staying where he was. It may well have been the insistence of Halil Bey, the newly arrived corps commander and a soldier of determination, that made him remain on

the battlefield.

Nixon

still

wanted Townshend

to stay at

'High Wall', but on November 25, air reconnaissance indicated that the Turks were advancing. Townshend thought that this movement implied Turkish reinforcements and decided to withdraw to Lajj. There is doubt as to what this movement really was. Turkish sources denied that there had been any reinforcements and the troops may have been the two battalions coming up from the Diyala. Anyhow, whatever it was, it was the end of the battle. The remnants of the 6th Division reached Lajj at 0100 hours, November 26.

summing up of the battle, the History makes four points which are worthy of further consideration. It states that the battle was the 'result of important decisions based on incorrect information'. If this refers to the Cabinet decision, made on the assumption that there were sufficient troops and river steamers, it was correct. It was not correct In

its

Official

as far as the government of India was concerned. Both the Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief had more precise information and they ignored it. But basically the battle was due to the ambition, optimism and obstinacy of one man. General Nixon. His ambition was to get to Baghdad; his optimism lay in thinking that, with fewer numbers, his troops could turn the Turks out of a long prepared position; his obstinacy was proved in the way he overruled the protests of his subordinate, General Townshend, and in repeatedly refusing to believe reports of Turkish reinforcements. The second point was that the battle was a 'dearly bought tactical success'. At the end of it, the British, with no reserves, were in possession of only the Turkish front line and were in no condition to resume the attack. The Turks retained their second line and had two fresh battalions. Can this be described as a tactical success? The British soldier can usually be relied

upon

to

produce fitting comment. At

the time the word 'Ctesiphon' was subject to varying pronunciations. A remark overheard was: 'Of the officers, some calls it Tesiphon and some calls its Sestiphon, but we calls it Pistupon.' With the third point, that it was a 'strategic defeat with far-reaching results', no one could disagree. Nor could anyone disagree with the fourth point, that it extolled the 'magnificent gallantry of the British and Indian officers and men'. It is fitting to quote an Anatolian Turkish officer captured during the battle. Although he was speaking of the attack on 'VP', it is a suitable tribute to all who took part. The Turk was 'astounded at the bravery and determination of the troops' as he 'could not have believed it possible for such a position to be carried in the manner and space of time it was'. Further Reading J., The Neglected War: Mesopotamia, 1914-1918 (Faber 1967) Barker, A. J., Townshend of Kut (Casseil 1967) Braddon, Russell, The Siege Official History of the War. Military Operations: Mesopotamia, Vol 2 (HMSO)

Barker, A.

Townshend, C. F., My Campaign in Mesopotamia (Butterworth 1920) [For Major-General Rich's biography, $ee

page

788.

Indian cavalry on the advance to Kut

/ I

Retreat

toKut

morale

After the action Ctesiphon, the growing superiority of Turkish strength at

compelled Townshend to retire. Arriving at Kut at the end of a gruelling retreat

with

but

the

high, he dramatically declared that he would defend Kut as he had successfully defended Fort Chitral on the Indian frontier in 1895. Yet, as the Turks began to close in it became apparent that with little food, insanitary conditions and troops becoming exhausted, his defensive preparations did not match his grandiloquence. However, there was no alternative but to dig in and wait for the Turkish onslaught. A. J. Barker. Below: British troops moving down the Tigris towards Kut troops'

still

**#

#

4$

4 I

•

For the British, the battle of Ctesiphon turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory. When

what was

Townshend's force started 'High Wall' on the morning of November 24 there were no Turks in sight, and the only indication of their preleft

of

to concentrate at

sence was the intermittent shelling of the British positions which

went on throughout

the day. On the Turkish side an Arab patrol reported the advance of a British column towards the Diyala during the early morning, and Nur-ud-Din issued orders for a retreat. But what the Arabs had seen was actually a party of men of the Turkish 51 st Division withdrawing after the previous night's battles, and when Nur-udDin learned the truth, the order to fall

back was cancelled. Instrumental in persuading him to cancel the order to retreat

was his newly arrived Second-in-Command, Khalil Bey, a dynamic young man of 35 who was soon to play a leading role. On the morning of the 25th the Turks started to retrace their steps towards the battlefield, and news of their volte-face came to Townshend by way of an air

reconnaissance report.

Up

to this

time he

had delayed making any move, not only because he still cherished a faint hope that he might yet march into Baghdad, but also because he knew that any withdrawal would be seen by those in Whitehall and Delhi as a political catastrophe. But now, believing — wrongly in fact — that Nurud-Din had been reinforced, and realising that the heavy casualties his troops had already incurred reduced the likelihood of success in a further action, Townshend decided to retire to Lajj. And so, at 2030 hours on November 25, began the long withdrawal which was to end at Kut. It was argued afterwards that Townshend meant to hold Lajj, while reinforce-

ments which would enable him to resume offensive were concentrated at Al 'Azlzlyah. If this were so then Nur-udDin's co-operation would have been necessary, for it is quite certain that no reinforcements could have reached him in less than a couple of months. More probably Townshend had intended to fall back and stand at Kut from the moment that he the

had realised that the Turks were on the And it was lucky for him that Nurud-Din's supply ships were delayed by their own obstruction near Salman Pak, had been forthcoming for if supplies sooner, the Turkish commander would have been on Townshend's heels even more quickly than in fact he was. From the beginning the retreat was fraught with the most extraordinary difficulties. The British flotilla had to be covered by troops ashore and as the exmarch.

hausted army slowly retired along the road was only by the greatest exertions that the ships were able to keep up with it. Vessels were constantly running aground and, when one did, all the others above it were held up. Meanwhile, the local Arabs sniped and waited for opportunities to fall on the stragglers — according to custom they had turned against the beaten side. it

On

the morning of

•

4| 'V*.

v

( !

November

26, the ad-

vance guard of the long column of weary troops arrived back at Al 'AzIzTyah and Townshend stood silently at the entrance of their old camp to watch the regiments

>c

in

getting the

men

off

her doomed consorts,

minutes before Turks were swarming on their abandoned decks. With the Shaitan lost earlier, and now the Firefly and the Comet, Townshend's flotilla had but only

virtually ceased to exist. In the last two days of the retreat,

Townshend dared not halt. When Kut was finally reached on the morning of December 3, Townshend stood again to watch the exhausted men dragging themselves past him. In his diary he recorded 'Courage and firmness in adversity were not wanting in the 6th Division.' Since this seven and a half day retreat was one of the most arduous that has ever been experienced in the history of the British army, the praise was well deserved. After his battered regiments had limped .

British howitzer in action.

The Turks followed the

march in. Just above Al 'AzTzTyah the Comet and the Shaitan had run aground and although the Comet was soon afloat again the Shaitan was stuck fast. Under the constant sniping of Arabs lying on the banks above them, the Comet, Firefly and the Shushan all tried to get her off. But she was immovable and as soon as it became apparent that the Turkish advance guard had started to arrive on the scene the

Shaitan was abandoned. Valuable time had been lost in trying to save her.

Turkish camp an inferno The next leg of the retreat was only Fortunately for the British columns, the Arab cavalry heading the pursuit had been diverted by the prospect of loot in Al 'AzTzTyah, and so at a crucial period the pressure on Townshend's rearguard momentarily eased. Not only that, but while the Arabs were seeing to their booty they could not reconnoitre ahead, and eight

miles.

was unaware of how close really was. During the night his infantry, believing their cavalry to be still in front of them, ran up against the British positions. Thinking that they had Nur-ud-Din

Townshend

stumbled on Townshend's rearguard which would retreat at once, the Turks contented themselves with shelling the British Prepared Turkish gun positions near

Kut.

retreat closely, forcing

outposts, night.

many such

actions

and then settled down

for

the

Nobody was prepared for the sight which greeted both sides in the early morning, but the British were the first to take full advantage of it. Less than a mile from their perimeter was a huge camp, in which large numbers of Turks could be seen forming up ready to continue the chase. Shrapnel from Townshend's artillery and high explosive from his gunboats was soon bursting amongst them and within minutes the camp was an inferno surrounded by a pall of dust raised by the bursting shells. Under its cover some of Townshend's infantry charged towards the camp but as soon as the Turks started to rally, the action was broken off and once again they set off marching back towards Kut. The Turks, shaken by the sudden turn of events, had suffered a severe shock and it was some hours before they were ready to resume the pursuit. The flotilla had not been so fortunate. A party of Turks had managed to manhandle some field guns to the river bank and get them into action. One of the first shots fired went clean through the Firefly's boiler, disabling her, and when the Comet tried to take her in tow both vessels went aground. The little tug Sumana came to the rescue and succeeded

The Turks had closed the

ring

.

Townshend

declared: 'I mean to defend did Chitral' and a signal couched in the same terms was sent to Nixon. From Basra the army commander replied that he was 'glad to hear' of his decision and was 'convinced that your troops will continue to show the same spirit in defence as they have shown throughout your operations. in,

Kut as

A

.

around Kut by December

7

I

Reinforcements will be pushed up to you with all possible speed.' It was not clear yet when they would arrive but he said nothing about this.

A poor defensive site In theory, the principal advantage to be gained from holding Kut — which in effect meant holding the confluence of the Tigris and the Shatt al Gharraf— was that the Turks were prevented from moving down the Shatt al Gharraf to An Na§irTyah to attack Basra from a flank. While Townshend's guns dominated the Tigris, Feldmarschall von der Goltz, the newly appoin-

commander

in Baghdad, could not overMesopotamia. Furthermore, while Townshend held Kut, Nixon could regroup his scattered forces, organise the expected reinforcements and prepare a counterthrust. Tactically, however, there were many disadvantages to a protracted de-

ted

run

lower

fence of the area. The town itself was scarcely more than a densely packed conglomeration of houses crowded with about 7,000 inhabitants, a flour mill and a bazaar. Opposite, on the right bank, there was the tiny 'Woolpress' village of Yakusum which possessed, besides a woolpress, a liquorice factory. Filthy beyond description, Kut was the most vile and insanitary of all the places occupied up to that time by the British in Mesopotamia and only the date plantations and a few gardens north-west and south-east of the actual town provided alleviating features. From a logistic viewpoint, Kut's importance derived from the fact that it was the centre of the local grain trade and so long as it remained merely a post on the line of communications to the front, grain supplies were available there. But this advantage obviously could not hold if it were in a state of siege and indeed such a situation had never been visualised. The few defences that had been erected round the town had been planned for its role as a supply post on the way from

Basra

to

Baghdad and

A

it

was

in

no sense a

of four

blockhouses, connected by a barbed wire fence to a mud-walled enclosure, dignified by the name of a 'fort', extended across the mile long neck of the loop in the Tigris which contained the town. Except for a few mounds near the river. fortified

176

enclave.

line

1177

Indians, as well as plenty of ammunition' the prospect was not so glum so long as the reinforcements Nixon had promised

him within two months. Kut was not yet surrounded and it appears that Nixon did not finally make up his mind reached

Nov25

fjtesiphon

Justan

British

that

leave

Nov 26 Turks occupy Ctesiphon

Nov29 Turks

December 1 ,dawn

Nov 28

at

action

arrive;leavel\lov30

British arrive

Tubul

Ded

British leave

Nov30 Turks

arrive

30KMS

Dec 3

British enter

Kut Amara q Q.

retreat to Kut.

one

of the

most arduous

that has ever

and some irrigation channels which would afford ready-made cover from fire, the surrounding countryside was flat, open and almost featureless. This fact meant that any army standing to fight at Kut would have to hold both banks of the Tigris if boats were to pass up and down the river. Furthermore, the Tigris, although 200 to 300 yards wide, was now so shallow near Kut that it was quite possible to wade across near Yakusum. As the Shatt al Gharraf was also practically dry at this too did not constitute a serious

juncture,

it

obstacle.

The worst

tactical

drawback was

the one which might seem, on the face of it, to make Kut an attractive location to withstand a siege. Because they would be enclosed in a loop of the river and with their backs to it, the defenders were liable to be driven down into the loop. Once this happened they would be shut up in an area about two miles long and a mile wide, where they would be exposed to fire from all sides and from which it would be very difficult to escape, even if bridges were available — which they were not. Across the neck of land at the mouth of the loop the short front line had its advantages while on the defensive but, as this was the only way the garrison could sally out, its defensive advantages reverted to those opposing any attempt at breakout. Strategically, the most serious disadvantage lay in the potential advantages that the neighbourhood of Kut afforded the Turks besieging it to hold off and delay any relief force coming up from Basra, and

Es Sinn Townshend himself had already run up against them. On the left bank from Sannaiyat to Hanna, 25 miles below Kut, there was only a mile wide strip of dry land between the river and extensive marshland; on the right bank the ground was also broken up by dried-up water courses and marshes. Getin his earlier battle at

ting a relief force across terrain of this nature would be difficult enough in the dry weather, but when the floods produced by the melting snows in the highlands swept down in March or late February, much of the Kut landscape would be submerged, with a proportionate increase in the difficulties which the advancing relief force

1178

would have

to face.

Chitral'.

under the very noses of the Turks nothing short of splendid, and speaks eloquently for the courage and discipline miles

20 MILES

The

'like

Meanwhile Townshend had issued to the troops one of his typical communiques: / intend to defend Kut al Amara and not to retire any further. Reinforcements are being sent at once to relieve us. The honour of our Mother Country and the Empire demands that we all work heart and soul in the defence of this place. We must dig in deep and dig in quickly, and then the enemy's shells will do little damage. We have ample food and ammunition, hut Commanding Officers must husband the ammunition and not throw it away uselessly. The way you have managed to retire some eighty or ninety

iv28 Turks follow

^ziziya

should be held until four days after

about defending the place

(\lov26 British pass through

Uituniya

it

Townshend's characteristic announcement

been experienced by the

British

army

One

of the few things that could be said Kut was that any delay is usually to the advantage of those on the defensive. Those who are attacking generally face greater hardships in favour of sitting tight in

than those who are on the defensive and doubtful friends and potential enemies waiting on the touch-line are held in suspense, unable to make up their minds which side to support; time is gained for the development of the defenders' resources. If the Turks were to advance from Baghdad to retake Basra then they would have to pass Kut and this was Kut's greatest merit. In this instance the question of cultivating the uncertain sympathies of the Arab tribes in the immediate area can probably be discounted: their attitude was conditioned purely by practical considerations as to who was in the ascendant. But the same argument did not necessarily apply to the Persians. For some time they had shown a most equivocal attitude and to deter them from declaring in favour of the Turks and Germans was as good a reason as any other for checking von der Goltz's advance as far away from Basra as possible. Kut was as far forward as it was possible to do this. Perhaps the most important consideration was the one which seems almost hypothetical. Any army which is locked up in a besieged city is not pulling its weight; it might be compelled to retire hundreds of miles but while it is intact and mobile it still retains the power to change the balance of a campaign by a single successful manoeuvre. Apart from that, once it is immobilised and besieged, the tendency is for everybody else to hurry to its assistance, a move which hands the initiative straight across to the opponents. On these counts Townshend's decision to stop withdrawing and stand at Kut seems to

have been wrong.

Having said all this, the one factor of paramount importance which influenced Townshend on December 1, 1915 must be mentioned. In the telegram announcing his intention to fight it out at Kut he pointed out that his men needed rest there and then. Strategic and tactical considerations were secondary to this, the decisive factor, and with 'one month's full rations for British troops and two months for

is

of this force.

The Turks encircle Kut Second thoughts came after the receipt of Nixon's next signal. Every effort would be made to relieve the force, the army commander said, and it was hoped that this would be achieved within two months. And, because the Turks would probably invest the town — though some of Nixon's staff were doubtful on this score — it would be a good thing if Townshend were to send the cavalry and any transport that could be spared back to 'AIT al GharbT and to return as many of the ships as possible. This would not only reduce the numbers he would have to feed but would also help the relief force. The prospect of being locked up for two months in Kut did not suit Townshend at all. Apart from the

was the limit of his rations as he assessed them at that time, his principal fear was that the advent of the flood season might well delay the relief beyond then. He was a great student of military history and he knew full well that the story of besieged camps was almost invariably one of repeated capitulations. When Nixon's reply came, it was clear that Townshend's new proposal was not to Nixon's liking. So long as Townshend remained at Kut, Nixon propounded, by containing superior numbers of Turks he fact that this period

would be doing what was expected of him. The only crumb which Nixon offered in an otherwise unpalatable message was that the two months he forecast was the outside limit and that yet another division and more heavy guns had been asked for. On December 7, the Turks finally closed the ring round Kut and the siege began in earnest. The Cavalry Brigade and the ships had got away only three days before, the ships full of sick and wounded sailing down to Basra, the

Cavalry Brigade

to fight its

way back to 'All al GharbT where, a week later, it was joined by the first contingent the Kilt enclave with about 10,000 fighting men (excluding 2,000 odd sick and wounded of whom about 7,400 were infantry: there were also about 3,500 Indian non-combatants — drivers, cooks, servants and the like -together with 6,000 Arab of the

relief

force.

Townshend was

In

left

>.

inhabitants. The only gunboat to stay behind

was the

A Union Jack, symbol of Townshend's defiance, flies over Kut on a rickety improvised flag-

symbolic of his precarious position and scanty resources post, equally

tug Sumana, which had been kepi back as a ferry, but a do/on other smaller boats which Townshend thought would be useful had also been retained. Neither food nor ammunition appeared to present an immediate problem. With two months' supplies, 'exempting firewood, medical coin-

old

and vegetables', Townshend decided that the vitality of his command would best be maintained on a full daily ration, which for British troops was 1 lb meat, 1 lb torts

bread. 8 oz bacon, butter, cheese. 6 oz potatoes. 4 oz onions, 2j oz sugar, 3 ozjam, 1 oz tea and I oz salt. The estimate of a sufficiency for two months had been arrived at

as the result of a quick assessment and, when stocks of grain in the town were commandeered, even the first detailed survey suggested that two months was a somewhat conservative estimate. Nor had every source of food been tapped and it was not until things began to get desperate that any systematic search was made of the Arab houses; this was a mistake which materially contributed to all the abortive efforts to raise the siege by the middle of all sieges food and ammunition stocks are critical considerations and with Townshend's experience at Chitral it is surprising that he did not take steps in the early days of December to find out the exact position and then to husband such stocks of food as were revealed. The defences of Kut, organised only as a means of holding off the marauding Buddhoos, have already been mentioned. Except for the mud-walled Fort at the north-east of the perimeter, linked by a single barbed wire fence to four blockhouses, there were none. This meant that trenches and shel-

January. In

Cheerful

sappers

in

at

the early days of the siege, dinner in Kut

had to be dug, barbed wire entanglements erected, and arrangements made to defend the river front. The troops were tired out and, according to Townshend, only the British regiments were fit to do any digging on December 4. The Indian ters

troops could not move at all, he said -a statement with which others present at the time subsequently disagreed. The blockhouses were too far forward and their position added hundreds of yards of unnecessary line to the front. Yet abandoning them was not feasible; to do so would mean giving up the Fort which held large quanti-

and stores and these could be moved elsewhere because there were no men to spare from the digging programme generated by this situation. Beyond the blockhouses a line of sandhills, too far away to be occupied by the British troops, was a further disadvantage. Not only would these sand dunes offer cover to the Turks but they would also limit the ties of supplies

not

garrison's ability to cross the river. On the other bank, the Liquorice Factory in Yakusum, the Woolpress Village, was

an area which Townshend decided would have to be an outpost connected to the town by means of a boat bridge. Apart from the fact that there was a large quantity of grain stored in Yakusum, Townshend had concluded that it was essential to the defence of Kut. Coming from such a brilliant tactician this seems an odd conclusion. The factory was on the wrong side of the river and while it was obviously necessary to hold it until the grain had been removed, it is difficult to understand why it otherwise had any advantage over many other areas on the right bank. The main defences were

sited in the 'U' loop of the river, protected

by the so-called 'First Line' entrenchments running from the Fort; this was the line incorporating the four blockhouses and behind this a 'Middle' and a 'Second Line' were dug -the latter covering the final redoubt. For ease of control, the whole of Kut was then sub-divided into three sectors; the peninsula being divided more or less east-west by the Second Line, the area south of this line, together with the Woolpress Village and its Liquorice Factory, forming the Southern Sector. North of the Second Line, the top half of the 'U' was divided by a line drawn south from 'Redoubt B\ the second blockhouse — the east side, including the Fort, becoming the North-East Sector and the western half the North-West Sector. To each sector a brigade was allotted; Hoghton (17th Brigade) to the North-

Delamain (16th Brigade) to the North-West and Hamilton's 18th Brigade to the Southern Sector, where most of the East:

was also located. Melliss' 30th Brigade was put into reserve, to rest in the town during the day and alternate with the 16th Brigade at the north end of the peninsula by night. Work on organising the defences started as soon as the force had arrived in Kut and for the next few days the infantrymen's lives were one long round of digging. Apart from the fact that they knew that life above ground was going to be very difficult when the Turks finally closed in, the morale of Townshend's artillery

troops

was

high.

[For A. J. Barker s biography, and addipage 1 163]

tional bibliography, see

Much capital has been made in the halfcentury following the First World War of the fact that in the period of lively military speculation which preceded its outbreak the only theorist fully to appreciate what its nature was likely to be was a civilian — Bloch, a Polish banker and economist writing in 1897. His thesis was that the development of industrialism had fundamentally altered the character of war. He claimed that 'the outward and visible sign of the end of war was the introduction of the magazine rifle. The soldier, by natural evolution, has so perfected the mechanism of slaughter that he has practically secured his own extinction'. The picture he painted of what actually was to happen in 1914 and 1915 on the Western Front turned out to be startlingly accurate. At first, he wrote, there will be increased slaughter on so terrible a scale as to render it impossible to get troops to push the battle to a decisive issue. They will try to, thinking they are fighting under the old conditions, and they will learn such a lesson that they will abandon the attempt. The war, instead of being a hand-to-hand contest in which the combatants measure their physical and moral superiority, will become a kind of stalemate in which, neither army being able to get at the other, both armies will be maintained in opposition to each other, threatening each other, but never being able to deliver a final and will be endecisive blow. Everybody trenched in the next war; the spade will be as indispensable to the soldier as his rifle. ,

Fifty years later it can be seen that these were the deductions which the General Staffs and defence philosophers of all the belligerents should have drawn from their studies, ardently pursued before 1914, of the American Civil War, the FrancoPrussian War, the South African War and the Russo-Japanese War. The effect of rifle fire at Gettysburg, Gravelotte and Saint Privat indicated that the defence had become the stronger form of war. The two gallant but abortive French cavalry charges at Worth showed that the day of the 'arrne blanche' was over: never again would armies be able to justify the large

amount

of railway rolling stock their absorbed. The great potential of modern artillery was already apparent. The development of railways with the inevitable risks arising from being tied to fixed lines of supply had been shown to be both an advantage and a disadvantage. British experience in the South African War had emphasised the great potential of the skilled marksman firing from cover and consequently that of the machine gunner: it had also brought out the need for more mobile and intelligent infantry exercising their initiative to the full. These then were the facts of life which the armies were to discover by bitter experience on the Western Front in 1914 and 1915. It is therefore surprising, in view of the emphasis that had been laid on the study of military history, that the French, German and British military leaders should have gone to war in 1914 steeped in doctrines which flouted to a considerable degree the lessons of the immediate past. In view of their obsession with Napoleon and their tradition since Waterloo of arriving at the wrong conclusion by apparently faultless logic, the French prewar theories must be considered first. Foch, Grandmaison and Langlois were disciples

forage

W«r

Office"

[Crown Copyright

Reserved.

FIELD SERVICE REGULATIONS PART

I.

OPERATIONS. 1909. (Reprinted, with Amendments, 1014.)

GENERAL

WAR

STAFF,

OFFICE.

support until a position about 600 yards from the enemy was reached. At this stage they thought a struggle for fire superiority would develop which, when won, would enable the infantry to move forward until, on reaching a position about 100 yards from the enemy, they would be able to deliver the final assault on classic lines. Both nations had studied the battles of Mukden and Port Arthur and had realised the need for increased artillery support for the infantry attack. In the case of the French, this took the form of increased emphasis on the role of their excellent 75-mm field gun. The Germans mobilised

under Corps control four heavy batteries guns per division in addition to the normal divisional artillery. The British tactical approach to the coming war was understandably influenced by the experience of the South African War. After this war, Roberts had given General Henderson the task of producing a tactical manual. This appeared in 1905 and was entitled Combined Training. In it, Henderson embodied not only his own deductions from the South African War but also what were thought to be the lessons of the Russo-Japanese War — the importance of entrenchment, the problems raised by barbed wire obstacles, the need for attack in depth at the enemy's weakest point and of 5.9-inch

MAJESTY'S STATIONERY OFFICE

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Pnce

Sixpence,

THE NEW WARFARE As the belligerent powers surveyed the events of 1915, they looked with dismay at the mistakes they had made, the opportunities they had lost. Nevertheless, both sides hoped for a successful conclusion to the war in 1916 Major-General H. Essame Above: Sixpenny handbook for the troops at the front of Clausewitz who taught that the secret of success in war was offensive action and the concentration of superior force in terms of bayonets at the decisive point and time.

They were further greatly influenced by Colonel Ardent du Picq's Etudes sur le Combat which stressed that morale was the most important factor in war, which indeed has always been true, but did not necessarily imply that a solid phalanx of heroes in red trousers was the best answer to the bullet and the shell. Foch even went so far as to claim that 'a battle lost is a battle one thinks one has lost; for a battle cannot be lost physically'. He went on to state that future improvements would increase the effectiveness of the attack. Above all, the French envisaged a short and mobile war in which the mystic quality of elan, which they believed they possessed to a higher degree than all other nations, combined with the threat of the long bayonet {Rosalie), would triumph. The artillery would merely be an auxiliary arm. In the attack they pictured an advance supported by controlled fire to within 400 yards of the enemy; thereafter they considered that aimed fire by the enemy would become impossible and that a mass of infantry in depth charging with the bayonet would carry all before it. The German theorists prescribed opening the attack with a dense infantry firing line followed by an advance with artillery

the value of indirect artillery fire. Field Service Regulations (Volume 1), which superseded this manual in 1909, repro-

duced

much

of

what

had

Henderson

thought. By this time, however, there had been a good deal of cross-fertilisation of ideas with the French. The results of this liaison are evident in the section entitle The Decisive Attack, where concentratio of all available artillery and machine gi a fire and the building up of a firing line a/3 envisaged. The section goes on to say: The climax of the infantry attack is the assault which is made possible by superiority of fire to be gained by the artillery, 1

.

machine guns and infantry. The fact that superiority of fire has been obtained will usually be first observed from the firing line; it will be known by the weakening of the enemy's fire. The impulse for the assault must therefore come from the firing line and it is the duty of any commander in the firing line who sees that the moment for the assault has arrived, to carry it out and for all other commanders to co-operate. Should it be necessary to give the impulse from the rear, all available reinforcements will be thrown into the fight and as they reach the firing line will carry it with them and rush the position. Its companion volume. In fan try Training (Volume 1 1914), was even more explicit: The action of the infantry in attack must therefore be considered as a constant pressing forward to close with the enemy. When effective ranges are reached there must usually be a fire fight, more or less prolonged according to the circumstances, in order to beat down the (ire of the defenders. The leading lines will be reinforced and as the enemy's /ire is gradu ally subdued, further progress will be made by bounds from place to place, the move merit getting renewed force at each pause until the enemy can be assaulted with the bayonet. This manual, the bible of the vast New Armies, goes on to stress the need for close liaison with the supporting artillery and places responsibility for communica tion with them on the infantry. Volume h Field Service Regulations i

I

I

SI

jF

^gj|S^

-

^

must succeed;

also implied that at the crisis of the battle the chances of successful cavalry inter-

was determined enough

vention en masse would increase — something Henderson had never said and probably now inserted as a result of the influence of Haig, Director of Staff Duties at the relevant time, and the coterie behind the Cavalry Journal, brought privately into being in 1906 to ensure that the well bred horse occupied a distinguished place on the battlefield — a concept which even managed to survive the First World War. Thus so far as their approach to battle was concerned, all the belligerents in August 1914 had this much in common: all paid lip service to mobility and thought in terms of a short and highly mobile war; all stressed the importance of offensive action; all gave the impression that if the assault

operation between the artillery, machine guns and infantry, in order to gain superiority of fire and thus enable the infantry to close with the bayonet. Furthermore, all implied that cavalry had still a future as an assault arm and none fully appreciated the great strength of defensive systems in

all

it

agreed on the importance of close

co-

depth based on entrenchments, wire, interlocking arcs of machine gun fire and artillery defensive fire. As a result of years of brainwashing drill on barrack squares all were wedded to the ideas of units attacking in straight lines thus producing perfect targets for machine guns firing in enfilade. The first three months of the war were to show that in armament and organisation, although the Germans had the

Above

A German impression

of the Ypres, the climax of the Race to the Sea. The caption to the picture emphasises the 'ardour' of the German troops which led them to a complete victory' — an erroneous conclusion, based on the widely-held assumption that if the assault were determined enough it must left:

First Battle of

succeed. Above:

A French hand-painted

plate stresses the horrific quality of the fighting in the zones where gas was

used. The action

is

described as being

'masked ball', in which the troops advance through the fumes with their like a

partner, Rosalie, the long bayonet.

Below: Soldiers of Kitchener's New Armies complete their training in France. The British tactical approach to the war was influenced by the experience of the South African war, and so great an emphasis was placed on fitness and aggressiveness

X

^ *^*C

,v*uS*

f>

\

r*+

*

>

»

advantage in heavy howitzers and numbers machine guns, th' s was counterbalanced by the French 75s and the British out-

Casualties

standing superiority vividly

Cateau.

in rifle

demonstrated at Mons has been claimed that

In

capture the Chemin Aisne he might have ended the war in 1914, This doubtful; his army had neither the is technique nor the equipment. At the First Battle of Ypres in the following month the rapid and accurate rifle fire of the British army in the opening engagement had virtually the stopping effect of machine gun fire. In this bitter struggle — a 'soldiers' battle' if ever there was one — the fallacy of prewar theory was finally demonstrated. The defence, for the time being at any rate, had shown itself to be much the stronger form of war. A whole generation of British regular officers and men had been destroyed in the process: consequently they would not be available to train the New Armies. For the future, the blind must lead the blind. Virtually a whole generation of young Frenchmen had also sustained such losses that the national morale would never be quite the same again. With the onset of winter, the front finally congealed: trench warfare began. Tactical and strategical stalemate on the Western Front was complete. The Allies and Germans now contemplated a deadlock. Meanwhile, by trial and error, they would all learn their lessons, item by item, by costly instalments. For the Allies there was no alternative to offensive action: the Germans were on French and Belgian soil and public opinion unanimously demanded their removal with the greatest possible speed. The battles of the Aisne and Ypres had des

Dames

to

in the Battle of the

resulted in a demand for artillery ammunition far exceeding anything anticipated by the British War Office before the outbreak of war and in consequence an acute shortage developed during the winter. This led those preparing for the renewal of the offensive in the spring to think that overartillery bombardment — to German machine guns and cut enemy wire with shrapnel — would pro-

whelming

swamp

the

the vide the key to success. These ideas dominated the meticulous preparations for the battle of Neuve Chapelle in March 1915, the aim of which was to capture Aubers Ridge. In this battle, after a brief but intense preliminary bombardment, lasting only 35 minutes, four infantry brigades advanced to the attack on a total frontage of only 2,000 yards. Complete surprise was achieved, the German front line was overrun and the infantry advanced about 1,200 yards. Thereafter communications between the infantry and the artillery collapsed and between commanders below the divisional level as well. It was not until late in the afternoon that anything in the nature of serious exploitation was attempted — obviously too late. Further attempts on the succeeding days came to nothing. Such success as this battle achieved was due to the surprise effect of the preliminary bombardment lasting only 35 minutes. Obviously the front of attack was too narrow. The battle further accentuated in dramatic form a complex problem — that of communications between the forward infantry and the supporting artillery. Tele-

his next offensive at Festubert a later Haig, encouraged by the

who had had some success in attacking after four days' intensive shelling, arranged for a 36-hour artillery preparation to be followed by a night attack to gain a footing in the first two German lines. It was then proposed to exploit the penetration next day. Although the Germans were not taken by surprise, this gambit at first had some success but the support proved inadequate, artillery ammunition ran out, no reserves were available when the crisis came and troops already tired were driven forward to assault once more. The attack soon expired in the teeth of greater machine gun fire than had ever previously been encountered. Haig concluded however from the experience gained in the battle that provided the long bombardment was preliminary enough, heavy enough and meticulously prepared an advance to a depth of about 1 ,400 yards could be guaranteed. French

and Le French

if

had not allowed his divisions to drift to battle and had made a more vigorous and determined attempt

the attacking troops

month

marksmanship

It

among

were as high as 75%.

of

Above: General Sir William Robertson, the newly appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff He forced Kitchener to recognise the differences in their respective roles, and he also believed that, given sufficient resources. any line could be broken, any offensive won

The soldier, by natural evolution, has so perfected the mechanism of slaughter that he has

secured his

own

extinction' phone

lines were found to be and continued be almost hopelessly vulnerable. The success of the short and sharp preliminary bombardment at Neuve Chapelle encouraged Haig to try a similar technique when he was ordered to make a further attempt to take Aubers Ridge on May 9, in conjunction with a French offensive under Foch north of Arras. This time there was to be a 40-minute preliminary bombardment to cut the wire, swamp the Germans' forward troops and cut off their reinforcements. Haig planned two converging attacks 6,000 yards apart hoping to cut off some six or seven German battalions. To ensure continuous artillery to

support, specific batteries were detailed to follow the advancing troops and batteries of mountain artillery were placed in close support of attacking battalions. Unfortunately, the Germans too had learnt something at Neuve Chapelle, notably the need for solidly constructed fortifications in depth. The British bombardment was a failure, much wire remained uncut when the infantry advanced to find the German defences to be immensely strong. Twenty-foot breastworks and bomb-proof shelters protected the garrisons and enabled them to line thenrifles and machine guns the bombardment lifted. Accord-

parapets with

moment

the

ing to an officer survivor of the 2nd Fast Lancashire Regiment: 'the artillery entirely failed to shake the enemy, who

maintained heavy rifle fire and machine gun fire throughout the bombardment."

'Miserable offensive'

The

British wanted no more major offensives in 1915. The shell shortage was now

its height and it would take the new ammunition factories in the United Kingdom and the United States at least a year

at

to reach

did

not

peak production. Delay, however, suit the French who demanded

and

finally obtained British assistance in the build-up area about Lens and Loos on the immediate left of Foch's September

offensive towards Namur. French and Haig could see little future to operations in this area of coal mines and industrial slums but were overruled in what were thought to be the interests of the Alliance. Haig, now committed to the policy of prolonged artillery preparations, had only sufficient ammunition to support two of the six divisions available for this battle. le therefore decided to make good the deficiency by using gas discharges from cylinders operated by Special Companies of the Royal Engineers. As the German gas attack at Ypres in April had already shown, success depended on the vagaries of the wind: on the day of the attack there was virtually none. Nevertheless the attacking troops did succeed in capturing the German first 1

it. Now, hov bringing forward the reserves who were controlled by French himself, and the Germans were able to stabilise the battle. Haig continued this dismal offensive for a further miser able 17 days. It was the first experience ol the New Armies and despite their out standing courage and high grade human material it emphasised not only the lack of training of the troops but also of their

line

and

in

ever, there

advancing beyond

was delay

in

commanders and staffs as well It also showed that the Germans once again were a step ahead: they now catered for a second line of defence out of range of any bombardment the Allies could mount. At Loos, Haig had been right in asking for control ol' the reserves and French wrong. French therefore was removed His replacement in somewhat dubious circum stances by llai<_; involved no dramatic leap

forward m tactical thought. In he planning and conduct of the battle he had tailed to find a means of keeping bis finger on liipulse of it. After zero hour bo bat far as he was concerned bad virtually i

I

t

I

|i

1

183

Above: Aerial photograph of a German trench system. Aerial reconnaissance was becoming a vital pre-requisite of a successful attack

1184

Below: A motorcycle and side car are used as a base for a machine at German aircraft over northern France

gun being aimed

fought itself. Experience gained up to the end of 1915 had convinced him that the heavier the bombardment, the greater the chances of success, even if it inevitably involved the sacrifice of surprise. He proceeded to create senior artillery appointments at every level of command. In the development of tactics, Major General Birch, at first Rawlinson's and later Haig's principal artillery adviser, was henceforth to exert ever increasing influence. He and Haig saw the coming battles as series of step by step advances, each stage covered by an elaborate fire plan. This procedure, they thought, would eventually so demoralise the enemy that the waiting cavalry divisions could gallop through his shat-

1915 his mobility had been continuously reduced. In August 1914 his load had been 59 pounds 11 ounces, by Christmas 1915 this had risen to 66 pounds. Apart from his weapons, he had to carry into the attack a pick or shovel, wire cutters, sandbags, an anti-gas respirator and 170 rounds of

ammunition. To this had

to

be added his

formidable: four to six miles deep, crisscrossed by interlocking arcs of machine gun

personal necessities — a heavy greatcoat, a ground sheet, three pairs of thick socks, a spare woollen undervest and long underpants, a cardigan, a spare shirt and his iron ration of a one pound tin of corned beef, tea and sugar and two packets of cementhard biscuits. The steel helmets issued in this year were of solid steel and very heavy, often causing headaches. Each man also had a heavy mess tin, a waterbottle, a knife, fork and spoon, an enamel mug and washing and shaving kit including a cut-throat razor. In winter, thigh gum boots and leather jerkins were added for good measure. In an attack the infantryman was expected to carry on for days on hard rations washed down with such tea as he could brew for himself in his mess tin with solidified paraffin. At all times his food included an inordinate amount of cheese — a constipating factor which the almost continuous shell fire did something to mitigate. The infantryman was thus almost always overloaded and inadequately sustained by hot food. The short Lee-Enfield rifle carried by each man was an accurate and simple weapon capable, in skilled hands, of producing 15 aimed rounds a minute. Thus to a limited extent platoons and companies, although overloaded, had the means to get forward on their own in a fluid situation once clear of the enemy's main defences. Despite the bias of the prewar manuals to what they called open warfare and the stress on it as the ultimate aim, little or no thought at the higher levels of command was given to it after 1914. As late as spring 1916 the Infantry Officers' Basic Course of one month at the School of Musketry at Hythe was devoting a complete week to firing the rifle in the standing position. Platoon tactics received two hours in the whole course — two

dead ground covered by artillery defensive fire and protected by everincreasing belts of wire. By the end of

sections of instructors advancing by alternate rushes from the 800-yard firing point to the butts. A high proportion of training

1915 they had put an amazing amount

time was devoted to bayonet fighting. So important was this subject deemed to be that all troops passing through the Base at Etaples were rushed through an insti-

tered defences. On the Eastern Front the operations had on the whole conformed to the mobile type envisaged by Allied and German prewar theory. Here, the cavalry divisions had played a prominent part both in Russia and the Balkans, largely on account of their mobility. The general incompetence of the Russian commanders at all. levels, the virtual absence of an efficient logistic system, the acute shortage of munitions, had combined with the vast distances and featureless terrain to give the Germans

comparatively easy victories. Politically, the Germans intended to embody Belgium in the Reich; it therefore sufficed in 1915 to stand on the defensive on the Western Front and in the process concentrate on economising in manpower by the ever increasing use of wire, machine guns and deep dugouts. The end of active operations in 1914 had left the Germans, unlike their opponents, in tactically sound defensive positions. Throughout 1915 they had pushed ahead with the construction of well-drained and well-revetted trench systems with an industry which put the efforts

of the British

in

this respect to

shame. Their prewar theory had stressed the importance of depth in defence and provision for counterattack. Constructed in accordance with these principles, their defensive systems by the end of 1915 were

fire,

of work into the construction of shellproof and weather-proof accommodation, thus enabling them to keep their troops for long periods in the forward defences

without undue discomfort and with small loss of life.

Falkenhayn, like Joffre and Haig, saw the coming battles of 1916 in terms of fire rather than of large scale movement, but with greater subtlety. He planned to attack with very light forces after an intense bombardment, thus forcing the French to counterattack straight into the maw of his massed artillery and machine guns. By this means he hoped to bleed them to death.

Weighed down surprising that so little thought was given in the early years of the First World War to the tactics needed once the much desired breach in the German defences had been blasted by the artillery. One consideration, which the prewar regulations had stressed, was that the infantryman would have to show great initiative and be highly mobile. Instead, throughout

It is

tution known as the Bull Ring. Here instructors in red jerseys showed how 'easy' it was. You stabbed your opponent in the stomach, stirred your bayonet round a bit, then pulled it out smartly. Also available within brigades was the Stokes Mortar which had a maximum range of about 400 yards. It consisted of a plain steel tube with a spike at the bottom end. The crew attached a sporting cartridge to the base of the shell, slid it down the barrel onto the spike and hoped for the best. It was advisable to wait for the departure of one round before inserting the next: increased range could be obtained by adding rings of ballastite to the cartridge.

was

The main drawback

to this

weapon

weight, particularly that of the base plate. Nevertheless, it does seem that these drawbacks could have been eliminated quickly if more attention had been given to the problem at GHQ. More than half a century later it is not its

easy to explain the shortsightedness of the Allied High Command in tactical matters in 1915. It may have sprung from the fact that most of them had never in their lives had to fight on foot as infantrymen. It may well be that from sheer inexperience and lack of imagination they literally could not understand that it was virtually impossible for a battalion commander in the attack to control his companies and maintain touch with his supporting artillery. Now that the tactical problem by which they were confronted had taken an unmistakable form they fell for what seemed to them the obvious solution — overwhelming bombardment. They would now crush all resistance by sheer weight of shells. Accordingly they proceeded to pile gun on gun, substitute high explosive for shrapnel and bring in ever increasing numbers of heavy artillery batteries with calibres ranging from 6 inches to 18. In almost all their eyes, the developments inspired by Swinton and Churchill which would eventually completely change the character of land warfare had no significance. The views expressed by Robertson, at the time Chief of the General Staff of the

BEF, in his memorandum to Asquith on November 6, 1915, may be taken as epitomising the official attitude. He wrote: Experience has taught us that, given sufficient

guns and ammunition, any front

system can be broken. It is the depth of the enemy's defences and the power of bringing intact reserves up quickly to occupy rear lines which make attack difficult on the Western Front. He later went on to state that the main lessons of the attacks in 1915 had been that given adequate artillery support there is no difficulty in overwhelming the enemy's forces in front

and

support. The principles are that force should be employed to exhaust the enemy and force him to use up his reserves, and then, and then only, the decisive attack which is to win victory, should be driven home. There are therefore no grounds for considering that the prospects of a successful offensive next spring are anything but good. line

sufficient

Further Reading

Edmonds, Sir James, Military Operations France and Belgium (HMSO) von, General Headquarters and Decisions (Hutchinson 1919) Fuller, Maj-Gen. J. F. C, Decisive Battles of the Western World (Eyre and Spottiswoode 1957) Liddell Hart, Sir Basil, The Tanks Vol.1. (Faber 1959) Montgomery, Viscount, A History of Warfare

Falkenhayn, its

E.

Critical

(Collins 1968) Sixsmith, E. K. G., British Generalship in the 20th Century (Arms and Armour Press) Weller, J. A. C., Weapons and Tactics (Vane 1966)

MAJOR-GENERAL

H.

ESSAME

Infantry Officer from early

1915

to

served

1949

In

an

as

the First

World War he fought at the battles of the Somme, Third Ypres and Passchendaele and was present at the March retreat of 1918 and the final advance to the Armistice Line. He was awarded the Military Cross. Between the wars, he graduated at the Staff College, Quetta and in the Second World War he

commanded Normandy

the

214th Infantry Brigade from Since his retirement he has a radio commentator, military

to the Baltic.

been active as

television adviser, lecturer, freelance journalist and as a writer on military historical subjects His literary

works include: The 43rd Wessex Division (Clowes),

Battle

for

Normandy Bridgehead

Germany

at

(Batsford)

War and

(Ballantine).

1

1

85

The blindness of those in command to the real demands of the war machine led,

during the

first

year of the war,

to a critical shortage of ammunition. As the factories in Britain struggled to

miMl

meet the new demands, the press laid the blame for the crisis at Kitchener's door Major Henry Harris

iss ^^^^ t^/saji

^irss**

H

'-'':••.

1

>«

rz ~^j

sraTir

»r«J

f

Th

MJ

fsj •••••

ji»»i

v

-" •

1

1

is

generally considered beyond question

the

lengthy duration of the war or the

form it would take. Field-Marshal Lord

Kitchener,

lonely, formidable, Irish-born

the

Englishman,

who was brought

into the Liberal governthe vacant post of Secretary of State for War (the first serving soldier to hold the job since Monk), had been one of the few to predict that the war would be a prolonged one. But not even he had foreseen that the lines would become static and that the artillery, the standard counter, would be used so extensively and would go on firing continuously day and night, using up enormous quantities of ammunition. In anticipation of besieging Belgian and

ment

to

fill

French fortresses, Germany was at first prepared for heavy ammunition expenditure than her foes, but by the spring of 1915 she too was deficient in the types of guns and ammunition which experience was showing to be necessary. And the pattern of warfare which had emerged now called for an unprecedented number of guns and enormous reserves of ammunition, not only of existing calibres and types, but also of new weapons more suited to trench conditions. Of these, high explosive shells for all calibres of guns were to be the most critical. By early October 1914 there was general concern better

among

the Staff and the Ordnance in the

BEF

about the ammunition shortage. So meagre was the supply that every round had to be rationed. At the First Battle of Ypres, the allocation for 18-pound shell had to be reduced first from 20 to ten rounds per gun per day and towards the end of that month's fighting to two rounds per gun per day; the 4.5-inch howitzers were on two rounds and the 6-inch howitzers on six rounds per gun per day. Reports of daily stocks at railheads were telephoned to a senior

Ordnance

Officer at

GHQ

who

prepared a tabulated statement for the QMG, BEF. From this, allocations on a priority basis were made. At times this meant not more than six rounds per gun per day, or less for some if the situation was worse than usual in another sector. To provide some flexibility, the Ordnance kept certain types of ammunition on special trains, which could be diverted from one army railhead to another in accordance with operational needs. During the 1915 battles nothing was left in depots and ammunition was being brought up to the guns straight from the ships. At Ypres in 1915 the British Second Army demands for howitzer ammunition had to be refused.

Shared responsibility 1914 the British War Office's Army Council included two military and one civilian member concerned with supply — the Quartermaster-General (QMG), the Master-General of the Ordnance (MGO) and the Finance Member. The and the shared the chief responsibility, the latter being concerned with artillery supplies and technical munitions. The MGO's principal officer for material was the Director of Artillery whose branches dealt with all types of field and fixed guns, their pattern, design, manufacture, inspection and employment. The total staff of this Directorate was only 40. The also had various technical bodies, such as the Ordnance Board and In

QMG

MGO

MGO

and obtain which was

to inspect 'sealed patterns' specifications of equipment

that at the outbreak of war in 1914 none of the combatant nations foresaw either

Above: Kitchener visits France for talks during the ammunition crisis. The Press, in their campaign against him. underestimated his popularity and found themselves boycotted by major institutions. Kitchener survived the crisis and public faith in him remained unshaken. Opposite: Men and women at work in

a shell filling factory.

The system

of

tenders governing shell production was largely inefficient

and

led to inflated prices

the Small Arms Committee, as well as the production establishments of the Royal Ordnance Factories (ROFsi at Woolwich Arsenal, Waltham Abbey and Enfield Lock. The had a principal officer, the Director of Equipment and Ordnance Stores iDEOS), whose duties included receiving, storing, issuing and repairing

QMG

equipment and ammunition. Under the Finance Member was the

artillery

Director of Army Contracts, in charge of the Contracts Branch born out of the British troubles in the Crimea. This was responsible for purchasing the total requirements of all departments of the army, but could order nothing without the concurrence of the military branch concerned. It had a staff of eight in August 1914. The size of the army being determined by Parliament and scales of equipment approved, the ordering followed a welldefined pattern through two main channels.

A large amount of artillery equipment and ammunition was obtained from the ROFs under direct MGO control. ROF contracts were regulated so as to keep them busy, but when necessary outside orders were placed to prevent civilian firms from closing through lack of work. Shells were ordered from 'the trade' so as to give the firms concerned experience of such work in the event of war. ROF work also acted as a check on contractors' prices

To obtain such work,

civilian firms

had

get on the List of Contractors. There were rigid rules on eligibility for this list — fair wages, no sub-letting, cutting out first to

agents

and

middlemen,

financial

and

quality control criteria and inspection of plant— all to be satislied before a manufacturer could be put on the list There were arrangements and facilities for firms

highly standardised. Supplies were invited by tender. Tendering was a formal and leisurely business; the tenders came in by a fixed date in sealed envelopes and were dropped through a slit in a metal tender box. the key of which was held by a specially nominated officer. At an appointed hour this box was ceremonially opened and the tenders listed. signed and witnessed by those attending. Tenders were afterwards tabulated and considered, the basis being the most favourable price, though some note would be taken of the competence of individual firms. The procedure which laid down that 'The established principle of public purchase is competition and the acceptance of the lowest offer' was designed to ensure fairness between rivals and to avoid suspicions of favouritism or collusion. In normal times the system ensured reasonable prices for standardised articles. But the supply requirement in August 1914 was far from normal. The supply departments realised this, but with no precedents to guide them, their steps to cope with the new situation were slow and hesitant, based on the existing machinery. Had the demands escalated immediately, the fundamental reorganisation on a national rather than a localised basis might have taken place earlier. But the gradual build-up obscured the fact that the current organisation for supply was only capable of limited expansion.

The defects were not immediately apparent, even to Kitchener who considered the Liberal government guilty of the collective sin of irresponsibility, and himself took on the burden of raising and equipping new armies of unprecedented size, and supervising the conduct of British military strategy throughout the world. Apart from lack of shells, shortages of all kinds were immediately apparent within a couple of weeks of the outbreak of war. Some requirements, such as clothing and footwear, harness and saddlery, could be met by large scale purchases of certain non-standard patterns When shortages became crucial and it was widely known that, contrary to his orders, many recruits were without boots and other necessities, Kitchener dismissed the Director of Army Contracts. But guns and ammunition could not he obtained by speedy resort to trade patterns. No action by Kitchener or anyone else could redress for many months the prewar blindness and indifference of the British people and their leaders But he demand for more heavy guns had to he met In September 1911 a Siege Committee of officers from the War Office and GHQ, BEF recommended the provision of Id heavy howitzers 'for use against fortresses on the Rhine', as well as ant aircraft guns and weapons for use trenches Kitchener immediately authorised these but when the Lieutenant -( Icneral von Donop) demurred about the size and cost of the order which ran to £3,000,000 Kitchener had it checked with the French War Ministry. When lhe\ replied thai they thought these were essential, he i

1

i

m

MGO

i

overruled von Donop and gave inst ruct ions for heir purchase. In the earl} days ol the war. put to tender to the approved the ROFs put on lull capacity

perempt

t

shells firm

were and

production

I

l.s,

Above: One of the small firms that did go over to shell production, in this case in Ireland. Women provided useful and plentiful labour

1

188

Below: Business as usual that could have

gone over

at

the Wilkinson sword factory.

to shell

Many

production failed to do so

in

firms

time

first orders, totalling 500,000 rounds (mainly shrapnel), were contracted for by separate components and assembled at Woolwich Arsenal. But unplaced demands began to accumulate as early as August 12. Kitchener invited US manufacturers to send representatives over to discuss production and the War Office placed some orders in Canada and India. Troubles and were to hold up misunderstandings deliveries of these overseas orders; there

These

were variations in meanings between US and British technical terms, and the British were ignorant of US methods and vice versa. So keen were US firms to get orders that one company signed a contract a month before they knew what they were going to make! Another firm quoted for an entirely different article from that which they were expected to supply. Canadian production was to be particularly disappointing as a result of the difficulties in organising manufacture among a large number of inexperienced firms. One of the first relaxations of the supply procedure was to permit sub-contracting— as this was recognised as giving training to firms inexperienced in munitions work — but the main contractors were held fully responsible. But lack of Inspecting Officers to visit the new firms led many to ask for and receive orders they were unable to fulfil. The most that could be done by the

overworked inspection staff was to show samples and give advice to would-be contractors who came to Woolwich. 'To get them and hold them' Unnoticed and unrealised by the government, a grave shortage of skilled labour developed.

The

initial

and

temporary

of trade impelled many men to enlist rather than face the miseries of

breakdown

The engineering trade alone lost 12% by October 1914 (this was to go up to 20% by July 1915). In the scramble for orders, firms began to poach each other's labour, inducing tradesmen who were already on war work with other employers to join them. Some firms, wishing to give their men on war work some recognition, suggested special badges. Churchill agreed to this and ordered one for Admiralty Service but it was initially vetoed by the Treasury. Full peacetime Treasury control (prior approval of all expenditure) was not completely relaxed for munitions until February 1915. Employers made various other proposals; the Chief Superintendent of the Ordnance Factories suggested that suitable skilled men be given two to three year contracts of employment — 'the only way to get them and hold them'. Messrs Vickers proposed bringing over Belgian workers and implementing large scale employment of women. It was also suggested that the French system of industrial mobilisation should be adopted, under which workmen were conscripted by the government into their jobs and moved about as munitions production required. This was fiercely resisted by the trade unions. Some of the drain off into the army was checked by telling Recruiting Officers not to enlist men from certain firms without their employers' consent. But despite these measures, by the end of the year the unemployment.

munitions programme was in deep trouble. The tendering system created artificial

and inflated prices. All the tendering firms went after the same raw scarcities

materials at the same time, the net demands multiplying several times over in the market. Two hundred firms would put in for orders which involved the use of 2,000 tons of raw materials. Only 20 firms

would get the orders but all 200 would have obtained options on 2,000 tons each. This caused chaos in the markets and forced options up to fictitious and unwarranted Calling for tenders also led to the War Office revealing its total requirement to everyone in the trade and the relation of such demands to probable supply was quickly and accurately gauged by most. The War Office, being in a hurry, accepted high tenders in the hope that disappointed firms would reduce their prices next time. The abandonment of many standard patterns and specifications for 'trade pattern' substitutes made inspection for quality control and other checks difficult, with innumerable queries arising. Most of this work was done physically after delivery, in the labyrinthine Peninsulaperiod accommodation of Woolwich Arsenal. Delays occurred often, with masses of items lying around in confusion until decisions could be made. The most frequent excuse for failing to keep to delivery dates was shortage of machine tools. The output was insufficient and US orders were not delivered on time. One firm working on shells, Cammell Laird, in two months had only obtained 26 machines out of over 200 ordered, and had to put off their planned expansion. Gun contractors were also badly affected, and by the end of 1914, though their production had only just begun, they were finding it impossible to live up to their promises. The greatest amount of delivery failures occurred among sub-contractors, who, despite their initial experiences, continued to give too optimistic a picture of their powers of production. They were harder hit by labour shortages than the big firms and were also hampered by delays in obtaining samples, drawings, specifications and of course in delivery of machine tools. The War Office machinery for dealing with this situation was itself in poor shape. There was confusion in the offices as a result of over-crowding, the staffs' long hours (some worked 14 hours a day) and the ordinary civil servants' ignorance of commercial matters clashing with the contempt shown by the businessmen brought in to assist. Despite the addition of these 'expert buyers and advisers' in the Army Contracts Department, the oldfashioned purchasing procedure was little altered, some 'expert buyers' often being subjects of suspicion on grounds of gaining unfair advantage over their competitors. In October the government set up a Cabinet Shells Committee. It was presided over by Kitchener and met six times up to December 1914. On December 21 there was a 'Shells Conference' which debated all the munitions troubles (in this month the government had considered it imperative to ship munitions to Russia to avert a military collapse there) and on December 23 the Cabinet agreed to coordinate the supply of labour in the following ways: • substitute Belgian for British workers; • divert labour from less urgent industries 'such as the railways'; and • put pressure on firms not on munitions levels.

UK

work

to release their

men.

To strengthen the War Office, an addimember was appointed to the Army Council, and a general officer added to the MGO's Branch to visit and report on the flood of untried firms offering their services (as a result of an appeal by the Board of Trade) and whose production capacity was unknown. tional civilian

From

this point on, the responsibilities Office were shared by other government agencies, and certain interests in and outside Parliament began to feel

of the

War

uneasy about the way munitions producwas being directed. But the government still maintained that no drastic

tion

revision of policy was necessary except for machinery to deal with the delays in deliveries. The Board of Trade's efforts included attempts to obtain relaxation of trade union restrictive practices, and a drive against drinking by workers.

Unfair load

A

large

section

of the

engineering

in-

was dissatisfied with the War Office's methods of contracting, feeling that more direct contracting would help to reduce the loss of workers. Cammell Laird and Vickers were two firms to put this view when revising downwards their dustry

delivery dates. Demands for direct conby sub-contracting firms were stimulated by the steady loss of their work force. But it was not easy, as shown above, to give orders direct to untried firms and the policy of organising supply through firms already on the Contractors List had much in its favour. In 1914-15 these were the only firms with experience of such work; with little or no higher organisation to instruct and supervise, ordinary firms were quite incapable of going on to such work at short notice. To a great extent, the 'education' firms received as sub-contractors enabled them to organise themselves better in the summer of 1915. But apart from delays, deliveries in early 1915 were often defective. The ROFs were compelled to carry an undue share of the load at the expense of more specialised manufacture and every branch of the Arsenal tracts

was congested with work

in

hand and

for

Kitchener tried to conceal these troubles from his Cabinet colleagues, although he informed Asquith, who told him that any form of conscription (including industrial conscription, which Bonar Law was advocating) would wreck the government. Kitchener therefore addressed himself anew to enlisting private firms into making munitions. But by March it was no longer possible inspection.

to conceal that, as far as the

immediate

future was concerned, adequate supply was not assured. Kitchener abandoned his usual reticence in a speech in the House of Lords on March 15, 1915. He admitted that 'progress in equipping the new armies and forces in field is hampered by failure to obtain sufficient labour and by delays in production of plant, largely due to enormous demands', and went on to say: 'Labour has a right to say (hat their patriotic work should not be used to inflate the profits of directors and shareholders and we are arranging a system under

which the important

Government

control.

funis

come under

Men working

long

hours in the shops by day and night, work in and out, are doing their duty tor King and Country the same as those on active service in the

field.'

L189

Bj now. Lloyd George and others had decided that a radical reorganisation was

ward movement.' The 'next forward movement' was Festubert, a week before which

Kitchener opposed this. He did, accept the Munitions of War Committee which was set up on April 12 under Lloyd George and he was represented on it by the MGO. Bui he refused to delegate any War Office responsibility for munitions, and also, on security grounds, to provide the committee with information about the numbers of men being put into the line by particular dates. Lloyd George claimed they were unable, as a result, to prepare accurate estimates of quantities required by specific dates.

French told Kitchener that 'the ammunition will be all right'. But on the first day of the battle, Kitchener had had to reserve 20,000 shells on paper for Gallipoli — an

vital luit

however,

Britain's other enemy Lloyd George, though Chancellor of the Exchequer, was active on many other matters at this time in addition to munitions supply. He was giving advice on strategy iwith Churchill he had strongly advocated an attack on Turkey), industrial unrest and the problems of drink. He was particularly keen to deal with 'the lure of the drink' which he felt was detrimental to good work and the cause of many serious production delays. He announced that: 'If we are to settle with Germany we must of all settle with drink.' He induced the King to set an example by banning all alcoholic liquor from Royal establishments and sought a law to control or close public first

houses near where war work was being done. He claimed that it was 'proved quite clearly that excessive drinking in the works [sic] connected with (munitions) operations is seriously interfering with output'. During March the government negotiated an agreement with trade union leaders with recommendations to workers including eschewing of strikes, the use of negotiating machinery and temporary relaxation of demarcation and dilution rules. Most moderate trade unionists w-elcomed this and readily co-operated with local munitions committees in 'delivering the goods' and 'doing their bit'. But Lloyd George was not satisfied with these steps and felt he had a duty to play a more direct part in munitions supply. He considered it proper to invite the megalomaniac Lord Northcliffe to take up the munitions question in the press and so compel Kitchener and the government to act. Northcliffe, who considered Kitchener an impediment to victory over the Germans, naturally favoured a campaign against this overburdened titan, based on information obtained from Sir John French. At this time things were not going very well for the British on the Western Front and Sir John French was induced to lend his name to the campaign. He appears to have done so willingly after his defeat at Neuve Chapelle, claiming that a shortage of ammunition robbed him of victory. But there was in fact no shortage during that four-day battle; ammunition was fired off at an unprecedented rate, described by Kitchener as 'irresponsible'. Shortages had hampered French on other occasions, mainly because of his refusal to accept the logistic situation and curtail offensive operations until supplies were adequate for his plans. Such a -preciations were not well understood by hat generation of Commanders and StuTs. However, on April 14, Kitchener tokl Asquith that 'French says that with the present supply of ammunition he will have as much as his troops will be able to use in the next for-

1190

earmark which was cancelled the next day but it was enough to upset Sir John French and spark off the crisis. In the preceding weeks, press comments on munitions had become more pointed. On April 7, The Times (a Northcliffe paper), writing about Kitchener's Armaments Output Committee, criticised the 'extraordinary failure of the Government to take in hand in business-like fashion the provision of full and adequate supply of munitions. The War Office has sought to do too much and been jealous of civilian aid. It should chiefly devote itself to the organisation of the armies and should state its supply requirements and leave to others the far more complex task of organising industry.' On April 10, The Times stated that the primary reason why Sir John French is unduly short of munitions is not drink at all. It is that in our previous wars the War Office has been accustomed to rely for all such supplies on the as a sort of Universal Provider. In this unprecedented war the Government ought to have insisted on instant organisation of the whole of our national resources, leaving the War Office to state its requirements and raise its armies. But Lloyd George was saying that it was obviously better to get your men under the direct supervision and control of those who for years have been undertaking this kind of work, obviously better than going to those without experience. The failure [of the Board of Trade to get men through Labour Exchanges] drove us to other courses — to introduce the Defence of the Realm Act to equip War Office and Admiralty with powers to take over engineering works. In mid-April the Prime Minister set up the Munitions of War or Treasury Committee under Lloyd George. He announced that the decision to do so had been taken a month earlier but the ground had had to be prepared for its activities. Kitchener was not a member of it and by its terms of reference it superseded his Armaments

MGO

Output Committee. One of its schemes was and it was in effect the embryo of the Munitions Ministry. The Battle of Aubers Ridge of May 9 resulted in heavy British casualties and on the 14th The Times printed a telegram from its correspondent in Northern France, stating that the 'attack had failed because of want of unlimited supply of HE (High Explosive)'. This correspondent was Colonel Repington, a retired officer, who had been

with the banner headline 'The Shells Scandal — Lord Kitchener'sTragicBlunder'. But Northcliffe had underestimated the nation's belief in its idol and the ceremonial burning of the paper containing the headline outside the Stock Exchange was but one reaction. Clubs and other institutions cancelled subscriptions to the Daily Mail and the general public in-

dignantly boycotted it to such an extent that sales became seriously affected. After a few weeks, Northcliffe dropped the campaign, ruefully admitting his failure to a fellow press lord — Beaverbrook. The press campaign, described by Churchill as 'odious and calculated' and by Haig as 'reptilian', had, if anything, increased public faith in Kitchener, and the King made him a Knight of the Garter. In the reconstruction of the government on a coalition basis, Asquith therefore had no choice but to retain him, but his position was weakened. In the new coalition National Government formed on May 26, Kitchener remained as secretary of State for War and Lloyd George went from the Exchequer to the new Ministry of Munitions. In the latter's words, this was from first to last a businessman's organisation.

most distinctive feature was the appointments I made to chief executive posts of successful businessmen to whom I gave authority and personal support that enabled them to break through much of the aloofness and routine which characterised the normal administration of Government Departments. These businessmen had powers to take over any land .or buildings they required, to engage such labour as they needed and to make conditions of work binding for the war period. Strikes and lockouts were forbidden, profits were limited, but workers were encouraged to earn as much as they could by piece work. But despite all these powers (and an increase of staff from 137 to 2,350 in five months) the time needed from creation of new capacity to delivery of bulk outputs differed little from that experienced by the War Office. The shortage of shells — the prime reason for handing over supply to a new department — was brought about by arrears of deliveries, not lack of orders, and these could be remedied by time alone.

Its

for National Shell Factories

staying at Kitchener

GHQ as French's personal guest.

had cautioned French about having Repington with him as it was a breach of orders, but French replied: 'Repington is an old friend and stayed for a day or two in an entirely private capacity — I really have no time to attend to these matters.' French gave Repington access to the papers on munitions and said all his efforts were crippled by lack of shells. He also sent copies of the papers to the opposition leaders, unknown to Asquith and

Kitchener.

A week after The Times reported Repington's telegram, the Daily Mail (another Northcliffe paper) opened a direct attack intended to hound Kitchener from office

Further Reading Sir Philip, Kitchener, Portrait of an Imperialist (Murray 1958) Maurice, Life of Haldane (Faber & Faber) Maurice, British Strategy (Constable) Official History of the Great War Vols. to III

Magnus,

I

(Macmillan)

C, Lloyd George and the British Labour Movement in peace and war (Harvester Press

Wrigley,

1976)

MAJOR HENRY HARRIS, Officer,

is

well

known

a retired British

Army

historical circles for his

in

lectures to the Military History Society of Ireland, of

which he is a founder member. He has contributed articles on military matters to the Irish Times the Irish ,

Army Defence

Journal,

Brassey's Annual. British

He has

the

Army

written

two

Quarterly

and

histories of the

Ordnance and has contributed 50 monthly

1914-1918 to the on logistic and administrative aspects of the First World War. His Model Soldiers, based on his collection to be seen in Curragh, Kinsale, London and Camberley, has appeared in four languages. He has produced articles

British

on the

'Lost Generation' of

Ordnance Gazette,

chiefly

several other books, including a dictionary of Irish battles and one on the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland

in

1169.

THE

BELLIGERENTS ardship and reappraisal By 1916

Britain was paying six million pounds a day for the war. On both sides, disillusion prevailed, but with the start of a new year came no immediate hope of victory. All' that the belligerents could do was to reaffirm their commitments and endeavour to boost the morale of their people. E. K. G. Sixsmith

1191

B> the beginning o( 1916, Britain had for the moment ceased her search for a way round the Western Front. With the failure at Gallipoli and with Serbia defeated there seemed hardly any alternative but to agree to the French proposals for a general offensive on the Franco-British, Italian and Russian fronts. Britain looked upon her

Egypt and Mesopotamia as purely defensive and hoped to withdraw altogether from those in Gallipoli and Macedonia. She would put her faith in the effective use of her new armies to break the deadlock on the Western Front. France, despite her passing interest in the Macedonian adventure, never had any other real aims except on the Western Front. With a large part of her soil in German hands it was natural that to her the war should mean the defeat of the German armies in the West. The Russians had not set foot in

commitments

in

time, the combined strength of the Entente would outweigh the fact that France had been 'weakened almost to the limits of endurance', that the offensive powers of the Russian armies could never revive in anything like their former strength and that Italy could be contemptuously dismissed. Falkenhayn saw no opportunity of striking directly at Britain, except by submarine warfare, and Russia could be left for the moment in the hope that internal troubles would compel her to seek peace. The main aim of the German army for 1916 must therefore be the destruction of the French army. Austria would have liked to have turned to deal with Italy once and for all but strategically and politically Austria was directed by Germany and, for the present, the Austrian forces were required for the Russian front.

Germany

Climate of change

in

In Britain, political and military opinions

since their defeat at Tannenberg August 1914 and Russia was still cut off from her allies except by the Arctic and Pacific routes. The Russian armies were badly equipped and poorly commanded but it is difficult to know what they expected from their allies. It may best be summed up in the words of the chief of the American Military Mission which was already there: They want us to put a big bag of money on their doorstep and then run away.' For her part, Germany had in December 1915 made up her mind about her enemies. She believed the Allies were able to continue the war only through the influence and political strength of Britain. Given

mPTO

TO ILL MEN SERVING THE EMPIRE. It

possible holder of that office, but Lloyd

George had begun to capture the political and popular imagination. Dissatisfaction with the progress of the war so far was stirring the beginnings of personal and political intrigue. Kitchener had lost much of his influence with the Cabinet, and with the appointment of Robertson as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the War Office was beginning to take its proper place in tendering military advice to the Cabinet

has been proved by

the-

most careful

SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS and complete ly continued by actual experience

ATHLETICS and

in

WAR

as attested by

Field-Marshal Field-Marshal Field-Marshal

LORD ROBERTS, V.C.. K.G., K.P. LORD WOLSELEY, K.P., G.C B. EAKL KITCHENER, K.P., GC.B,

and many other Aimy Leaders, that

ALCOHOL

DRINK

or

1.

SLOWS

2.

CONFUSES prompt Judgment.

the power to see signals.

4.

SPOILS accurate Shooting HASTENS FATIGUE.

6-

LESSENS

3.

6.

were changing. Asquith, Prime Minister from the beginning of the war, seemed from the point of view of Parliament the only

MINISTRY OF LABOUR ANNOUNCEMENT

EFFECTS OF ALCOHOL ON NAVAL AND MILITARY WORK.

We

resistance to Diseases

and Exposure INCREASES Shock from Wounds.

there/ore most strongly urge you .for your own IJialth and Efficiency that at least as long as the War last* you should

BECOME TOTAL ABSTAINERS. (Signed)

THOMAS BARLOW.

M.D.. F.R.S.. K.O.V.O.,

Pres. Coll- Phys.. Physician to H.M. the King. C.S.. G.C.V.O.. Hon. Col. R-A.M.C. T.F.. Sergeant Surgeon to H.M. the King O. J. H. EVATT. M D.. C.B.. Surgeon-General R.A.M.C. HORSLEY. v.n.c s.. f.k.s.. Captain r.a.m.c. T.F. O. SIMS D.. F.R S.. Lt.-Col. R.A C. T.F.

FREDERICK TREVES. F R

VICTOR

M

WOODHEAD. M

Above: Exhortation to go sober into battle. In Britain, no liquor could be sold in the shops after 9.30. Right: A poor substitute for rum — a cocoa advertisement in 1915. Below: Fruit today, jam tomorrow. Below right: German civilians queue for their soup ration in the streets of Berlin

WOMEN

PROVIDE RASPBERRY JAM FOR THE FIGHTING FORCES

P

TED

the end of July to M id - Septem be BLAIRCOWRIEand AUCHTERARDER district Special arrangements for fares at reduced rates.

can be earned can be obtained at

canteens. can be housed, fed and employed together if early application is made. that the and fruit which is wanted for Sailors and in

Soldiers should be picked before

it

spoils.

information and full particulars as to fares, rates of pay. equipment. etc. can be obtained from the nearest All

WHERE ALL WHO WISH TO HELP SHOULD APPLY

AT

1192

/"^

M

I*"*

IT

and in making the plans to execute Cabinet decisions. Fisher, the strong man of the navy, .had gone. He still bombarded the

them would be in hospital by the end of the first month of active service and would

Admiralty and the government with advice and reproof but the attitude of the Royal Navy was defensive. The main effort had

terns and rank and

to

be the destruction of the increasing

number of German U-boats. But at the same time the fleet had to be prepared to deal with the main German fleet should it venture out. The Germans for their part would attempt to entice out the British a disadvantageous position. By the beginning of 1916 the new armies, recruited under Kitchener's impetus, were fleet

nearing readiness. The use of the first of new divisions at Loos and at Suvla

these

Two National Forces RENDERING YEOMAN SERVICE TO THE CONSTITUTION.

THE HIGHEST COCOA VALUE OBTAINABLE'

MAKERS

TO H.M.THE KING.

Bay showed the defects in training and especially in staff work in these new formations. The natural emphasis on the use of the regular army in the field in the greatest possible strength in 1914 and 1915 had in fact resulted in starving the newly raised units of the officers and non-commissioned officers fit to train and lead them. The failure to use the Territorial Army as the vehicle for expansion had added to the waste of resources and had unnecessarily cast a number of territorial divisions into a category trained and equipped for home defence only. A commander of one of the new divisions, Major-General Ivor Maxse, who had commanded the 1st Guards Brigade at Mons, wrote of his division that a high proportion of the officers were too old for the duties of battalion and company commander. He stated that half of

thus leave the 'excellent material' (subalfile)

leaderless at a

very critical moment. He believed that a proportion of captains and subalterns with 'priceless war experience' should be used in the new units. Not enough had been done to follow this advice because of the drain of manpower from the regular army during 1915 as a result of the enormous casualties. At the beginning of 1915 the War Office had begun for the first time to take its proper place in the machinery for making war. General Sir Archibald Murray had done much to fit the General Staff into its proper sphere and his successor, General Sir William Robertson, who had assumed the duties of Chief of the Imperial General Staff in December 1915, had forced Kitchener to face the difference in role of Secretary of State for War and Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Consequently, when considering the direction of the British war effort for 1916 the government was provided with a comprehensive military review of the resources available and the alternatives open to them. The recommendation was categorical — that the War Committee should agree to the following conclusion: 'From the point of view of the British Empire, France and Flanders are the main theatre of operations. Our efforts are to be directed to carrying out offensive operations in the main theatre of operations in close co-operation with the Allies, and in the greatest possible strength.'

L193

Above: One of the many reiterations of Austro-German brotherhood: the Kaiser and the Emperor Franz Josef, inappropriately framed in laurel leaves, smile out on the alliance of the two eagles. Right: In the shape of a cross France's plea to her people to reject Germany's claims on her land and bring in the dawn of her liberty. The German people are represented as a smilingly obsequious commercial traveller smugly pocketing France's liberties, in accordance with the grand German design of world domination. Below: A reminder of Allied loyalties but hardly of their achievements as the sun set on 1915. Below right: The colours of the Entente: Japan is now included in the line-up on a French cotton scarf.

Opposite:

Germany

is

In

one

of

Raemakers'

bitterly

P£P£S SARtf E5 1194

anti-German cartoons

personified as a decadent queen dancing a tango with death

L195

The War Office paper showed thai 55 divisions, soon to be increased to 59, could

bombs weighing 300 pounds and already some 200 civilians had died.

be maintained in the field at full strength and in addition there were 13 Territorial Army divisions, much below strength and trained and equipped only for homo defence. It' all the 59 divisions were to be used overseas the manning and training of the 13 TA divisions would have to be taekled immediately — they were not fit to hear the burden ot home defence unsupported. The allotment of the field force divisions could thus he: France — 42, Egypt -eight. Gallipoli — four, Salonika — five. It was recommended that the divisions from Salonika and Gallipoli should also be withdrawn, thus making 51 divisions available as compared with the 35 divisions in France tor the offensive in autumn 1915. Lloyd George considered that the

France had borne almost the whole share of the war on land up to the end of 1915. By that time her losses in dead alone amounted to more than British total casualties in the whole war. The Germans considered that France had been weakened almost to the limits of endurance. Joffre on the other hand believed that if Britain, Italy and Russia co-operated to the full France would be able to undertake a general offensive with a view to the destruction of the Germany army. For this purpose France had 95 divisions and in addition there were the Belgian six

ammunition situation would have been resolved by April and that all demands could be met by May. The effort of building up production was still going on but it did not appear that these measures could be fully effective before the end of 1916 so there was no surplus of heavy guns or machines guns for Russia and Italy.

Both government and army were beginning to lose confidence in Joffre and the appointment of Gallieni as Minister of War might have led to his supersession. However, the almost legendary reputation

divisions.

of Joffre among the Allies was responsible for his retention. His powers were in fact to give him authority over all theatres of war, from which it was perhaps hoped to lessen his direct influence in the West. At the same time Castelnau was made Chief of the General Staff.

extended

1 •

1

^

1

i i

sonal expenditure to which this led. The Times pointed out that women who were used to the cheapest clothes were now ordering costumes costing four or five guineas and even guinea hats. But on the whole prices were not rising unduly. A man could get a good suit for 50 shillings and a pair of boots for 17s 6d. The rent for a threeroomed house was about 15 shillings a week. But food prices had begun to rise. Bread was 9d for a 4-pound loaf and butter was Is 8d per pound. Certain items of food too were beginning to get scarce, notably sugar and fats, but there was no rationing and no restriction on ho. el meals. Only in alcohol was there austent y by regulation: no liquor could be sold after 9.30 pm and there was a 'no treating' law. In parts of the country the actualities of war touched the civilian population; Zeppelins dropped

1196

\

1

V

\

0^

^H

?i

s

> The certainty that the war must now be a long hard struggle had not impaired the morale of the British people. There were few who doubted the certainty of eventual victory. But the war was costing the British Treasury six million pounds a day, Income Tax was two shillings in the pound and the bulk of this war expenditure was found by borrowing. There was criticism of the high wages of munition workers and the per-

1

J

^

France had entered the war better prepared than her allies and her supplies and ammunition were so far sufficient for her needs. On the other hand, half her coalfields, her iron ore fields and a large part of her industrial manpower had already fallen into German hands. Moreover, her concentration on the manpower requirement of the army had left her woefully short of industrial workers. She could make use of at least 100,000 more labourers and was trying to get them, particularly from Belgium and Italy. The loss of territory had not affected France's self-sufficiency in food. Peasants were still to be seen working in their fields, often within a mile or so of the line and within range of occasional shell fire. Milk was one of the few shortages but the government had taken the precaution of acquiring rights to requisition at fixed prices all cereal products and, later, sugar, milk and eggs. But inflation had begun to take its hold in France and the cost of living had risen by 20% by early 1916. The least skilled worker earned 20 times as much as the soldier in the ranks. This perhaps rankled less with the men at the front than did the stories of the profiteering and the financial gains of the men who had fraudulently

Above: By 1915 Lloyd George had begun

to

capture the popular imagination. Below, far left: Krupp von Bohlen, the brilliant German arms manufacturer. Centre: Tsar Nicholas, now Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army. Below: Asquith, Prime Minister of England. Bottom: Joffre and Castelnau (right)

S FLASKS V

The kitchen spE/jks down, but "ThERMOS'shves the situation.

Britain had ceased her search for a way round the Western Front Left:

Men

whom food can only TIII5RMOS— in which

he brought once in 24 hours, avc no chance of a hot any hot liquid keeps hot for 24 hours in the coldest weather. weary march, for the Inncl) sentinel, for the wounded man, a IIIIKMOS means renewed vigour and strc milli xpediti.mary Force all THKKMOS Masks sent to her at l.ady French has ollcrcd to forward to the 54, Hcauchainp 1'h.ce.S.W. in

I

lie

trenches, lo

drink except

On

in a

I

the

I

SEND A THERMOS TO-DAYI

Hot water was a luxury the troops

seldom enjoyed; Thermos flasks, said the government, would make it possible. Below left: Another example of the plea for everyone to do his bit. Below: French comment on the

German food

crisis:

now

the victim of the

Allied extension of the blockade, in effect eating her own gut

Germany

is

avoided military service. The discipline of the army was still sound. The attitude of the French soldier was that of the stoic. He had suffered much but he accepted it. Losses from sickness and courts martial were small. Even the indifferent transport

arrangements for wounded and for men on leave and the notoriously ill-equipped medical services had not succeeded in undermining his spirit of acceptance. The civilian morale of France was also high. No further territory had been lost in 1915 and the beloved city of Paris seemed safe. For the moment there was almost unparalleled political unity- Men of all political parties had sunk their differences in the Union Sacrc. Even such irreconcilables as Clemenceau and the dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church showed themselves as brothers for the sake of national unity. There was, however, one shadow — the beginning of the spirit of defeatism in a few high places. Le Bonnet Rouge was the organ of this defeatism Caillaux, a former prime minister and one of the most brilliant finance ministers in French history, had had connections with the paper ever since a famous prewar legal case involving Madame Caillaux. Caillaux was no longer a member of the govern-

1197

ment and he was probably a true pacifist and genuine 'European'. Some of his associates were probably not so visionary; in particular Jean Malvy, Minister of the Interior, was notoriously lax in dealing with defeatism. Italy was at war with Austria but not with Germany. By the beginning of 1916 the Italian army had not been able to disadvantage overcome the strategic presented by the shape of her frontier with its salient between the Trentino and the Isonzo fronts. In her efforts to do so Italy had suffered 250,000 casualties — about five to four more than the Austrians — and had gained no advantage, tactical

By 1916 Germany believed she could effect the crucifixion of France Below: Sinister comment on the world's red cross

or strategic. Italy had 36 infantry divisions of which 25 were on the Isonzo front; there were in addition four cavalry divisions and two Alpine groups. Against the Italians the Austrians had disposed 17 divisions.

Although the planning estimate had shown a requirement of 20 divisions the full number had not yet been drawn by the threat.

By January 1916 the inefficiency of the command of the Italian army had become apparent. Some 30 generals and a larger number of colonels and battalion commanders had been removed but there still

a good deal of dead wood.

of guns. Of the 150 divisions 70 were regular and had 36 field guns each and some ten to 20 regular officers per regiment. The 16 rifle divisions had 18 field guns and six to eight regular officers per regiment. The remainder, second and third line divisions, had only a few regular officers left and some of them were largely officered by boys with two or three retired 50-year-olds who had neither the ability

nor the inclination to train them. The 37 second line divisions had 36 field guns each. The chief needs of the army were heavy artillery, technical equipment, efficient railway communications and, above all, efficient higher commanders. There was hardly a man of ability over the rank of regimental commander. The assumption of the position of Commander-in-Chief by Tsar Nicholas II had proved unfortunate. The whole army — indeed, the whole nation — knew that he understood nothing of military matters and that his command would be nominal. Alexeyev, the Chief-of-Staff, was a capable soldier who would have been an admirable Chief-of-Staff to a real Commander-inChief. He was not, however, the man of

higher

was

number

make the commander's as well as to put into effect the necessary orders. As an indicapurpose needed to

mind up

The

for

him

V/' ii\

,

greatest material weakness of the Italian army was its lack of heavy artillery and it

tion JlWi

needed more machine guns too. General Cadorna, Chief of the General Staff and in effect Commander-in-Chief in the field, considered that without more heavy artillery his army could not succeed in the offensive and was not secure in the face of a determined Austrian attack. The machine guns which Britain had hoped to send were not yet ready because of the failure of Italy to send the 6,000 workmen promised to Britain. Not only Britain but also France wanted labour from Italy. Italy's difficulty in sending the labourers was partly the requirement of her own army and agriculture but undoubtedly in some provinces a surplus existed. The real obstacle was that the men could not be compelled to go and so far Italy's allies had not offered terms as favourable as

were

still

hoped for.

By the beginning of he year the Russian army had to a surprisi g extent recovered its morale after the de a ats and frustrations of 1915. But it was 'oefully short of

experienced officers. The i itish military an divisions attache reported that the Ru varied in effectiveness in direc ratio to the number of prewar regular offk ra and the i

1198

of

the

difficulties

of

his

position

Alexeyev is said to have remarked that the Tsar had not a single honest man about him except Count Frederiks who was stupid, deaf and blind. Civilian as well as military morale was undermined by the Tsar's failure to control Rasputin whose influence and conduct created a public scandal

that authority.

destroyed

all

respect

for

Lack of transport was one of the principal facing Russia at this time. Railways that had been insufficient before the war were now asked to take on the added burden of supplying an army in which men and horses ate much more than in peacetime. Difficulties were accentuated by the loss of the use of the principal ports, Petrograd, Riga and Odessa, so that immensely longer journeys from Archangel and the Far Eastern ports were necessary. Inefficiency and lack of refrigerating plant and a canning industry added to the food problem — the only way of moving meat was on the hoof by cattle train. For the civilian, the burden of war fell most heavily on the cities and big towns. There was plenty of food in certain parts of the country but no means of distributing it. In Petrograd officers' wives lived on what was sent back difficulties

csi

from the front by their husbands and sons. A consequential danger in the cities was discontent because of high prices, particularly as speculation added to the problem of scarcity. In Moscow the price of bread had risen by 47% and in Odessa by 80%. Firewood had risen by more than 100% and sugar, if obtainable, by 65 to 70%. Russia relied on her allies for helping in the supply of heavy artillery and most munitions of war and also for a number of minerals. Apart from obsolete rifles received from Italy, hardly useful except for training units, large

numbers

of rifles

had

been ordered from the United States. But the difficulties did not end with procurement; all imported goods had to be shipped to the distant ports and carried over immense distances by the sparse and inefficient railway system.

No cause for concern By the end of 1915 the blockade of Germany had been considerably strengthened by its extension to the neutral countries through which she could be supplied. At the same time the measures inspired by Walther Rathenau were effective in countering to some extent the consequences of the blockade. A full programme for the conservation of raw materials, augmented by extensive and ingenious use of substitutes, was in operation so that Germany was organised for a long war. Politically, under the chancellorship of Bethmann-Hollweg, Germany was working for a negotiated peace rather than total victory. This accorded in general with Falkenhayn's military views so the inherent conflict between the liberal elements and the

remained dormant. A small element had split off from the Social Democrats in 1915 but it was not of any great significance and the country as a whole was obedient and disciplined in the wholehearted pursuit of the war. The Kaiser showed little interest in the internal state of the country and spent all his time at Imperial Military Headquarters. Extensive food rationing was in force throughout the country but this was more an act of conservation in the face of the blockade than an indication of immedimilitarists pacifist

ate shortages. Austrian policy and strategy was completely subordinated to Germany. The

German Austrians were paramount in the Empire but Hungary had an important influence as she controlled the food supplies for the whole country. Bohemia was a weak link in the Empire and there was a steady flow of Czech deserters from the Austrian army. It hardly looked, therefore, as if the peoples of Austria-Hungary could remain united. Industrially, they were ill organised and they lacked anyone of the ability of Rathenau to handle the question of resources and of substitutes. But on the military side there is no doubt that the Austrian forces were a valuable asset to Germany, and Conrad co-operated both with Falkenhayn in strategic direction and with Hindenburg and Ludendorff on the

Russian

front.

The Central Powers could

still

maintain

4,500,000 to 5,000,000 men in the field. On the Western Front there were 110 divisions, all German. On the Eastern Front the Central Powers were outnumbered by five to three but this was largely offset by their considerable superiority in

heavy

artillery,

machine guns and

aircraft and above all by the higher quality of their senior officers. The Germans suffered from the same lack of lateral railway communications as the Russians but this again was offset to some extent by the use of motor transport. The great strength of the German military position as a whole was their possession of interior lines which gave them the ability to move troops quickly from one front to the other. The efficiency of the German railways had already .been proved in 1915. They were able to move four corps simultaneously in either direction in four and a half days and then to keep up this rate. Another great strength of the German army was its ability to think out the tactics and technique, especially of defence, necessary to meet the conditions of trench warfare. They had learnt much from the Allied offensives in 1915; in particular they had learnt the depth to which the initial artillery allowed the offensive to penetrate and the necessity for reserves close at hand and protected by deep dug-outs. So both in the East and the West the Germans spent the winter preparing a strong, deep defensive position. In the East

there was less time because the work had to be completed before the hard weather set in but in the West a veritable fortress line was being constructed. On both fronts therefore the Germans were prepared in strong positions with every resource deployed so that any local enemy success might be countered, even if this meant taking risks on one part of the front in order to assemble forces for the assault on another. On the Western Front, German administration was efficient and intelligently thought out. New railways were built with spurs running well up to the defences so that heavy guns could be supplied with ammunition and every form of engineer stores brought forward. The Germans were thus in a position to exploit their superiority in heavy guns and mortars and had all the necessary material at hand for defensive work. In order to meet the new weapon of air reconnaissance, artists were set to work to devise means of camouflage and deception. On the Eastern Front, the administration of German troops in the occupied and largely devastated area of Russia in winter created special problems which were tackled with customary German efficiency under the direction of Ludendorff. Despite the lack of forward railway facilities the supply of the German forces kept pace with the requirement; fodder for the horses was the most difficult item and many horses died from exposure and insufficient feeding. Health of men and horses was one of the most difficult problems of the front, but under Surgeon General von Kern effective action was taken to combat disease and control vermin. Perhaps the most effective measure taken by Ludendorff to ensure that his army remained fit for operations was his organisation of occupied territory. Special teams were brought in to organise the civil administration and to try to make use of every possible local resource for the army and the population alike. Even long term problems such as cultivation were tackled but the most effective means for the moment were the cattle census, control of prices, estate management, fishing, road improvement and the collection of local transport. To some extent military stores

were used

to alleviate distress in the civil population but much was done to ensure that local resources were exploited to the uttermost and that everything possible would be available for the supply of the German army in 1916.

The German command system was by now well established and Falkenhayn to have weathered the storms of 1915. He still had the confidence of the Kaiser, who no longer tried to interfere in the conduct of operations, and the confidence if not the affection of the senior

seemed

commanders. There was no Commanderin-Chief of all the German forces in the West but Falkenhayn had the authority to co-ordinate the military effort of the Central Powers and at the same time to deal directly with the army group commanders in the West. In the East, Hindenburg was the German Commander-in-Chief but he was not the supreme commander on the Russian Front. His command reached only to the Pripet Marshes, south of which the Austrian armies came directly under the command of Conrad. This, despite the loyalty Conrad had already shown to Falkenhayn's direction, was an obvious weakness in the structure of command and one which was constantly in the mind of Ludendorff, who bore the overall burden of command in the East. It would be misleading to say that either the Entente or the Central Powers had the advantage in January 1916 or that either of them held the key to breaking the deadlock on the Western Front. The time factor was important to both sides. Britain still needed time to develop her full effort, but France desperately needed victory in 1916. A long war must mean defeat for Germany, but she still had a strong hope of dealing a decisive blow at France. Russia — on whom the Entente had put so much hope — no longer seemed capable of decisively affecting the issue.

Further Reading Barnett, Correlli, The Swordbearers (Eyre and Spottiswoode 1962) Brusilov, General A. A., A Soldier's Note Book

1914-1918 (Macmillan 1932)

Cameron, James, 1916-Year of Decision (Oldbourne 1962)

Edmonds, Sir James, Military Operations France and Belgium 1916 (Macmillan 1932) Falls,

Captain

Cyril, Military

Operations

Macedonia (HMSO 1933) Falkenhayn, its

Critical

von, General Headquarters and Decisions (Hutchinson 1919) E.

Fleurieu, R. de, Joseph Caillaux (Paris 1951) Knox, Sir Alfred, With the Russian Army 1914797 7 (Hutchinson 1921) Liddell Hart, Sir Basil, The Real War (Faber 1930)

Ludendorff, General

E.,

War Memories 1914-

7978 (Hutchinson 1920)

MAJOR-GENERAL

E.

K.

G.

SIXSMITH

was

educated at Harrow and Sandhurst He was commissioned in August 1 924 into the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles). During the Second World War, he served as Brigade Major, 2nd Infantry Brigade and as First in Command of 2nd Battalion, Royal Scots

He was wounded in Italy but returned there the 2nd Battalion, the Cameronians After the war, he held a number of posts, including Chief of Staff British Forces, Hong Kong and Assistant Chief of Staff Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe He retired in 1961 and wrote Fusiliers.

to

command

a book, British Generalship in the 20th Century, published by Arms and Armour Press, followed by a study of Eisenhower as a military commander, and a biography of Douglas Haig published in 1976.

1199

During the four years of war, the internal life of the neutral states was significantly affected by the fortunes of their belligerent neighbours. The laws governing trade and commerce were disrupted, traditional loyalties constantly brought into question. Amid the universal disharmony, there were both profits to be made and hardships to be endured. D. R. Shermer Above: American attitudes frustrate the Kaiser's attempt to justify his U-boat campaign. Right: Host to her crippled neighbour, Belgium, Holland had the task of housing and feeding thousands of refugees. Pro-Allied at heart, Holland was forced to act as a trading middleman to both sides. 1200

Although the First World War engulfed the major powers and many of the small and middle nations, certain states — the neutrals — escaped complete involvement. This is not to say that the neutrals avoided all the hardships which accompanied the war; but at least they were spared the ravages of military occupation or the mass bereavement of decimated armies. The more important neutrals were the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Denmark (of which Iceland was still a part),

Spain and Switzerland. Some 24 countries maintained their neutrality throughout the war, including several Latin American states, a few independent nations in Asia and Africa, and the Spanish and Dutch colonies. The most important neutral at this stage of the war was the United States.

Since the 17th Century, the small seafaring European nations, and later the United States, had been the stoutest protagonists of the Dutch jurist Grotius'

principle of 'freedom of the seas'. The slogan 'free ships make free goods' meant that neutral ships and the goods they carried should not be seized by belligerents, thereby affecting the economy of the neutral countries. The opposing principle of belligerent rights, upheld by Britain. maintained that control of the seas was the paramount factor in a wartime context of neutral rights, and that visit and search and other measures would be conducted against belligerent and neutral ships.

1201

The slogan of Europe's small sea-faring nations: Tree ships make free goods' Right: Germany welcomes the sinews of war English exports to neutral countries impounded at German ports; cartoon from Punch 1915. Below: A neutral vessel hit by a German submarine. Fear of the German U-boat countered the neutrals vexation with Britain who regularly exercised the right of seizure of neutral exports: they might well have rebelled against British policies had Germany been willing to cooperate by limiting her submarine activities to Allied shipping

1202

In the 60 years preceding the First World War, sea law was affected by two important agreements. The 1856 Declaration of Paris provided that only the contraband of a belligerent could be seized in time of war. The 1909 Declaration of London, listing contraband, absolute commodities as conditional contraband and free (non-

contraband) goods, accepted that neutral foodstuffs might be declared contraband, but listed as free goods such strategic commodities as rubber, oil and raw cotton. When war broke out, the Declaration of London had not been ratified by any major initially the belligerents but power, promised to adhere broadly to its terms, while reserving the right to modify them if

extreme conditions so required.

By

the

summer

of 1915, despite losses

due to German submarine attacks, British and other Allied ships dominated all the world's waters except the Baltic Sea. Many German ships had taken refuge in neutral harbours, and thus many cargoes ordinarily bound for Germany now travelled in neutral ships at some profit to the neutrals Meanwhile, however, the themselves. British had been taking steps to reverse the declining fortunes of the theory of belligerent rights. On November 3, 1914, Britain declared the North Sea a military area in which ships would be exposed to mines and other hazards; because of this, the Admiralty stated that 'all ships passing a line drawn from the northern point of the Hebrides through the Faeroe Islands to Iceland do so at their own peril'. Besides this disincentive to trade, in the course of 1915 the distinction between absolute and conditional contraband was almost erased. Indeed, the main reason for the order of March 1915 and subsequent British Orders in Council was the realisation that neutral imports would have to be restricted. In many cases these were running far in excess of imports of the previous year; evidently much of the surplus was being re-exported to the Central Powers. Contraband control stations were now established in the Orkney Islands and the narrows of the Straits of Dover area. Neutral ships which called voluntarily for inspection were given top clearance priority, and this minimal interference was an incentive to other ships to do likewise. Sometimes repeated seizures of goods were used by the British as a deterrent, for if this was done often enough, the effort of defying the British was not rewarded by

high enough profits. Neutral resentment was abated to some degree when certain detained cargoes were purchased outright basis. Neutrals' vexation at these delays was also countered by their fear of German submarines; they would have rebelled further against British

on a regular

policies

if

Germany had been

willing to

acquiesce.

The Germans

replied to the British minezone decree by their War-Zone Declaration of February 4, 1915. The waters surrounding the British Isles, including the English Channel, were a war-zone. Because of the British misuse of neutral flags and because of the inevitable accidents of war, even neutral vessels would be at risk if they penetrated this area. Only waters just north of the Shetland Islands and in a 30mile belt along the Dutch coast were free from danger of submarine attack. Two days earlier the Germans had warned off neutrals from the north and western

coasts of France, and in February neutral fishing off the German coasts was also restricted. The justification for each of these announcements was said to be some British move. At first the Germans said that any ship in the above zones might be sunk without warning; later in the spring, neutral pressures caused a policy change to one of attacking belligerent vessels only, although unrestricted submarine warfare

always had

its

strong adherents.

The British were now given the excuse for further measures, which would have been necessary in any case to restrict German shipping and thereby curtail the war's duration. In an Order in Council of March 11, 1915, the British decreed that: • No merchant vessel sailing after March 1, 1915 would be permitted to proceed to a German port. Unless the ship received a pass for proceeding to a specified neutral or Allied port, her goods would have to be discharged in a British port. • No merchant vessel sailing from a German port after March 1, 1915 would be permitted to proceed with any goods taken aboard at that port.

• Every merchant vessel sailing from whatever port after March 1, 1915, and enemy goods or enemy-bound goods, would be required to discharge her cargo in a British or Allied port. • The third provision applied also to goods

carrying

which were outward bound from enemy countries or which were

enemy

property.

The discharged goods would be put in the custody of a prize court. The goods in the second and fourth cases would be detained or sold as deemed fit by the prize court, while in the first and third cases, if they were non-contraband and not requisitioned for British use, the goods would be restored 'upon such terms as the court might deem just'.

Breach of the above provisions would be punished by confiscation in the appropriate cases; and a merchant ship which had received an Allied bill of clearance for a neutral port, or which had been allowed to pass ostensibly to. a neutral port, and in fact had proceeded to an enemy port, would be liable to condemnation if captured on any subsequent voyage. Thus the framework of German and British measures was well established by March 1915. It remained for the neutrals to protest where they might, and live with the British and German measures as best they could.

'Middleman' The Netherlands, the smallest pean neutrals

(at the

of the Eurotime when Iceland

was

still linked to Denmark), had a larger population than any of the others except Spain. The Netherlands East Indies was a

priceless colonial asset, from

which came

quinine and many other products. In addition, the Dutch merchant marine was second only to that of Norway among European neutrals. The Dutch thus had reason for pride in their achievements and

tin,

possessions.

The geographical position of Holland, astride the busy sea lanes of north-west Europe and with a long border with Germany, made her a natural trading middleman. Swedish iron ore entered Holland en route for the Krupp works at Essen; military material, especially sand and gravel for trenches, was sent to German-

occupied Belgium and northern France. The Netherlands needed to import fertilizers, iron goods and coal; but the link with the Indies lay across British-dominated oceans. Yet Germany needed transit of goods across Holland to such an extent that she would not have permitted Dutch participation on the Allied side without invading the country. The Dutch had to remember, however, that a traditional British vital interest was that the Low Countries should never be held by a rival power. Because of these factors, the Dutch had to tread a careful path between the

two

sides.

Despite the Boer War, probably most

Dutchmen were pro-Allied at heart. They were certainly shocked by the fate of their Belgian neighbour, but they saw clearly that neutrality was the course best in accord with the country's position. The Dutch government protested against the British November mine-zone decree as being contrary to international law, which held that only the immediate theatre of military operations could constitute a military area. The North Sea was too vast for such a designation. Moreover, the decree was contrary to the spirit of the 8th Hague Convention, which Britain had ratified, for the Dutch claimed that British mines were causing excessive detours and inconvenience to commerce. However, the British prize court in its Stigstad decision disagreed with this last reason as a justification for saying that British measures

were

illegal.

In February 1915, the Dutch vehemently denied the German charge of acquiescence in British restrictive measures. At the same time, Holland pointed out that Germany had a clear duty to determine the nationality of a ship before capturing or destroying it, and Germany would be held strictly liable in the event of Dutch citizens suffering through German errors. The Netherlands responded equally strongly to the British decree of March 1915, which the Dutch said was contrary to the 1856 rules. Article 8 of the order in council stated that the British would relax provisions 'in respect to the merchant vessels of any country which declares that no commerce intended for or originating in Germany or belonging to German subjects shall enjoy the protection of its flag', but the Dutch declined to make such a declaration, saying that this would be contrary to Holland's duties as a neutral. One of the strongest Dutch protests — one which was echoed by the United States, Italy and Sweden — was against the British instruction of February 1915 that neutral flags might be used by British captains to avoid capture. Britain said this was a recognised ruse of war, but neutral ships soon started to use other distinguishing features. The belligerents

were nevertheless de-

much control as possible over Holland's trade. Methods of Allied pressure included trade black lists, specific and general embargoes of goods, the refusal of bunker coal to unco-operative neutral ships, attractive insurance policies for co-operative ones and special financially attractive buying agreements respecting products of need to the Allies termined

to exercise as

With normal trade channels frequently disrupted by the war, the neutrals naturally saw the advantage of this last offer in particular.

1203

The establishment oi' the Netherlands Overseas Trust tNO'H has been described on page 367. The Trust was of great help to Dutch trade through its assistance in the importation and re-exportation of goods. Unless there was a prohibition on the export o( a particular commodity. finished products manufactured from raw' materials and unfinished goods could be re-exported to neutrals, and even goods and products imported from an enemy belligerent could be re-exported to the land of origin. This was of obvious assistance to Dutch business. Under the terms of the British agreement with the NOT, exports to Holland were allowed only after a licence had been obtained and the goods were consigned to the Trust. The shipping companies demanded consents for shipments from neutrals, for only by refusing to take shipments not consigned to the Trust could a company keep delays and confiscations to a

fantastic profits. The crux of the problem was that the Dutch government did not co-operate sufficiently with the NOT; the government insisted on buying fodder independently of the Trust, and the govern-

ment's

December announcement that

it

wished to be the sole consignee of all rye and corn was taken by the British as a breach of faith. In retaliation, the British detained grain cargoes consigned to the Dutch government on the ground that the meaning of 'home consumption' could be given numerous interpretations.

largely on the supposition that the war would not continue much longer; hence he

postponed decisions in the belief that the problems would right themselves when peace was re-established. Ihlen, a businessman, had no desire to argue over legalities, and in this he differed from the Swedish prime minister, Hammarskjold, who was

an eminent authority in law. Thus it was nearly always Sweden rather than Norway that took tbe initiative in protests to the belligerents concerning legal matters. The British November 1914 mine-zone

had advised Scandinavian and Dutch shipping to sail via the Straits of Dover, where directions for avoiding the mines would be given. However, during

decree

Outward looking Norway was the only Scandinavian neuwhich normally imported large quantities of essential foodstuffs from the United States and from the Allies, principally Britain. Because of the mountainous terrain, less than 49c of the land was under cultivation. In addition, traditional tral

ties

had formed between

Norway and

negotiations with the British, Norway to obtain an authorised course at Kirkwall, Scotland for examination of their cargoes. At the beginning of 1915 no compre-

was able

hensive agreement had been reached be-

minimum.

its very nature the NOT greatly in enforcing Britain's de facto blockade, it was not, as the Germans claimed, a mere British tool. The Trust had to face the facts of British sea domination. Still, the NOT was distrusted not only by the Germans, but by pro-German business interests in Rotterdam, centre of the Rhine

Although by

aided

transit trade.

An example of the Trust's self-interested co-operation with Britain was its provision to all ships sailing from Dutch ports of declarations that their goods were Dutchowned before March 1, 1915. In return, for some time the British assisted Dutch trade by allowing manufactured goods of less than 25^ enemy origin to be considered wholly neutral products; nor did Britain require certificates of origin of vital Dutch exports such as bulbs, dairy products, fish, candles and gin. As part of its policy of attempting to limit supplies to neutrals to the needs of home consumption, a general agreement accepting the rationing principle was concluded on July 20, 1915 between the British government and the NOT. Trade with Germany was reduced, but smuggling over the

An American cartoon portrays indignant world reaction monopoly of the seas. America's own prosperity - had become enmeshed in wartime profits and most neutral

frontiers persisted.

After the British measures of March, the German government became interested in securing guarantees against re-exportation of its goods to the Allies. Thus Germany began to use the Trust for its exports to the Dutch colonies, and trade by this method rose from 150,000 tons in March 1915 to 10,000,000 tons in October and November of that year. Under the July British-NOT accords, the Trust licensed neutral goods that had been sent to Holland for reshipment. In November, the British accepted in good faith the Trust's statistics as to trade the previous year, and the rationing principle was now implemented. As a quid pro quo, Britain guaranteed purchase of 44,000 hundredweight of margarine from Holland. This agreement was the first successful attempt to channel a large proportion of Dutch products for Allied use; it was the forerunner of more ambitious agreements with all the northern neutrals in 1916, with the object of keeping these gooa. from Germany. Despite all this, Bru ih relations with the Trust at the end of 1; '5 were not very friendly. British suspicions vere fanned by reports of increased DuU h exports of fodder, corn and hides to Germany at

1204

Right:

o

to the Allied

<3 countries suffered economically from the laws governing their t rights to trade with the Central Powers. Above: President Wilson > and Bryan, his Secretary of State for war. Left: Colonel o E. M. House. His influence with Wilson caused resentment

England, two seafaring nations looking out across the seas and the European periphery rather than inwards to the European heartland. By 1914 the Norwegian economy was inextricably integrated with that of Britain, and Norway was the most susceptible of the Nordic countries to British influence and pressure. 1914 the Norwegian mercantile In marine was the fourth largest in the world in tonnage and the third largest in number of ships. This made Norway one of the main targets of German submarine attacks and although the Norwegians, too, chafed under British restrictions, their British

connections combined with German depredations made them overwhelmingly pro-Allied in sentiment. Norway's attitude to the legal problems British and German wartime measures was partly conditioned by the

raised by

personality of her foreign affairs minister, Ihlen. Until the beginning of 1916 he acted

tween the Allies and the Norwegian government or with private trading associations. However, Norway had complied with British requests to embargo the most important articles on British lists. At the end of August, an agreement between the British government and the Norwegian Cotton Mills Association followed the same pattern as that between Britain and Denmark a week earlier. The Norwegian government for its part promised to issue dispensations from its embargo on cotton exports only to the Allies.

In

a British

agreement of September

1915 with certain Norwegian margarine and glycerine companies the rationing principle was recognised. Similar agreements were made between Britain and Denmark. The various companies involved agreed to investigate the ultimate destination of cargoes carried by their ships, to refuse

German-bound

or

German-made

cargoes, and to give warehouse space to cargoes until Britain gave permission for their delivery to the consignees. In return, these ships would not be required to undergo search in British ports, provided they were bound for neutral destinations. British-Norwegian negotiations were held in September 1915. However, in late December the British said they were no longer interested in a generalised arrange-

ment.

This

criticism

was due

of the

to parliamentary details of the previous

British-Danish agreement. Thus for the time being, the remainder of Norwegian problems had to be shelved. Sweden's claim to leadership of the Scandinavian nations rested on several

Sweden is the largest and most populous of the Nordic countries, and in the past it had been a great power. Moreover, Sweden's position in relation to the blockade was relatively invulnerable compared to that of Norway, and Sweden's factors.

Germany enabled her to ship large quantities of badly needed iron ore to that country. Furthermore, when Sweden took measures that were not to Germany's liking and the Germans retaliated against Swedish shipping, Sweden's prosperity enabled her to put these ships in 'mothballs'. These measures vexed the British, who were nevertheless unable to stop them, as the straits at the entrance to the Baltic were closed to shipping. In any case, Sweden had to be handled with care, for her land route to Russia was needed by the Allies for transit goods; the Allies also needed Swedish ball bearings, iron ore and timber. There was also a certain danger that under intense provocation Sweden might enter the war on the German side. A large percentage of Swedes were proGerman, including the army elite business circles, university scholars, Conservatives and certain other elements of the upper proximity to

and middle classes. Many other Swedes were merely anti-Russian, for Russia was the hereditary enemy whose grip on Sweden's neighbour Finland irked Swedish concerning the important sensibilities Swedish minority of that country. Russia's suspected ambitions for warm-water ports in the Baltic also caused Sweden deep forebodings. The Activists, a small but influential group, openly advocated intervention on the German side; these men dreamed of wresting Finland and the strategic Aland Islands from Tsarist domination. Though the government opted for neutrality and Swedish-Russian relations improved to some extent, the possibility of Sweden's involvement with her German protector against Russia remained in the

background. Sweden's

determination

to

uphold

neutral rights led directly to the determination of her government not to restrict its foreign trade, in particular Swedish ex-

Such regulations as were imposed

ports.

were

to protect national resources, for the

untrammeled export of certain commodimight have denuded the home supply. Sweden held that while the belligerents had the right to deny contraband to their enemies, a neutral was not obliged to assist ties

endeavour through control either of exports or its transit trade. Moreover, the logic of the Swedish position called for a large import-export trade with her close neighbour, Germany. The Swedish government would only guarantee the nonre-exportation of imported neutral goods, not of by-products. At the beginning of 1916 there was still no import-export regulation agreement between Sweden and Britain, for the Swedes preferred to settle any disputes on an ad hoc basis. But Britain was able to arrange a rationing of some Swedish imports while exchanges between Sweden and Britain continued on a basis of compensation of goods. in this its

Despite the strong disapproval of the private government, some arrangements trading Swedish-British

Swedish

were made. The first was an agreement June 2, 1915 with the Association of Swedish Cotton Spinners. In return for

of

Britain's releasing of 15,000 bales of detained Swedish cotton, the Association guaranteed that the cotton would not be re-exported. Late in 1915 petroleum agreements were also concluded. These agreements were both important, but lack of government co-operation in Sweden greatly lessened their effectiveness. The Swedish government also specifically refused to make an accounting of the amount of goods covered by its export licences, After or their destinations. March 1915, the British made wholesale detentions of Swedish goods in the hope of forcing Sweden to negotiate, but the Swedes merely threatened prohibition of the Russian transit trade. Eventuallv

Sweden agreed to tranship large quantities of goods to Russia, but insisted on the right to sell an equal volume of goods to Germany. In June 1915 the Swedish government established a bureau for regulating foreign trade, the State Commerce Commission. A further compensation principle was introduced on more and more categories o\' goods: Sweden would export such goods to a belligerent only

if

the belligerent sent

goods of equal amount or value to Sweden In late October British-Swedish negotiations for a general trade agreement were formally ended after more than two months of argument. Britain had to he satisfied with the fact that the transit trade to Russia continued unabated. Denmark, a country small in size and population, had a disproportionate import ance because of its strategic location ;it the entrance to the Baltic and because of its vulnerability to German invasion across

much of the army were proGerman because of dislike for French

terrain with no natural defences. Prussia had fought a war with Denmark half a century earlier, and the militarily weak

servatives and

viewed events in Belgium with apprehension. This, together with German attacks later m the war on the important Danish-British maritime trade, made a large percentage o\' Danes anti-German, if

appeared personally to support the Allies, but remained outwardly neutral. The neutrality of Switzerland was guaranteed by international agreement among the great powers. However, the invasion of Belgium cast scepticism on the value of such arrangements. Accordingly, the Swiss were glad that their efficient citizen-army and rugged terrain were

Danes

not pro- Allied.

might have seemed that Denmark's would spare her the worries of a nation such as Norway, hut the Danish need for coal, oil and some manufactured goods from Germany offset this advantage. Had the Allies prevented most of these supplies from reaching Denmark, her position would have become It

self-sufficiency in food

untenable, but Allied desire to forestall a German invasion helped to protect Danish trading patterns. A constant remaining source of difficulty was the heavy dependence of Danish agriculture on nitrogen fodders imported from America and elsewhere. Had Germany and Britain not needed Danish imports, doubtless they would have harmed the nitrates trade much more than they did. Like the Dutch, the Danes tried to combine a measure of certainty in their trade with an avoidance of its direct control by foreigners. The circumstances warranted a British-Danish trade agreement, which was reached on January 12, 1915. Danish embargoes would be maintained through the British government's seeking guarantees from Danish importers of certain categories of goods. The Danes had resisted the establishment of a trust similar to the NOT, and the British agreed, as they found satisfactory the existing organs, the Merchant Guild and the Chamber of Manu-

religious

and

The monarchy

social habits.

reverse.

Tsarist yoke, was virtually anti-Russian. For these and other reasons, the outcome of the war was of cardinal importance to

invaders.

The

German-

ments, but the Swiss encountered difficulbeing economically the least selfsufficient of the European neutrals. Grain, and unfinished goods were vital imports. Coal and iron were normally obtained from Germany. Thus Switzerland's position made neutrality the wisest course amid concessions to both sides. ties in

Abo ve: John Bulls hand guiding American policy? Many immigrants to America resented her continuing ties to the old country'

On of the

October 11, 1915 the Swiss version NOT, the Swiss Economic Surveil-

lance Society, was created. The Society assured the Allies that Swiss imports would not be conveyed to the Central

Powers, but important agreements with Germany were signed in 1916.

important of the neutral countries. America was the world's greatest producer of foodiron, steel, petroleum and raw stuffs,

Spain was practically

textiles.

First

among equals

The United States was by

far the

most

and cotton from America and coal from Britain, and her small merchc t marine could not of itself supplies. Yet Spanish guarantee th iron ore was us. to Britain, and the two

Her industrial plant was so great as to rival that of all Europe. Her navy was third among world powers. Moreover, in normal times she engaged in a brisk trade with both sets of belligerents. Another feature that set America apart

countries co-oper

from the other neutrals was her massive

stuffs,

self-sufficient in food-

she required

oil

1

The Spanish

ed.

tsantry on the whole favoured neutrality Liberals, Republicans Allied because of and Socialists were °nch tradition of their sympathy for tbt radical anticlericalism. he clergy, Con\

,

']

1206

'Ivy

America, although most Americans sought involvement in Europe's

to escape military troubles.

In 1915, as a result of the German Declaration in February and the British Order in Council of March, the United States was more than ever concerned about its neutral rights. The salient feature of the American negotiating position in 1915 was that because of the German submarine campaign, controversy with Britain was never so acute as it otherwise might have been. Particularly in the late winter and early spring, when the German government had not promised to safeguard neutral shipping, Wilson and his advisers were deeply perturbed at the German position. While they tolerated the British whittling away of rights and interference with prosperity, German action that threatened wholesale loss of life caused anger and concern. An additional worry was that American prosperity might now be threatened, for recovery from the recession of 1914 was due largely to the expanded overseas trade since the outbreak of war. Accordingly, on February 10, 1915 an American note to Berlin protested against the war-zone decree and declared that the Germans would be held to 'strict accountability' for

American

Spain, the largest European neutral in and population, was less affected than the northern neutrals early in the war by the blockade and the submarine campaign because of her greater distance from the main belligerents. Although territory

the

pro- Allied. Both sets of belligerents needed Swiss manufactured goods and precision instru-

to

facture Allied-bound

September. Though the execution of these various agreements presented some difficulties, on the whole the Danes were quite successful at playing off Britain and Germany to advantage. In practice, each belligerent turned a blind eye to some Danish exportation of goods containing German material to Britaki, and the

among

speaking bulk of the populace was naturally pro-German, but the important French and Italian speaking cantons were mostly

deterrents

An agreement between the Chamber of Manufacturers and the British was reached in February. Goods such as wool and hides would be imported into Denmark only under British licence and would not be re-exported to Germany in any guise. Offenders would be punished by expulsion from the Chamber. In August a GermanChamber agreement provided that goods imported from Germany would neither be exported to the Allies nor used to manuwar material. A simiGerman-Guild agreement followed in

pro-Allied sentiment, especially

government and

League' university eastern 'Establishment'. On the other hand, important groups had other sympathies: the German and Austro-Hungarian descended populations of the midwest were generally pro-German, as was the German elite of the influential American Jewish community. The Irish of Boston, New York and other cities were antiBritish, if not pro-German, and the bulk of American Jewry, so recently under the

facturers.

lar

come to America to put such Old World ties aside. The invasion of Belgium and both the reported and the actual atrocities there provided grounds for much that they had

of 100,000,000. Of these, a large number was of first or second generation immigrant parentage, and bonds to the 'old country' were in many cases strong, though the attitude of others was

population

loss of life; America would reserve to herself the right 'to take any steps necessary to safeguard American lives and property and to secure to American citizens the full enjoyment of their acknowledged rights on the high seas'. The British Order in Council of March was greeted with consternation in America, but Wilson, against Bryan's advice, decided not to press American rights too hard until the issues raised by German actions were first clarified. Wilson decided on further patience even when an American was killed on March 28 when the British ship Falaba was torpedoed and when the American tanker Gulflight was attacked on May 1. But the sinking of the British passenger liner Lusitania on May 7 with a loss of 128 American lives among the many was a disaster of a different magnitude. Public opinion alone would have forced some government reaction; even

Bryan, though he favoured pacifism, agreed new admonishments were called for. The American note of May 13 called on the Imperial government to dissociate itself from the action of the U-boat commander, that

to

make

suitable reparations for the lives

and to offer promises that submarines would not in future attack liners or merlost

chant ships. The German reply being unsatisfactory, a second note was dispatched

Netherlands

Denmark

Norway

Won self-supporting.

Self-supporting as to

l\lon

4%

less than

food stuffs.

Sweden

self-supporting,

Self-supporting.

of land

under cultivation. Trading middleman;

Geographically

Economy

provided passage for

vulnerable to a

integrated with that of GB.

Swedish

iron ore

bound

for

German

inextricably

Pro central powers.

invasion.

Krupp works, Essen.

Exports: bulbs, dairy

Exports

produce, fish, candles,

margarine, glycerine to

gin to both sides.

Allies only.

:

cotton goods,

Exports:

iron ore via

Holland to Germany; iron ore, ball bearings

timber to Allies

needed her

and

who

vital land

route to Russia.

Imports: coal, oil and some manufactured goods

Imports: essential food

goods, coal from her colonies across British

from Germany. Nitrogen

from GB and US.

dominated waters; grain

fodders from US; cotton

from GB, some of which was re-exported to

from

Germany.

exportation of cotton

Imports:

fertiliser, iron

GB

in

stuffs (corn, sugar,

meat

Some minor agreements with GB over non-reexportation of cotton

goods.

return for

guarantees of non-re-

goods to Central Powers.

Allies

Central Powers Neutrals

The dilemma facing most neutrals — important

economic ties with countries on both sides Above: French comment on Germany's practice of launching submarine attacks on neutral shipping. The U-boat commander, realising he was about to attack a French ship, protests that he mistook her for a neutral vessel. Left: The chart shows the interdependence of the Allies and the Central Powers on the neutral countries. Allied domination of all the major seas except the Baltic gave the Allies the 'right' to change the laws governing neutral cargoes. Below: Another attack on Germany's U-boat campaign by the Dutch cartoonist, Raemakers. He entitled the picture the Water Babies' — the dead of the Lusitania

Spain

USA

Switzerland

Self-supporting as to

food stuffs.

Geographical position forced her to

make

Overall allegiance to Allies,

concessions to both sides.

much pro-German

sentiment among minority groups.

Exports

:

iron ore to

GB.

Exports: food petrol, steel, to Allies;

stuffs, iron,

raw

textiles

almost non-

existant exports to

Germany

by the end of 1915 because of British

Imports cotton,

:

oil

coal from

from US.

GB

Imports

:

blockade.

grain and

unfinished goods, coal iron

from both sides

in

return for manufactured

goods and precision instruments.

1207

on June 9. Bryan resigned on June 8, partly through his feeling that America was dealing peremptorily with Germany and in some degree because of a personality clash with Wilson and because of resentment over Colonel House's pre-eminent policy influence over the President. Satisfaction was not obtained even then, and a third Lusitania note was sent on July 21. At this juncture, however, Wilson

received

assurances

that

the

Germans

HERR DERNBURG'S SMOOTH TONGUE, MAKING LOVE TO THE UNITED STALES.

KNOW YOU ARE ANGRY."

"I

had ceased submarine operations against liners and neutral merchant ships, and the subject of Lusitania reparations was

FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.

held in abeyance in preference to creating

New

a

new

crisis.

Yet a new crisis arose in any event, due to the sinking on August 19 of the British liner Arabic in which some American passengers were killed. Lansing and certain others were willing to go as far as breaking relations with Germany, customarily the last step short of war, but Wilson was willing first to give the Germans an opportunity to apologise. Eventually, on October 15, the German government disavowed the sinking, offered an indemnity, and promised at least a temporary reversion to the stricter code of cruiser warfare. Even so, American relations with Germany were further soured by revelations of German espionage from the summer of 1915 on, as Marion Siney has shown. Moreover, in November the Italian vessel Ancona was torpedoed by an 'Austrian' submarine, causing nine American deaths. After an initial flippant reply, Vienna ultimately made a full apology. Under these circumstances, in the winter of 1915-16 Wilson urged greater military preparation at home in case war should come and attached increased urgency to mediation efforts, accordingly sending his intimate adviser, House, on a peace mission to Europe. For unless or until the United States entered the war, she had to take care not to alienate both belligerent groups at once. This endeavour met with success. As a neutral, primus inter pares, America had also to steer clear of entanglements and unneutral acts. In this she was not so successful, though the policy worked tolerably well at this stage. Marion Siney has discussed American loans to the Allies, and from this commitment and the enormous profits of wartime trade, the inexorable process of building an American stake in an Allied victory was well under way by January 1916, though few understood this as yet. These involvements also

threw away America's negotiating trump;

American prosperity became enmeshed wartime profits, the Allied need to tread warily for fear of offending America declined. Perhaps in other circumstances the United States could have forced a more as in

strict

observance

of

traditional

inter-

national law.

The American attitude was naturally influenced by the behaviour of both sides. It was Britain's good fortune to have connections in high American circles. The American ambassador in London, Walter Hines Page, was an anglophile, as was Colonel House. Both these men softpedalled such protest, as America made. Wilson, though he tried o be scrupulously fair, was a son of all tha. was best in the common Anglo-American culture. Germany and America had none of this community of interest, and the ineptitude of 1208

York, Sunday.

The Germans have takeu advant *ge due to the increase

of the dearth of news,

of the rigours of censorship, to redouble

newspaper campaign

thoir

to

win Ameri-

can sympatnies.

Like their soldiers in the field in the first few days of the invasion of France, the German writers seek to conquer by sheer numbers. Thoir pleadings occupy by far the greatest space to-day in the American newspapers. Most of them are of the familiar type of vindictiveue&s, but there is one contribution which for subtlety and argument must be awarded the palm. It is from the pen of Herr

Dernburg,

formerly the Kaiser's Colonial Secretary and now his special commissioner of amity to the American nation.

"American "

In the Hun this morning Herr Dernburg devotes a whole page to a prolonged and very clever sneer at the motives of Great Britain in seeking to crush German militarism. Rapidly reviewing from the German standpoint the development cf the British over-sea Empire lie seeks to impress Americans with the fact that Great Britain is an international vulture. This is not Herr Dernburg's phrase, for he is scrupulously politic throughout his in-

German espionage and

against her. Other pressures also did their work. Wilson, haunted by the spectre of 1812, believed that at that time war with Britain had come about because public opinion had made it impossible for President Madison to do what he thought best. Determined to avoid this error, Wilson hesitated to involve America in lengthy controversies with Britain. His nature revolted instinctively from the carnage of war, and publio opinion was divided and

muddled. These ambivalences and procrashandicapped the full use of American power in 1915 to assert the

tinations

neutrals' position.

Even Wilson's desire to mediate was used by House as a bolster for AngloAmerican understanding. It was not until 1916 that the peace issue began to mar between London and WashingHouse had given harmony priority even over mediation. As 1916 opened, Wilson was still drifting with events, and settlements were being deferred until after the war while in theory America's rights remained largely uncompromised. The year 1915 had brought many cordiality

ton, for

changes in warfare, including the new emphasis ori economic factors. The greatest development in this connexion was the introduction

Germany

Great Britain, he declares, will seek *-o prolong this war because she and she alone can be the material gainer from the exhaustion of Europe. He draws a

goods

picture of the manner in which Great Britain rules all seas, and confesses that it was with the object of liberating herself from this rule that Germany built her Fleet. If the German Fleet is destroyed, he says, the United States will be obliged to build the second largest fleet in the world unices she is content to carry on her international trade under the permission of England.

"IF

BRITAIN

WINS." Americans that they are incapable of profiting by Great Britain's

He

tells

invitation to share with her the German trade lost as a result of the war. for owing to t'.ie high wages prevailing here

Americano .annot compete with England Great either as carriers or exporters. Britain, Herr Dernburg says, will eet it will merelv all and the United States

Germany

suffor the loss of her trade with

and

and

Austria

European

other

countries.

Next Herr Dernburg.

in

the

politest

possible language, coujures up the bogey of the Monroe doctrine, which, he says,

but Great Britain has always desired to overthrow. Above: The Times' report of one of the

Germany has never

many German The

efforts to

ties of the

win

US sympathy.

mother country'

still

held

of

the

rationing

principle,

though no system as such had been established by the end of the year. Nevertheless the principle had been accepted by several neutrals, and agreements concerning certain commodities had been negotiated to fit the special circumstances of each country involved. The Danish and Dutch agreements were fairly comprehensive; the Swedish arrangement applied only to cotton. These accords barred trade with

sidious argument.

terrifying

the frequent tact-

lessness of her communications to the State Department, and to House's spring 1915 peace mission, militated further

in some commodities, but many remained free of control. Britain

had

to be satisfied with such control as she could get by the exertion of her power of restriction; the neutrals had to recognise that, in the final analysis, Britain was more powerful than they were. The system was still evolving as 1916 began.

Further Reading

Thomas A., The Policy of the United States towards the Neutrals (Johns Hopkins Press, 1942) Dudden, A. P. (ed.), Woodrow Wilson and the World of Today (Philadelphia 1957) Esposito, Vincent J. (ed.), A Concise History of World War I (London 1964) Bailey,

Hecksher, Eli F., Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland in the World War (Yale University Press 1930) Link, Arthur S., Wilson: the Struggle for Neutrality 1914-1915 (Princeton University Press 1960) Link, Arthurs., Wilson: Confusions and Crises, 1915-1916 (Princeton University Press 1964) Link, Arthur S., Wilson the Diplomatist (Johns

Hopkins University Press) May, Ernest R., The World War and American Isolation (Harvard University Press) Siney, Marion C, The Allied Blockade of Germany 1914-1916 (University of Michigan Press 1957) Vandenbosch, Amry, The Neutrality of the Netherlands during the World War

(Eerdmans 1927) [For D. R. Shermer's biography, see page 407.

1

9K

m

M»

As 1916 approached, the High Commands of both sides once again pondered the problems of how to win the war in the following year. Both faced the rapid exhaustion of their available manpower resources, so time was of the essence. The Allies could hope only to close the circle round the Central Powers and squeeze them to death slowly. Germany, partly to bolster Austria-Hungary, had to remain on the offensive. Her only hope here was to bleed the Allies to death — literally. And there was only one place to do it, they thought: Verdun. Brigadier Anthony Farrar -Hockley. Above: High Command in action: Joffre and Cadorna confer in the field

i

^

i

I I ^ktfk^^te^MIMM^

months of 1915, the governments and military stalls of the warring powers in Europe began a major review of their strategic positions and prospects, some for the second time. The first great military and political audit had boon forced on the major powers in the autumn and winter of 1914, while the ardour of the huge continental armies,

Central Powers as for the loose partnership of the Allies. The latter envied the Central Powers their geographical contiguity and the decisive influence of Germany which,

In the closing

grudgingly accepted as it often was, permitted an effective measure of co-ordination in military and economic policies. Russia, cut off by land from the western Allies, denied the exits from the Baltic and Black Seas and accessible only via the Arctic and Pacific Oceans readily accepted an invitation to Chantilly on December 6,

the quiet confidence of the regular British

Expeditionary Force, persisted. The battles 1915, East and West and the struggle Dardanelles, had taxed the spirit and endurance of the soldiers profoundly.

o\'

1915, where the Allied commanders-inchief or their representatives hoped to compound a common strategy. The host in his own headquarters and, incidentally, the senior officer present. General Joffre, was invited by his colleagues to preside. If he had been Allied

tor the

It'

this spirit survived

untarnished

among

the replacements tor the casualties, it was not wholly quenched in the ranks of the remaining veterans, though tempered there by a growing cynicism. If the war directors had still illusions as to strategy — tactics, even — neither they nor those subject to their orders were deluded by belief in a quick, cheap victory on the battlefield; still less on the high seas.

Commander-in-Chief with full powers instead of the chairman by courtesy at a consultative conference, some precise arrangements might have followed. But he was not. He was obliged to suggest policies and, being reliant on persuasion, to conceal his true feelings. What he wanted to say was that France had borne the brunt of the fighting and needed a rest — but without affording the Germans any respite. The

But where and how should they next What approach and method would succeed in 1916 that had not been conceived and tried in the year past? However different their political aims and problems, these questions were as identical for the strike?

Above: The necessities

of

an extended war:

had to Below: German troops on

Territorials, well past their prime,

be kept

in

the

line.

way up to the line by light railway. of the greatest advantages enjoyed by the Central Powers was good internal lines of communication. Right: The tightening circle their

One

around Germany (Austria-Hungary is ignored). was an instance where propaganda and fact met — the Allies strategic aim was to encircle and crush Germany

This

armies of the other powers, he thought, ought therefore to carry out a series wearing-down operations — batailles of d'usure — until the spring of 1916 when, joined by an invigorated French army, they should unite to mount a major and overwhelming offensive. As it was, he succeeded in carrying his Belgian, British, Italian, Russian and Serbian colleagues this far in formal agreement: the decision of the war can only be obtained in the principal theatres, that is to say in those in which the enemy has maintained the greater part of his forces (Russian front, Fr~anco-British front, Italian front).

The decision should be obtained by coordinated offensives on these fronts. All the efforts of the Coalition should therefore be directed to giving these offensives their maximum force from the point of view of

men and

material. Decisive results will only be obtained if 4f**

•

from attack as a nest of revolutionaries' and might now recover from the battle-

the offensives of the Armies of the Coalition are made simultaneously, or at least at dates so near together that the enemy will not Ih> able to transport reserves from one front to another. The general action should be launched as soon as possible. The wearing down of the enemy will henceforward be pursued intensively by means of local and partial offensives, particularly by the Powers which still have abundant reserves of men. The Conference is unanimous in recognising that only the minimum forces should be employed in secondary theatres, and that the troops now in the Orient seem, as a whole, sufficient to meet requirements. .

.

of the sick and wounded who otherwise die. There were thus hopes inside Russia and amongst her Allies that this great nation might make a significant contribution to victory in 1916. field

.

The Tsar takes command At the prompting of the neurotic Tsarina, the Tsar had taken command personally of his armies in the field; the able and popular giant, Grand Duke Nicholas, was transferred to command the forces in the Caucasus. At first there appeared to be no ill-effects as a result of this change, though when planning for the 1916 offensive began the Central Powers' sector selected was their strongest on the Eastern Front: from the north of the Pripet Marshes in Poland to the Lithuanian coast on the Baltic. With minor exceptions, the line opposite was manned by Germans. The sector south of the Pripet Marshes was manned by

Practical difficulties When the terms of this agreement were read and discussed in the various seats of national government and in the headquarters of the individual field armies, there was no dissent from the points made in the first three paragraphs quoted. In so far as the meeting had brought the struggle into common military focus, the Allies had progressed a little. When it came to translating the principles into a co-ordinated strategic plan, difficulties arose. The general action should be launched as soon as possible. Ever anxious to break the German armies on the soil of France, J offre had March in mind as the month in which the Allies should open the 1916 offensive. This would permit three months or so for planning and preparation, when

they should catch the weather for campaigning through the spring and summer. It was generally accepted that if their efforts were to be decisive they would certainly require to be prolonged. March was, however, out of the question for Italy and Russia. Quite apart from doubts about the weather in the mountains of the Tyrol and in Poland, each of these two required extensive material support. Italy needed artillery and shells urgently and relied on Britain for quantities of coal. The Russian army, at the time of the Chantilly Conference, was only just beginning to re-

many

would

Austro-Hungarian divisions and

cover from the corrupt administration of Sukhomlinov, dismissed from the War Ministry in mid-summer. The only medium

and heavy

artillery of

service

that

Russian origin in time were 84 105-mm, 389 120-mm and 141 155-mm pieces. Considerable armaments had been shipped from Britain and France, from Japan and the United States, but even taking these into account 160,000 men were in the firing line without rifles and the total manpower shortage in the army was 1,000,000. The infantry was similarly short of almost 300,000 machine guns, all depot stocks being exhausted. Given three full months, the new War Industries Committee might remedy critical shortages; given four, they hoped to be able to place reserves of ammunition, arms, equipment and food in the field. At last, the Civil Red Cross was free at

ripe,

in

the view of the Russian army group commander, General Brusilov, for attack. He was ordered to hold down the Austrians opposite him but otherwise to remain on the defensive. The major portion of the increased flow of supplies was concentrated in the north. In late January, the French liaison staff reported from the Tsar's headquarters that plans had advanced to divisional level but so much remained to be done that they believed the offensive must be delayed until July. In Italy, arrangements were equally incomplete. General Cadorna had elected once more to attack across the Isonzo river, not because he expected to break the Austrians in this area but in the hope that Italy might gain territory there for retention after the war. There was no great enthusiasm for the venture in the lower echelons, however, and some of the Italian General Staff at least assumed that they would not open their campaign until the British and French operations were fully launched. In January, they asked politeb. through liaison channels what form these

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being

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was

take and in what month. these questions were

that

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passage of time, there was no firm plan for the combined FrancoBritish armies at the end of January. In the previous month, Jofire had ordered Foch, commanding the French northern croup of armies, to study an offensive in the area o( the Somme river. On Christmas Day, he had written to Haig, 'I'offenIn fact, despite the

frangaise serait

pur

grandement favorisee

une offensive simultanee des forces

brittaniques

enire

la

Somme

et

Arras.'

(The French offensive would be greatly aided by a simultaneous British offensive

between the Somme and Arras.) From the evidence available, it is probable that the only reason why Jofire favoured the area was that the British and French occupied side by side the chalk downs above and below the river. Suggestions that there were strategic prizes, such as railway junctions, to be won in this area were afterthoughts. Joffre believed that a joint offensive, co-ordinated with similar offensives on the Russian and Italian fronts, would enable the Allies to break the German armies. Providing that they kept to reasonably open ground — as opposed to the mountains in tbe south — what did it matter whether there were immediate strategic objectives or not?

Fewer volunteers Haig, now in his

first

weeks as Com-

attempted to be more selective, prompted perhaps by a warning from Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, that the British cabinet was by no means united in its' attitude to the mander-in-Chief,

projected offensive. There is a fairly strong party in the Cabinet opposed to offensive operations on your front in the Spring,' he wrote to

Haig on January 13, 'or indeed at any One wants to go to the Balkans, another to Baghdad, and another to allow

time.

the Germans "to attack us".' One cause of the fears among this coalition of Conservative, Liberal and Labour ministers under Asquith was manpower for the armed forces. The flood of volunteers, overwhelming in the first year of the war, had diminished. Clinging to the principle of voluntary enlistment, the government tried one after another in their attempts to avoid conscription. The failure of these was manifested by the announcement in December 1915 that 650,000 single men had declined to register for any form of military service, while the number of young married men unregistered was even

scheme

greater. In France and Belgium, Haig had 39 divisions, all below strength. He needed 75,000 officers and men to bring them up to

establishment. Robertson calculated that the overall requirement to maintain the army at war strength at home and abroad was 133,000 men each month. An offensive, with its increased toll of casualties, would necessitate recruitment at about 150,000 for six months. Asquith realised that they had passed the point of debate on the matter of compulsit and began now a skilful and deliberate apj. >nch to the passing of a. conscription bill. Closer to the obligations of the alliance, Haig set in hand studies of his own for the offensive.

'Friday, 14th January. I asked General Plumer [he wrote in his diary] t consider >

1212

the following alternatives: (a) An attack on the Foret d'Houthoulst with the further object of capturing the German railway lines about Roulers and to the north and south of Court rai. (b) An attack on Lille. (c)An attack on Messines-Wytschaete ridge.'

At the same time, he ordered General Allenby, holding the area north of the with his Third Army, to study an attack in the spring with 15 British divisions acting alone, or a summer offensive in concert with the French immediately to the south in which the British contribution would be 25 divisions. Yet the site of the offensive was not the main subject of discussion between Haig

Somme

and Joffre from late December to January. was the matter of the preliminaries and the assumption of a greater share of the It

line

— the commitment of a greater number men overall — that concerned

of British

them. Haig wrote to Kitchener on January 19: / am told that the French are looking to the British and Russians to carry on the preliminary actions or 'wearing-out' fights which are designed to attract and exhaust the enemy's reserves before the main or The French army (except decisive battles .

some

.

.

divisions) is to be reserved for this last phase. As yet I have heard this indirectly, but I have every reason for thinking that this is the view of the six or seven

No doubt Joffre will tell me the truth tomorrow. The fact is the French 'depots' are so empty of troops that their

French GHQ.

army

only capable of one big effort in

is

their opinion.

A few days after his meeting with he confirmed this view in a letter

Joffre,

to the

Prime Minister: 'General Joffre told me privately last Thursday that although his companies are quite up to strength he has no longer large reserves behind them. The French army is thus only capable of undertaking one big offensive effort.' Haig had accepted the fact of French weakness but it did not persuade him to undertake long-term wearing-down operations. He wrote to Joffre on February 1: The batailles d'usure which you asked me to undertake in April, and again (in certain circumstances) in May, would not have the same result, as the Germans would have time to replace losses from their depots and

and refit their reserves before commencement of the general offensive. They would undoubtedly entail considerable loss on us with little to show for it: while the result on the morale of our own troops, and more especially on public opinion in England, Germany and elsewhere might be unfortunate. The enemy could claim that he had defeated an attempt to 'break through', and as our real object would not be generally understood, his claim would probably be widely acto

reorganise

the

For these reasons I submit that most desirable that once fighting begins this year on a large scale it should be carried through as quickly as possible to a decisive issue. The two men met at Chantilly on February 14. Haig's diary summarises their discussion. 'General Joffre began by giving way on the question of the wearing-out fight. He admitted that attacks to prepare

cepted it

.

.

.

is

the way for a decisive attack and to attract the enemy's reserves were necessary, but only some 10 to 15 days before the main

battle,

certainly not in April for a July

attack.'

The British Commander-in-Chief declined equally to relieve the French Tenth Army, positioned between his First and Third Armies, citing his own manpower problems as the reason. When he and Joffre parted, all the main points for the combined plan seemed to be agreed. They would open operations with a subsidiary attack in late June to draw out the German reserves. The main offensive should open on or about July 1 on either side of the Somme and they would persevere to break into and through the German defences. The French would employ 40 divisions, the British about 25. Thus at last the die seemed to be cast. What none of them had calculated closely was the action the Germans might be contemplating over the same period. Falkenhayn, Chief of the German General was perhaps the shrewdest of all the military chiefs on either side in Europe at the end of 1915. He had assumed the senior military post of the German empire — in effect, of the Central Powers — at a time when the Schlieffen Plan, on which Germany had relied to accomplish victory in 70 days, had failed. He had skilfully gathered together a fresh army of veterans and fledglings in an attempt to turn the Allies' flank through Flanders, a strategy in which he had come close to success. When it failed, he believed that Germany had lost the chance of winning the war by outright victory; for by that time the Central Powers were obliged to undertake operations on two main fronts, East and West, the very suggestion against which the great Moltke had warned. After 17 months of war, Falkenhayn had first to consider whether to adopt an active Staff,

or a passive policy in 1916. The latter was a possibility. The German army had shown that it was capable of holding almost any onslaught by its enemies and that in such defensive battles the losses of the attacker were invariably far greater than those of the defence. It was precisely because of its ardent policy of offence that France's casualties were, by December 1915, more than 1,250,000 killed, wounded and missing on the Western Front. But a persistently defensive policy had two major drawbacks for Germany. It would drag out the war, perhaps for years before Allied losses became insupportable. The economies of the Central Powers might not survive such a prolongation. Second, it might permit

Russia the opportunity to break in through the lines of the Austro-Hungarians, whose confidence was waning.

Offensive imperative Falkenhayn, therefore,

chose

an

offen-

sive policy. But the same question arose for him as for the Allies: where and how to strike? What approach and method would succeed in 1916 that he had not conceived and tried in the year past? He no longer had reserves of manpower at home. There was therefore no question of raising fresh formations. The means of compounding a striking force now were by stripping

theatre reserves and by combing out fit and NCOs from the depots, training regiments and schools. In this way, the staff calculated that he might assemble 26 divisions. He had reckoned that any effective campaign would require 30. Where should his 26 divisions be employed -East or West? Oberost, the Eastern

officers

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GERMANY

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1200

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Above: The Allies v the Central Powers: the balance of land forces at the beginning of

War game: a German machine gun course. The longer the war continued, the more the combatants came to rely on the crude power 1916. Left:

grenades and machine guns ratherthan good Below: Cadorna. the Italian C-m-C. Britain and France had to rely greatly on Italy s willingness to suffer attrition of

tactical thought.

Front

headquarters

under the

nominal

in

what strength? What

if

the campaign

command

of Hindenburg and the brusque direction of Ludendorff, his Chief-of-Staff,

into central Russia extended also into a Russian winter? The example of Napo-

had several plans which simply wanted troops for the execution. Falkenhayn has often been criticised for giving them such scant consideration; yet one may ask: was it possible to defeat Russia? There is little doubt that with 26 German divisions added

leon

to the Oberost order of battle a very large portion of the Tsar's armies would have

been defeated. The shock and confusion implicit in such a victory would have been intensified by the indecision and muddle to which the rear areas were subject; for once more the degenerate appointees of Rasputin were returning to power through the agency of the Tsarina. But then what? The capture of western Russia would not necessarily mean total Russian defeat. They would not destroy all the armies there in one blow so that there would be troops to man a defence line in the inwith adequate stocks of food behind them and their supply lines open still to the Pacific coast. The Russians were patriotic and possessed astonishing powers of endurance. How far would the German and Austro-Hungarian armies have to follow;

enough terior,

was not lost on Falkenhayn. To the south-east, Britain and France had withdrawn from the Dardanelles at the moment when the Turkish army was approaching exhaustion. A large Allied army was growing in the region of Salonika but it offered no menace. The Serbs had been driven out of their territory. Turkey and the Balkans were therefore secure. If they had once offered the Allies a chance of approaching Germany by a back door, they did not offer Germany a similar opportunity in reverse. The only area of uncer-

tainty was Rumania, hesitantly neutral but inclined to join the Allies. The General Staff had already written an appreciation of this problem and, rightly, dismissed the initiation of preventive operations. Falkenhayn did not ask advice of his Austrian colleague, Conrad von Hotzendorf, as he surveyed his strategic prospects. It is improbable that his national

and professional pride would have permitted it, even if he had wanted to do so. In any case, the Germans at Supreme Headquarters held the view that, in serious

fighting, they could not rely on the AustroHungarians. Conrad, their chief, was an imaginative general, bold and quick if sometimes erratic. His interest now was in sorties against the Italians. Falkenhayn's staff had considered earlier in 1915 a plan to break out into the northern Italian plain and then on into southern France but bad discarded it as impractical. There was nothing promising in any of these backwaters. If not in Russia, they must seek a

decision in France. France's belief that she had borne the main burden of operations was well known to the German High Command. Britain's reluctance to compel her young men to fight was known, too. The concluding pas sages of Falkenhayn's appreciation, written at this time, link these facts. As I have already insisted, the strain on France has almost reached breaking point though it is certainly borne with the most remarkable devotion. If ice succeeded in opening the eyes of her people to the fact that in a military sense they have not hit more to hope for, that breaking point would be reached and England's best sirord knocked out of her hand. To achieve that object the uncertain method of a mass 121.}

1

400 MILES

British division needed 200 000 tons of shipping: about 30 ships

Left: The advantage of a central position, especially for moving troops. Below: The rationalisation of German resources as the Allies saw it. Right: Raw material for warmen of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. Right below: Horse lines in a German artillery unit. The demands of this arm were very great

1

_

breakthrough, in any case beyond our means, is unnecessary. We can probably do enough for our purposes with limited resources. Within our reach behind the French sector of the Western Front there are objectives for the retention of which the French General Staff would be compelled

throw in every man they have. If they do of France will bleed to death — as there can be no question of a voluntary withdrawal — whether we reach our goal or not. If they do not do so, and we reach our objectives, the moral effect on France will be enormous. For an operation limited to a narrow front Germany will not be compelled to spend herself so comto

so, the forces

pletely that all other fronts are practically drained. She can face with confidence the relief attacks to be expected

on these fronts

and indeed hope to have sufficient troops in hand to reply to them for counterattacks. For she is perfectly free to accelerate or draw out her offensive, to intensify it or break it off from time to time, as suits her purpose. It was a novel concept. Falkenhayn had carefully considered which point along the front would meet all its requirements. In the north, Flanders was largely held by the British; and the weather there would also compel him to wait for the late spring. Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, commanding the Arras sector, had suggested a break-out battle immediately south of the famous old city,

which must result in

its

capture.

He

reckoned that this should be achieved by a force of not less than 24 divisions and stressed that his own artillery could support the entire operation without moving from their existing gun positions. But here, too, the enemy would be for the most part British. A study of the ground showed also that whereas they might begin the assault on a narrow front, it would be difficult to confine the fighting in later stages. Thus Arras, a city for which the French would have fought passionately, was excluded. South again, the regions of the Somme and Champagne were too open; the initia-

1214

K.llmll

tive to extend the front would lie with the Allies and there were few centres of exceptional strategic or patriotic interest. The dense woods of the Argonne, the marshy nature of the Woevre plain dis-

missed each from consideration.

On

the far right flank Belfort had exceptional political attractions. For Belfort was a fragment of Alsace regained for France. France would do battle for that. Its disadvantage was that Germany as an assailant might find the battle too difficult. A late winter campaign in the Vosges mountains did not recommend itself. One other sector appeared to offer better oppor-

Verdun. This old French city on the Meuse had played a significant part in French history for centuries. Apprehension of its loss was not likely to inflame the people of France

tunities:

quite so intensely as Belfort but, remembering their perpetual excitement concerning the occupation of portions of their land by Germany, Verdun would surely prove an adequate substitute. From the soldier's viewpoint, the approaches from the German side favoured secrecy. The railway complex at Metz was only 12 miles behind the battle line and, close by, lay the iron and steel works of Briey-Thionville, and from here the Central Powers derived quantities of shells. 'Verdun is therefore the most powerful point d'appui for an attempt with a relatively small expenditure of effort, to make the whole German front in France and Belgium untenable. The removal of the danger, as a secondary aim, would be so valuable on military grounds that, compared with it, the so to speak "incidental" political victory of the "purification" of Alsace by an attack on Belfort is a small matter.' With this appreciation completed, the Chief of the General Staff travelled by train to submit it to his master, the Kaiser. Wilhelm was not content to be a cipher either for his government or high military staffs. Had he been so, they might not have been at war. Occasionally, he had ruled against Falkenhayn's reinforcement of the Western

at the expense of the Eastern Front. Though he had found Hindenburg tedious and active disliked Ludendorff, they had won famou victories with a rare economy of 1

'

It is said that Falkenhayn persuaded the Kaiser finally to approve his plan by reminding him that the offensive at Verdun would be commanded by the Crown Prince, but there appears to be little evidence to support this. What recommended the concept for 1916 was its deadly logic and simplicity, combined with the theory that the initiative lay always in

forces.

German

hands.

to Supreme Headquarters after his visit to the Kaiser, Falkenhayn picked up en route General Schmidt von Knobelsdorf, Chief-of-Staff to the Crown

Returning

Prince.

He expounded

the plan which was

to be passed verbally to the royal

army

commander. Consultation would continue and technical notes issued but they should expect no written directive so as to preserve secrecy. At first delighted to find that he would command the prime operation of the year, the enthusiasm of the Crown Prince was chilled as it became apparent that he was to preside over a deliberate mass slaughter. He tells us that he 'could not regard the future with an altogether serene confidence. I was disquieted by the constantly repeated expression used by the chief of the general staff that the French army must be "bled white" at Verdun.' Falkenhayn called this projected operation 'Gericht', which means a judicial sentence, a deliberate punishment. This is precisely what he intended it to be. In January, he may have had final doubts as to its efficacy. Towards the end of the month, he ordered Ludendorff to meet him at Lida. Hopeful that there might be some change of heart at Supreme Headquarters, Hindenburg's chief-of-staff was ready to lay out the latest ideas of Oberost for an offensive with a modest bill of requirements and a sure if limited prize. But when the two men met there was no response to these proposals. Falkenhayn's interest had been confined to the state of the forces in

the command. Perhaps he simply wished to reassure himself that this eastern door would remain securely closed while he opened another in the west. Before the meeting of Joffre and Haig, therefore, on February 14, and the decision to unite their strength in the summer on either side of the Somme, German troops, weapons and supplies were moving in to join the Crown Prince's army opposite Verdun. The fine principles, the vague plans of the Chantilly Conference were due to be shot to pieces by the first German shell fired into the Verdun defences on the morning of February 21, 1916. Further Reading (British)

Army

Quarterly,

Volume XXIV, Verdun:

Falkenhayn's Strategy Crutwell, C.R.M.F., A History of the Great War, 1914-18 (OUP 1934) Haig, F-M Earl, The Private Papers of Douglas Haig (ed. R. Blake) (Eyre & Spottiswoode 1952) Hankey, Lord, The Supreme Command, 191418 (Allen &Unwin 1961)

Home,

Alistair, The Price of Glory: Verdun, 7976(Macmillan 1962) Reichkriegsministerium, DerWeltkrieg 1914

bis 191 8,

Volume X (1927)

[For Brigadier Anthony Farrar -Hockley's biography, see p. 396.]

&*&.

THE FALL OF SIR JOHN FRENCH Patrick Scrivenor There can be no doubt thai Sir John French was not the man to the BEF either at the outbreak of the war or subsequent^ and that lie lasted almost IS months in his command is a comment not so much on his generalship as upon the reluctance of civilian ministers to sack a commander-in-chief in the field. From the outset doubts had been expressed as to Sir John's competence His age. poor eyesight, unstable temperament and his manifest lack o( intellect bred doubts in the minds not only of his superiors but also of his subordinates. George V described him as not particularly clever' and Haig described him as 'unfit' for his command. As these misgivings existed even before Sir John's abilities had been put to the test, it is not surprising that after 17 months of operations they should have hardened into certainties. By the end of 1915 there was widespread disappointment in

command .

England at the conduct of affairs in France. Throughout 1915 a series of engagements, Neuve-Chapelle, Second Ypres, Aubers Ridge, Festubert and Loos had failed to achieve any important gains at a cost of 267,597 men killed, wounded and missing. For these repeated failures Sir John blamed many things, but in particular the shortage of shells and munitions with which the BEF had to cope. It is true that the British government had failed completely to foresee the problem of shell production, and the BEF was chronically short of munitions, particularly of the all-important high explosive shells for destroying barbed wire. In this Sir John had a perfectly legitimate complaint, but it is unfortunate that he should have become involved in the personal feud that raged around this dispute. Lord Northcliffe took advantage of the shell shortage to wage a press campaign against Lord Kitchener, and while this campaign was not successful in ousting Kitchener from office, it did highlight the whole munitions situation, and other newspapers joined the hue and cry. On May 9, after the battle of Aubers Ridge, The Tnues published a report by a Colonel Repington. Repington had stayed at French's headquarters, and French had shown him confidential papers about munitions. Repington's report blamed the lack of munitions for the failure at Aubers Ridge. French had also sent copies of these papers to opposition leaders, unknown to Kitchener or Asquith. This behaviour was a grave breach of professional conduct and it soured Sir John's already poor relationship with Kitchener, but even so he was not relieved of his command outright. His relations with his subordinates had already been damaged by his sacking of Smith-Dorrien on May 6 during the Second Battle of Ypres, and his relations with the most important of his subordinates, Haig. became impossible when in September 1915 in a dispatch about the Battle of Loos, Sir John falsified the time at which he handed over command of the reserves to Haig, thus casting some of the responsibility for failure onto Haig. (Haig himself had already been in correspondence with Kitchener commenting adversely on

French's generalship. For two months the cabinet considered the question of Sir John's removal. Frequent visits were made to his headquarters by cabinet ministers, and finally on December 15, 1915, Lord Esher arrived with a message from Asquith stating that French was to be relieved of his command, but suggesting that Sir John should offer his resignation himself. In return for this gesture he was offered a Viscountcy and command of the Home Forces. French accepted this offer, and on December 17 laid down his command. In spite of his shortcomings much can be said in extenuation of Sir John's conduct of operations during his command. His first duty, according to his original instructions, was the military security of his force, but this duty was often at variance with his duty towards his French allies. Sir John's position vis-a-vis Joffre was never satisfactorily clarified, and in spite of a great deal of personal friction Sir John often went far out of his way to fall in with Joffre's plans. Also, during the period of his command the BEF increased from six divisions and five cavalry brigades to 37 divisions and five cavalry divisions. This, in itself, completely altered the nature of his command and he was denied the normal advantages of an increase in strength (for instance a strong reserve) by the additional sectors of front that he had to take over as his force increased. Also the highly professional force with which he started was transformed by wastage and casualties into a force of hastily recruited and partially trained soldiers. The qualities that had given Sir John French success in South Africa were quite unable to cope with the huge scale of warfare taking place on the

Western Front. 1216

The man

of yesterday: Sir

John French

at a

Hyde Park troop review

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Further Reading Official History of the Great War Volume 2 Charteris. Gen. J.. Field Marshall Earl Haig (1921) Crutwell, C.R.M.F., The Great War (OUP)

[For Patrick Scrivenor's biography, see

p.

353.

1

in

France

John Keegan

HAIG& ROBERTSON

The self-made man

is a Victorian archetype. Robertson personifies him, the story of his struggle from obscurity to eminence surpassing any celebrated in Sammuel Smiles' Self Help. For Smiles' heroes were generally men who had made their way in the freefor-all of commerce or the new world of technology. Robertson won his in a profession suspicious of the talented and industrious even within its own ranks and deeply hostile to the social outsider. It was an extraordinary achievement. He was born in January 1860 in Wellbourn, Lincolnshire, youngest son of the village tailor, and on leaving school at 12 was put into service. First a gardener's boy, then a footman, at 19 he outraged his parents by enlisting in the 16th Lancers. 'I will name it to no one,' his mother wrote, 'I would rather bury you than see you in a red coat.' Her distress was understandable for to the respectable Victorian poor, a son in the army meant a son lost to idleness and drink. Robertson succumbed to neither. A model trooper, he next proved so outstanding an NCO that, after only nine years service, he was offered a commission. Accepting it meant braving fierce social terrors, as his first letter home as an officer touchingly conveys. 'It is all among strangers — strangers in more ways than one. I feel I am acting under a false flag if they do not know my previous life [but] the clothes Father made me compare very favourably with any others have and ... I hope to repay

him some

day.'

His parents were to feel more than repaid by the pride they were able to take in his subsequent rise. In India, where he was compelled to serve for want of means, he secured appointment to the Intelligence branch, having taught himself five Indian languages in five years, and sensibly stuck to that side, where his talents would tell, until 1907. Meanwhile he succeeded in winning the DSO, the hand of a general's daughter and a place at the Staff College. In 1910 he was appointed Commandant of the College and in 1914 was serving as chief administrative officer of the Aldershot Army Corps. When it was ordered to France in August, he became Quartermaster General on French's staff and in December was promoted to head it. It was a promotion he was reluctant to accept, fearing that French's fall, which he regarded as inevitable, would then entail his own. Once installed, however, he was quickly able to establish the independence of his own position and views. These took an extreme 'westerner' form, in that he opposed any diversion of effort from the struggle in France. In this he and Haig were of a mind, as also in their judgement of French's incompetence. Neither hesitated to make known their feelings to their influential friends, who included George V and, in Robertson's case, Asquith, whom he met when summoned by Kitchener to London after Loos. French's mishandling of that battle had condemned him in almost everyone's eyes and Robertson determined that Haig should replace him. Asquith was inclined to agree but was more concerned to get rid of Kitchener, whose pretensions had become intolerable to him but whose resignation from the War Ministry he dared not request. In December 1915, he hit upon a compromise. Kitchener would retain the dignity of Cabinet rank but surrender operational responsibilities to Robertson, who would become Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Haig would succeed French. The newcomers would run the war between them. Thus was born one of the most powerful military partnerships in British history and one devoted to the narrowest of strategic aims: the unrelenting pursuit of victory on the Western Front. It was a partnership to which Robertson brought unswerving loyalty: Haig was to return it only as it proved expedient to do so.

What Robertson had won wholly through

his capacities,

Haig

than to patronage. It was patronage, moreover, for which he had to work, for the Haigs, though prosperous, were not an illustrious family. The father was a whisky distiller and the education he gave his son, at Clifton and Brasenose College, Oxford, would scarcely have introduced him to the great. At Sandhurst, to which he proceeded after leaving Oxford without a degree, he did well, as a man four years older than the average cadet should, but not well enough to secure a commission in the obvious regiment for a Scotsman with a cavalry bent, The Greys, Instead he went to the 7th Hussars, with whom he was to spend the next nine years, 1885-94, in India. In 1894, aged 33 and still a captain, he returned to England to take the Staff College examination. Unexpectedly he failed and it was only through the intervention of the Quartermaster-General, whom he impressed while acting as one of his supernumerary staff officers, that a place was found for him the following year. There he was a success and in the next four years, which he spent on continuous active service in Egypt and South Africa, he reinforced his reputation as a man of decision and forthright views (inarticulately expressed except on paper). His dash in the handling of cavalry, particularly under John French in South Africa, brought him command of the 17th Lancers, several decorations and appointment as ADC to Edward VII. It was through this association with the court that he found his wife, one of Queen Alexandra's maids of honour, to whom he proposed after two days' acquaintance. Thenceforth Haig's career prospered. Posted to the War Office, he was given responsibility for one of the most important reorganisations set in train by the reforming Liberal Minister, Haldane, that involving the reserve forces. The scheme he carried through was undoubtedly a good one. This achievement led on to the post of Chief-of-Staff, India, from which he was promoted in 1912 to GOC Aldershot, the centre for Expeditionary Force troops. It brought him command of I Corps on mobilisation in 1914. Haig proved to be a corps commander of great competence. His handling of I Corps in the retreat from Mons, at the battle of Landrecies on the Marne and on the Aisne cannot be faulted. And at the First Battle of Ypres, in Oct/Nov 1914, he showed resolve in command and personal bravery in crisis of the highest order. It was, therefore, altogether natural that when in December, the BEF was reorganised into two armies, he should have been given command of the First. In the following year he was to direct its operations in three battles, Neuve Chapelle, Aubers Ridge and Loos. Loos, after a brilliant opening, ended in disaster but the fault was universally recognised by his fellow commanders in France to have been French's. Haig's reputation survived unscathed. Indeed he was now widely spoken of as the obvious successor to French, his qualities of calm, resolution and decision being seen as precisely those which French lacked and the new form for war demanded. Haig was not reluctant to listen to views of this sort and was even prepared to pass word of French's shortcoming to the King's private secretary, with whom George V, a friend of prewar days, had asked him to correspond. Robertson, meanwhile, was working on his behalf both on Asquith and Kitchener. Their discovery of French's falsification of the record of his orders at Loos, seeking to cast discredit on Haig, prompted them to act. On December 19 Haig was appointed '-in-C.

owed

less to talent

(

[For John Keegan's biography, sec

Below

left:

p.

96.

1

Haig and Joffre Below: Sir William Robertson

:'l

THE TUNNEL

The aim was simple: dig under the enemy's front line, place a mine and blow it off the map. But mining had become a forgotten art and much anxiety and terror had to be borne before worthwhile results could be obtained. Captain W. T. T. Prince. Above: Are they there or not? A German with his ear to the ground, listens for sounds of Allied digging activity

To the average person, mining

is the art of extracting minerals from the earth, though some know a little of the more recondite practice of blowing up one's enemy with devices buried in the ground or sunk in water. But few know that this is barely more than a modernisation of a technique which has its origins in the Great Horse of Troy and in other such ruses. It was a technique, initially, used for gaining access to otherwise impregnable positions and the invention of gunpowder merely widened its scope, for, in addition to gaining an entrance to some stronghold, one could now damage the enemy within before having to come to grips with him. It became a standard way of attempting to break the stalemate that could result from sieges. Yet towards the end of the 1880s, as a subject that required specialist training, it became virtually ignored. The Crimean War was the last time that British troops had fought an enemy of like sophistication. 1870 was the last time that either Germany or France had fought a major war. It was the era of colonialist expansion, when Europe fought against indigent tribes in backward parts of the world. There had been sieges, but nevertheless the whole of tactical thinking had swung towards the Arrne Blanche, the cavalry, whose mobility and shock-action were enough to scatter and destroy an enemy shaken by the firepower of infantry

and

artillery

equipped with magazine-fed

and quick-firing guns. It was the age of 'gun-boat' diplomacy and the balance of power, and military success in the 19th Century had bred a generation of cavalrymen as the commanders of the early 20th Century, and these were not to be gainsaid by any but the most rash of their subordinates. Thus the science of military mining fell into the category of an obscure rifles

technical backwater.

was almost inevitable that the summer and autumn of 1914 should falter and then bog into what was to become perhaps the most protracted and unusual form of siege-warfare ever to be waged by Europe. The Germans were the first to win honThus

it

offensives of the

ours in tunnel warfare. Their Pioneer Battalions were trained in tunnelling and, though it was not envisaged that tunnelling would become their foremost occupation, they were sufficiently proficient to be able to almost annihilate an Indian brigade in December 1914. The French

Sapeurs-Mineurs had some comparable training, but they were hampered by archaic equipment and the doubts of their commanders. The Russians lived in a mystic world, largely the imagining of their singularly inept and unbelievably brave aristocratic leaders to whom war consisted largely of cavalry charges and brilliant uniforms. In such conditions engineering, let alone tunnelling, could only moulder in oblivion. The same was true of Britain. Short courses, more the excuse for visiting Lon-

don than anything else, were available at Chatham, where practical experience was gained by digging short tunnels under ideal conditions, after which the trainee went back to some duty not even remotely connected with tunnels. Equipment was antediluvian, bulky, noisy and in very short supply. The basic unit, the Field Company, received no training in this art, and the Fortress Company, infinitely more specia-

lised, was far more able to make capacious galleries and stores at a leisurely pace and in a style not far removed from that of a

coal-mine. The British Expeditionary Force of 1914 had no mining specialists at all. Thus virtually anything done was the result more of experiment or desperation than the result of careful planning. The beginnings of tunnel warfare were made on the Western Front, tentatively at first, but becoming more complex as the practice developed. Frustration at the stalemate and the dreadful slaughter of massed frontal attacks, coupled with rumour and largely exaggerated reports of the success of these early operations encouraged experiments on other fronts. It was to be a period of trial and error, a semi-chaos from which was to emerge some sort of order only at the end of 1915. The basic technique of tunnelling was one of driving a tunnel (known as the 'Sap' — from which the nickname 'Sapper' is derived) under an enemy position where an explosive charge (the 'Mine') was placed and detonated at a suitable time. In

1914 this warfare began

to

appear when

British and French troops crawled out of their trenches at dead of night with portable charges which they placed on the ground as near to the Germans as they could and then exploded by remote control. These charges, while keeping alive an offensive spirit, were largely ineffective. Meanwhile, below-ground, the Germans were burrowing methodically towards the unsuspecting Indians, comfortably dug-in along the Belgian border. Ten small mines, each with between 50 and 300 pounds of explosive in them, exploding under the front trenches, killed, buried or shocked the defenders to such an extent that the German assault which followed was almost completely unopposed. Further mines exploded by the Germans in the next few days were attended by the same tactics and tbe same success, setting a pattern of behaviour which was not to vary appreciably in the future. There would be an explosion, a rattle of machine gun and rifle fire, the scuttle of ant-like infantry attacking the smoking crater, the thunder of artillery fire, and more scuttling figures as defending reserves hurried forward in a counterattack: all in a process of attrition the cost of which was out of any proportion with the value of the ground held or lost.

Honeycomb

German

diggings open saps, pushing a trench forward from their front line and ducking underground at the last moment. It was too obvious and the Germans just saturated the sap-head with artillery fire, destroying the works and killing the tunnellers. The French then began to dig from further back and were horrified to find that of

The French then

tried

was a veritable honeycomb of Gerdiggings along their front. They were forced onto the defensive, trying to neutralise the German works before any harm could befall their own troops. Meanwhile, the British, shocked by this unexpected series of reverses and puzzled as to how to deal with the menace, ordered the already overworked Field Companies, RE, to carry out countermining. Reports of German mining came in such floods that the Sappers were unable to cope. Most of these reports were false alarms, figments of tired and apprehensive imaginations. But General Rawlinson, commanding IV Corps, there

man

GHQ

permission to asked and received start offensive mining. He was given no extra men, and the fairly extensive records of a series of experiments in both mining

and countermining which had been carried Chatham in 1907, and which did not become available at all during the war, were completely forgotten or ignored. In fear and frustration, small, almost unofficial, mining sections were formed in brigades, composed of men who had even the most sketchy of tunnelling experience. Their task was one of purely defensive work, and they laboured under almost impossible burdens. They had no tools, no listening gear and no experience. By trial and error they evolved a system of listening posts, in which men pressed an ear to out at

clammy earth or made a primitive sounding-board of a drum filled with water and sunk into the bottom of the trench. Any the

suspicious noise was investigated, the trench occupants warned and an exploratory shaft sunk. At a depth of about ten feet the sap would begin, running out in the direction of the noise. This was a tricky business since both speed and silence were vital. Almost certainly the Germans would be listening for the sounds of retaliation. Both sides would be intent on blowing a 'camouflet' — a small charge designed to blow in the other side's works, preferably entombing the men on duty, without breaking the surface or damaging their own tunnel. At first the longer experience and superior technique of the Germans told, so that both the British and the French suffered accordingly. In places the Russians too

had taken

to

trench warfare by the beginning of 1915, and here too the practice of mining and tunnelling began. For the Russians it was no new experience — they had met this technique against the Japanese in 1904, but they seemed not to have remembered.

The German works were markedly

better

and their successes correspondingly more frequent. However, it was in Flanders that the main effort was to be. The Germans continued to push ahead with their tunnels, while the British, in whose area the ground afforded the most suitable geology for such warfare, were feeling their way towards an effective solution to their dilemma. Major Norton Griffith MP, a man who was by profession a contractor, by inclination a politician, and who was sufficiently wise to see what was needed, was also sufficiently brash and influential that he could beard Kitchener and propose to him that a special force of miners, enlisted straight from civilian life, be given the task of managing tunnel warfare. He had, in a firm of which he was head, men whose occupation was that of driving sewers underground. Because of their method of working they were known as 'Clay-kickers' or 'Men-on-th'-Cross', and their style of work was to prove the ideal one for driving fast, economical and silent tunnels. In December, Kitchener sent Griffith to France with a foreman to study and report. They reported that the ground held by the British was ideal for tunnelling, and the soil perfect for their style of digging. Griffith got the permission he sought and began recruiting, in rather empirical fasion, in January 1915. Several sections were formed, being attached to Field Companies, from whom they were almost always parted, so it was finally decided that specialist

companies were more suitable. 1219

rhe Brigade Mining Sections had, by this lime, reached a degree of proficiency that was beginning to tell on the German effort. They were an entirely ad hoc organisation and it was felt that they should be incorporated into the new Tunnelling Companies. RE, which were being formed from Griffith's clay-kickers and a leavening of

regular RE, officers and

NCOs. At once a was never to be

problem arose, and this using big business techniques, was recruiting men entirely on their merits as clay-kickers. Many were far too old to be enlisted. Others were far too unfit. Often they had no idea that they might be required to fight, and when faced with the rigours of military discipline they were apt to be mutinous. Being professionals, and recruited as such, they were paid at a higher rate than their counterparts from the mining sections. All this led to problems which were aggravated when fully resolved. Griffith,

regular commanders failed to realise the situation. Despite these teething troubles, the work went on. It was still a matter of learning by experience, but the technical aspect was now much clearer. The tactical use of mining was still hazy, however. To the Germans the problem was always fairly clear — they had evolved a tactical doctrine that had proved effective so far, and they continued to use it. The British, still largely on the defensive, were concentrating on wanning what was still to them a battle for the protection of their front line trenches. As they progressed through the year they developed a system in which defensive galleries were sunk running parallel to the line of the trenches that were to be protected, just forward of them, at a depth of about 15 feet. From these, shafts were driven a short distance towards the Germans, culminating in a Y-shaped sap-head which was a listening post. From this post it was a relatively simple task to direct a defensive camouflet at German shafts and tunnels, once they were located. Occasionally, if opportunity or the incentive to act offensively occurred, a mine

might be placed beneath a German position. Such an action, in April 1915 at the notorious Hill 60, was supported by exactly the same tactics as used with sucb success by the Germans. The British reached the smoking lips of the three craters, held them until there was no further chance of reinforcement, and then withdrew, having lost many irreplaceable men. They had failed to realise that flanking positions require neutralising.

Terror inspired by tunnelling Tunnelling was still a war within a war. The men in the trenches were terrified of being blown to death by the men below them. The slightest rumour of mining activity by either side would send panic flooding through the front line. It was infective and caused trenches to be abandoned on more than one occasion. Commanders on both sides, therefore, tended to keep their tunnellers busy on purely protective works. It was only natural that the areas best suited by nature to tunnelling were more worked than areas which were not. Thus, the British tended to have more activity on their front than did the French. Thus also, the Germans and the British met quite frequently underground. These

meetings were hectic affairs Most often they were a meeting by ear alone, when the two sides might stalk each other with

1220

a view to finding an opportunity to blow a camouflet. The cool courage required of the men concerned was such that they might carry on as though they knew nothing of the position they were in, hoping to lull the other side into a false state of security. In this they had to trust to the

most as a result of it, there was the terrible shortage of equipment. Such as was available was often ancient, and at least one British officer has recorded that the equipment which he received from store had been in preservation since the Crimean War. Inventiveness was the task of the

of their officers. Some officers got a reputation for being lucky. If they were unlucky, they and their men did not return from their shift. Often, the meeting would come as a surprise. A thrust in the gloom with a spade would meet only temporary resistance, and a guttering candle would be quickly extinguished as the cold draught from another tunnel struck the digger's face. An

Tunnelling Companies and ranged from digging techniques to the very implements used by the men. The geology of the British sector was such that, once down to about 20 feet, the ground was clay, the consistency of which was such that it was ideal for digging. To reach it, however, particularly in the low-lying and waterlogged area of the Lys and the canals, generally meant driving the shaft through a belt of liquid sand. Quite naturally, this obstacle was both problematic and dangerous. It re-

judgement

would be summoned, and he would what to do. Normally, a camouflet would be blown at a convenient time, sealing the doom of whoever was trapped by the blast. Sometimes a listening post would

officer

decide

be established for recording information. Occasionally some intrepid soul might venture into the exposed tunnel. There he might engage the men he met before fleeing back to the comparative safety of his own tunnel and firing a camouflet to deter pursuit. Some used to take the camouflet with them, so placing it that they were able to seal off a section of the enemy tunnel, which they turned into an extension of their own. Occasionally, a fully-fledged raiding party might attempt to capture the whole tunnel, including the shaft leading from the enemy trenches. This was a tactic of which the Germans were particularly fond, and many a startled miner was forced to defend his handiwork with a rifle which was all too often a totally unfamiliar instrument. Sometimes the two sides might meet without any prior warning. There would be a pause, a shout, then the frantic rush of bodies as both sides tried to gain the initiative. Picks, shovels, timbers and fists — these were the immediate, and the best, weapons. A short scuffle in the dark, the vague hope of a prisoner, then a discreet but swift retirement and the firing of a camouflet. Rarely was a breakthrough never detected, but one British tunneller at least was used as a foot-stool by a passing German shift that had trodden through to the tunnel he was driving under theirs, without realising it. The man-made dangers were not the only ones. Gas, both natural and as the result of explosions, lingered in the soil in which the men dug. It could asphyxiate or poison. It could ignite through a variety of causes. Collapsing tunnels might trap a man. These were common enough but they were not the worst. The very conditions in which the men had to work were worse. Often working in a foot or more of water for up to 12 hours at a time, short of air, frozen whenever they stopped digging, they were a prey to illness. Bad food lowered their resistance and fatigue did the rest. By arranging rotas, and billeting those not on duty quite far back, there was some alleviation of the problem, but casualties were still proportionately high. Originally set up unofficially and as an experiment, there were a series of schools specialising in rescue, which did a great deal with the few resources that were available to them. During the course of 1915 they were expanded and improved, taking on responsibilities for mining technique and training. Besides the lack of experience, and al-

quired a great deal of patience and expertise. Two basic methods were used. Spiling, by which boards were driven into the ground to form an enclosure the inside of which was then dug out so that the boards now formed a barrier against the sand, was the most easily done, though both the British and the Germans used the 'freezing'

method as well. This was the use of a liquid, normally liquid carbon-dioxide, passed through pipes laid in the ground, to freeze the surrounding area. Once sufficiently frozen, the ground was workable, the shaft being sunk and lined with wood or iron. On the equipment problem there was a certain amount of acrimony between the High Commands and the tunnellers. The Germans, perhaps, had the better of this initially, since they had done some preparation before the war. The British were issued with existing stock and were discouraged from further burdening the Treasury by asking for new and improved tools. Where possible, Griffith cajoled and threatened the authorities into providing small quantities, but was unable to get improvements as quickly as he wanted. He scrounged and used his private contacts, which was to lay the foundations for the

improved tools of later years. All through 1915 the Germans were in command of the war underground. Their tactics were generally successful and the British were forced to fight defensively. Yet this was to prove advantageous to the British, since it gave them time to sort out their ideas and to reorganise the Tunnelling Companies into an effective, if inexperienced organisation. At the end of the 3'ear there were some 20 companies operating in France and Flanders. In Gallipoli, where the pattern of static warfare had also emerged, the Turks began mining against the Australians, who retaliated in

much

the

same way

as that

which had become standard in France. They formed mining sections and began counter-mines the very same day. From this beginning there was formed the VIII Corps Mining Company, which was to merge into the official 254th Tunnelling Company when this arrived from England. It was here that what had started as a mine became a strongpoint because it was discovered that a gallery being driven along the side of a cliff dominated a Turkish position. The Tunnellers enlarged the position, put in firing slits, and so took up the role of a Fortress Company for a brief moment. The Turks also produced

On one occasion, having broken through to an Australian tunnel, they did not blow a camouflet. Instead they tried to

surprises.

to rest upon the laurels that they had won initially, the British were now beginning to get themselves organised. A Director of Mining, Colonel R. N. Harvey, RE, was to be appointed with a staff of experienced min-

Germans were content

ing engineers and staff officers scattered throughout the British army in Flanders. failures, the frustrations and the mistakes of the war underground so far were being studied and thrashed out, and a workable solution was slowly evolving. It was to be a long process, and there were to be many serious errors made, but the improvement was already apparent, particularly to the Germans, who were beginning to feel that their defensive tactics against countermining were not altogether adequate. The British, however, were still almost totally ignorant of the tactical use of mining as an offensive weapon. Such attempts as were made by them usually ended in a bloody failure to exploit the initial success of the explosion. Lives would be thrown away in desperate, heroic, attempts to hold a position won by mining, the value of which was more often than not the very opposite of the cost of the effort expended. Technically, order was coming from chaos; but the

The

problem of correctly handling this form of attack was still beyond the grasp of the top British commanders. A new generation, with fresh thoughts on the subject,

was needed. Until they arrived, the conventional blood-baths would continue.

Top: The awesome power of a large mine: the crater left by a French mine at Carency after a great plug of earth had been torn from the

ground. Above: The simple view of mining and countermining: first the tunnel to blow up the fortifications, and then the defensive countermine. Left: The explosion of a British mine

Before ending, it is perhaps important to mention the 'Miners' Friends' who suffered mutely, and in great quantities, that the tunnellers might survive. They are honoured upon the Scottish War Memorial in Edinburgh. Mice and small birds, such as canaries, are highly susceptible to gas. For this reason they were issued to the Tunnelling Companies as an official item. Many were to die, and so give warning to the diggers with them. Many were gassed but recovered, and one company is said to have kept a record of the gassings so that the creatures did not have to endure more than three times before getting pensioned off to an aviary. The tunnellers were very fond of these creatures and would often put them near an air pipe so that, while they did no service as a warning, at least they would suffer no hardship. This was an extreme of humanity in a form of warfare that demanded so much of its exponents.

Further Reading

pump

.

-^"^t^^^H

tear-gas into the gallery, presumably in order to capture it intact. In September 1915 Britain asked the Empire to provide Tunnelling Companies for the war in Flanders. Australia and New Zealand provided one each and Canada was to provide three. They did not get into the battle until the middle of 1916, though the New Zealand Company reached England in December 1915, and the Canadians were already using their unofficial Mining Sections in Flanders at this time. These were to form the nucleus of the third

Barrie, A., War Underground (Muller 1962) Grieve, W. G. and Newman, B., Tunnellers, the Story of the Tunnelling Companies,

Canadian Tunnelling Company.

but lived mainly abroad. In 1960 he joined the Sherwood Foresters as a Short Service officer, but later changed to a Regular Commission. He has

Thus, as 1915 came to its close, the situation on the front which had seen the most mining activity was one of triumph for the Germans — but a triumph which was being slowly turned back upon them by the expanding efforts of the British. While the

Royal Engineers, during World War

I

(Jen-

kins 1936) Institution of the Royal Engineers, The work of the Royal Engineers in the European W,u

1914-1918. Military Mining (McKay 1922) The New Zealand Tunnelling Company (Auckland: Whitcombe & Tombs,

Neill, J. C.,

1922)

MAJOR

W

T

T

PRINCE was born into an old He was schooled in England

military family in India.

served as an infantryman in Malaya, Cyprus, Aden, Ulster (during IRA days), Muscat and Oman and Germany. In 1968 he won the Sultan of Muscat's Commendation He retired from the regular army in

1979

122

TUNNELLING

AND MINING British"

Mines and countermines

Sap

at Guinchy.

For every yard of trench on the surface, there were several yards of tunnelling

underground, the object of which was to place explosives

Strengpoints. r

Itself

was

In

under opposing

time, the front line

The plan view and side elevation

continually altered to take

of

tunnelling operations in progress.

any advantage possible from the many

British forces (on the left)

mine craters produced by both sides.

mine

throw out

a

to place a charge under the

German position (on the right). The Germans, aware of this, throw out a countermine, which in turn is detected by the British and destroyed by means of a camouflet. an explosive charge

pushed along a small tunnel close enough to collapse the German mine

when exploded the British mine

German

(centre). Eventually

is in

position

is

position,

and the

destroyed (yellow

areas indicate mine explosions).

of sapping and mining in schematic form. Unable to progress

The theory

over the surface, the attackers had to

throw forward a sap. and then digging and deep, burrow their way under the opposition's front line trenches, place a mine, blow it and then storm forward to occupy the gap. silently

"Ouutermine

in

moved downwards, its

.he tunnel d

timber.

hack

shored up with e the earth brought

-

froni

either for filling

ring thn trench or

li

Jo tamp (he he Germans

sand

explosive mini

heard the a

Tht;

•d

'votild

digrjii

countermine,

i

could be neutral ''Htonatttin a cai

ket or ex

aHJJ dig

detected

'clay-kicking

tuniieiliwj

method. The kicker lay on his cross', wedqed at an angle of 15 deyrees in the tunnel, and hicknd his specially adapted r.fiarJe into »Iih clay He could then lever out a chunk of clay and move onto and so move tin; unit section forward,

The theory of mining and countermining. If baulked on the surface, one side would set itself to dig under the opposing lines and place a charge large enough to blast a gap m the lines. The opposition would try to detect tunnelling operations, and intercept them with a tunnel of its own. This in turn could be countermined, and so a whole under ground war built up. In this diagram the yellow areas represent explosions and their effects.

M

PEACE MOVES The empty hope

President Wilson hated war — it was the negation of the principles of humanity in which he believed. And so he strove to halt the war. But

House, Wilson's chosen emissary in Europe, failed to reconcile the warring parties. Charles Neu As we have seen, the hopes of the great powers ran high when the First World War broke out in August 1914. Few expected a long war or connected war with social

Used a vision of an American-inspired international community which could, through its creation, in some measure atone for the terrible destruction men had

catastrophe. When the initial military thrusts failed to produce decisive victories, men were surprised but not disillusioned.

endured. From the start Wilson, House and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan felt a moral duty to end this tragedy of Christian civilisation. They saw, of course, no need to become entangled in it, for both historical and practical considerations militated against American involvement. But they did believe that the United States could help fulfil its historic mission and carry out its obligations to mankind by assuming the lead in the search for peace. Prior to Britain's entry into the war the American government made a formal offer of good offices, and in the weeks that followed it pursued a variety of peace schemes. None of these early peace efforts produced any results, and Wilson soon came to realise that vague yearnings for peace were not enough. As the President's mind came to grips with the difficulties of mediation, he turned to House as his chief emissary to the European capitals. Bryan urged a bold

Diplomacy was renewed

in

an

effort

to

strengthen coalitions and win over wavering neutrals rather than to find a compromise peace. All the powers felt they had too much at stake to accept a peace based on the status quo ante helium, to return to the intolerable tensions of the prewar years. Bach government believed that the growing sacrifices of the war could only be justified through the achievement of new forms of security. All the powers had entered the war to win and assumed that it

would end decisively. During the early years of the war, then, peace initiatives from the belligerent governments were largely tactical efforts

weaken the enemy coalition. A serious mediation effort, aimed at a general compromise peace, could only come from a

to

neutral. The peculiar traditions and great power of the United States gave her the

leadership in efforts to end the war. Shortly before war broke out, President Woodrow Wilson's intimate adviser, Colonel Edward M. House, had travelled to Europe in an attempt to ease the acute tension and bring about an Anglo-GermanAmerican entente. Though House accomplished little, he did perceive that the situation in Europe was explosive — that it was jingoism run stark mad'. Nevertheless, neither the President nor House was really prepared for the shock of war. It challenged all their premises about civilised international behaviour and the decency of modern man. In the decade and a half before the war most Americans had come to believe that war among civilised powers was a thing of the past. They discerned a world-wide trend toward interdependence and co-operation, a coalescence of mankind into on< pacific, international community. Confident of the growing supremacy of law and reason, the President and his advisers could not fathom the bitter rivalries which spawned the great war. The war interrupted their dream of progress, hut it did not shake their faith in the evolution of a more harmonious, idealistic world order. In fact, the war gradually crystal-

1224

plea for peace, irrespective of conditions in Europe. Indifferent to the position of the belligerents, he wanted to launch an

independent peace move which might seriously embarrass the American government or threaten to draw it into the war on the

wrong side. House knew

far

more about European was more cautious

affairs and, as a result,

his approach to peace. Strongly proAllied from the start. House saw no prospect for successful mediation until the belligerents had lost their hope for victory. in

Moreover, House wanted American mediaupon a previous agreement and believed it must be an instrument for achieving a moderate Allied victory. Wilson shared these assumptions. He did not want a peace move which would promote a German triumph or imperil American prestige. His choice of House limited the scope of American mediation

tion to be based with the Allies

efforts

and meant that they would be

pro-

Allied in nature.

The incurable romantic Wilson's choice of House also gave a peculiar quality to American attempts to end the war. House had travelled widely in Europe in the decade and a half before the

war, restlessly searching for a fulfilment which eluded him in America. He was an incurable romantic, driven by the spur of fame to seek a great place in the history of his times. When his ambition was frustrated in the real world, he found an escape and fulfilment in a world of fantasy. In 1912 he published a political novel, Philip Dru: Administrator, in which a young army officer overthrew a corrupt government, instituted sweeping reforms and then relinquished his power to the people. The intimacy with Wilson established after 1911 satisfied some of this ambition but, at the same time, it nourished even greater dreams of a large role on a world stage.

Thus missions

House dramatised to

Europe,

his

wartime

exaggerating their

possibilities and his influence upon other men. He easily saw in others what he wanted them to believe and repeatedly convinced himself that a few persuasive words and gestures had won statesmen over to his own position. Though his diplomacy had a veneer of realism, he was often naive in his negotiations with French and British leaders and assumed that, in the end, reason, calmness and idealism would triumph over the baser aims of the Allies. By mid-December 1914, Wilson and House were discouraged in their peace efforts. Initial British encouragement had changed to sharp warnings from the British government suggesting that mediation might imperil Anglo-American friendship. American hopes were easily revived, however, upon the receipt of a letter from Arthur Zimmermann, the German Under-

secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, encouraging new American peace initiatives. Despite the coolness of the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, and blunt warnings from the French and Russian ambassadors that their governments would not accept a negotiated peace, the President urged House to travel immediately to Europe to sound out European leaders. House eagerly agreed, and sailed on January 30, 1915, with the President's complete confidence. He had no formal instructions, for Wilson believed that 'we are both of the same mind and it is not necessary to go into details with you'. House's mission aroused anxieties in the belligerent capitals, particularly in London and Berlin. None of these governments were willing to think seriously of peace. In

Wilson: enlightened, humanitarian and decent, and obsessed with the idea of a better world

Germany, Great Britain and France, and Russia and AustriaHungary, the war had brought a wave of popular enthusiasm and a suspension of party rivalry. Even with the passing of the

to a lesser extent in

expectation of a quick victory, the governments and people in all the belligerent nations remained determined to fight the war to a successful conclusion. Still unaware of the vast social ramifications of the struggle, they developed war aims incompatible with the notion of a compromise peace. The Allies, aside from specific territorial gains, sought to destroy Germany as a great power and talked of a partial partition of the German and AustroHungarian empires. They were, moreover, engaged in delicate, complex negotiations with Italy, Greece and Rumania in an attempt to lure them into the war. The bait was Austrian, Hungarian and Turkish territory.

Austro-Hungarian and German war aims were even more expansive than those of the Allies. Austria-Hungary, though now fighting primarily to ensure her continued existence, developed plans to remove the south Slav threat and to attach Poland to the empire. Germany viewed the war as a means of achieving dominance of continental Europe and world-power status. Most Germans, including the Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, envisaged a Central European customs union, substantial territorial gains in Africa and both indirect and direct expansion in the east and west. They planned to reduce France and Russia to the position of second-rank powers.

Not even from these intended to and bind it

Austria-Hungary was immune vast ambitions, for Germany penetrate that decadent empire

more closely to Germany. Soon after the war began the German government realised that these war aims could not be achieved through a general, negotiated peace. In early 1915 Germany did become interested in a separate peace with Russia, but only as a means of turning all her resources against France and Britain. Though German leaders knew this was essential for a decisive victory, they expected military successes in the east to bring a peace offer from Russia and did not foresee a peace based upon a return to the status quo ante. Thus, for Germany, negotiations for a separate peace were not

only a tactical step to disrupt the enemy coalition but also a part of her thrust for the hegemony of Europe. House's mission seemed a threat to the efforts of the Allies and Central Powers to unify their peoples, strengthen their coalitions and lay the groundwork for a long but successful struggle.

Combatants reluctant Though

reluctant to talk about peace, belligerent leaders were even more reluctant to offend the United States. Sir Edward Grey had attempted to put off House's visit by suggesting that Allied peace aims went far beyond the restoration

Belgium and Northern France and postwar disarmament. House and Wilson were of

not discouraged by these

new peace

condi-

and House was full of hope when he first saw Grey on February 6. The two men quickly developed a deep rapport. Grey later remarked that he 'found comtions,

bined in him in a rare degree the qualities wisdom and sympathy', while House discovered that 'his mind and mine run nearly parallel, and we seldom disagree'. Grey shared with both House and Wilson a desire to see new forms of international co-operation emerge out of the war. In fact, Grey's thought had progressed further than theirs, for he asked House if the United States would participate in a general organisation to guarantee the peace. House was unwilling to go this far; nor did he hold Grey's belief that the new postwar order must be based on the complete defeat of the Central Powers. But these differences seemed unimportant. House was soon listening sympathetically to Grey's exposition of the problems of

of

the Allies, and Grey was relieved to discover that House had no intention of relentlessly pursuing mediation. Quickly accommodating himself to the intransigent

mood in London, House made it clear that he would not force mediation against the wishes of the Allies and that he had no desire to suggest the terms of a final settlement.

House was willing

to wait for the results

of the Allies' 1915 spring offensive,

which would greatly weaken Germany's position. Lingering in London until early March, he reluctantly arrived in Ber lin in the middle of the month. There, too, he avoided conflict and attempted to create he believed

mutual

confidence.

He emphasised

the

common

concern of both governments with the freedom of the seas after the war. House calculated that German statesmen, offered the assurance of absolute freedom of

commerce, would give up their more

ambitious war aims and come to terms with the Allies. Despite his conciliatory attitude, however, House found German leaders unresponsive. He left Berlin convinced that the Germans were 'narrowly selfish in their purposes and have no broad outlook as to the general good of mankind" House ended this first wartime mission to Europe as he began it, with a visit to England. By now he saw in his notion ol freedom of the seas a bridge between Germany and England, and talked excitedk to Grey about his vision of a future peace. Indulging in the fantasy which so often characterised his career, House discussed the organisation of the peace conference and the unselfish union of America ami Britain for the welfare of mankind. House believed Grey was 'intensely interested'

he was reticent and evasive. however. House was entranced with this vision of peace and his own role in its implementation. He felt certain that he had laid the framework for Anglo-American understanding, one which would soon become important with a shift

when,

By

in fact,

this

time,

House assumed that the British campaign in the Dardanelles would succeed, that Italy would enter the war and that by the autumn of 1915 the Central Powers would he desperate to negotiate He shared most -though not all of these thoughts with President Wilson and con vinced him that mediation must remain a future hope. So long as House was managing the President's peace moves, the preset vation of Anglo-American accord would ho placed above the quest for peace. The sinking of the Lusitania on May 7. 1915 put American peace moves in a differ ent context. Previous to that event Amerithe war seemed imcan involvement probable; after that the danger ol involve ment seemed much more imminent Bj insisting that traditional rules ol cruiser warfare be applied to U-Boat operations, Wilson in effect put the decision for peace or war into the hands of the German government. Once he staked nut this posi tion, he had to insist that Cermain honour American rights or go to war to in the tides of war.

-

m

Bryan, ignorant of the true state of European he hoped to impose a peace by sanctions

affairs,

defend them. Considerations of national prestige, domestic politics and inner convictions closed off any path of retreat. Wilson had challenged Germany partly out of the belief that the preservation of America's honour was an essential basis for any attempt to bring peace. Only by standing up to Germany could the United States retain its influence with the Allies and act effectively to end the war. Though Wilson preserved America's potency for mediation, he realised that the need for peace was far more urgent than previously. This was all the more true because the Lusitania issue

remained largely unsettled. As a result, tension between the United States and Germany remained high, and a crisis erupted again on August 19 with the torpedoing of the White Star liner Arabic. This time Wilson won more specific concessions from Germany, but the Arabic crisis dramatised the precarious position of American neutrality and the need to bring peace in order to avoid war.

Xo

specific plan the autumn of 1915 all of Wilson's deepest instincts pushed him in the direction of a peace move. But the President, preoccupied with many foreign and domestic problems, lacked a specific plan. House's fertile imagination supplied it. By this time House's own feelings about the war had further crystallised. He had no hope of integrating the present German In

government

into a reformed postwar inter-

national order; the war, in his view, was now a struggle between democracy and autocracy. His visits to Germany had convinced him that, if the United States failed to challenge the Allied blockade, Germany would begin unrestricted U-Boat warfare sometime in 1916. House vacillated over the desirability of American intervention, but he believed it was inevitable. The central question was how the nation would go to war. The United States could simply drift with the tide of events, eventually responding to the U-Boat campaign with a declaration of war. This would mean entering the \\ r for narrow, negative reasons. The alt native was a peace move which, if it failed, would allow the United States to join the Allies to secure a reformed international order. Thus the decision for war would be elevated into the highest expression of America's mission.

In October 1915, House outlined to Wilson his plan for a mission to Europe. He pointed out that it was essential to convince British and French statesmen that the United States shared their concept of a just and lasting peace. Then an accord could he reached on terms to end the war. These should include disarmament and a league of nations, as well as a restoration

quo ante. House and Wilson were vague on the specifics of the territorial settlement and seemed to feel that these were less important than larger goals. Once Britain, France and the United States concluded an understanding, the American government would, upon a signal from the Allies, issue a call for a of the status

peace conference. If Germany agreed to participate, she might be manoeuvred into accepting a liberal peace. If she refused, as was far more likely, the United States could justify her intervention on the basis of Germany's unwillingness to accept a reasonable peace. Desperate for some way out of his predicament, Wilson grasped at House's plan and in late December 1915 his trusted adviser sailed for Europe. Though the President accepted House's scheme, the two men had quite different notions of what was to be achieved. Neither fully realised these differences, though House was more conscious of them than Wilson. One way or another House wanted to guarantee a limited Allied victory. He sought an Allied approved mediation and an agreement on a postwar settlement which would allow the United States to enter the war in 1916 with a firm understanding with the Allies. House regarded the whole question of British maritime practices as subsidiary, important only because the British, by pressing too hard, might arouse American public opinion and

imperil Anglo-American co-operation. In contrast with House, Wilson genuinely viewed American mediation as a way in which to end the war. He still believed the United States might keep out and was not willing to use American military power to ensure an Allied victory. Wilson hoped to achieve his goals through moral rather than physical force. Far more aroused about British maritime practices than House, he thought his confidant would insist upon a modification of Allied policy toward neutral shipping. All of these differences remained unstated, endowing the

climactic American mediation effort with confusion and uncertainty. House arrived in London on January 5, 1916. Assured of the President's confidence, he saw himself in the midst of great events, possibly determining through his own efforts the fate of western civilisation. But statesmen in London, Berlin and Paris welcomed House with a sense of foreboding. In initial talks with Wilson's emissary, Grey and Arthur Balfour, First Lord of Admiralty, were sceptical, pointing out the resistance any peace move would meet from the Cabinet, public opinion and Britain's allies. At the same time, however,

they gave House some encouragement. No British statesman dared to reject openly his overtures and some, such as Grey, were attracted by the idealistic vistas House revealed. But all knew that this was not the time to talk of peace. With Germany holding so much French and Russian territory it would be difficult to secure a settlement based on more than the status quo ante. Few were willing to settle for such an outcome, since the mirage of victory still had great power. Mediation would be attractive only if defeat seemed near. The British public and its leaders, rather than moving toward peace, were being engulfed by a rising tide of chauvinism. This fierce determination to achieve victory, combined with doubts about Wilson's perception of the moral issues of the conflict, made it extremely unlikely that the British would accept House's problematical mediation scheme.

Germans adamant House

London for Berlin convinced that position was weakening and that the future would bring a tightening of Britain's economic warfare. He quickly sensed that German moderates were also losing their hold and that Germany would left

('.rev's

never accept an end to the war on reasonable terms. Bethmann-Hollweg spoke of the impossibility of returning Belgium and

Poland and mentioned an indemnity

for

the evacuation of Northern France. Though the Chancellor seemed uncompromising. House realised that he would soon be forced out of office by far more extreme U-Boat enthusiasts. The German militarx had subdued Serbia and was about to launch a great offensive on the Western Front. Many Germans felt that every re-

House: too prone to fantasies, he failed to appreciate the real nature of his negotiations

source must be employed to break Britain's will to resist. They had no interest in a general peace settlement or in mediation by an American President who was not really neutral. Other German leaders were, however, eager to give the impression of a desire for peace, primarily to prepare the way diplomatically for unrestricted U-Boat warfare. They hoped that somehow the United States would remain neutral if convinced that the Allies were largely responsible for the continuation of the war. House did not divine all these complex motives, but he did leave Berlin with an increased sense of urgency; if this mediation effort failed, there would be no opportunity for another try.

Plans impossible In discussions with French leaders. House knew that he faced his most formidable challenge. They were, by British reports, adamantly opposed to a negotiated settle-

ment. Both Jules Cambon, former French Ambassador to Germany, and the Premier, Aristide Briand, said flatly that Wilson's peace initiative was impossible at this time. Though they did not completely rule out the possibility in the future, they gave little indication that circumstances would change. These statements, however, made little impression upon House, who saw only what he wanted to see. He openly revealed

Germany would not accept reasonable terms and that the U-Boat extremists would soon triumph. Admitting that the United States would intervene on the Allied side in 1916, House strove to convince the French of the unwavering American support for their cause and thus lure them into an acceptance of Wilson's mediation. He concluded that he had created confidence in American purposes and persuaded the French that the United States would, in one way or another, see their cause through to victory. Astonishing as it now seems, House thought that t heAllies would make the enlightened choice, preferring to see the United States intervene for broad, idealistic purposes rather than for a technical defence of neutral his belief that

rights.

House returned

to

London

for

the final

phase of his mission in a euphoric mood, certain that there was a suppressed enthusiasm among French and British leaders for his plan. He still had great faith in the

influence and idealism of Grey and in the power of those political forces in Britain and France which favoured liberal peace aims. Though discouraged by the American Ambassador in London, Walter Hines Page, House resisted his pessimism and largely

ignored the obvious divisions among members of the Asquith Cabinet about war aims and peace plans. Confronted with a series of indecisive discussions with Balfour, Grey and others, House discarded his plan for obtaining an agreement upon the general terms of disarmament, a league of nations and the restoration of the status ante. He now approved of more farreaching Allied territorial demands and agreed that Wilson, in his call for a peace

quo

conference, would not set any conditions. Though the timing of Wilson's peace move was left unresolved, House believed that Grey stood for immediate action and that he could carry his colleagues with him. Undoubtedly Grey was less certain than most prominent statesmen that the Allies could completely defeat Germany, and he was more fearful that a prolonged war would ruin Europe. There was enough ambiguity in Grey's attitude and enough evasion by other members of the government to allow House to convince himself and the President that he had won important converts to his cause. He believed that British statesmen, in their more thoughtful moments, would see the wisdom of his plan to halt the war short of total victory and create, out of the ashes of the struggle, a new international order. His mission seemed crowned with success when

on February 22,

1916 House and Grey

a memorandum in which they agreed that President Wilson, on the receipt of a signal from France and Great Britain, would issue a call for a conference to end the war. If Germany should reject the call, or come to the conference insisting upon unreasonable terms, the United States would probably enter the war on the side of the Allies.

offending the American government. In retrospect, there was never any chance that these American efforts would succeed. The war was too intense, the sacrifices too enormous, for statesmen on either side to stretch out their hands across the chasm which divided them. The House-Grey memorandum stands today as a curious testament to the way in which House and Wilson thought about the war and to the way in which they tried to end it. Viewing the conflict from afar, they never comprehended the passions it engendered. They serenely assumed that men, for all thenconfusion, were basically decent and would sacrifice selfish national interests for a new world order based upon peace and justice for all nations.

Further Reading

Germany

Fischer. Fritz,

World War (New York:

s

Aims

W W

Company, 1967) Edward (Viscount Grey

Grey,

in

the First

Norton and

of Fallodon),

Twenty-Five Years. 1892-1916 (New York Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1925) King, Jere Clemens. Generals and Politicians Conflict between France's High Command, Parliament and Government. 1914-1918 (University of California Press 1951) Link, Arthur S., Wilson: Confusions and Crises. 1915-1916 (Princeton University 1964) Link, Arthur S., Wilson: the Struggle foi Neu 1914- 191 5 (Pi meet on University Pre 1960) May, Ernest R The World War and American trality.

,

Isolation.

1914-1917 (Harvard University

Press 1959)

Seymour, Charles (ed

The Intimate Papers of ). Colonel House (Boston Houghton Mifflin Company, 1926-1928)

initialled

CHARLES

E

He received 1958 and

NEU was born in Carroll, Iowa in BA from North-western Univei

his

PhD from Harvard

He

is

Roosevelt and Japan. 906- 1 909. was put Harvard University Press in 1967 A specialist

in

his

in

1964

currently Professor of History at Brown Ui His first Book, An Uncertain Friendship

-

<

1

Great hopes wrongly aroused So American mediation efforts

finally

culminated in a memorandum which a roused great hopes in House and Wilson In contrast, it aroused none among British statesmen. For them it represented only one more stage in their continual attempts to evade American peace moves without

American foreign policy and

pat!

East Asian relations, his woik Encounter The United States published by Wiley in 1975

bled

AUSTRIA

ON THE DEFENSIVE

*''***»-

f «

r
Ki

S# .,*'

*»c<

—

J

Along the Isonzo

valley,

the Austrians held excellent natural defensive fortresses.

•Thrown time and time again against these, the Italian infantry was cut down in its tens of thousands- as much for political as strategic reasons. Friedrich Wiener.

Below: An Austrian crew prepares to fire a 15-cm mortar

World War did

Italy's entry into the First

It fell to

not produce the expected results either in the political or the military field, and several crucial issues remained unresolved after the Italians' first offensive. The knowledge that further major efforts would be necessary led to considerable disillusionment, for the country had not in fact envisaged any kind of sacrifice in attaining her ends of fulfilling her duties towards

her

new

task

allies.

The

its

of the ridge.

Moreover, with the equipment then available, the building of good trenches was almost impossible in the rocky ground, and

during the year-long fighting along the Isonzo, the Austro-Hungarian army had failed to devise an efficient way of constructing trenches. The troops paid heavily for ITALIAN 6/1915

•Kal

1/1916

58 •Vertojba

A

Fajti

VII

*

..

• Kostanievica •* osia

•Doberdo

14

61

V.I

57 Monfalcone#^l

F

|

ondar# »no

jfermada 0|< MS

qIles

1230

of the Italian

of scaling

the steep slopes of the

concentration of troops. On the left-hand sector of the Italian Third Army, VI Corps attacked Monte San Michele. In the central sector, X Corps had to capture Hill 118 (Monte dei sei Busi) with the help of the VII Corps. The course of the battle can be sum-

attacks served as a greater stimulus than the great victories being achieved in Galicia at the same time.

Austro-Hungarian lines to the western rim of the Karst plateau had all been carefully reconnoitred long before the outbreak of war. They provided a wide field of fire but lay, for long stretches, right on the edge

commander

Karst plateau, breaking through the Austro-Hungarian lines and then leading his men round into the heart of the battle area. The Duke of Aosta realised that the order could only be carried out in two stages: firstly by gaining a footing on the edge of the Karst plateau, and then by carrying the attack to the top with a fresh

To the Austro-Hungarians, the fact that they had managed to halt the first Italian

Italian high command still clung to original plan of action even after the first actions on the Isonzo, while remaining on the strategic defensive on all other sectors of the front. This decision resulted in the terrible battles on the Karst plateau and in the mountains east of the River Isonzo. Soon in Italy and in Austro-Hungary there would be hardly a family that had not suffered at least one casualty in the 35 miles or so of the front between Flitsch and the coast. Scarcely two weeks after the First Battle of the Isonzo had come to an end, the Italian army attacked once again. The Commander-in-Chief of the Austro-Hungarian Fifth Army, General Boroevic, had put this short pause to good use. He replaced battle-weary troops with fresh men, saw to it that new reinforcements were brought up to the front as quickly as possible and improved liaison by introducing a further staff corps (VII). The

the

Third Army, General Vittorio Emmanuel, Duke of Aosta, to undertake the difficult

marised quickly: The Italians had learnt

much from

the First Battle of the Isonzo.

The preliminary artillery bombardment was this time shorter than before but mere concentrated and therefore more effective. The Italian batteries opened fire along the The war

winter: Italians prepare to release a sled loaded with explosive onto the Austrians in

this. The 'trenches', even in the most favourable conditions, were constructed in three layers. The bottom layer was hacked out of rock, the next consisted of broken up rocks and this was, in the third layer, finally topped with sandbags. The preliminary fire from the Italian guns regularly levelled the sandbags and rocks and thus filled up the lower third of the cover available to the Austrians. In the Second Battle of the Isonzo, General Count Luigi Cadorna intended primarily to take the Doberdo ridge so that he could then capture the Gorz bridgehead from the south, i.e. from the rear. Action along the rest of the front was to be limited to feints, which were to be the responsibility of the commander of the Italian Second Army, General Pietro Frugoni, who was to engage the Austrians in the sector stretching from Flitsch to Gbrz with the object of hindering the movement of both reserves and artillery on the Karst plateau.

entire length of the front on July 18 at 1400 hours, but concentrated especially on two sections of the Karst plateau. Between 1100 and 1300 hours, the storm troops of IX and X Corps joined in the attack; but

only succeeded in breaking through at one point. The Austro-Hungarian VII Corps was nevertheless forced, even on the first

day of

battle,

to

throw in most of

its

On

July 19 the Italian Third Army once again made a concerted attack, this time also on the southern section. reserves.

A division decimated Yet again only minor breakthroughs were made along the Austro-Hungarian lines, although, once more, the successful Austrian defence was only achieved at the expense of great losses to the troops. The strength of the 20th Infantry Division alone fell from 6,000 to 2,000 men on the evening of July 19. As a result, the Austro-

Hungarian Fifth Army had to make VII Corps available as an army reserve on the next day. The corps immediately began to replace the battle-weary troops along the line. At the same time the Austro-Hun-

command notified the Fifth that further reserve troops were being drafted in. These were expected from the Balkans between July 22 and 25. General Boroevic could thus look forward to improvements in the situation when his reinforcements arrived. On July 20 the Duke of Aosta sent groups of men from XI Corps, situated in the small area around Hill 143, which they had captured from the Austrians, to join in the storming at Monte San Michele, although a large enough area for the positioning of the rest of the Third Army had not as yet been captured. This bold step indicated a major deviation from his original plan on the part of Cadorna. The

recaptured the mountain at 0515 hours. Violent fighting broke out in the entire battle area on the 21st, and continued until July 23. No decision was reached, great losses were suffered by both sides, and still further reserves were drained from the

garian high

Army

managed

Austro-Hungarian Fifth Army. At this moment General Cadorna gained the impression that the Fifth Army's ability to fight was finished, and therefore decided to carry on the attack 'at all costs'. To do so he moved his last reserves, XIII Corps, by train from the area around Verona to Palmanova and transferred them to the Third Army on July 23. The Duke of Aosta was thus able on the morning of July 25 to continue his full-scale attack along the whole of the front. But even this led only to local successes, for by then Fifth Army had been able to stabilise its position with yet more reserves. On the evening of July 26 the impetus of the Italian Third Army began to wane and the battle thus to peter out, although it dragged on until August 10 in the end. At the end of the Second Battle of the

Monte San Michele by 1730 hours — a success which induced Cadorna to offer XIV Corps to aid Third Army. During the night of July 21 the AustroHungarian VII Corps prepared 15 battalions to counterattack on Monte San Michele. The attack began at 0400 hours, after a two-hour-long bombardment, and Italians

to capture

Opposite page, below: The Italian theatre Above: The war in spring, but more as romantics and propagandists saw it than the troops on the ground. Below: The Austrian defence prepares — rifle grenades along the heights above the Isonzo of war.

:^^P^

2

pagne, due to begin on September 22, supported by an Italian offensive. But although Pans and London later pressed for an immediate start to this offensive, in order to relieve the struggling Serbian army, General Cadorna was not willing to begin until he had completed his complex preparations. For between the Romhon and the sea he planned to position, within the framework of Second and Third Armies, almost two-thirds of the entire Italian fighting force, a difficult and

time-consuming husiness. Meanwhile tbe Austro-Hungarian army had either replaced or rested its battleweary troops, had increased the number of machine guns and other modern arms available and had pressed on with the construction of trenches, for which they used Russian prisoners of war as labour to some extent. The Austrians had increased the number of their guns from 462 to 604 since the end of the Second Battle of the Isonzo, and at the start of the Italian attack 12 Austro-Hungarian divisions were positioned and ready along the front. So the

which 260 Italian battalions had fought against 129 Austro-Hungarian ones, the Italian Third Army had improved its position minimally and at only three points, but had gained the rim of the Karst plateau. Losses were high on both Isonzo. during

sides:

the

Italian

army

lost

a total

of

41.866 men between July 18 and August 3, while the Austro-Hungarian Fifth Army lost 46,640 men between July 15 and August 15 — the particularly high losses of the defending army being due to a lack of properly constructed lines and to the many counterattacks which had had to be launched during the course of the battle in order to recapture the principal front line whenever it was taken.

Yet another attack Although the Italian High Command reckoned on an attack on the Italian Front in September 1915. those Austro-Hungarian troops not engaged on the Eastern Front were, in

fact, not to be sent into action against Italy, but to take part in the large scale attack on Serbia, launched on

October 8. Once this had become clear, General Cadorna decided to renew his attack on the Isonzo. This had already been requested at the beginning of September by the French Commander-in-Chief, General Joffre, during his visit to the Italian headquarters. Joffre wanted to see the Franco-British attack in Artois and

Cham-

N

v-**

relative fighting strength was as follows: 24 Italian divisions to 18 Austrian ones as against 30 Allied to seven German divi-

sions in

began

Champagne when

bridgehead.

The Italian Second and Third Armies attacked on October 21 after three days of preliminary artillery fire. As in the Second Battle of the Isonzo, the Italian troops only managed to break through at a few points and then had to struggle to hold their position. The fiercest fighting in the north was around Tolmin and Plave while to the south fighting was again concentrated on the Karst plateau, especially in the area of Monte San Michele. The Austro-Hungarian Fifth Army was only able to master the situation by bringing in all their reserves and later still more reinforcements were needed. There seemed no end to the slaughter, and still no decision in sight. After several preliminary raids the Italian army extended its attack on October 25 to take in the Gorz bridgehead, and for a time the Fifth Army was in a difficult position, as it had difficulty relieving tired troops at the front with fresh reserves. But, as before, the crisis passed and on November 3 and 4 the fighting eased everywhere.

lJ+m

to

hold their position. All the courage and sacrifice on the part of the Italian battalions had once again

The Austro-Hungarians 42,000 and the Italians 67,000 men. Yet still no decision had been reached. Fighting flared up again during November for three reasons: • The Italians hoped to succeed in their proved

had

fruitless.

lost a total of

break through the Austroby keeping them engaged in battle, thus draining them of reserves. • The small advance the Italian troops struggle

to

Hungarian

lines

made

in the first six months of the war had not come up to the expectations of the Italian people, who had counted on a speedy victory in May. Instead of the hoped-for victory over the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the Italians were faced with continued severe losses and violent fighting along the Isonzo. 'The joyous ecstasy of spring was followed by disenchantment and disillusion by All Souls Day' it was stated in an Austro-Hungarian general staff report. In addition to this, the time for the opening of the Lower House of the

Italian parliament

was approaching and

in

order to master the difficult political scene on the home front, the government needed a speedy victory from the army for use as

propaganda.

• The unfavourable developments Allies'

in the positions in the Balkans and in

^*»**«fc,

H^* "Hfc jpdwfrw* *

the offensive

end of September 1915. This time General Cadorna intended to attack along the whole of the Isonzo front, that is both to the north and the south of Gorz, to take the heights of Bainsizza and Doberdo and then to destroy the Gorz at the

The Austro-Hungarians had been able

-:

«•

rag****"

uVte

The

Italian Front:

from Alpine peaks to the marshes of the Isonzo Far left: Loading an Austrian 12-cm trench mortar. Left: The breech swung back into place: the mortar ready for firing. In the trenches in Italy as in those on the Western FrOnt, trench mortars came to play an increasingly important role in defence as they were •handy weapons and could be used right up in the front line. Right: An Austrian bunker in the ice at about 10,500 feet on the Ortles peak. At this altitude, it was absolutely essential to provide as much protection from the elements as possible. Below: The Gorz area on the eastern bank of the Isonzo under Italian artillery fire After their early disastrous attempts at producing a barrage, the Italians accepted the tactical doctrine of the French

and

their

subsequent

efforts

were more

successful. But they still had to learn to coordinate their infantry attacks with the barrage

Russia, as well as the imminent resumption of fighting in France, encouraged the Western Powers to exert pressure on Italy to reopen her offensive along the Isonzo with a view to drawing as much as possible of the Central Powers' forces to the south, away from the Eastern and Western Fronts. A difficult task lay ahead of General Cadorna at the beginning of November. He later said that this period of autumn fighting was the most difficult of the whole first year of war. On the one hand he had to reorganise his forces, so that the troops worn out during the Third Battle of the Isonzo could be relieved, and on the other he wished to revise his offensive method; Cadorna had long realised that nothing could be gained by again employing his previous methods, and moreover, the extraordinarily bad weather of that November worsened the hardships of his troops.

Radical alterations Cadorna proceeded with his usual energy and resolution. He reinforced the battered regiments with reserve battalions; and as the techniques followed by the artillery in the Third Battle of Isonzo had proved too rigid and systematic, he altered them radically. Furthermore, the French had informed the Italians of their new tactics, which shortly before had proved so useful in Champagne. Cadorna sought to adopt these new tactics as far as possible, but he

had too

time before fighting recom-

little

menced to adopt them fully. The Austro-Hungarians were

also

ex-

Their troops were worn out, and so reserves had to be put back into combat before they were fully rested. Supplies of munitions ran out all at once as the lines were in ruins as a result periencing

of

weeks of

difficulties.

Italian artillery

fire.

A

further

supply of reinforcements could not be counted upon, for in the Balkans every man was needed if the offensive there was to be continued, in Russia a long front had to be maintained and in the Tyrol winter was just beginning. The troops suffered greatly as a result of the dreadful conditions and the incessant Italian attacks. Morale at the front and behind the lines had hit rock bottom. When war had broken out the army had in mind, at least subconsciously, the victorious battles of 1848 and 1866. Instead of this, they were now faced with murderous battles among the rocky trenches, to which there seemed no end. However, the already legendary Boroevic would not bend in his determination to carry on. As snow began to fall along the upper reaches of the Isonzo, Cadorna narrowed the area for action down to the section from Plave to Doberdo. The heaviest fighting was concentrated in the south to begin with, in the Third Army's sector, but it soon moved to the Gorz bridgehead area. Had this town, whose name was then known to every Italian child, fallen, it would have served as a great boost to mor-

However,

ale.

all

the Italian efforts at

Plave and on the Karst plateau failed. Fighting once again raged around Monte San Michele and for a time it looked as though the Italians would effect a breakthrough. Without weakening Austrian fighting strength in the Balkans, Boroevic sent in every man and weapon that could be spared. Even the last reserve division in Galicia was withdrawn in order to reinforce the Isonzo front. Instead of a day-long artillery bombardment over a wide front, the Italian artillery bombardment this time lasted only four hours and was concentrated only on points

where a possible breakthrough was

fore-

Consequently considerable success was achieved. For the first time along the Italian Front an 'intense bombardment' had been achieved. Even the attacks by the infantry were more vigorous and forceful seen.

as a result. As the battle continued, the importance of the fighting around the Gorz bridgehead

M*^'

^^_

:J-&^f^ WZl*

L?

>

•*?

-

increased. On November 18 (after the civilian population had been warned by leaflets distributed by air) the Italian artillery began a systematic bombardment of

the town. During the weeks that followed it was practically razed to the ground. Yet. as so often before, the destruction of inhabited areas had no effect on the actual outcome of the battle. It was not until November 29 that the Italian Second Army succeeded, under their new commander, Lieutenant-General Capello, in taking the Oslavija ridge and though the AustroHungarian troops were unable to prevent this breakthrough entirely, they were able to block the Italians effectively enough to prevent them from exploiting their initial success. The Italians had to pay dearly to catch sight of Gorz. From December 1 onwards the attacking power of the Italian armies flagged, though the fighting around the former strategic points at the Gorz bridgehead and Monte

San Michele continued

until

December

15.

At the climax of the Fourth Battle of the Isonzo, which was the last of the first group of battles along the Isonzo, 28 Italian divisions fought against 15 AustrO-Hungarian ones, and yet, as the fighting died out amid the snow, rain, storms and bitter weat her of mid-December, the front line remained almost unchanged from its position at the start of the Second Battle of the Isonzo

on July

18.

I

,

i?

left: An enormous flash as an Austrian 30.5-cm howitzer is fired. Right top: Culled from every available source, Austrian reserves rush to the front near Doberdo. Right centre: A few of the droves of Italian infantry cut down in the almost hopeless battles along the Isonzo Right bottom: An Italian 75-mm mountain gun in the Alps

Below

Even during

this Fourth Battle of the the Italian High Command had issued directives for the continuation of the war in the winter of 1915 16. Basically it planned to continue to exert pressure on the Austro-Hungarian army along the middle and lower stretches of the Isonzo while maintaining the front line in the hills with the minimum of troops. In order to secure the most favourable results when the major offensive was resumed in the spring o\ 1916, it was intended to launch individual probing attacks against specific points along the front during the winter. But after the autumn fighting, the Italian army had first to reorganise and re-equip itself. This was made more difficult as the Italians had not heen fully prepared for war when it broke out, and so there was a lack of trained reserves. Only from the spring of 1916 onwards did the majority of the measures introduced the previous year begin to bear fruit. Furthermore, training of the army in the field had to be improved and the troops made familiar with the new tactics being introduced. This all went hand in hand with the improvement in supplies of war materiel. As the Italian

[sonzo,

High Command envisaged an attack on

its

front by the Central Powers, the construction of trenches well into the threatened battle area was accelerated. The structure and organisation of the forces in the trenches, however, remained unaltered.

The Austro-Hungarian army was faced with similar problems. Its front line troops also had to be refreshed, and both immediate and long term reserves had to be found and trained. Besides this, the construction of better trenches, offering protection from the weather as well as from the Italians,

was

of the utmost importance. Fighting was thus limited to individual and local outbreaks along the whole of the Isonzo front while preparations for greater things were in hand. The most important incident was undoubtedly the recapturing of the Oslavija ridge in the Gbrz bridgehead

by

Austro-Hungarian

troops

on

their

second attempt on January 24, 1916. The attack was carried out as storm troop action aimed at one particular target. It meant that the front line had now returned to its former position.

Concerted Allied plans At the beginning of December 1915, at the second Allied Council of War at Chantilly, it was decided to launch simultaneous offensives in France and in Russia as well as in Venetia and in the Balkans, and thus the Central Powers' freedom of action and finally to put an end to it completely. The date set for these co-ordinated offensives was March 1916.

restrict

General Cadorna, who at this time learned from reliable sources that a large scale attack in the southern Tyrol was being planned by the Austro-Hungarians, himself entered only half heartedly into preparations for an even more extensive operation along the Isonzo. The fact that the

French Army was engaged in a distressing and arduous defe, sive action at Verdun, induced him, neven

As

eless, to attack.

military acti along the upper reaches of the Isonzo as restricted as a result of conditions, t strategic battle area was once again sift ed in the sector held by the Italian Second rmy under the Duke of Aosta. His target v the Podgora ridge in the southern part »f the Gorz

1236 A

bridgehead and to the west of the Karst plateau around Monte San Michele — San Marti no. It was of greater importance to Cadorna to find out the Austro-Hungarians relative strength and to capture occupying units than to gain any territory. The object of the Fifth Battle of the Isonzo was therefore merely demonstrative. The Italian artillery began its prelimin-

ary bombardment on March 11, 1916. On March 13 the Italian attack went in and by the 16th the fighting had practically come to an end. There was no change in position of the front line, nor was the Italian army successful in capturing any significant

numbers of Austro-Hungarian troops on the Karst plateau. Action along the Isonzo front from March 1916 onwards was overshadowed by the preparations by the Austro-Hungarians for their planned major offensive in the southern Tyrol. In order to conceal the fact that they were transferring six divisions and several batteries of artillery to that area, the Fifth Army launched a series of attacks with limited objectives, which in turn led to countermeasures by the Italians. In order to stimulate the transfer of Italian reserves from the Isonzo to the area around Vicenza, the Austro-Hungarians bombed the bridges of the Piave on the morning of March 27. They failed to destroy the bridges, however, as a result of the bad weather conditions as much as anything. From then onwards their air raids were directed on easier targets, such as large railway stations and towns (Venice, Padua, Vicenza, and Verona). Thus the first five battles of the Isonzo showed that the Italian army lacked the necessary strength and equipment to break through the strong and determined AustroHungarian defences. Thousands upon thousands fell in the first two battles only because they were simply — for the want of a better word — too clumsy to dig themselves into the rocky ground efficiently.

The

soldiers'

courage and

self-sacrifice in

recent history of

planned

war has an attack been

through from the south against an army that holds the Alps, an army that is furthermore fully prepared against all eventualities. Only if an army were to be beaten in the northern Italian plains would it be in any danger of having to beat a retreat from the Alps. Both armies can thus be seen to have misunderstood the role of tactics in mountain warfare, and the lone peaks that they each controlled offered no real concrete advantage. Soldiers coming from the Isonzo front found their turn of duty in the Alps a comparatively relaxing change of scene. As one Austro-Hungarian soldier from the Isonzo put it: 'Up there it just depended on the season whether you called it going to get some fresh air in the summer, or going off to take a cure in the winter.' In summary, then, it can be said that if the Allies had hoped that Italy's entry into the war would exert a swift and lasting influence on the situation, they were sorely to strike

mistaken in their assessment of their new ally's power and potential. There were also those in Austria-Hungary who had exaggerated the dangers threatening the southernmost area of their country, in an effort to raise the general morale after the resounding defeats Austria had received in Serbia and Galicia in 1914. Their exaggerations were calculated to give new impetus to the war effort by pointing to 'massive victories' in the south. It is, of

remember that

course, vital to

even before 1914, and in the ten months of war that followed, Austria-Hungary had laid far more thorough plans for a war against Italy than for either of the campaigns against Serbia and Russia. Whole areas had been fortified, trenches dug, barriers laid and whole railway systems built to cater for any and every eventuality. For this reason, second and third line troops could safely be left to man these defences. Only on the Isonzo were the Austrians forced to answer Italy's menaces by bringing in first line troops from other fronts.

action is legendary on both sides. 'Without fear of losses, the Italian infantry drove

forward again and again and every time their enemy retaliated with grim determination,' says the German Official History. It was sheer hell for the AustroHungarian soldiers on the Karst plateau. The limestone made the construction of lines and trenches doubly difficult, splintering stone increased the effect of the Italians' fire, heat and a lack of water resulted in agonising living conditions and the fact that there was no vegetation for protection or camouflage restricted movement and aggravated problems of supply. The heavy autumn and winter rainfall

made it similarly difficult for the Italian troops situated in the low-lying plains. The ground was transformed into swampland, in which every trench and dugout was with water. Further to the north-west, the southern tongue of the mountain ranges of the south Tyrol posed a constant threat to the exposed flank of the Italian army. At least a third of the available forces were continually occupied in defending this area. The Austro-Hungarians, on the other hand, could comfortably afford to ignore this part of the front. Any Italian attack had first to cross three ridges of mountains before being in a position to launch any worthwhile offensive operations. Never in the filled

Further Reading C, Karst (Salzburg 1934) Cadorna, Gen. L, La guerra alle fronte italiane

Abel,

(Milan 1921) Carracciolo, M., Italy in the Great War (Rome) Kaltenbbck, B. An Army in the Shadows (Vienna 1932) Koch, L, Isonzo Sketches (Vienna 1916) L'esercito italiano nella grande guerra (Rome 1927) Osterreich-Ungarns letzter Krleg (Vienna 1931) Weber, F., The End of an Army (Munich 1938) ,

DOCTOR FRIEDRICH WIENER was and on leaving High School

in

born

in

Vienna,

1940 he joined the

German army. He was assigned

to a tank division

and took part in campaigns in France and Russia up to the end of the war, at which time he was in command of a tank howitzer division. After the end of the war he studied law, history and journalism at Vienna University and then made a career for himself as an economist. From 1953 to 1966 he edited the army magazine Feldgrau and published articles on subjects in both World Wars. In 1963 he became chief leader writer of the official training manual Truppendienst for the Austrian

many

army.

«

I

THE SMALLEST ALLY 50

Miles

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l

OKms

80 SERBIA

Jtenube jSaya

J&

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

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Pec» •

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(Kotor)

Podgorica

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BULGARIA SERBIA Scutari (Shkoder

Adriatic

Sea

San Giovanni di

Medua

(Shengjin)

J

(

Durazzo(Durres)

ALBANIA ITALY

»

Brindisi

Salonika

'Valona (Vlone)

GREECE

Miles

OKms

JOO 150

Y^

An anachronism in the 20th Century, Montenegro was no larger than Yorkshire and had a population of only 250,000. Ruled by the colourful, if erratic, King Nikita, this proud and independent people were crushed in the Balkan Wars and yet did not hesitate to join Serbia on the side of the Allies in August 1914. But by early 1916 the Central Powers were advancing through the Balkans and the fate of Montenegro seemed sealed. Alan Palmer

On August 5, 1914 the parliamentary deputies in Cetinje, the capital of Montenegro, petitioned King Nikita I to give support to their brother Slavs in Serbia h\ declaring war on Austria-Hungary. Two days later Baron Otto, the Austro-Hungarian Minister Plenipotentiary to Montenegro, was handed his Legation's passports and set off down the steep road below Mount Lowen to Cattaro (Kotor), the Austrian naval base in southern Dalmatia, little more than 25 miles away; and that night Montenegrin artillery began a desultory bombardment of the Austrian positions. The smallest of all the Allied combatants—a kingdom no larger than Yorkshire and with a population estimated at 250,000— thus entered the First World War with strict observance of diplomatic protocol and prompt evidence of aggressive intent. Within a few days 45,000 troops were under arms, every fit man in the kingdom between the ages of 18 and 62. It was an impressive beginning. Unfortunately such outward concern for

war belied the true condition of Montenegro at that time. The history of the Montenegrins is a proud record of brave deeds, in which fact and legend are inextricably mingled. They had for centuries defied the Turkish overlords of the Balkan lands. No one had doubted the spirit of this warrior people when the Balkans rose against the Turks in the 1870's. Gladstone himself declared in the House of Commons that the Montenegrins were 'heroes such as the World has rarely seen' and that they were waiting 'to sweep down from their fastnesses' and 'establish justice and peace' from the Adriatic to the the punctilio of

Aegean. But that was more than 40 years ago, and by 1914 warfare had become too scientific and sophisticated for the clansmen soldiery of the Black Mountain. Primacy among the Southern Slavs had passed from the Montenegrins to their numerically greater kinsfolk, the Serbs. The persistence of passionate blood-feuds made the Montenegrin State an anachronism in 20th-century Europe. There had been several attempts to modernise the machinery of government in Montenegro in the decade preceding the war but the changes were largely superficial, not least because of the high degree of illiteracy. In 1910, for example, a military code of administration and instruction was issued for the first time. It had disastrous consequences as its provisions were widely misunderstood. In the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 the Montenegrin army suffered heavy losses against the Turks and Albanians at Scutari (Shkoder), partly because it was equipped with very old Russian rifles and field pieces, but also because of confused leadership and poor training. Hence the Montenegrins, who a few years earlier had been favoured clients of 'Mother Russia', were written off as of little importance after the Balkan Wars. In April 1914 a conference of army and civilian leaders in St Petersburg decided that it would be to their interest if Montenegro should unite with Serbia rathei ban retain a militarily ineffectual independence solely by grace of Russian financial aid. Nor was it only the R sians who favoured the union of 'back\ rd' Montenegro with 'forward-looking' Sl bia. The idea was supported by young Mo enegrins who had been educated in Serbian hools and by former emigrants who had r< trned from

1238

A Montenegrin infantryman wearing the uniform which was standardised only just before the war. In fact most Montenegrin soldiers

wore a

traditional, rather

flamboyant costume

the United States and were shocked by the lack of progress in their homeland. In midsummer 1914 a conspiracy was being hatched in Cetinje to carry through such a merger by a military coup, but attention was diverted to other questions by the news from Sarajevo. The Cetinje conspirators had no love for the Montenegrin dynasty, and the internal political tensions of this small monarchy were to have important repercussions on the Balkan campaigns which began so soon afterwards.

The key figure in Montenegrin affairs was its ruler, Nikita Petrovic-Njegos. He had come to the throne as a Prince in 1860 and celebrated the 50th anniversary of his accession by elevating his title to King. He was a man of intelligence and culture, a skilful tactician in guerrilla warfare and a poet of talent. His character was complex. At times he affected the boorish attitudes of a peasant patriarch, but he could maintain a dignified correspondence with statesmen of the eminence of Gladstone when it suited his political objectives. He was also extremely avaricious and the later years of his reign reeked with financial scandal. His blatant stock exchange speculations on the outcome of

the

Balkan Wars won him European and one of the most frequent

notoriety,

complaints made against him (even in his own National Assembly) was a propensity to add to his personal funds money donated

by Russian sympathisers

for

charitable

institutions.

Dynastic solidarity Nikita's main political concern was preservation of his dynasty. In earlier years he had married off his daughters with a diplomatic finesse worthy of the great European royal families; he numbered among his sons-in-law in 1914 two Russian Grand Dukes, the King of Italy, and King Peter of Serbia. Relations between the Courts of Belgrade and Cetinje were, however, extremely strained, partly because of two allegedly Serbian time-bombs discovered (without fuses) in the Montenegrin royal baggage in 1907, but perpetuated by Nikita's awareness that several Montenegrin clans preferred the rule of his sonin-law to his own fitfully enlightened despotism. Yet although Nikita received a tempting offer of territorial aggrandisement from Austria-Hungary in return for a pledge of neutrality, he bowed to the will of the nation in that historic week of August 1914 and telegraphed to King Peter a pledge that he and his subjects would stand loyally beside Serbia. Although the Montenegrin army had neither cavalry nor modern field guns, it achieved some success in the first four months of the war. Infantry detachments seized the small town of Budva, on the Adriatic coast, and a number of villages outside the main Austrian defensive peri meter around Cattaro. Another Monte negrin column penetrated southern Bosnia in an ill-directed thrust in the general direction of Sarajevo, hut it was repulsed before it could become a serious threat \ more sustained offensive in mid-September enabled the Montenegrins, with consider able Serbian support, to establish themselves on the left hank of the upper Drina at Vlasenica, only 40 miles from Sai jevo; but on October 11 an Austrian counterattack in ext remedy had weather took the Montenegrins by surprise and 1

1

239

them into a hastj withdrawal. With justice the Serbian High Command complained that the Montenegrins were showing the same weakness as in the Bal forced

some

kan Wars under pressure they tended to abandon recognised military discipline and round the chieftains of their clan. literally, the Highlanders of the Balkans, and their fighting qualities showed both the strengths and the weakrally

They were,

nesses of the men o\' 745. \tter the repulse on the Drina the Montenegrins made little contribution to the war for over a year, apart from a halfhearted raid across the Bosnian frontier at the end of November 1914. But Montenegro's geographical position overhanging" southern Dalmatia made Nikita a potentially more dangerous opponent than the efficacy of his army suggested. The Austrians themselves believed that the presence o( a force of some 5,000 men on the heights above the Gulf of Cattaro hampered its effectiveness as a naval base, especially as the Montenegrins now and again lobbed shells from their two exItalian howitzers at Kouk on Mount Lovcen towards the anchorage. Since, however, the maximum range of the howitzers was 16,500 feet few warships ever came under fire and it seems probable that the bombardment was not so much a military menace as a sport good for Montenegrin morale, for the reverberation of shelling in the mountains was a wondrous noise. Yet the Montenegrins were by no means inactive in 1915. Most of Nikita's troops were engaged in Albania, for although this wild outpost of the Turkish Empire had been declared an autonomous Principality in 1913, no settled government was established before the coming of the war and the Montenegrins vied with other Balkan competitors to profit from the general anarchy. There is no doubt that the fertile plain along the sea-coast of northern Albania and 1

even

its

more

to

rugged mountain ranges meant far Nikita than the towns of Bosnia or southern Dalmatia, with their strongly Yugoslav political sentiments. By the autumn of 1915 it began to look as if Montenegro was fighting a war of her own, with objectives limited to Scutari and its saltlagoons. It seemed a different world from the great set-piece battles waging in Artois, Galicia or on the Isonzo, but it was soon to be enveloped in the general conflict. When the main Austro-German offensive was launched against Serbia at the end of

the first week in October 1915, the Montenegrins made no move to help their fellow Slavs. Yet they had an important function to fulfil. So long as Nikita's troops held Mount Lovcen and the mountain barrier separating the Austrian garrisons in Bosnia and Dalmatia from northern Albania, the Serbian left flank was secure and it would even be possible to keep open links across the Adriatic to Italy and the west (for Bari and Brindisi are no farther from the Albanian coast than Southampton from Le Havre). This route became of vital significance to the Serbs when, on November 23, they were forced to fall back into Kosovo. the mountains south treat for the Serbs The principal line o

was by way of Pec and 1

rorica (Titograd),

^

enegro, to the the largest town in Tie going was coast south-west of Scutai er that the tough. It was three week; first Serbian units reached tl p] ain around ,

.

Scutari, famished

1240

and exhau

ed.

At

first

they had been pursued by the Austrian Third Army (General von Kovess), which had advanced southwards from the Sava and the Danube; but Kovess had ordered his troops to halt at Pec, the only town along the snowbound ranges of Montenegro's north-eastern frontier.

Austrian invasion With blizzards sweeping the mountains, the fugitives from Serbia seemed safe enough at Scutari, for the whole region was under Montenegrin control. Other groups of Serbs, military and civilian, struggled down to Scutari throughout December. But the Austrian naval and military commanders at Cattaro were well aware of the importance of this stretch of the Albanian littoral. In the first week of December a raid by an Austro-Hungarian naval flotilla on San Giovanni di Medua (Shengjin), the port for Scutari, sank most of the shipping in the small harbour. It was a portent of increased Austrian interest in the Montenegrin-Albanian theatre of war. A more serious threat developed at the end of December when the Austrians began to concentrate an invasion force of 50,000 men beneath Mount Lovcen ready for a southward thrust through Montenegro. But the defenders of Lovcen were sanguine. Although Cetinje itself had on three occasions been betrayed to an invader, no conqueror had ever subjugated the Black Mountain by force of arms. It seemed unlikely that the Austrians would succeed in midwinter in accomplishing what had defied the Byzantines and Turks for centuries. Lovcen towers over the town of Cattaro like the wall of a granite amphitheatre. Small wonder that English seamen in Nelson's day called it 'the Gibraltar of the Adriatic'. The Austrians knew that its capture would be hailed throughout the

Habsburg Monarchy as a distinguished feat of arms. The offensive against Montenegro began

at

dawn on January

8,

1916 with a heavy

bombardment from some 500 guns,

supported by a naval squadron in the approaches to the Bay of Cattaro. The invaders, who were commanded on this sector of the front by General Weber von Webenau, were a scratch force drawn from most parts of the Austro-Hungarian

Empire. There were Croats, Rumanians from Transylvania, Hungarians and some 5,000 Moslems from Bosnia (traditional enemies of the Montenegrins) as well as three battalions of Kaiserjager recalled from the Italian Front. The Montenegrin defenders were outnumbered by ten to one. The assault on Lovcen had been meticulously planned. No attempt was made to seize the heights immediately above the

town

of Cattaro.

The

principal attack

was

launched on the western flank of Lovcen, the foothill known as Mount Vrmac. At first the Austrians ran into difficulties. The vanguard of infantry had been fitted out with special boots manufactured locally and known as opantz. The soldiery found this strange footwear cumbersome and there were as many casualties from climbing accidents on the precipitous slopes as from Montenegrin fire. The key to the defences was the fort at Kouk, 3,050 feet up, with the limestone summit of Lovcen still towering 1,800 more feet above it. After two days of heavy bombardment, supported by a squadron of aircraft, the guns of Kouk fell silent. The defenders had no system of supply and only limited food and munitions. The Montenegrin infantry, with battalions no more than 500 strong, fell back 12 miles on Cetinje, reeling with shell-shock and demoralised by rumours of poison gas (although there is no evidence that the Austrians resorted to chemical warfare). Negotiations immediately began for a local truce and Cetinje itself fell on January 11. A considerable part of the Montenegrin army retired north-eastwards towards Pec. There, however,

I

known

as an Austrophile, but his father his residence in the Austrian capital by explaining that he had gone there to receive treatment for tuberculosis. But with the king in France and a prince in Austria it was not difficult for Nikita's opponents to suggest that the Montenegrin dynasty was seeking insurance against the victory of either the Allies or the Central

justified

Powers.

Meanwhile his subjects were experiencing a grim occupation. Even before the invasion the kingdom was desperately short of food, for the Austro-Hungarian fleet had blockaded the short stretch of sea-coast, cutting off every supply route except the difficult track into southern Serbia by way of Pec. In midwinter the Pec trail was impassable for wheeled traffic but in summer ox-carts and pack-horses were able to get through, although an ox-cart loaded with three hundred-weight of corn took eight weeks to complete the 110-mile journey from the Serbian railhead at Mitrovica to Podgorica. The defeat of Serbia cut off this tenuous link for, quite apart from the disruption of communications, the Serbs had no food to spare. The Austrian authorities supplied Cetinje and the villages on the slopes of Lovcen, but there was famine in Podgorica and conditions in the more remote districts of the north deteriorated rapidly, not least because of the killing of cattle

Kovess's Third Army awaited them and although the Montenegrins made a stand along the frozen river Tara, there was for

them little chance of escape. King Nikita's conduct in these days was equivocal.. Subsequently

his

enemies

at

the Serbian High Command maintained that he ordered his son to surrender the forts of Lovcen and seek an armistice, and the confused negotiations over Cetinje add substance to this conNikita himself got away to tention. Scutari and crossed by ship to Brindisi. It is hard to see why he did not order his troops to fall back on Scutari unless he had already contemplated some accommodation with the Austrians. But if so, why did he go into exile? There had certainly been contacts between some Austrophile Montenegrins and the Austrian High Command before the offensive. The resolute defence offered by the Montenegrin levies surprised the Austrians. Even after the King's flight a pitched battle was fought at Mojkovac, 50 miles north of Cetinje, and it was only after three days of severe fighting that General Radomir Vesovic, the Montenegrin Commander-in-Chief, ordered his troops

home and

back

to their

homes and

(on

January

17)

signed a general capitulation. Ten days Foreign later the Austro-Hungarian Minister mentioned in conversation to the American Ambassador in Vienna that the Austrians had assumed, from prior knowledge, that Nikita would open peace negotiations after offering only token resistance. They had been amazed to find that he

had

fled to Italy.

Accusations of treachery The collapse of Montenegro put the ing

Serbs

retreat-

danger. Austrian patrols moved rapidly into northern Albania and on January 21 entered Scutari. But French and British military missions had improvised an escape for the Serbs down the Albanian coast to Durazzo (Durres) and in

Their Montenegrin allies crushed, Serbian prisoners pass a German baggage train in a mountain pass between Macedonia and Montenegro. Above: King Nikita with the French and Russian generals Gouraud and Lohvitsky;

Above

left:

Montenegro after his armies had been swept aside by the Central Powers, he lived in France on French, British and Russian subsidies fleeing

Valona (Vlone), whence they were ferried to the Greek island of Corfu, which had been occupied by French marines. On Corfu the Serbs were re-equipped so effectively that, within three months, a Serbian army of 125,000 men was ready to resume

the fight on the Salonika Front (Thessalonikil.The contrast with the fate of the Montenegrin army was not lost on the Greater Allies, and the accusations of treachery against Nikita received a hearing. Yet curiously enough Nikita's personal fortunes continued to prosper. Declining the hospitality of his Italian son-in-law, he settled in France and was provided with a pleasant villa at Neuilly, the most fashionable of Paris suburbs. He was treated with the respect due to an Allied sovereign and taken on an official tour of inspection of the Western Front. Having convinced the French government that his long experience of Balkan affairs might be of value, he received from them a generous pension. This was supplemented by subsidies from the British and Russian governments, apparently on the tacit understanding that he would not serve narrowly French interests. In retrospect his closest diplomatic contacts appear to have been with the Italians, not through pecuniary inducements but because they too looked askance at any growth of Serbian influence along the Adriatic in the postwar world. While Nikita was in Neuill> his second son (Prince Mirko) was being treated as an honoured guest by his Austrian captors in Vienna, and he received a considerable sum of money from the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Ministry. Mirko had always boon

by bandits.

the administration of the Austrian occupation authorities was orderly and by no means unjust. General Weber

At

first

showed no favours even to the Vasojevic which was held by all the other Montenegrins to be pro- Austrian. Up in clan,

hills bandits, mostly from Albania, preyed equally on Montenegrin villages and Austrian encampments. Some younger

the

emulated the detniks of Serbia and organised guerrilla bands in the woods, but there was never any formal summons to insurrection. At midsummer 1916, however, a widespread revolt flared up in eastern Montenegro, centred in the Vasojevic district between the small town of Kolasin and the pine woods of Andrijevica. General Weber held General Radomir Vesovic, a member of the Vasojevic clan, responsible for stirring up unrest. When the Austrians sent a patrol to bring Vesovic in under arrest, he shot dead its commander and fled into the woods. At once the Austrians instituted a regime of terror. They hanged Yesovic's brother and two other rebels on a hill outside Kolasin and burned down the homes of villagers believed to have given the insurgents. succour to Radomir Vesovic himself survived, hut several hundred other members o\' the Yasojovic clan perished. Montenegrins

occupied

Further Reading Devine, A Montenegro ,

War Djilas,

(Fisher

Unwm

Milovan,

and

in History, Politics

1918)

Land Without Justice

(Methuen 1958) May, A J., The Passing of the Hapsburg Monarchy 1914-18 (University of Pennsylvania 1966)

Palmer, A

,

The Lands Between (Weidenfeld

1970)

West,

R.,

Black

Lamb and Grey Falcon (Mac-

millan 1942)

[For Alan Palmer's biography, sec page

60.

I

mi

]

'.Ml

Falkenhayn, Germany's grand

*

1916 was to be the year for a supreme effort in the West. He resolved on a deceptively simple plan: to attack the French at Verdun, a fortress of such emotional importance to the French that they would be 'bled white' in the attempt to defend it. Inevitably, this plan of attrition threw up one great but unanswered question: how to prevent Germany bleeding to death in :v r* the process? Christopher Duffy Below: Hardpressed French troops defend the way to Verdun strategist, decided that

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On Christmas Eve

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hayn. Chief of the

German General

Staff,

was drawing up a paper that brought together all the reasons why he believed that the mam war effort in the year ahead should bo directed towards the overcoming of Germany's enemies in the West. Events on the Eastern Front had already taken a favourable turn. The German and Austrian offensive which began in May 1915 had swept the Russian armies back tor hundreds o( miles, destroying their offensive capacity (so Falkenhayn thought* and bringing the Tsarist regime within measurable distance of dissolution. Falkenhayn did not intend to pursue this already beaten enemy any further, in the absence ot' any worthwhile or attainable military objectives. In the Balkans the Bulgarians had thrown in their lot with the Central Powers, and Germany had derived some indirect benefits from the subsequent destruction of the Serbian army: there was now a direct line of communication to the Turks, who were battling successfully with the Allied forces on the Gallipoli peninsula: the Austrians would now stand in less need of German support on the Polish and Italian Fronts.

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Above: Germany's Chief of the General Staff, General Falkenhayn; he planned a long drawn-out battle early in 1916 to arrest the inevitable build-up of Anglo-French superiority in military materials

1244

The respite in the east was all the more welcome because Falkenhayn had to reckon with the fact that the British and French were going to build up their resources in men and materials at a quicker rate than the Germans. This development could be

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halted only by a decisive victory in the near future. If the German authorities could overcome their hesitation and launch a ruthless, unrestricted U-Boat campaign then there was every likelihood that the British would capitulate in 1916, before the outraged Americans could intervene on the Allied side. On land a defeat of the French would serve the same purpose, for Britain would not fight on after her 'best sword' had been broken. Once we descend from the grand strategic level, it is not at all easy to see how Falkenhayn intended to translate his intentions into operational terms. Only two facts can be established with reasonable certainty. One was that Falkenhayn appreciated that the history of the present

war had demonstrated how futile and costly it was to attempt to break through a powerful, well dug-in enemy who enjoyed high morale. The other was that he was persuaded that the Allies would respond so

left: Looking confident just before jump-off time, German troops trenches near Verdun. Below right: The French were ill-prepared to counter a major offensive in the area around Verdun

Below in

violently and so irrationally to a threat to the 'fortified zone' of Verdun in Lorraine that they would give him the opportunity of bringing about their destruction.

The fortress complex of Verdun embraced both banks of the upper Meuse. The position had been preserved for France in the exciting days of August and September 1914 by the resolution and quick thinking of General Sarrail, commander of the Third Army. Although the area had seen very little action since then, it continued to form the hinge connecting the northern and eastern fronts of the French line against the Germans. Nor did it escape Falkenhayn's notice that the outer defences on the east bank of the Meuse projected to within a dozen miles of the German road and rail

of

the

attacking

French

lines

in

the

Champagne, after the French had taken away their troops in order to bolster up Verdun. The German Third Army was delighted at the prospect. Falkenhayn, however, changed his mind once more, and on February 7 he was again writing about attrition at Verdun. Falkenhayn's infirmity of purpose is all the more remarkable in a man who had used all his influence in favour of the employment of such ruthless weapons of war as poison gas

and the unrestricted U-Boat

offensive.

We

whether,

when

shall probably never

the

Germans opened

know their

offensive at Verdun, Falkenhayn pinned his hopes of victory primarily on a war of attrition in the locality, or on a dramatic

communications between Metz and Sedan, the arteries which sustained the war-

blow elsewhere along the front. No less a personage than Crown Prince Wilhelm

the Champagne. Falkenhayn would have liked posterity to believe that he was aiming from the

was among the people left in the dark. As commander of the Fifth Army, which

effort in

bring about a battle of attrition at Verdun. In his perhaps not altogether complete and trustworthy memoirs he renders a passage of the 'Christmas Eve Memorandum' as follows: 'We can probably do enough for our purpose with limited resources. Within our reach behind the French sector of the Western Front there are objectives for the retention of which the French General Staff would be compelled to throw in every man they have. If they do so the forces of France will bleed to death — as there can be no question of a voluntary withdrawal — whether we reach our goal or not.' Falkenhayn never gave any indication of how he proposed to prevent his own forces first to

from 'bleeding to death' in the process. Possibly he hoped to seize the Meuse Heights and the forts on the east bank with his first bound, then dig himself in and massacre the French as they crossed the river valley to dislodge him. Against this view we must place the strong indications that Falkenhayn originally intended his attack at Verdun to be a carefully regulated diversion which would open up opportunities on other sectors of the Western Front. At the turn of the year he seems to have harboured hopes that the British would take such alarm at the danger to Verdun that they would be stampeded into launching a premature offensive north of the Somme. Falkenhayn intended to have about eight divisions and 20 heavy batteries in reserve in Artois by mid-February in order to grind the offensive to a halt, and prepare the way for a mighty counterblow. A German attack of this kind would have a much greater chance of success than an assault against fresh troops in a prepared position. On January 8 Falkenhayn opened his mind to LieutenantGeneral von Kuhl, Chief-of-Staff of the Sixth Army, the force most directly concerned. Kuhl records: T remember exactly what he said to me. He hoped that this move would restore life to the static front, and enable us to fight a war of movement in Artois. Through this combination of Verdun and Artois he hoped to attain a decision without the necessity of a major battle to break through the enemy front.'

Verdun — or the Somme Over the following two or three weeks the attractions of the

seem to

Somme

counteroffensive

have waned. Falkenhayn appears have been drawn instead by the prospect to

held the German sector opposite Verdun, Prince Wilhelm was full of schemes for the capture of this annoying French salient. In February and October 1915 he had bombarded the forts with the monster Krupp 42-cm siege howitzers, though with no success, and in December, when the coming offensive was mooted, he worked out a plan for an attack which was to embrace both banks of the Meuse. Petain, the future commander at Verdun, testified after the war that the French would have been powerless to withstand an assault of this kind. The Crown Prince's project did not accord with the schemes of Falkenhayn, who was not particularly interested in 'taking' Verdun. On December 14 and 15 Falkenhayn held two conferences in Berlin with the Prince's Chief-of-Staff, General Schmidt von Knobelsdorf, and told him that he could not spare the troops or the artillery for the offensive on the two banks. The Crown Prince writes: 'We insisted that Verdun was the corner-stone of the Western Front, and that it was a matter of honour for the French to retain it, and that therefore nothing less than an attack on a broad front could prevail against the forces that the enemy would certainly utilise for its defence.' Protests also came from two members of the Operational Section of the General Staff, Major-General von Tappen and Lieutenant-Colonel Bauer. Colonel Bauer's arguments were particularly cogent,

and as an

artillery specialist

he made the point that an unsupported attack on the east bank was bound to come under enfilade artillery fire from French batteries concealed behind the ridges on the far bank. Falkenhayn was not to be moved. He had only 17 or 18 divisions to spare on the Western Front, and he claimed that the operations on the east bank alone would involve nine, leaving him with scanty resources to meet an Allied relief offensive elsewhere along the front. Once he had made his point, Falkenhayn left the Fifth Army's staff, with its unrivalled local knowledge, to plan the details of the attack at Verdun. The Germans were confronted with a 30-mile perimeter of 20 forts and 40 lesser 'works', in two main lines around the wooded but almost waterless hills that framed the basin of Verdun. The ancient garrison city of Verdun stood in the centre of the hollow, and here and there, along the river valley and among the hills, were to be seen a few dusty and impoverished villages. The operation was to be confined

disposed

bank, as Falkenhayn had directhe terrain imposed further limitations. The hills to the south were tangled and heavily-wooded, while the plain of Woevres to the west was bare and boggy, and equally unfavourable to the movement of large forces. Prince Wilhelm and Knobelsdorf therefore planned a push from the north and north-east which would carry the Germans to the edge of the Meuse Heights immediately above the river valley. The attack involved about 140,000 troops, drawn chiefly from a number of newly-arrived elite corps of north German to the east

ted,

and

origin.

The

objectives

were as

follows, tak-

ing the units in clockwise direction from the north: the VII Reserve Corps (Westphalians) was to take Haumont Wood and the ridges running from it to the southwest ('A' sector); the XVIII Corps (Hessians) was to capture the defences from Caures Wood to the Ville valley ('B' sector); the Brandenburgers of the /// Corps extended the attack to the left as far as Herbebois VC sector), and the Corps took over from there to Ornes ('D' sector). The V Reserve Corps, a not particularly solid unit, was placed in reserve.

XV

Each corps was packed into an average one-and-a-half miles of front. The Germans possessed excellent road and rail communications to within a dozen miles of the line, but in the intervening tract of arid, broken and nearly roadless terrain the transport, assembly and upkeep of men and materials presented challenging problems in their own right. The hard-working Fifth Army laid down ten light railways and innumerable plank pathways, and made sufficient shelters, concrete bunkers (Stollen), communication trenches and assembly points to enable 6,000 first-wave assault troops to concentrate in safety within a short distance of the French line.

Massive artillery support The infantry attack was to proceed by bounds. At 1700 hours on February 12, 1916, after a nine-hour bombardment, the assault troops were to seize the French first-line trenches in sectors 'A', 'B' and 'C\ On the following day a new cannonade and a new push would reduce the rearward positions. The riflemen were to be accompanied by eight companies carrying flamethrowers, and great morale and material were expected of this terrible effects

weapon. The corps' commanders were puzzled by two contradictory passages in the orders, one of which limited the first day's objectives to the first-line trenches, as we have seen, while the other urged that a relentless pressure was to be kepi up on the French. No clarification could be obtained from the headquarters of the Fifth Army, and in the event the ebullient VII Reserve Corps was to take the whole of laumont Wood in the first few hours. I

The artillery support came from some 1,400 pieces, ranging from about 26 super heavy Krupp and Skoda siege howitzers, to the 550 guns of the field artillery ami the mass of short-range Minenwerfers flic heavy howitzers and the Minenwerfers were given the task of blotting out the first French positions, while the field howitzers and the super-heavy siege howitzers were to rain down their monstrous shells on the rearward defences and the forts. Heavy low-trajectory pieces were to rake the com munications and rear areas. A number of L24f

howitzers were to fire gas-shells against such French batteries as had already been detected, and further guns and howitzers were told off" to deal with the French artillery which came into action during the battle. The Germans enjoyed an abundance

ammunition on all fronts, and than 2,500,000 shells were assigned to the coming battle at Verdun. Six days' supplies were brought up to the guns before the opening bombardment. The artillery arrangements nevertheless gave some cause for disquiet. The percep-

A nine-day postponement as a fierce blizzard holds up the

of artillery

no

biggest artillery

less

tive Colonel

Bauer saw that the

underestimated the the

batteries

across

the

had moving

staff

difficulties of

crater-scarred

ground as the battle developed. Furthermore, Major-General Schabel, the com-

mander

of the field artillery, pointed out the apparently impressive total of 654 heavy pieces (10-cm and above) fell short by 408 barrels of the total he deemed necessary for the crushing of the French defences. Lastly, the heavy artillery was subject to an over-rigid chain of command; according to the artillery plan of January 8 the direction remained 'in the hands of the high command of the army; the fire orders proceed from here to the army corps, and so to the generals commanding the foot artillery of the corps'. To help to observe the fall of the shot, and to prevent the French balloonists and aviators from detecting the batteries and troop concentrations, the Germans brought together a force of two heavy aircraft, 145 21 reconnaissance planes, monoplane fighters, 14 captive balloons and three Zeppelins. The secrecy was obsessive. In January and early February small diversional offensives were launched along the whole front from Vimy Ridge to the Vosges, and shortly before the appointed date for the attack the Crown Prince made a point of visiting the extreme southern flank of the line, where he shook hands with the

German

sentry and the Swiss border guards. Falkenhayn carried security so far as to give no inkling of the intended attack to his Austrian opposite number, Generaloberst Conrad. This avoidable affront was to cost him dearly by midsummer. On January 6 Falkenhayn gave his blessing to the detailed plan of attack which had been presented to him by General Knobelsdorf in the name of the Crown Prince. That did not prevent Falkenhayn from harbouring a number of secret reservations concerning Prince Wilhelm's simple and soldierly scheme for the capture of Verdun. The Prince intended his sudden blast of artillery fire to blow a breach in the French defences, thus opening the way for rapid penetration and exploitation by the assault divisions and all the available reserves. Such a scheme was at variance with Falkenhayn's desire for a long drawn-out battle. He left the happy, busy and highborn Prince to proceed with his preparations, and at the same time made arrangements to hold back the reserves which the Prince believed he would have at hand on the day of attack. At Verdun a number of French officers had gone to the limits of subordination, and sometimes beyond, in their desperate attempts to persuade the high command to shore up the defences. General Coutanceau, the commander of the 'fortified zone' in 1915, had to contend with military and political opinion which was profoundly influenced by the unimpressive performance last

1246

barrage so far permanent fortifications in the war so Liege had fallen in 12 days, Namur in six and the Russian strongholds in Poland had fared no better. As Petain remarked: 'Thus it seemed as if the idea of permanent fortification were definitely doomed. It was

of

far.

believed

that forts, too conspicuous as targets, were destined to immediate destruction, and that only fieldworks, being less susceptible to attack by artillery, could offer to troops effective means of resisting

the enemy's onslaughts.' Coutanceau ventured to express his unfashionable opinions in favour of his forts on the occasion of a visit to Verdun by the Senate Army Committee and General Dubail, the commander of the Eastern Army Group. The enraged Dubail ordered him to be silent, and later

engineered his dismissal.

Between August 5 and September 4, 1915 a series of decrees and pronouncements placed the French fortresses with their men, guns and materials at the disposal of the field commanders. Every gun which could be prised loose was taken away to help to make up for the army's deficiency in heavy artillery. Fort Vaux was one of the smaller works at Verdun that were left without any armament at all. The larger forts were deprived of the pieces that flanked the ditches, though it proved impracticable to remove the long-range guns built into the top of the forts. It was fortunate for the French that the fabric of the forts of Verdun was of excellent design, and that the works had been subjected to continuous maintenance and improvement up to the outbreak of the war. The construction of the 'fortified zone' had begun in 1874, as the northern bulwark of one of the 'defensive curtains' with which General Sere de Rivieres wished to establish along the frontier with Germany. The general design of the forts was inspired by the style made popular by the famous Belgian engineer Brialmont, though in their solidity of construction and quality of workmanship the Verdun strongpoints were the superior of any fortifications elsewhere. On their intended front of attack the Germans would have to reduce or penetrate an outer line of four forts (Douaumont, Vaux, Tavannes, Noulainville), and then take the rearward fort of Souville and an inner ring of three forts (Belleville, St Michel and Belrupt) on the heights above the Meuse valley. The pentagonal fort of Douaumont was the largest and most powerful strongpoint of this sector, and indeed of the whole 'fortified zone' of Verdun. It sat on a 1,200foot high hill dominating the north-eastern approaches, and by 1914, after three reconstructions, the shell of the inner redoubt had attained a thickness of eight-and-ahalf feet, made up of a 'sandwich' of very hard concrete and shock-absorbing sand. Mercifully the 155-mm turret and the 75twin-turret had survived the fit of vandalism in the late summer of 1915.

mm

Now

was gone, the resawakening the high com-

that Coutanceau

ponsibility

of

mand to the vulnerability of Verdun devolved upon Lieutenant-Colonel Emile Driant, who commanded two battalions of foot Chasseurs who were working on the zone of trenches in front of the forts. Driant had established a reputation as a military polemicist before the war, and distant echoes of his protests about Verdun now reached the ears of Joffre, the French Commander-in-Chief. Joffre, however, was preoccupied with thoughts of the coming Allied offensive. He knew that the Germans intended to launch an assault of their own, but he refused to believe that it would be serious enough to dictate any important change in the Allied plans. If the Germans intended to attack on the Western Front rather than in the east, Joffre considered the likely targets to be in the Champagne, or in the area of the British and French junction in Artois. He disposed his reserves accordingly, and left the defence of Verdun to the four divisions of General Chretien's XXX Corps. This force was of very mixed quality, and contained a large number of elderly Territorials as well as the excellent Chasseurs of Driant's command. Only in February did Joffre send two further divisions to Verdun, and move the VII and XX Corps to within supporting distance. Joffre's miscalculation was rooted in his imperturbable calm and his unwillingness to see phantoms, the very traits of character which had stood the Allied cause in such good stead up to the present time. Up to a matter of days before the German attack of February 21, old General Herr at Verdun was under orders to concentrate his attention on building up the defences on the west bank of the Meuse. He had an inadequate labour force and a pitifully small artillery of only 270 guns. There were no communication trenches, no buried telephone wires, and no barbed-wire entanglements except around the city ramparts. The one useful commodity which came from above was the advice of General de Langle de Cary, commander of the

Army Group, to adopt a flexible defence: 'The first lines are not all that we must expect to see smashed by artillery fire in case of attack, but the whole group of lines included in the forward position. Central

Consequently we must not hasten to send forces to the first lines, nor even to reinforce the first-line position, but we must keep men in reserve for the defence of our other positions.' These views stood

up our

in marked contrast to the prevailing doctrine of rigid, forward defence. On the afternoon of February 11 the weather at Verdun broke in rain and snow-

Crown Prince Wilhelm saw that he had no alternative but to call off the assault which had been planned for the following day. For more than a week the waiting troops crouched in the dripping woods and muddy ravines. Miraculously the constorms.

centration of soldiers and guns remained undetected by the French. Further Reading

Home,

A., The Price of Glory-Verdun 1916 (London 1962) Petain. H., Verdun (London 1930) Ryan, S.. Petain the Soldier (London 1969)

DerWeltkrieg 1914-1918, Vol X- Die Operationen desJahres 1916 Crown Prince Wilhelm, My War Experiences

(London 1922) [For Christopher Duffy's biography,

page

138.]

see

The big guns — rivals

at Verdun

Above: One of the two 38-cm long-range (29 miles) naval guns earmarked by the Germans to interrupt communications behind Verdun. Below: A French 370-mm howitzer, part of France's inadequate defences

1247

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At dawn on February 21 the German bombardment of Verdun and its defences began, a bombardment so massive that it was heard as a steady rumbling 100 miles away. The Germans, superior in the air, in artillery and in numbers of fighting men, seemed poised for a stunning victory, and the fall of Fort Douaumont, the largest of the forts guarding Verdun, was seen as the beginning of a major French catastrophe. Yet the Germans let their opportunity slip, largely owing to caution from above. Fighting desperately under the inspiring leadership of Petain, the French began to slow the German advance. AlistairHorne. Below: The effect of the German bombardment — the devastated entrance of Fort Souville, one of the forts guarding Verdun «»

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was chance even bad luck -that in It the early morning of February 12, 1916, the day fixed for the German assault on Verdun, there was a ferocious blizzard. At daw n deep snow lay everywhere, the storm stdl raged and mist lay across the whole countryside, concealing all the meticulously pin-pointed targets for the German artillery, on whose accuracy success depended absolutely. So their opening bombardment had to be postponed. This initial postponement did in fact prevent immediate disaster for the French. On that morning, two newly-arrived French divisions, the 51st and the 14th, were not yet in position. If the Germans had attacked then, with their blanketing artillery and their battalions of chosen assault troops, they would have found the French in half-completed positions — the French 72nd Division alone facing the six German attacking divisions, and the other four French divisions, including the two newlyarrived, spread about through the citadel and the rest of the Verdun salient. Some of the French troops holding the front line were elderly Territorials. While the Germans waited for the stormy weather to abate, the French settled into their new dispositions. There were now three French divisions — making up GenCorps — facing the eral Chretien's Germans between the Meuse and the railway- to Etain. Of these, the 72nd and 51st Divisions, with 20 battalions, manned the north-eastern curve of the salient, which was to be the sector of the main German attack; and there were 14 further battalions on the French flanks or in close reserve. An elderly gunnery officer, General Herr, was in immediate command of the French troops in Verdun and the salient; but having lost a large part of his fortress artillery to Joffre's recent purges of fixed emplacements, Herr felt himself at a loss in a world of trenches, infantry, wire and chronic lethargy. As a fortress commander, Herr was directly responsible, not to a field army headquarters, but

XXX

General de Langle de Cary, commanding the Central Group of Armies. Opposite these 20 French battalions, the main German attacking force was made up of 72 battalions, or six divisions. On the German right, from the Meuse at Consenvoye eastwards to Flabas, was \ II Reserve to

Corps under General von Zwehl — Westphalians. Next, on a short sector opposite the Bois des Caures, was XVIII Corps under General von Schenck — mostly Hessians. On the left, from Ville to Azannes, was /// Corps: these were the famous Brandenburgers, and their commander, General von Lochow, had already gained a reputation for aggressive action — in particular, against Petain's thrust towards Vimy Ridge in the previous spring. Supporting Corps troops of V Reserve Corps and

XV

were on the German left. But the principal feature of the German line-up was the concentration of guns — over 1,200 for an assault frontage of eight miles. There were 654 barely including 13 of the 42-cm 'heavies', mortars, the 'secret weapon' of 1914 that had shattered the Belgian forts, and two 38-cm long-range naval guns earmarked to interrupt communications behind Verdun. There were 21-cm howitzers to pulverise the French front lines, and 15's to seek out and destroy the French batteries. Two and a half million shells had been 1252

Left: A German 21-cm short howitzer. A sudden thaw on February 28, following the long spell of cold weather, turned the surface into a sea of mud and made it difficult for the German artillery to advance

brought up to supply this greatest concentration of artillery yet seen on any battlefield.

To preserve secrecy, the Germans had deliberately restricted their front and not included the eastern side of the salient for their attack; for the Woevres Plain on that side was overlooked by the Frenchheld Meuse Heights. Of much greater significance,

however,

was the German

decision not to attack at the same time on the left, or western, bank of the Meuse. This limitation, and the later German it, were to be among the terrible hall-marks of the Battle of Verdun.

efforts to rectify

For nine days bad weather held up the opening of the German bombardment which was to precede the attack of their assault troops. There was snow again; a thaw with fog, rain and gales; more rain and gales; wind and snow squalls; mist and cold. The French troops at least were accustomed to a rough life in poorly finished trenches and improvised dug-outs, with shelter for some in the forts, now largely deprived of their guns, which ringed the inner fortress of Verdun. The

Germans probably

suffered

more

in these

harsh days of waiting, keyed up as they were for the attack. The concrete Stollen in which they assembled expectantly each day were not meant as a permanent shelter for these large bodies of troops; so most of them had a seven-mile march each night and morning to and from their billets through freezing sleet or snow. On February 19 and 20 the weather improved. So at dawn on the 21st, the massive German bombardment started — heralded

Above: A French soldier is hurled violently back by the impact of a German bullet. By the end of March, 81,607 Germans and 89,000 French had been killed — not only France, but Germany too, was being bled white

by a poor shot from one of the two long38-cm (15-inch) long-barrelled range, naval guns which, instead of destroying the Meuse Bridge in Verdun, exploded in the courtyard of the Archbishop's Palace, knocking off a corner of the cathedral. The other naval gun, aiming at Verdun Station, had more success. The ordeal of the salient had begun. The bombardment of the French lines and rear quickly rose to a shattering peak of intensity, and continued without abatement for nine hours. In all the great artillery barrages of 1915, nothing compared with this concentration of high-explosive shells, with this appalling weight of flying, disintegrating metal. From left to right, from front to rear and back again in the narrow sector of the impending German infantry attack, everything was methodically bombarded. Gas and tear-gas shells were included too, with the aim of incapacitating the French artillery. The French trenches, poorly prepared, were quickly obliterated and many of the troops man-

ning them were buried. Lieutenant-Colonel Driant, whose warning voice had first drawn attention to the deplorable state of the Verdun defences, was now in the front line in the Bois des Caures, with his Chasseurs, as a detachment of 72nd Division — in the very centre of the German attack sector, opposite XVIII Corps. They experienced the full intensity and horror of the shelling. It seemed to them as if the wood was being swept by 'a storm, a hurricane, a tempest growing ever stronger, where it was raining nothing but paving stones'. Through the din

the explosions came the splintering crash as the great oaks and beeches of the forest were split or uprooted by the shells The bombardment was heard nearly 100 miles away on the Vosges front as a steady rumbling. Unpreparedness played as much a part as the German gas-shells in upsetting the French artillery. Their counterbattery work was generally ineffective from the start: their fire was spread rather aimlessly, and ceased to count as visibility decreased and contact with the infantry broke down. All telephone communication with the French front line had been cut by the shelling within the first hour, and runners often found it impossible to gel through the avalanche of shells. As a result, effective command rapidly broke down There was no question of sending up reinforcements; and in Verdun itself the shelling from the 38-cm naval guns had already dislocated the unloading of trains. About mid-day there was a sudden pause: the shelling stopped and the French troops emerged from the debris of their line, ready to face the expected onslaught of the Gerof

man

infantry.

But

Germans quickly

it

was

a

trick.

The

took note of those pails

of the French line which were Still manned, and then at once took up the bombardment again, concentrating then- shortrange heavy mortars on the sections where

the French had shown themselves, and shelling every part with the same unrelenting fury. To the German infantry, after long days in and out of the flooded Stollen, the sight of the French trenches disintegral ing was intoxical ing.

the Germans were taking no the bombardment at last finished at 1600 'hours, they cautiously sent forward powerful fighting patrols who, making skilful use of the ground, probed for the sectors of least resistance. True to Falkenhayn's directive for a controlled but insistent advance, the Germans were here evolving a new method of approach and attack, which was quickly to become characteristic of the fighting at Verdun on both sides; and, paradoxically, by prolonging individual survival, these tactics also prolonged the duration and

Even

risks.

so,

When

suffering of this

On

inhuman

battle.

day at Verdun, however, German caution from above, and their unthis first

to follow up the probing, inpatrols at once with assault troops, lost them their opportunity. For once, the massed waves of attacking infantry, which until now had been the ultimate weapon all along the Western Front, incurring always suicidal losses — for once, these disciplined lines of infantry, coming

readiness filtrating

over immediately while the French were still stunned and shattered from the immensity of the bombardment, could have given the Germans a quick breakthrough and a clear road to Verdun. As it was, two of the corps' commanders stuck rigidly to orders and held back their main bodies of infantry until the next morning, leaving their patrols to do no more than explore French weaknesses. Only Zwehl, commanding VII Reserve Corps on the German right, obstinately improved on his orders and sent in his first wave of storm-troops hard on the heels of the patrols, and at once achieved an important success. They man-

1254

aged

to

occupy the whole of the Bois

d'Haumont before dusk and so effect the first breach of the main French defences. Elsewhere on the French 72nd Division front, and to the east on the 51st Division front, the German patrols, even without support, did damage enough to the French line, exploiting the gaps made by the shell-fire and using their new weapon of horror, the flame-thrower, with terrifying effect, causing panic through the French ranks. There still remained stubborn and heroic pockets of French resistance, flaring out even into disconcerting counterattacks. None of this, however, was the easy success the Germans had expected. The concentration of shell-fire from the unpre-

cedented opening bombardment had been planned to destroy all life in the French front-line trenches and block-houses. But

somehow

men had

survived.

Driant's

example, in the Bois des Caures had consisted of a complex network of redoubts and small strongholds, quite unlike the usual continuous trench lines. Here and elsewhere the German troops sector, for

were therefore disconcerted to meet intense machine gun and rifle fire from defenders who ought to have been buried in I z the wreckage of the uprooted forest. Full-scale attack By nightfall, Knobelsdorf, Prince Wil- || helm's Chief-of-Staff, had become impatient of this cautious progress, and ordered J a full-scale attack for the morning after ~\ another softening-up bombardment. It was One of the Stollen (concrete bunkers) which the French, however, who surprisingly the Germans built near the French line to permit first-wave troops to concentrate safely took the initiative at dawn on the 22nd, Douaumont after the German bombardment attempting several counterattacks with

A

V

den of their equipment, before they came within flame-throwing range. So 51st Division on the right were still able to tenaciously to Herbebois. On the other side of the sector, 72nd Division managed to hold up Zwehl's corps at last in front of Samogneux on an 'intermediate line', which de Castelnau had ordered to be constructed in January. When this line was broken, a battalion still held out in Samogneux itself till late into the night, when it was suddenly wiped out by a barrage of French 155's, firing across from the left bank in the belief that the village had already fallen to the Germans. With this final tragedy, 72nd Division virtually ceased to exist. The two first-line cling

French divisions, 72nd and 51st, with an combined establishment of 26,523, had together lost 16,224 officers and men. The Germans, despite their rebuffs, felt

original

that

So

A German shell explodes and the mincing machine' grinds on. Making skilful use of the ground, Germans sent out powerful fighting patrols probing for the sectors of least resistance

the

the spirit and dash typical of their army's tradition. But the means were not there, nor the organisation and communications: many attacks failed to get going, others were soon swamped. Even though Knobelsdorf now placed no limits on corps' objectives the XVIII Corps, opposite the Bois des Caures, was still a model of caution, faced as it was with the verve and flexibility of Driant's Chasseurs, which masked the absurdly small size of the French opposition; and it took the Germans all day, with the help of their comrades on either flank, to silence Driant's valiant resistance. Zwehl's VII Reserve Corps had captured the village of Haumont on Driant's left, after a hard fight lasting into the afternoon, and now the

Brandenburgers of HI Corps came round on Driant's right through the Bois de Ville, split up by the cross-fire from the surviving FYench machine guns, but relentless with their flame-throwers and overwhelming in their numbers. They surrounded the French positions and picked off their strong-points one by one. Driant himself and a handful of men tried to hold out in the last strong-point, in vain; and as they broke out to the rear, they were mown

down by enfilading fire. The German losses in

silencing the Bois des Caures had been unexpectedly heavy, and the confidence of their assault troops

was shaken. Above

all,

their offensive

had

been held up during one whole day by Driant's resistance in the very centre of the German attack. Nor was Driant alone in this. The anchor position on the left of the French line at Brabant on the Meuse was still held by other elements of 72nd Division; and on the right, 51st Division continued to fight bitterly in Herbebois, holding up the advance of the Branden-

These delays,

burgers.

though seeming

small in the overall picture, robbed the German assault of its required momentum. Earlier on this day, the French artillery

had improved their shooting, and had been reinforced. Fire from French batteries on the left (western) bank of the Meuse onto the Germans' flank was starting to cause trouble. Falkenhayn's parsimony in keeping back reserves for Verdun had deprived the German VI Reserve Corps, holding the line on the left bank, of adequate artillery,

weakness prevented them from silencing the French guns on this side. But on the right bank, behind the battlefield itself, the French field guns were being knocked out one by one by the fire of the and

this

long-barrelled 15's. Once more on the next day, February 23, the Germans made surprisingly little progress, even though they were still held only by the remnants of 72nd and 51st Divisions, whose losses continued at a

Brabant had been evacuated, but mixed elements managed to hold out all day in Beaumont, on a rise behind the Bois des Caures. Infantry of the German XVIII Corps pressed forward against this position in dense formations, one wave pushing in closely behind another, in the established style of the Western Front, to be scythed down in turn by the French machine guns. At the same time, the French heavy guns under XXX Corps' command had found the range of the advancing Germans, who were suffering too from their own shells terrible rate.

falling

short.

Official

German

records

speak of this as a 'day of horror'. The French infantry were also starting to get the measure of the dreaded flame throwers. They were learning to pick off the German pioneers who wielded them, as they moved clumsily under the heavy bur-

rm

it

Verdun was now theirs for the taking. was. They overran the whole French

second position, inadequately prepared to start with, and now pounded out of existence, in three hours on February 24. But following the unexpected and savage opposition which they had experienced in the previous two days and the serious losses they had suffered, the Germans were no longer poised to exploit the situation fully, and their cautiousness had increased. Once more, they missed the opportunity of breaking right through. The gap in the French lines left by the decimation of 72nd Division was now filled by 37th African Division — the Zouaves and Moroccan Tirailleurs. But the bitter, freezing weather, which had returned once the German offensive was launched, and was causing suffering enough to European

had cowed the temperamental North Africans. Furthermore, in an attempt to plug the disastrous holes in the French defences, they were being split up into small units under strange officers — survivors of the 72nd and 51st. The incessant bombardment, the horror of which was beyond their comprehension, was the last straw. When the North Africans saw the troops,

great grey carpet of German infantry rolling out towards them, some of them lost their nerve and fled.

Crumbling morale By the night of February

24, French morale seriously. Their guns were silent, their clearing stations overflowing with casualties, untended. their wounds often frozen by the intense cold. Only a fraction could be got out: the German 38's, firing with 'diabolical precision', had cut the one full-gauge railway out of Corps the Verdun salient. Chretien's was finished. Balfouner's XX Corps from the Lorraine front was to relieve them, but

was crumbling

XXX

only the vanguard had reached Verdun, hungry, and exhausted. Despite every protest, Chretien insisted on throwing them into the battle at once: but it seemed doubtful if they would hold till the corps' main body, en route in a desperate forced march, could arrive. It was on the following da\ thai the French Command took decisions which committed them finally to the defence of Verdun, whatever the cost On be evening of February 24 de .angle de Gary obtained permission from JoflVe to shorten the line in front of Verdun drastically on the still unthroatenod Woevres Plain side of the salient, and to withdraw cold,

t

.

I

--

from the Woevrea Plain to the Meuse Heights east and south-east of the city. Later that night, with the news desperate, orders and precedent, his routine allocation of sleep One authority says that it was de Castelnau who insisted on waking him; another that it was the Prime Minister himself, Briand, who had driven over against

Joffre,

all

was rudelj wakened from

from

Pans

to

General

Headquarters

at

Chantilly; a third merely states that Joffre rose to the occasion. The consequence, in

am

case, was of supreme importance. Joffre sent de Castelnau off to Verdun that

night with full powers to do whatever was needed. De Castelnau. as the recentlyappointed Chief-of-Staff at French General Headquarters and Joffre's closest colleague and rival was the obvious choice for such a critical mission. But the very choice of >.

de Castelnau made certain that the decision over Verdun would be a firm one. He was still very much a 'fighting general', as well as being outstandingly intelligent, quick-witted and flexible; and he had a way of inspiring staff officers soldiers alike

and

De Castelnau reached Verdun

front-line at break-

fast-time on February 25. He found Herr, who was still in command of Verdun and its salient, 'depressed' and 'a little tired'. He then went straight to the battle-torn right bank, made rapid and accurate apprecia-

and effected miracles in reanimating the defence, with his experience and insight and his boundless energy: 'wherever he went, decision and order followed him". He saw that Verdun could be saved, that an effective defence could be maintained on the remaining cross ridges of the right bank. He telephoned his conclusions to Joffre's headquarters that afternoon, and without waiting for agreement gave orders that the right bank of the Meuse should be held at all costs, and that there must be no retreat to the left bank. On the previous evening, Joffre had already agreed that General Petain, the tenacious commander of the French Second Army, should be brought over to defend the left bank at Verdun. Now de Castelnau recommended that Petain should be put tions,

immediately in total command at Verdun, of both sides of the river, and despatched the necessary order without waiting for approval. Petain enjoyed a considerable reputation as a master of the defensive: he had been one of the first to recognise the full implications of firepower. He was also a very able commander, meticulous in his preparations for action, with a real concern for his troops, who therefore trusted him. He had shown his mettle in attack at Vimy Ridge and, less successfully, in the Champagne. Austere, aloof, distrustful of politicians, he was a dedicated soldier. De Castelnau, by insisting on the defence of the right bank, had accepted the challenge of the German assault on Verdun: without knowing it, he was acting as Falkenhayn wished and expected, allowing the French army to be drawn inexorably into the Verdun salient, to be bled there by the nessure. And in remorseless German appointing Petain, de ( istelnau was ensuring that his decision to defend Verdun would be carried out. The French, in theory, need not have taken up the challenge. They could have withdrawn to the left bank, eliminating the dangerous salient and shorteni g heir line

Joffre's

t

1256

considerably. Verdun and its ring of forts were no longer of practical defensive value: their guns hat! by now mostly been withdrawn to augment the French artillery barrages for Joffre's hopeful offensives, and the forts stood there imposing and toothless. In the hilly country behind the Meuse, the French could have conducted a fighting withdrawal with advantage, exhausting the attacking Germans and overstraining their lines of supply. As Winston Churchill wrote at the time: 'Meeting an artillery attack is like catching a cricket ball. Shock is dissipated by drawing back the hands. A little "give", a little suppleness and the violence of the impact is vastly reduced.' Yet de Castelnau's decision to hold was based not only on his own aggressive spirit, but on an intuition of a greater truth: that perhaps, after 18 months without success, the French army was not capable of a controlled, fighting retreat in the face of superior forces. Nor, as Briand was aware, would the French nation or his government have easily survived the shock of abandoning a fortress with the immense symbolic value which Verdun held for the French, a factor of which Falkenhayn in laying his plans was conscious.

Brutal shell-fire

On

the ridges before Verdun, whose great were being rapidly torn down by the brutal weight of shell-fire, there was still some French resistance on the left, facing VII Reserve Corps. But elsewhere in the salient on the morning of February 25 — while de Castelnau was appraising the terrain with his quick, experienced eye — the Germans had before them only the forts which ringed Verdun, sinister guardian monsters which the Germans thought were still fully manned and armed. Fort Douaumont was the first that lay in their path, and the strongest. From every angle its great tortoise hump stood out, stark, menacing, fascinating. It was, in fact, occupied by only a small detachment of territorial gunners, manning the 155-mm turret gun which had survived Joffre's purge; its approaches were inadequately covered by the French infantry. Small bodies of Brandenburgers, heroically defying a powerful garrison existing only in their imagination, managed to edge into the fort unobserved during the afternoon of the 25th and to capture its elderly occuforests

pants.

The reaction to the fall of Fort Douaumont was electric. In Germany church bells rang; a newspaper declared, 'Victory of Verdun. The Collapse of France". In Verdun itself morale went to pieces. An officer ran through the streets crying 'Same quipeut', and civilians poured out of the city, jamming the vital roads. Worse still, the commander of the 37th African Division, on hearing the news, blew up the unthreatened Meuse bridge at Bras and withdrew his battered troops, quite needlessly, back to the last ridge before the city itself. Petain took over command at midnight and set up his headquarters in the village of Souilly, on the main road into Verdun from the south-west. His journey in the rigours of winter weather had been long and tiring, and the last stage, through the distracted rear of the French army in defeat, harrowing. He received his instructions briefly from de Castelnau, who then left. Petain contacted his corps' commanders by telephone, and spent the night huddled

Risking the shell-fire, French stretcher bearers attempt to reach a fallen comrade

:<*1 *»

T^fciW

'

an armchair in an unheated room. Next morning he had contracted double pneu monia; but the secret was strictly guarded with reason, for the mere knowledge of his arrival, that he was now in command at Verdun, had stiffened the French resistance and given now heart to every man, from in

General Balfourier down to the exhausted troops holding out in he front line, so high w a- Petain's reputation in the army. In the defence lines themselves the turning-point came at tin- same time with the t

arrival

of the

seasoned

XX

main hotly of Balfourier's Corps, the 'Iron Corps'. All

troops in the salient wore now regrouped under four corps' commanders, responsible i«> Petain and his Second Army staff. I Corps was coming in from reserve, and others were on their way. Haig too had at last agreed to relieve the French Tenth Army, which was sandwiched between the British First and Third in the area of Arras. Petain. on his sick-bed, took up the threads of command with remarkable

He Douaumont vigour.

realised that the loss of Fort did not mean final disaster,

that the other forts remained, and could be manned and linked into a formidable defence perimeter. He issued orders accordingly: from this line there must be no with-

drawal. With his profound understanding of the defensive power which guns could provide, he now had the artillery round Verdun reorganised into one concentrated and effective weapon. From this moment, says the German official history, 'began the flanking fire on the ravines and roads north of Douaumont that was to cause us such severe casualties'. It was the precarious supply route into Verdun which was Petain's next concern. The full-gauge railway had been rendered useless by the German long-range shelling. The only substitute was motor transport on the one road in, the narrow second-class road from Bar-le-Duc, just 21 feet wide. Petain and his able transport officer, Major Richard, threw all their energies and organising ability into making this road a life-line for Verdun. Richard went out requisitioning lorries throughout France, and gangs of Territorials were detailed to devote themselves entirely to the upkeep of the road. It was their tireless labour which kept the road intact and the lorries moving when a sudden thaw on February 28, following the long spell of hard weather, turned the surface to a sea of mud. The road was reserved strictly for the ceaseless flow of motor traffic in both directions. Any lorry that broke down was heaved aside into the ditch. With their solid tyres and top-heavy weight, many skidded on the bad surface; others caught fire. Drivers were inexperienced, and always fatigued. At night, the procession of dimly lit vehicles resembled 'the folds of some gigantic and luminous serpent which never stopped and never ended'. It is astonishing that the Germans never thought of bombing the road, which would so easily have been blocked: they had the aeroplanes to do it — C-class aircraft — and Zeppelins. Eventually vehicles were passing along the road at a daily avera; of one every 14 seconds, and for hours c end at a rate of the equivalent one every five seconds; ai of more than a division of soldiers was kept mending it. The road w; the artery through which the life-blood of France was

pumped it

into Verdun.

the immortal

Maurice

name of the

I

The tide, for the moment, had turned. By February 28, as the German official history says, 'the German attack on Verdun was virtually brought to a standstill'. The French now were fresher and more determined. Their original divisions had been replaced and the numbers greatly reinforced. The German formations, on the other hand, had not been relieved at all and their troops were feeling the strain of a week's intensive fighting: promised reserves were not forthcoming. Behind this shifting balance between attacker and defender can be seen a change in the balance of artillery; and it was the artillery's positioning and fire-power which were to rule the battlefield — no longer as a prelude, an opening barrage to clear the path, but as the constant and most demanding element of the battle. Now the German guns were flagging: they were having extreme difficulty in moving forward over the ground which they themselves had so violently cratered; and the sudden thaw turned the clay to deep mud. Worse still, the French had increased their heavy guns in the salient from 164 to more than 500, and they were shelling the German infantry with continuous and effective flanking fire from the left bank of the Meuse, in particular from the Bois Bourrus ridge. The left bank had therefore become an immediate problem to the Germans, and pressure to open an attack on it intensified in the Crown Prince's Fifth Army. The commanding height in this western sector,

Mort Homme, was the obvious objective; would also neutralise the Bois Bourrus ridge, behind which much of Petain's artillery was dug in. As late as February 26, with the right bank apparently within the Germans' grasp, Falkenhayn had again refused permission for an attack le

for its capture

on the

left

bank; but the next few days

changed his mind, and he let Knobelsdorf have his agreement on February 29, at the same time sending up reinforcements behind VI Reserve Corps holding the left bank trenches — X Reserve Corps, two further divisions and 21 batteries of heavies. Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, one of the most responsible of German commanders, noted at his headquarters in northern France: 'I hear that at Verdun the Left Bank of the Meuse is to be attacked now, too. It should have been done at once; now the moment of surprise is lost.' These German reserves — quite apart from those held immobilised opposite the currently inactive British front in the north — would have ensured a German breakthrough on the right bank to Verdun itself. Before the new German offensive could be launched, the increasing weight of French guns on the left bank was already taking a terrible toll. Many of these guns were old 155's, firing visually into the German ranks; and VII Reserve Corps, which had done so well initially on the Meuse flank, suffered prohibitive losses.

The

German wounded streaming back

were

'like a vision in hell'. Franz Marc, the painter, wrote in a letter from the Verdun front on March 3: 'For days I have seen nothing but the most terrible things a

human mind can

depict.'

He was

killed

next day by a French shell. The French at this time were slowly wresting back air superiority over the

The dramatic step had been taken of assembling some 60 of the French air aces, including Brocard, Nungesser, Navarre and Guynemer, and banding them together into the famous Groupe des Cigognes (the Storks). Altogether the French brought in 120 aeroplanes over battlefield.

Carrying their few bits and prisoners move away from

aires gave

Voie Sacree.

1258

VI

Verdun,

to set

against the Germans' 168

planes, 14 observation balloons and four Zeppelins. Poor German tactics and French verve tipped the scales, and in the next two

months, while the German balloons were shot down in flames, French observation planes were to contribute greatly to the success of their artillery, who once more

had eyes. The German

aces, Boelcke and upset the French supremacy, which the new Nieuport plane later helped to consolidate. It was clear to the French that the Germans would attack on the left bank now; but the first days of March slipped by, and the French were given time to assemble four divisions on that side and one in reserve, under General Bazelaire, the French VII Corps commander. As the German attack still failed to materialise, Petain was heard to remark, 'They don't know their business.' All the same, when it came, on March 6, starting with a bombardment comparable to that of February 21, the Germans at first had considerable success. They took the Meuse villages of Forges and Regneville and advanced towards the ridge of the Mort Homme on its north-eastern slope; but their attack on the northern side was held by a wall of fire from the French guns. The French 67th Division, defending the north-eastern approach to the Mort Homme had given ground too readily following the terror of the German bombardment, and over 3,000 of its men had surrendered by the end of the second day. It took a brilliant bayonet charge by a superbly disciplined regiment at dawn on March 8 to hold the Germans on this flank of the hill and force them to delay the final assault. In fact, the front now established on this north-eastern approach barely

Immelmann,

failed

to

shifted for the next month.

The Germans had planned a simultaneous attack on the right bank of the river, with Fort Vaux as their objective. The difficulties of bringing up ammunition to the guns over the bogged and cratered ground delayed them for two days. They then blundered in thinking the fort had been taken and marched up in column of fours straight into the French machine gun fire.

The 'mincing machine' The

on the Mort from the north began on March 14.

terrible frontal assault

Homme

With German reserves flowing in more seemed no limit to the men and shells they were willing to expend to freely, there

gain possession of this desolate hill. Attack and defence were evenly matched and the fighting swayed forward and back, until a deadly pattern of combat was established. It continued in this sector for the next two months. There would first be several hours of German bombardment; then their assault troops would surge forward to carry what remained of the French front line, which was no longer trenches but clusters of shell-holes. When the German attack had exhausted itself, ground down by the barrages from the French guns on the Bois Bourrus ridge to the south-east, the French would counterattack within 24 hours and drive the surviving Germans back again. But each flow and ebb of the tide brought the German high water mark a little further forward. The cost was terrible: by the end of March, 81,607 Germans had been killed and 89,000 French; and in this compressed and shelterless battle area a high proportion of the casualties were senior

commanding officers.

Here, on the bare slopes of the Mort Homme, there were no woods or ravines to

favour infiltration, so that the Germans had lost the advantage they had gained elsewhere by their expert use of these tactics. Their flame-throwers had become suicide weapons, for the pioneers were easy targets in open country; and the French flanking fire was even more crippling on these naked hill-sides. The Germans, in attacking the Mort Homme with the object of eliminating the threat to their exposed Meuse flank, now found their new right flank on the Mort

Homme

French time from the neighbouring hill on the west side, Cote 304. So this too would have to be attacked and taken. The German army, even more reluctantly than the French, was being sucked into this ever expanding battle in the Verdun itself a target for crippling

shell-fire

salient.

— this

The German Command was

not facing the

full

implications of

still

its

ex-

tended attack. Replacements were not being provided: the divisions were being kept too long in the line, and the gaps in the ranks merely filled with unseasoned youths. The French, in contrast, accepting the German challenge in its entirety, were

committed to a scheme of rapid rotation of units at Verdun. Petain, facing this same problem of exhaustion, was insisting, through his Noria system of reliefs, that no division remained more than a few days under fire. As a result, two-thirds of the French army was to be fed through the 'mincing machine' of Verdun, and its reserves drained. This was what Falkenhayn had hoped and expected — but he had not anticipated that the German army would also be 'bled white'. A key position at the base of Cote 304 fell to the Germans on March 20, after

French deserters had given them informaon the defences. But this success brought no further advantage, only staggering losses under the French machine gun fire. Signs of exhaustion and unwillingness to attack were increasing in the Gertion

man

ranks.

The German Fifth Army command structure was now simplified in preparation for a final assault. Mudra, a corps commander from the Argonne front, was put in command of the right bank, and Gallwitz, gunner, fresh from successes in the Balkans, in command of the left bank. On April 9 a massive simultaneous attack was mounted on Cote 304 and the Mort Homme. The Germans reached only a secondary crest of the Mort Homme; ami on Cote 304 the French guns kept up their relentless, devastating fire on the exposed German flank. Petain, recognising that an extremely dangerous attack had been held. issued next day his famous Order No 94. which he ended with the exhortation: 'Courage! On les aura!' ('We'll eel them!'). a

Further Reading Falkenhayn, E. von, General Headquarters, 1914-1916 (London 1960) Home, A., The Price of Glory, Verdun 1916

(London 1962) Joffre, Marshal, The Memoirs of Joffre (London 1932)

Marshal

Gen. B. E., La Grande Guerre sur le Front Occidental, Vols X-XII (Paris 1925) Romains, Jules, Men of Good Will. Vols 15-16 (London 1926) Palat,

[For Alistair

Home's

biography, see page

1035.]

1259

MB

was promoted

to

General and appointed to

command

the Fifth

Army in the campaign against France. Unfortunately the Prince was quite unsuited both in temperament and capacity for a soldier's life. His appearance, of course, was against it — his effete overbred face and gangling body fitting convincingly into none of the many uniforms that it was demanded that he should wear. But more important, he wasjjot warlike by disposition. He could, it was true, make warlike norees, and over the Saverne affair (when a Prussian Lieutenant mistreated the citizens of an Alsatian garrison town in 1913) struck a very 'blood and thunder' line on the issue of civil dissent. But his heart, if it was ever in the war with France, soon went out of it. At the time of the retreat from the Marne he was reputed to have confided to an intimate that the war was now lost to Germany and that she must seek to make peace, and he later went as far as putting that view to his father. But there- his views carried no weight at all, the Kaiser having made his playboy son a General only because the heirs to the subordinate German kingdoms of Bavaria and Wurttemberg had both earned the rank in their own merits. The dignity of the Hohenzollern house therefore demanded that if they should command armies, the Prussian Crown Prince must also. And when, in 1915, Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria became commander of a Group of Armies on the north-eastern front, a similar Group was subordinated to Crown Prince Wilhelm eldest son, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm Victor August Ernst, who was born in the Marble Palace, Potsdam, May 6, 1882, was destined from the beginning for a military career. At six he became the youngest Corporal in the Prussian army, and his education was thenceforth confined exclusively to military tutors, and after his father's accession to the throne he was allowed to communicate with him only through the Head of the Kaiser's Military Cabinet. At the age of 18 he was commissioned into the First Foot Guards — paragon of Prussian regiments — at 23 promoted to Captain and at 25 to Major. In 1910 he was given command of a cavalry regiment and in 1914, at the age of 32, he

The Kaiser's

Luxembourg and Lorraine. The Kaiser had naturally seen to it that his son discharged none of the responsibilities of a commander, having nominated as his Chief-of-Staff at the outbreak of the war the man who was resin

ponsible for his military instruction in peacetime, General von Knobelsdorf. The Chief-of-Staff conventionally played a leading part in the command of German armies; in this case, it is safe to regard Knobelsdorf as the effective director of the Fifth Army, and later of its operations. His nominal chief was thus largely freed to pursue at headquarters that life of chatter and wild philandering which he had led in Berlin in his happier years before the war.

his own promotion. A Lieutenant-Colonel only by 1907, after 30 years service, he was still in 1914 being denied promotion to Brigadier-General's rank, although he was exercising command of a brigade. It was, therefore, as a mere colonel of infantry (among his officers in the 33rd Regiment was Charles de Gaulle) that he

Henri-Philippe Benoni Omer Joseph Petain was born on April 24, 1856, at Canchy-a-la-Tour, near Arras, in north-eastern France, no distance from the battlefield of Vimy Ridge on which he was to win his reputation as a commander in May 1915. His family belonged to that class of prosperous, church-going peasants which had formed the backbone of French society since the Restoration, and which, after the defeats of 1870, was increasingly represented by its sons in the French officer corps. Petain, who was given an excellent education and excelled at his studies, seems to have decided early on a military career. He entered St Cyr in 1876, was commissioned a Second-Lieutenant in 1878 and for the next 22 years served, with devotion but very slow promotion, in the Chasseurs. He proved a competent enough officer, however, in what was after all the elite arm of the French infantry, to be selected for Staff College training in 1888. But his superiors' report on his performance in his first subsequent staff appointment— 'Silent, cold, systematic, an enemy of hasty decisions' — goes far to explain why Petain rose slowly in the peacetime army. He was not a likeable man. Worse, he could be distinctly contrary, and as often as not with his superiors. Appointed an instructor at the French small arms school in 1900, he adopted and proclaimed views- stressing the importance of aimed fire, which were wholly at Variance with those commanding fashionable support. Transferred nevertheless to the Staff College as a professor of tactics, he continued not only to deprecate the doctrines of mass attack but dlgo to make a display of strongly Catholic attitudes, at a moment 'when the leadership of the French army was at its most anti -clerical. Since he had earlier abandoned all religious observance, this new-found devotion seems to have been a deliberate gesture of defiance and contempt for officers who put politics above their professiowfelts effect was to delay further

went to war in August 1914. Petain was made for war and the war was to make him — not that he was ever to care much for the outward trappings of success. In the Battle of the Sambre in which he commanded the 4th Brigade and at the subsequent Battle of Guise, he showed such outstanding grip and drive that he was promoted to Brigadier-General in the field. On September 2, during the retreat, he was promoted to Major-General and appointed to command the 6th Division; and, having handled it with mastery in the Battles of the Marne and the Aisne, was again promoted in October to command the XXXIII Corps on the Arras front. With a command of that size, Petain was at last free to put into practice his long-considered and deeply felt ideas for a new tactical system. These, which were perfectly adapted to the novel conditions of trench warfare, entailed the

most thorough preparation for any offensive movement and the most intimate co-ordination of infantry and artillery action. For the headlong charge he had nothing but distaste; his attacks were to be preceeded by a methodical bombardment and to be accompanied by step-by-step artillery support. At Vimy Ridge on May 8, 1915, he was to show that such a programme could work. His superior's parsimony with reserves was then to show how such a success could be thrown away. Petain refused, however, to condemn his chief and, when promoted to command of the Second Army in July, warned that it was unlikely that a similar breakthrough could be obtained again, since the Germans would certainly repair the weaknesses in their defensive system which it had revealed. When he launched his new army into the attack on the Champagne front on September 25, 1915, his prediction was fulfilled. This offensive, on which Joffre had built his own hopes and those of many in the French government, proved a costly stalemate. Petain's reputation was unharmed by the result, however, and he was again promoted to supervise the training of all the French armies. It was an appointment this gruff, solitary (but far from celibate) old bachelor seemed to enjoy; for all his ruthlessness with incompetents and cowards, he abhorred waste of lives, and from that, these months at a quiet headquarters behind John Keegan the lines brought him a respite.

'Little Willie'

-

unsuited both in

temperament and capacity for a soldier's life

mam SjgE

1

.

.

A

|

A

M

^Lm

m

Petain — austere and aloof, he was a dedicated soldier and a master of the defensive

*&

JP'.MtWTf^'

'.

.

if'.'.

•

—

THE FALL OF

ERZERUM Anxious to forestall Turkey's reinforcement of the Caucasus Front, Russia abandoned the defensive and attacked Erzerum, Turkey's major bastion in the Caucasus, in early 1916. When the two forces met under extremely harsh winter conditions, it was superior Russian leadership which proved to be the decisive factor. Robert C. Walton The prelude

to the battle of Erzerum was the Turkish attempt to destroy the Russian Caucasus Army in a small-scale battle

encirclement during December 1914 and the early part of January 1915. The offensive was launched under the personal direction of Enver Pasha and was advised against by both Liman von Sanders, the head of the German mission to Turkey, and Enver's German Chief-of-Staff, Colonel Bronsart von Schellendorf. Enver's highhanded action ended in grim tragedy with the Turkish Third Army suffering a heavy defeat at the hands of the Russians, so that by the end of January 1915 the Third Army could muster only some 20,000 out of

of the original 120,000.

The Turkish defeat persuaded the Russians to abandon their defensive strategy and

to prepare for a

major offensive. How-

ever, Russian difficulties on the Eastern Front gave the Turks a respite of almost a year to recover from their defeat, while Russian troops and supplies were drawn off to the main theatre.

The Turks needed all the time they could get to recover. The German military mission under General Liman von Sanders had only ten months to begin the reorganisation of the army before Turkey again went to war. As Major Guse, the German Chief-of-Staff of the Third Army, noted after the war, ten months was not long enough for German influence to penetrate to the Caucasus, where the chief Turkish bastion, Erzerum, had long stood virtually neglected. The Turkish officer corps was not well trained, and had been demoralised by defeat as well as by the government's long-established habit of paying officers infrequently, which the reforms of the Young Turks had not immediately changed. Some senior officers were more interested in political intrigue than the responsibilities of high command. Mauser rifles and Krupp guns were also short, but Major Guse reported that, at least in the Caucasus theatre, there was no shortage of beasts of burden to carry supplies and this was a significant advantage. The other great Turkish advantage was the fine quality of the Anatolian peasants

who served in its army. What undermined the

fighting quality of the Turkish troops more than anything else were the weaknesses in the Turkish supply service. The best supply route was via the Black Sea to Trabzon, which was connected with Erzerum by the only really first class road in the area. Despite the presence of

1262

the Goeben and the Breslau, the Russians retained command of the Black Sea and the Turks could not rely upon the sea route. Supplies for all three Turkish fighting fronts had to be moved by the still incomplete, one-track Anatolian railroad. The Armenian persecutions further disrupted the supply system of the Third Army. Armenian clerical and labour units in the rear areas were dismissed from service. The deportation of the Armenians from their homes disrupted both the trade and agriculture which had served to supply the Turkish forces in the Caucasus. As a result of intrigue and imperial foolishness, the Grand Duke Nicholas had been relieved of the command of the Russian armies in the field and dispatched to the Caucasus as Viceroy and Commander-inChief in September 1915. He showed his ability by supporting the plans which Yudenich, whom he retained as Chief-ofStaff, presented to him at the end of December 1915. Yudenich foresaw that the British evacuation of Gallipoli would free considerable Turkish forces for other fronts and realised that because the collapse of Serbia had opened the land route between Berlin and Constantinople, these forces could be supplied with German and artillery. The combination and powerful artillery might turn the balance on the Caucasus front in favour of the Turks. Yudenich proposed to attack the Third Army, drive it out of

Austrian heavy

of fresh troops

Erzerum and,

if possible, destroy it before reinforcements could arrive. Once Erzerum was taken, he hoped to strike first at Trabzon on the coast and then to push on in the centre to Erzincan, the military headquarters of the Turkish Caucasus Command, while subsidiary forces rolled back the Turkish right wing beyond Bitlis in the south. Pressure from imperial headquarters for a Russian gesture to relieve pressure upon the British forces in Iraq made Yudenich's plan doubly attractive.

Advance through snow

drifts

Yudenich had carefully prepared his troops for heavy winter fighting in subzero temperatures and had presented the plan to the Grand Duke Nicholas on December 31, 1915, after every detail had been worked out. Once the Commander-in-Chief's assent had been given, it was possible to schedule the assault for January 10, 1916. The Turks were not expecting any trouble during the long cold winter and both the army commander, Kamil, as well

German Chief-of-Staff, Major Guse, were absent from the front. The total Turkish force numbered 78,000 and was responsible for holding a line which stretched diagonally from the 9,000-foot heights along the shore of Lake Van to the Russo-Turkish border on the Black Sea. The Turks faced a Russian army of 130,000 infantry and 35,000 cavalry which could draw upon a reserve of 160,000. The Russians had been further strengthened by a supply column of 150 trucks and the arrival of the 20 planes of the Siberian Air Squadron. The key to the Turkish position was Kopriikoy, where the main road from Kars to Erzerum crosses the River Aras. Here the Turks had carefully positioned 65,000 men and 100 guns to secure the approaches to Erzerum some 40 miles further down the road. Only a division and less than 20 guns were left to cover the vital towns of Hinis, Mus and Bitlis on the Turkish right flank, which were the chief sources of supply for the fortress of Erzerum. On January 14 General Vorobyev's 4th Caucasus Rifle Division had advanced along the Cakirbaba ridge through a blizzard and five-foot drifts of snow to break through between the northern and central positions of the Turkish line. Three days later Kopriikoy was in Russian hands and only the Russian as his

failure

exploit their success quickly possible for 40,000 badly shaken Turks to take shelter in Erzerum. The Russian success at Kopriikoy set the pattern for what was to follow at Erzerum. The Russians diverted the attention of the Turks to the wrong sector of the front and caused them to commit their reserves there, while an attack was made over a mountain ridge which the Turks considered virtually impassable and which divided two sectors of the Turkish position. The Turks seemed to have difficulty in coordinating their defence in mountainous terrain. Each sector was left to fight it out alone. Erzerum lay in a hollow at 6,000 feet

made

to

it

above sea level surrounded by mountain peaks and dominated at an 180-degree angle from north to south by a series of ridges, the most important of which was the 500-800-foot Deve-Boyun ridge through which the main road came. The DeveBoyun ridge was continued to the south by the Palandoken Dag, over which a narrow track leading from Ta§kesen passed. North of Deve-Boyun ridge was Giiney Hill. Both the hill and Deve-Boyun ridge were, in fact, dominated by an even more towering ridge, the Kargapazar Dag, which divides the Aras valley from the Western Euphrates and rises to more than 9,600 feet above sea level. Beyond Giiney Hill stands the only other

Erzerum

plain, the

way

into the

Bogaz pass, which en-

ters from the north passing along the base of the Karagol Dag and the Dumlu Dag ridges which lie to the north of it. The fortified camp, built by British engineers after 1878, left Erzerum open to

the west and followed the ridges which reached in a half circle around the eastern side of the city. The defences were constructed upon the assumption that the

Deve-Boyun Palandoken Dag ridges were the key to Erzerum. Both the British engineers and their German successors in the 1890's assumed that the Kargapazar Dag was impassable and left a gap between the Tafet fort, the last link in the

Above: Erzerum and the Caucasus Front. The Turks, understrength and partly demoralised, failed to hold a naturally strong position

whose

fortifications

soldiers, but

were out of date. Below: Turkish cavalry- fine peasant no match for the better-led Russian peasant soldiers

L263

northern

ii.ardin

fortifications

pass,

and the Cobnn dede

the

remainder moved to attack Fort Tafet on Februarj The attack was supported l>\ Przevalski's men coming down from ihe northern heights and up the Bogaz pass. he fort fell to an attack made from three sides before reinforcements from the Turkish centre could arrive. Przevalski's men moved forward to link up with Vorobyev's advance from the Kargapazar ridge. The way into the plain was open for Przevalski's Cossacks. Kamil realised what had happened too late. His Hank was turned and to save his army he had to abandon Erzerum.

which <. com-

fort,

1

no dolihle ri nu of I'm ilinu the main position, in fact, the German engineers made onh two additions to the British work- To secure further the Palandoken ridge, they added forts PalanI

!

i

doken West and Rast, which were

'I

built

along the southern rim of the ridge at an altitude of almost 9,000 feet. The northern into the Krzerum plain was guarded Fort 1'aU't at the head of the Bogaz pass and Kara-gobek fort seven miles to

entn b\

south at the other end of the pass. The Germans hail about a year to help the Turks make up for lost time. After the Sarikamis a German mission under General von Posselt began to do 'all tin-

that was humanh possible to get it into a state of defence', hut was laced with a complete lack of the proper means to do so.

Retreat and panic

Russian Cossack officers - a Cossack regiment first Russian unit to enter Erzerum

was the

What

Posselt did do was to link up the with trenches and barbed wire entanglements which were in themselves more formidable than the old forts. But the five-mile nap still remained between the northern forts and the central positions. When the Russians arrived, the forts had about 300 guns, of which no more than 30', were modern. To garrison the place adequately required about twice the number of men who had found shelter in it after the loss of the Kopriikoy position. Kamil, who had by now returned to the front, and his officers were not unduly concerned about this, for they believed that the Russians could not possibly attack before spring and that by then fresh Turkish forces would have reached the fortress. forts

The key

to

Erzerum

Yudenich had no intention of waiting until the spring. The IV Caucasian Corps was ordered to take Hinis and block possible Turkish reinforcements from Mus and Bitlis. Hinis fell on February 7. Yudenich's Chief-of-Staff, Colonel Maslovski, his Cossacks and his tiny air force began to scout the Erzerum position on January 20. The evidence which was brought to Yudenich all pointed to the conclusion that Erzerum was not able or prepared to withstand an

attack. Most interesting to Yudenich was the report that the Kargapazar Dag ridge had not been occupied by the Turks. He

appealed to the Grand Duke to be allowed to storm the place. An affirmative answer meant committing the last 8,000,000 rounds of the Caucasus Army's munitions reserve; the rest had already been sent off to the main Russian theatre. The Grand Duke hesitated and then on January 23 gave his permission.

As Yudenich saw the situation, the Kargapazar ridge was the key to Erzerum and he ordered Yorobyev's 4th sion to seize it on January 23.

Rifle Divi-

A

two-day delay in carrying out this order gave the Turks a chance to move up to the ridge but Vorobyev's men pushed them off it back onto the western slopes where they remained, while the Russians dragged guns up to the plateau at the top of the ridge. By the end of the month the whole division was in position on the ridge, ti. lugh only smaller parties of men stayed o the plateau for more than a few hours at time. At 9,000 feet the cold was too intei e and in some places the snow was more t. the height an activity of a horseman deep. The Ru. unduly did not seem to alarm the Turl Yudenich's plan was simple The 4th i

m

1264

I

Rifle Division was to come down the ridge, move through the gap in the Turkish de-

fences and cut behind the main Turkish Vorobyev's attack was to ease the way for the main assault which Yudenich intended to make through the Bogaz pass. The forts in the pass were to be taken by assault from both the Kargapazar ridge and the Dumlu Dag ridge on the other side of the pass. Voloshinov-Petrichenko's division, which had been moved up to the forts.

Kargapazar

down

Dag

ridge,

was

to

come

north face and attack Fort Tafet at the end of the pass. Przevalski's men ill Turkistan Corps) were to drive up the pass and attack the southern fort both from the Dumlu Dagi heights and the defile itself. Once the fort had fallen they were to move up to Fort Tafet and support VoloshinovPetrichenko's assault. After Fort Tafet had fallen the Cossacks assigned to Przevalski's its

corps were to sweep into Erzerum plain. To occupy the Turks the 39th Division was to assault the forts on the DeveBoyun ridge arid the artillery was to concentrate upon the ridge forts as well. It was assumed that this would cause the Turks to commit their reserves to the centre. The assault was to begin at 1400

hours on February 1 1 Most German accounts say that the first Russian attack failed. The evidence does not support this claim. During the night of February 11 the 153rd Bakinski Regiment took the Dalaneoz fort on the DeveBoyun ridge at bayonet point and held it with light reinforcements during the next day, despite eight Turkish counterattacks. The initial Russian success, plus assaults upon Palandoken East and the other forts along the two main ridges convinced the Turkish command that the reserve should be committed in the centre. The attack in the north began early on the morning of the 12th. It was greatly facilitated by the commander of the Turkish A' Corps who did nothing to co-ordinate the defence of the pass entrusted to his three divisions. Resistance at Fort Karagobek collapsed on the first day as the Russian assault came unexpectedly from the heights and the pass itself. The garrison, which had not been prepared for an attack, blew up its stores and retreated down the defile to Fort Tafet. During the 13th the Turks fought stubbornly along the pass but continued to give ground. An entire battalion of Voloshinov-Petrichenko's force froze to 'death on the way down from the Kargapazar ridge, but the

Air reconnaissance reported to Yudenich on the morning of the 15th that the Turks were moving west away from Erzerum. By afternoon the last forts were being evacuated and the retreat toward Erzincan was beginning to turn into a panic. If Yudenich had ordered the immediate capture of Ilica, which controlled the junction of the roads to Erzincan, Trabzon and the Euphrates bridge, the whole Turkish force might have been taken prisoner. But he turned his attention to Erzerum first. The Terek Cossack Regiment entered it at 0700 hours on the morning of the 16th, the same day that Mus fell in the south Ilica was taken on the night of the 16/ 17th and the 34th Division of the Turkish XI Corps, which was serving as the rearguard, was wiped out the next day a little north of the town. The Russians won 327 guns and in all about 12,000 prisoners at a cost of 10,000 killed and wounded and 4,000 men suffering from frostbite. By the time they had finished retreating, the Turks had less than 25,000 men left with perhaps 30-40 guns. For the second time within a year the Third Army would have to be reconstituted. On February 23 Turkish diplomatic sources in neutral countries denied the Russian claim of victory and issued a statement which asserted that Erzerum was an open city of no military importance which had been abandoned voluntarily without loss. What had really happened was that an understrength. poorly equipped and already partially demoralised army had failed to hold a naturally strong position

whose

quately cover

it

fortifications did not ade-

and were

in

any case out

The fine peasant soldiers of the Turkish army had been expected to do the of date.

impossible against the better equipped and led peasant soldiers of the Grand Duke Nicholas' Caucasus Armv. Further Reading

W

E. D.. Muratoff. P.. Caucasian Battle(Cambridge University Press 1953) Falls. C, The Great War (Putnam 1959) Golovine. N N The Russian Army in the World War (Yale University Press 1931) Trumpener. U., Germany and the Ottoman Empire 1914-1918 (Princeton University

Allen.

fields

.

Press 1968)

ROBERT C WALTON

has been Professor of History State University since 1973 and was previously an Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia He received his

at

Wayne

Bachelor's degree from Harvard University, and then read History at Yale University where he gained a Ph D Since then, he has taught history and published books on Zwingh and his Reformation movement Military history has long been a hobby, and in 1972. F E Peacock published his book Over There European Reaction to Americans m the First

World War

DOUAUMONT *'•

Wm.

Fort Douaumont, the cornerstone of the Verdun defences, fell to its German captors with hardly a shot being fired in its defence. This amazing episode, in which isolated German patrols were able to penetrate the very bowels of the fortress and help themselves to a much-needed meal without meeting

any opposition, is told this week by Kenneth Macksey. Below: Seen from one of the arches in the back entrance to the fort — a broken gun

i

surrender

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\ whole year before the Germans Launched their offensive against the Verdun sector, the) had experimented with their great 42-cm guns against the linch pin of the French fortifications - Fort Douaumont.

Sixty-two shells had been

some wa\

off,

fired

and from

German observation smoke and dust hanging

in the

posts, the pall of

over the target and the total lack of response by the French guns seemed to confirm that the effects o\' the bombardment had been comparable to those at Liege, Antwerp. Maubeuge and Przemvsl. It did not occur to the ever-confident Germans that the French might have withheld their fire because their guns happened to be out of range of the front line, nor were the Germans to realise that the enormous structural strength of Douaumont was greater than anything they had tackled so tar — fully comparable, in fact, with the past high standards of French skill in fortification.

The French were well aware, before the war. of what destruction modern shells could wreak. In 1886 they had carried out trials against their own Fort Malmaison determine the effect of 8-inch shells upon existing fortifications. The result had been quite conclusive, amounting to

to the almost total disruption of the concrete fabric and the steel cupolas. At

that time the military necessity for fronforts was not seriously in dispute,

tier

although there would always be those who would claim that an immobile position

was bound

succumb

end to highly remained that, in the past, a fortress barrier had frequently given time for an army which had lost the initiative to gain time in which to restore its power, particularly when a system of mutually supporting forts had blocked some vital gap. And so the French had put in hand a major reconstruction of their to

mobile forces; the

principal

forts,

in the

fact

particularly

those

at

Verdun where they blocked the vital entrance into France. The new methods employed

consisted

of

sinking the actual in the ground and

accommodation deeper

covering them with successive layers of protective materials — 18 feet of earth above four feet of concrete, over four feet of sand and finally another four feet of concrete. Beneath this dense roof, which was designed both to detonate and absorb the shock of the greatest projectiles that artillerists could envisage, there lay a miniature town consisting of barracks, magazines and store rooms all linked together by a labyrinth of passages. Surrounding Fort Douaumont — which was some 350 yards across — was a 24-foot deep ditch which in turn was barred from the outside by two deep belts of barbed wire barriers backed up by a line of 8-foot railings. But these were only a shield. Behind the barricades lay nests of pom-poms and machine

guns set deep in the earth and in cupolas sweep the approaches to the fort. In addition the south-western approach was covered by two 75s in a casemate. Yet,

to

armament was only of a defensive nature, supplemented by such supporting fire as could be brought down by Fort Vaux to the south-east. What little influence Douaumont might have beyond this internal

its

own wire perimeter depended almost upon three turret guns — twin 75s

entirely

emplaced on the north escarpment and a single 155-mm gun on the east — the range of the latter not much greater than 8,000 yards. The turrets were the most ingenious part of the fort; the gun was encased in a thick steel cupola which rested flush with the concrete roof of the fort when not in action, and which could be raised by a system of counterweights when required to shoot. But, although the 75s could develop a very high rate of fire and the 155could throw three shells a minute, this was by no means heavy in weight or range compared with what could be brought into action by the mass of artillery in the field armies. Seen from afar, with only the mound of the underground works and the squat domes of the gun turrets and observation cupolas visible above a 1,200 foot hill, Douaumont was not in itself impressive. Its importance lay in its physical strength and its position at the dominant place in

mm

the Verdun defences. And it had proved its invulnerability under the bombardment by 42-cm guns, even though, to those inside, the arrival of each shell had seemed like an earthquake. But the fabric had remained unbroken and the gun turrets untouched, and ready for action should the enemy ever come within range. The most deadly enemies of Douaumont were French military theory, and French policy and inefficiency—not German guns.

Obvious redundancy At the outbreak of the war it had been generally accepted in French military circles that, despite the overall implementation of a policy of outright offensive, fortresses could play the part of a shield along the frontiers to protect mobilisation while it was in progress. Thereafter, the field armies would take their place alongside and in between the forts, not — as at Metz in 1870 — within them. Despite the obvious failure of the preordained offensive in face of field fortifications, the opponents of forts could still point in 1915 to the obvious redundancy of these installa-

Nowhere had forts survived a serious bombardment — and the success of Douaumont in resisting the 42s in February was insufficient to overrule their argutions.

ments. In any case, and not illogically in the light of the French commitment to major offensives throughout 1915, forts

which were not in the front

made

to

line could

make do with fewer men and

be

less

It was with these consideramind that Joffre permitted the

equipment. tions

in

withdrawal of certain guns from the Ver-

dun forts in August 1915 in order to supplement the artillery of the field armies: Douaumont lost the 75s from the casemate its turret guns or pom-poms. It also suffered the removal of all 500 infan-

but not

trymen,

leaving

only

the

artillerymen

who were serving the turret guns when the German offensive began in February 1916 — 56 Territorial gunners commanded by the

elderly,

white-bearded

Sergeant-

Major Chenot.

More serious yet, the peculiar division of responsibility between the Governor of Verdun (from whom Chenot took his orders) and General Chretien, whose Corps held that part of the line, encouraged Chenot to behave independently of the troops who held the ground in the vicinity of his fort. When Chretien had visited the fort earlier that year he had

XXX

refused permission to enter by Chenot: 'The fort opens only to the Governor of Verdun', he is reported to have said. Chretien did not dispute the order and when the battle developed, Chenot was free to fire his guns at will, but not to any ordered plan. Not even the Governor of Verdun, General Herr, had a clear conception of the role of the forts: on February

been

24 he had ordered his engineers to demolish them all, though Douaumont escaped because the officer detailed to do fhe work had not got forward. Regaining his composure, Herr then ordered Chretien to reoccupy the line of forts and hold them to the last — an Chretien's

which arrived at as he was handing over command to General Balfourier and which, under the strain of a dreadful moment of tension, was never passed on. So, on February 25, the Governor of Corps' commander lived Verdun and in the belief that Douaumont, along with the other forts, had been strongly reinforced with infantry, whereas, in fact, the nearest French infantry were not within 1,000 yards of the fort's perimeter and could see very little of what was happening there because of the snow that was falling. Chenot, meanwhile, with all his order

HQ

XXX

men except the four-man reliefs serving the 155-mm turret, were crouched in the deepest part of the fort, out of reach — they hoped — of the dreaded 42-cm shells which had sapped the morale of men whose nerves lay bare under the repeated concussion from these monstrous projectiles. Thus far, over 1,000 shells of different kinds had already been fired in their direction and more were on the way. On the 25th Douaumont was thus with- c out direction, without a sense of purpose | and, to all other intents, defenceless.

*<•*** *

On the evening oi February 24 the leading elements of the German /// Corps had >;ot to within a mile of Douaumont from the northeast having chased the French 37th African Division, and more particularly it< Zouave regiments, pell-mell to the south. The advance was to be continued towards the fort nexl day, following the invariable deluge of fire, but in .

accordance with Falkenhayn's 'mincing machine' policj was not to attempt to take the fort since this in itself was expected to require a major operation on its own Instead the line was to be pushed no closer than 750 yards and was then to be dug m. Douaumont stood in the path of the 12th Grenadier Regiment while the 24th Brandenburg Regiment was intended to conic up on their left and the 20th Regiment still further to their left. But it was not until too late that cither regiment received details of the plan: when the guns ceased fire at /en> hour the only German infantry fully prepared to advance were the 24th Brandenburgers who gained a great reputation for dash and valour in all the campaigns in which they had already partaken since L914. This day luck was on their side from the outset, for having decided to cong tinue advancing, regardless of the fact hat neither the 12th on their right nor the 20th on their left were going with them. g r they entered, quite fortuitously, the gap

which had heen opened wide by the debacle w Inch had overtaken he French .'57th Division the previous day. Before them, at the top of a lon<^ slope, loomed Douaumont, its surface earth a rippled moonscape of broken soil littered with shattered stakes and mangled tentacles of wire and railings, At a steady rate the 155-mm gun turret mot visible from the valley) was tossing shells oxerhead to the north, hut apart from that the fort just exhibited a threatening silence while the only Frenchmen in sight were scattered fugitives, routed by the German infantry and running south whenever the barrage permitted. The Brandenburgers

stantiated.)

advanced

obstacles

t

bility to a

snowstorm which cut visihare 200 yards. Yet they did not

in

a

advance unseen, for those who got into the valley became engaged with the French 95th Regiment which was holding the village of Douaumont. and a small dedicated party of Germans who actually decided to investigate the approaches to the fort were seen mistil} through the smoke and snow climbing the northern slope. Fire was opened by the local French commander and as quickly cancelled when that officer reached the conclusion that since the target did not reply and since it was moving into a curtain of German shellfire the advancing figures could only he French. (A later French claim that the Germans wore Zouave caps is not sub-

It seemed to him that he had committed the error of momentarily firing on friendly forces -a not uncommon (went at the host of times. Hut in fact there was more than one party of Germans mak-

ing for the

fort, each in breach of orders short of the perimeter, and none of them aware of the others' presence. 'fhe leading party was not of the 24th Brandenburgers, hut a section of ten Pioneers, led by a Sergeant Kunze, who hail heen attached to the first infantry wave for the routine job of clearing obstacles from the path of the assault troops and to help in consolidation of the objec-

to

halt

tive.

Kun/e's task was

to

eliminate

all

of the infantry' and Kunze was a regular soldier drilled to obey orders no matter how incredible they might in

front

seem. In the initial advance he had found few obstacles, hut instead had become heavily involved, as the day wore on. in close combat with scattered Frenchmen. Nevertheless, he had arrived on the objective with his men unscathed, to see ahead of

him

may

thi'

mass

of

Douaumont. Whatever

he said of the stultifying effects of Prussian discipline on the barrack square, it was by no means true to suggest that the German rank and file were thus deprived of all initiative, and indeed the basic code of the German army aimed at inciting the men to deeds beyond the call of duty. Kunze could now detect an obstacle such as mi^ht

stop the infantry indefinitely — an obstacle which, moreover, seemed strangely passive while it took heavy punishment from a hail of German shells. Just one gun, sunk somewhere in the mound ahead, continued to shoot rhythmically into the distance.

Solitary escapade Kunze resolved to attempt the reduction of this great obstacle, quite ignorant of how it might be done with only ten men. filven though he reached the wire quite unchallenged by way of a gulley, the omens

were discouraging. Away to his right he heard French machine gun fire from Douau-

mont

village cutting into the flank of the

24th where they clung, exposed and falling on the slope. In front, the wire was disrupted by the shellfire (which was still falling since the German artillerymen were not to know that anybody would be so rash as to advance beyond the objective on to the strongest part of the French defences) and a few minutes work with wire cutters easily opened a way to the railings. The railings, however, were intact and it was not until Kunze had led his men left handed to the north-east corner that a fourfoot gap was found, At this moment the

serious doubts began to cross the minds of the party as to the wisdom of their unpremeditated advance, and the sight of the 24-foot ditch Idid nothing to dispel those doubts. They wavered until the blast from first

a nearby

mind

for

German shell made up Kunze's him as, it blew him, full toss, over

the parapet to the floor of the ditch below. Still nothing happened. Kunze was merely sturEned and while his corporal lost his nerve and announced that he was withdrawing, Kunze was able to persuade the rest of his followers to scramble down to

Below left: German

infantry dig themselves into the shell-torn earth in front of Fort Douaumont. Shell bursts mark the German artillery's efforts to range the fortress. Above: An incitement to posthumous glory for the French: 'Better to be buried beneath the ruins of this fort than to surrender.' Below: Verdun: the Germans push forward. Bottom: The formidable but unwatchedouter defences of Fort Douaumont

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was an embrasure in the outer wall through which the muzzle of a pom-pom gun could be seen. It was out of reach, 12 feet above t he ground, but quite inactive — the only sounds, in fact, were those that came from the continuing German bombardment punctuated by the monotonous booms of the 155-mm turret gun firing from almost above their heads. Kunze now resorted to assault course practice and tried to form his men into a human pyramid — manoeuvre of which they had long since lost the art and which introduced an element of slap-stick comedy on the several occasions when the pyramid collapsed in a heap. At last, however, Kunze reached the embrasure and managed to squeeze through it. It was deserted and he quickly opened the door to admit his men, but this time the example of the corporal proved infectious and only two would follow. In front of them yawned an unlit gallery with a passage leading off and, more frightening yet, an atmosphere of the utter silence of a tomb, contrasting insidiously with the racket of the battlefield they had left behind. But Kunze was not to be stopped. Possibly out of sheer curiosity, he plunged down the tunnel which led him, in fact, straight under the ditch almost to the base of the 155-mm turret, and once there the boom of the gun and the rattle of empty shell ~ cases acted as the incentive to his next m move. Leaving his staunch escort of two to join him. Close by

i

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cover his rear, he moved to the sound of the gun, flung open a door and, pistol in hand, leapt among the four man gun-crew shouting, Handehoch. He was instantly obeyed. The only piece of offensive armament in Fort Douaumont had been silenced without a shot being fired. With four prisoners Kunze was at a disadvantage, though nothing could now curb his ardour. Pushing the Frenchmen before tried to make his way back to his but he took the wrong turning and arrived, instead, at the southern fore-court. Here the prisoners took their chance and dived through a doorway — followed by Kunze waving his pistol. But no sooner had Kunze lost his first captures in the passages (ill lit by kerosene lamps) than he came upon no less than 20 more astonished Frenchmen in a candlelit barrack-room —

him he

escort,

mutual surprise that was resolved by the arrival, nearby, of a great

German shell the

which extinguished the candles. Taking advantage of the confusion, Kunze slammed the steel barrack-room door and secured it. In one move he had penned in

blast of

almost half the garrison, not one of whom in the least aware that only one German was loose in their midst. So confused were the Frenchmen, in fact, that when next Kunze met an unarmed member of the garrison walking down a corridor, the Frenchmen mistook the German's rank and addressed him as 'mon Capitaine'

was

Concrete, stone, earth and human spirit against the shattering and demoralising hammer blows of the German 42-cm shells The

Fort de Moulainville at Verdun. This and all the other forts in the area took atremendous pounding from the giant German guns, but held out

which seems to have prompted Kunze to attempt the capture of the officers of the tort At all events, he managed to make his new captive understand that it was the officers' quarters he now wished to visit. Hut there were no officers present and all Kunze found in their mess was a table laden with wine and a variety of food — whereupon soldierly virtue gave way to human failing. Kunze had not eaten a full meal for several days and the sight of the feast was too much for him. Standing his guide to one side he sat down to eat. By now, however, Kunze and his two comrades (still standing guard) were not .

v

the only

Germans

present.

The

first

fresh

were from a platoon from 6th Company of the 24th under Lieutenant Radtke — a reservist officer who realised, quicker than Kunze, the possible reasons for Douaumont's silence when he reached arrivals

the perimeter wire without being fired on. To him, only the German barrage had prevented a further advance and, try though he might by firing signal cartridges in the air to get the gunners to desist, he could make no impression. The shells kept on 'Calling and his men seemed to be losing heart. Under these conditions it is often o safer to advance than to retreat if only because, .having retreated, somebody less in,

]

-»«'

volved will merely order you forward again. Radtke advanced and broke through the wire to the right of Kunze's gap, coming in at the apex of the fort where a vast hole had been torn in the railings. With 20 men Radtke jumped into the ditch at about the same time as Kunze was taking his meal, but unlike Kunze, Ratke and his party tackled the top of the fort, crawling forward in the open under the persistent bombardment until they found a way into the barracks at the centre of the fort.

Almost at once, unarmed Frenchmen be*gan to fall into his hands. But not all, for by then the batch Kunze had locked in the barrack room had escaped (as Kunze was to discover when he went to revisit them) and four gunners* quite oblivious of what had happened, had gone to the 155-mm turret, found it unoccupied but had started routine firing again. Now the Commander of 7th Company of the 24th, Captain Haupt, put in an appearance with the few of his men who remained. Haupt was the one man on the German side who turned a genuine Nelson eye to his orders. When one of his officers objected to the proposal to advance on the fort, Haupt had overruled him. Like his predecessors, Haupt also got into the fort without being fired upon by the garrison, but he at least

Above

left: Oberleutnant von Brandis, the self" )rocfaimed victor of Fort Douaumont. Below: 3rm|ns pose outside their

**~

&

A-

to put a stop to the German artillery fire by having a large artillery flag flown from the ramparts.

managed

Within the fort the French garrison arrived at the final stages of collapse. Led by a prisoner, Haupt was taken to Sergeant-Major Chenot where he hid on the lowest floor of the fort. Germans who were not aware of each other's presence began to meet up and, a quarter of an hour after Haupt had arrived, were joined by yet another of their Companies — or what remained of it — 8th Company under Captain von Brandis. Brandis had been on the extreme right of the 24th and his unit had suffered most severely in consequence. He had persevered because he had seen Haupt's party go in ahead of him and because the flying of the artillery flag (which he must also have seen) would signify that the place had fallen. Entering by the same breach as Haupt, Brandis also made his way underground and took 26 French prisoners. The entire French garrison was now under lock and key, their place taken by 90 Germans who at last became united at 1 700 hours — nearly two hours after

Kunze had first arrived. It was to be longer yet before the French Command were to know what had happened -the first hint of trouble coming when a local patrol was surprised and repulsed by Brandis's men at 1715 hours. These were the only Frenchmen to approach the fort from outside all afternoon. Their bad news would be some time reaching the French leaders and longer yet to be translated into counteraction.

now remained

for Haupt to put the a state of defence facing south and to discover whether the French had placed a mine beneath the fort to blow them all sky high. He ascertained this by holding the prisoners immediately above the main magazine: there was no panic and it could therefore be assumed there was no mine Finally, the glorious news had to be carried to German headquarters, with a request that the rest of the 24th should be brought up to consolidate the victory. The regiment's triumph had also to he publicised and to this task Haupt sent Brandis (who was his next in seniority). Thus the first account of the battle came from Brandis the man least aware of all that had taken place — and it was Brandis who asked for and received permission to carry the news to higher headquarters until none were left in doubt that the credit went to him and Haupt. Radtke's part was forgotten when he was badly wounded next da\ and Kunze slipped unnoticed into the background. In due course Brandis was to be lionised by a nation seeking heroes and it was to be over 20 years before the record It

place, in

.

was set straight. Douaumont had

fallen without a drop of blood being spent by a single French de fender and without one of those defenders drawing blood in the defence of their charge. The Germans bail taken the corner stone of the Verdun position as their offensive entered an even fiercer phase e

Further Reading

I

Home,

> e

Alistair, The Fall of Fort Douaumont (Macmillan 1962) Home, Alistair, The Price of Glory (Macmillan

|

1962)

^

Radtke,

| [For

E.,

Douaumont -Wie

es Wirklich W,u

Kenneth Alacksev's biography, see

i page 245.]

>

—

'

I'lir long dialogue between Great Britain and Germany concerning Portugal's over-

seas provinces is well known Ai the bottom of these negotiations always lay, on the one hand, the difficulties, normal enough at the time, of Portugal's financial position am) on the other band the idea, wideh accepted in those days, that colonial dominion should be adapted to the most efficacious colonial torical

system ami not

to his-

The German dream of whereby German East Africa

rights.

Mittelafrika,

would be extended to take m the French and Belgian Congo, Angola and British Central Africa, had lor long posed a threat to Portuguese Africa, both on the continent and m the islands. Prince Lichnowsky, at that time German Ambassador in London, disclosed an agreement which, inspired by this German dream, was being negotiated between Germany and Great Britain. Only the threat of war prevented it from being signed. According to Lichnowsky, a clause in tlu- agreement promised to 'secure to all appearances, the integrity and independence o( the Portuguese Empire' but would express no more than the intention of aiding Portugal financially and economically. Thus, the text was not at variance with the Anulo-Portuguese Alliance. Nevertheless,

PORTUGAL AT

WAR

In Portugal, opinion was divided over her role in the war.

As

Britain's 'oldest ally'

she was pledged to a measure of co-operation with the Allies, and in July 1916 she

was

'cordially invited' to fight at their side. H. A. Cidade

Far left: General de Abreu, commander of the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps. Left: Dr Bernadino Machado. His government was replaced by that of Dr Jose de Almeida (above) who favoured intervention in the war. Right: General Gomes da Costa, commander of the 1st Division. Far right: Proposed partition of Portugal's colonies by Germany and Britain

every Portuguese was well aware of what was awaiting him once war had begun. A victory by the Central Powers would be especially ominous. But in the event of a negotiated peace, Portugal felt it necessary to attain, tbrough co-operation in the war, a seat at the table where that peace was to be negotiated. With what human and financial resources, and in what degree of activity she could achieve such co-operation now had to be decided. It was obvious that many people within the Republic were indifferent to the international prestige which a successful solution to this question of intervention in the war would achieve. But by staying out of the war Portugal remained in a good position to help Britain — her oldest ally — by

supplying resources, both her own and those obtained from other neutral countries. In Africa, it was inevitable that Britain should take advantage of Portugal's proximity to her own colonies and even went so far as to request military aid. The British Consul in Lourenco Marques obtained from the Portuguese Ambassador in London, Teixeira Gomes, the British government

1274

of British Central Africa; he also requested — and obtained — permission for the passage of British troops through Chinde, to reinforce attacks on German troops.

Opinion in Portugal was divided. Professor Afonso Costa's Democratic Party, and the Evolutionist Party, led by Dr Antonio Jose de Almeida, pressed for intervention. The Unionist Party, led by Dr Brito Camacho, preached the policy of caution, as expressed by its leader: 'That which Great Britain has the right to demand from us must be plainly asked for and should not be such as would exceed our normal capabilities and put in risk our own safety in the colonies.' The government, presided over by Professor Bernadino Machado, with Professor Freire de Abdrade as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and General Pereira de Eca as War Minister, comprised several advocates for intervention who lacked, however, the ability to make bold decisions. Their conversations with the London Foreign Office were lengthy. Through the Portuguese Ambassador in London, Teixeira Gomes, the British government

for 'any declarations upon which could safely be based our procedure as allies.' The reply was to implore Portugal to abstain from making an official declaration of her neutrality. The Portuguese government replied that Great Britain would, in any situation in which she found herself, have us at her side. And to the request that the defence of Portuguese African possessions against surprise attack from the Germans should be studied immediately, Great Britain reiterated her promise to fulfil the stipulations of the Alliance. Meanwhile, she would be satisfied with Portugal's silence on the question of neutrality. In the future, if any request not compatible with this situation were made, then an appeal would be made to the Alliance. The Portuguese government was not entirely happy with the ambiguous relationship witb a country which was on nearpeaceful terms witb it in Europe and on near-hostile terms in Africa. But on October 10 1914, Sir Edward Grey sent a memorandum to Lisbon in which he said: 'Considering the loyal and unhesitating

was asked

manner

in which the Portuguese government complied with the request of nondeclaration of neutrality, we are encouraged to invoke the Ancient Alliance be-

tween Portugal and this country, to invite the Portuguese government to put aside its neutrality

and place

itself actively

beside

Great Britain and her Allies. The position of the Allied forces would be considerably strengthened if the Portuguese government could send out now an artillery unit, later to be followed by other forces, for the purpose of co-operating with our forces in the present campaign in Africa. The details of this co-operation would naturally be decided between the Portuguese military

authorities

General

and

the

French and British

Staff'.

But the Foreign Office did not agree to Portugal's intervention. Her 'dishonourable ambiguity' served Allied interests well enough. Sir Edward Grey, however, utilised his diplomatic skill so as to attribute Portuguese aid as coming spontaneously from her and not as a result of a British demand. The situation was still undetermined when the Portuguese government — prompted by Britain — requisitioned and immediately occupied the German ships which after the beginning of hostilities had been

new government, intensive military preparations were immediately begun. These became known as the Miracle of Tancos, named after a village near Abrantes, on the right bank of the Tagus. The government, which had 'replaced that of Bernadino Machado, was presided over by Antonio Jose de Almeida, with Afonso Costa as Minister of Finance and Augusto Soares as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Colonel Norton de Matos was the War Minister and he authorised the training of an entire division — the nucleus of the future Portuguese Expeditionary Corps (CEP) -for the sector of Neuve Chapel le and Vieille Chapelle. The division was comtion of a

manded by General Tamagnini de Abreu with Major Roberto Baptista and Ferreira Martins as Chief-of-Staff and Deputy Chiefmost prestigious of-Staff— two of the officers of the Portuguese Army. In three months the training was complete and the division set out for France to occupy its sector, where another officer of considerable merit, Captain Bento Roma, enthusiastically directed a further period of training. This training camp was in operation throughout Portugal's participation in the war and included a School of Military Officers. Portuguese troops occupied a trapezium

keeping with the sacrifices to which was urging those in France. President Sidonio, however, and many of his coltion in it

leagues felt the necessity of continuing the efforts begun and he made a declaration to this effect: 'Portuguese soldiers are fighting in Africa and Europe against the Germans in a war that was declared upon us, a war which we will continue until the end, and that end will be the victory of those that are fighting for a just cause -for the Allied cause." But the leader's words did not overcome the passive resistance of those who handled the executive machinery. Appeals for replacements for those who had already died and for troops who were exhausted and nerve-shattered were answered by the summoning of officers from France for various missions in Portugal, and by extensions of leave and excessive benevolence in the medical inspections which granted pensions for physical incapacity. The result of these

measures was predictable. General Gomes da Costa, Commander of the 1st Division, revealed in his book. .4 Batalha de Lys, that in his division 37'/ of his officers were absent and 24' of his privates. But within the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps (CEP) 3,260 officers of the Permanent Staff and Militiamen embarked for France, in addition to 114 other officers and 51,709 other ranks — making a total of 55, 08 4 men. In Africa there were European and Native troops to the number of 1,337 (in Angola' and 40,026 (in Mozambique). Considering <

1

the smallness of the population (at the time only 6,000,000) and the geographic situation of a country at a great distance in Europe from the scene of war. this mobilisation of fighting troops to France and

was considerable. Portugal's inin the war was not the result, as was the case for example in Belgium and Africa

volvement

France, of threats or feelings experienced by the entire nation, which therefore united in a common reaction against the invader; it was the direct response to (he

demands of a far-sighted and dynamic elite who were more aware of future prospects than present discomforts.

sheltering in the port of Lisbon. The amount of tonnage involved and immobilised was discovered to be enormous — to the benefit of both the Portuguese and the British. Germany's reaction was swift in coming: Baron von Rosen made a declaration of war. The Austrian Ambassador requested his passport. The British government, who had

been against taking this step, found themselves with a fait accomplit. On July 15 1916, the British Ambassador in Portugal informed the Portuguese Minister for Foreign Affairs, that: 'Her Majesty's Government fully recognises the loyalty of Portugal and the assistance she is already giving, and cordially invites any further military operations beside the Allies in Europe.' But the term 'further' of the memorandum was a source of controversy. Some members of the Portuguese government felt that it implied little confidence in Portugal's military capabilities. But after the meeting of the Congress of the Republic, convoked to take the necessary measures for war, and after the establishment of a Sacred Union of the parties engaged in the military intervention, and the forma-

in Flanders, the base of which, facing the

enemy, extended

for seven miles, from a road to the west of La Bassee to another east of Laventie. The opposite side, only half its length, went from the River Lys canal to the south of Haversquerque, to the bridge of the Merveille-Berguette railway line, over the Aire Canal. This enthusiasm of the Portuguese fighting in France, however, was debilitated by the reaction of those who constituted their most distant rearguard — those who in Portugal fluctuated between revolutionary restlessness and apathy. When an increase of effort was suggested at the front, the troops' contingents were always found to be grossly insufficient, because their most urgent appeals to remedy the deficiencies and send replacements were greeted with stony silence. Although she was aware of the discrepancy between the enthusiasm of the command in France, and the negligence of those directing the war in Portugal, Britain refused to solve her transport problems, while at the same time criticised the Democratic Party for not possessing an austere and efficient internal adminislrn-

Further Reading

Camacho. Brito, Portugal na Guerra (Lisbon) Cortesao, Jaime, Memorias de Grande Guerra (Oporto 1919) da Costa. General Gomes. A Grande Batalha do Corpo Expedicionano Portugues (Lisbon 1917) Lichnowsky. Prince. Vers I'Abime (Paris) Pereira. Almeida, Portugal na Grande Guerra (Lisbon 1923) Peres, Professor Damiao, Histona de Portugal (Lisbon 1935)

HERNANI A

CIDADE was born in Redondo. During the First World War he was mobilised as an officer and sent to France, where he obtained promotion to Lieutenant On his return he became a Professor in the Faculty of Arts of Oporto and later of Lisbon He has given many lectures in European and South American universities and is Honorary Professor of the University of Bahia and Doctor honoris causa of the University of Poitiers He is also Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur and Grand-Officier of Santiago de Espada He acted as a consultant tor the period covering the First World Portugal.

War

in the Portuguese Official History and lor General Ferreira Martin's book. Portugal in the War, and then became literary director of the Gulbenkian Foundation review. Cnloquio

l

On January 5

1916, Asquith introduced a Military Service which made all single men liable for conscription. It had been preceded by vain attempts to bolster the voluntary recruiting system, which was collapsing under the demands of the trenches, and by Christmas the Prime Minister felt obliged to 'introduce some form of legal Bill

.

The Bill caused a crisis of conscience for the Liberal papers and appalled the Labour movement.

obligation.'

Arthur Mar wick

itZr,

sg,

W •-v/

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m&%?$& I .

£4@Sgg

X whom this scroll commemorates

Itmsmmibereclamongthosetwho,

atthccaUofKingancl Countn|,leftaTl thatwas clear to mem,endure&Tiarclness, ikeddanget;ancl fmaUijpassecloutof the sight ofmenln^ the path ofduty

and selfsacrifice, etvingup their oum Uvesthatothersmiolitlwemfrecdom. Let those who comeatterseetoit

/Above /e/f: The price of obeying the country's call was often death. To the grieving relatives of men who dieoWkhe war the King sent this commemorative scroll /Above: Yet another variation on thwibpeals to the Englishman's conscience, which had failed, by the second year of the war, to produce enough men for the front

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to Certifg

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NEED YOU

that

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has been Registered under the

f

National Registration Act,

1915.

Holder.

GOD SAVE THE I.)

W Ottmmuea.

feme

KING. <<)

PmoJ KUnm.

ROYAI/NAVY

SEAMEN FOR THE PERIOD OF HOSTILITIES (Continuous Service Rate of Pay)

Age

19 to

30 A WEE "SCRAP O'PAPER'IS BRITAIN'S BOND

NO PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE NECESSARYbui

im'n

«iih

prininus

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to

the

up

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expert)

age

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ins.

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eparation Allowance at Naval Rates

1278

TO MAINTAIN THE HONOUR and GLORY OF THE

BRITISH EMPIRE

s

In prewar years Britain was marked off from continental countries by the absence of military conscription, widely held to be against the best British traditions. Before the war only a few enthusiasts had advocated conscription in Britain: most important among these groups was Lord Roberts' National Service League. Lord Roberts had the careful support of J. L. Garvin, editor of the Observer, and the far-fromcareful support of Lord Northcliffe. As soon as war broke out Northcliffe 's Daily Mail opened up an enthusiastic pro-conscription campaign. Garvin, however, believing national unity to be more important than the institution of conscription, continued to exercise restraint. Well on into 1915 Liberal opinion as a whole, the Labour Party and the Trades Union movement, and a substantial number of Conservatives still believed that it would be possible to fight the war without recourse to conscription. However, there were hints of the way things were going. Despite Asquith's reluctance to take on more direct control of the economy, the government was slowly being forced to do so. In August 1915 the introduction of a National Register was announced. Primarily this was concerned with the economic reorganisation of the country, and the intention was to ensure that the best possible use was being made of all the available labour. It was an important stage in the increasing employment of women in the national effort. Those who had been strenuously advocating the establishment of a National Register (and they included a wide section of the press) were mainly concerned with the problems of economic and social reorganisation; nonetheless those who feared conscription rightly saw the National Register as a possible first step towards it. The Quakers and other pacifist groups advised their members to register as legally required, but to add a statement that they would resist any attempt to impose conscription. While* the Register was being compiled it became increasingly apparent to the military leaders that the voluntary system was not keeping pace with the number of deaths on the front. Lord Kitchener therefore invited Lord Derby to prepare a scheme which would make good the de L ficiency. Lord Derby's name will always be indissolubly associated with the Derby Scheme, a shotgun wedding between the fair maid of Liberal idealism and the ogre of Tory militarism over which Asquith's last Ministry presided in characteristically

unctuous fashion.

1 Lord Derby, who gave his name to the Derby Scheme which provided the basis for conscription in Britain. 2 A poster stressing the importance

of the factory worker's role in the war. Now, such men would have to take their turn at the front. 3 Many people saw the National Registration Act as the first step towards compulsory service. 4 A naval recruiting poster. Despite the initial enthusiasm to join the ranks, by 1916 the voluntary system was breaking down. 5 Many Scotsmen had already lost their lives in the war; now Britain's commitment to her Allies would force many more to sail for France. Above: The Military Service Bill further underlined the new role of women in the world. They were now to be seen in all manner of jobs previously done only by men

What the Derby scheme did was to adopt the continental practice of dividing all the adult males of the country into annual classes, each class in turn became available for military service with the changing calendar. One. refinement on the continental system was the pledge that no married men were to be considered until there were no longer any unmarried men available.

The Derby scheme, then, provided the basis for conscription on the continental plan, but there was no compulsion — Liberal principle was still strong enough to ensure that. It relied on persuasion and blandish ment to pressurise men into 'attesting'

that

to say, undertaking to serve if and called upon to do so. Every man was

is

when

but those who were found to have good national or personal reasons were to to attest,

1279

be given exemptions. Having good national reasons meant being employed as a skilled worker in a munitions factory or seme business directly connected to the war effort. Persona] reasons could cover a multitude o( soft options, from being sole owner of a profitable business enterprise, to being the sole support o( a widowed mother, an invalid wife or a large family. It was for the purpose of determining these exemptions that a Local Government Hoard Circular of November 1915 announced the establishment of tribunals throughout the country, with a central tribunal under Lord

Sydenham

in

London.

Astute tactics The Derby scheme did

not, in fact, succeed

in providing the necessary

men; but it was manoeuvring.

a very clever piece of political

Had

the scheme succeeded, the sanctity of

I914

voluntarism would have been maintained, but since

it

failed the case for conscription

was now well-nigh

Opinion in the country nonetheless remained divided: Liberal newspapers like the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian carried strongly-worded editorials against conscription

and,

in

irresistible.

order

to

exorcise

its

shadow, were forced to praise the substance of the Derby scheme. The Labour movement, partly for moral reasons, but mainly through fear that military conscription would lead to industrial conscription, maintained

its

opposition.

The Derby scheme had been for only just over a fortnight

in operation

when Asquith

indulged in a characteristic piece of thinking-aloud: Tf,' he said, 'there should still be found a substantial number of men of military age not required for other purposes and, who, without excuse, hold back from the service of their country, I believe that the very same conditions that make compulsion impossible now — namely the absence of general consent — would force the country to a view that they must consent to supplement, by some form of legal obligation, the failure of the voluntary system.' Statistics on the scheme were not available for a further six weeks. The report on recruiting published as a White Paper at the beginning of 1916 revealed that of 2,179,231 single men shown by the National Register to be of military age, only 1,150,000 had attested; the proportion of married men was not greatly different — out of a total of 2,832,210 on the Register, 1,152,947 had attested. From these figures Derby concluded that, in view of the pledge to take single men first, 'it will not be possible to hold married men to their attestation unless and until the service of single

IQI5-

ipi6

men have been obtained by other means.' The

'other means' appeared within a few days as a Military Service Bill introduced on January 5, 1916, by the Prime Minister. Its central clause declared that all single men (including widowers without children)

were to have been deemed to have enlisted and to have been transferred to the Reserve, whence they could be called up as and when required. The Bill caused a crisis of conscience for the Liberal papers, though they tried to keep their spirits up with the reflection that this was simply the necessary redemption of the pledge to the married men. Only one Liberal Cabinet Minister, Sir John Simon, resigned and thereafter kept studiously clear of any active opposition to conscription.

1280

Augusts Three

Above: An over-optimistic comment on the three summers of war. The old regulars had been succeeded by the territorials and they in turn by the young men of the New Armies, but the victory was as far away as ever. Above right: Every man drafted abroad took this message with him. Right: If they combed this mud out they might get a few more men.' Far right: The war demanded the painful transition from civilian to military life

—

[This paper is confidential,

Pay

considered by each soldier as

to be

and

to be kept

in his Active

Sei'vice

and

always

act.

You

Book.']

to

be

upon

look are

trusted

sure' ;

King

are ordered abroad as a soldier of the

to

will

You have

to perform a task

Remember

that the

honour of the British

that

justify

So keep constantly on In this new ex-

may find temptations both in wine and You must entirely resist both temptations, while treating all women with perfect courtesy,

perience you

women.

Army

It will be

must

Your duty cannot be done

sound.

is

a disgraceful

as

your guard against any excesses.

which

need your courage, your energy, your patience.

depends on your individual conduct.

trust.

unless your health

help our French comrades against the invasion of a

common Enemy.

looting

meet with a welcome and

your conduct

welcome and that

You

to

and,

your

you should avoid any intimacy.

duty not only to set an example of discipline and perfect steadiness under fire but also to maintain the friendly relations with those this

The

struggle.

engaged

will,

for

are helping in

operations in which

the

friendly country, and

whom you

most

Do your duty Fear God

most

part, take

Honour the King.

you are

place in

bravely.

a

you can do your own country

KITCHENER,

no better service than in showing yourself in France

and Belgium in the true character of a British

Be

invariably

courteous,

considerate

Field-Marshal.

soldier.

and kind.

Never do anything likely to injure or destroy property W1510?— H.5 02

100,000

2/17

HWV(P1177)

Learn .Anyone

tuith

ficht

to

a

taste Pot Pishing, or

c&n learn c&n but a hooK

nriycae

worm

a

in

instinct

Instruction

helb .you To earn

,

tui 11

,

,

or

and by our

We. develop that

b'ig~

Doth Collecting to

a

fi^ht. bin

a moth. Course or by fiV/htiua'

in

Postal

mone y

Sublets Tau^it;-^ J

x, , ,, o.$phyxio.Tior?

,

i;^yonelijuorK

,

bombing, cj

This s Ketch shows the UjotK oy a former [xibil.

n

Try this exercise .yourself on a friend, and tell us trie

had not jour ""xCha^tieT on U|f' Cuts or I f«l Sutp J^KowU ^ot

y

result We will at once tell^ou^your chances «£^ .

of Success.

Lieutenar-CT -writes:

Unfortunately a.
far

I

&
not" he \uh€TC J

am nou

.Yrs truly

cvp-Hl3^

CU'a.rm a Station

GezMnComrr".

v^p^r The

demand

"Write

The lfo VT3

for

fe htcrs exceeds

trie

subbly

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School

of i

Instruction

Hooq*1281

1282

it remained opposed to the prinof the Bill, the Labour movement had entered enthusiastically into the last attempts to bolster the voluntary system. Its hostility to the Bill itself was reinforced by the absence of any accompanying proposals for what it termed 'the conscription of wealth'. Actually the Labour representatives in the government were in a difficult position, Arthur Henderson, in particular, now being convinced that conspecial Labour scription was essential.

Because

ciple

A

Conference was

summoned

for

January 6

to consider the issue. The official proposal to the conference from both the Labour

Party and the TUC was that Labour MPs be left a free hand either to vote for or against the Bill; but the conference convincingly demonstrated continuing Labour hostility to the notion of conscription, by calling upon Labour MPs to oppose the Bill by a majority of nearly two to one. The Executive of the Labour Party and the Parliamentary Labour Party as a whole now decided to withdraw from the Coalition Government. Henderson and the other Labour Ministers felt obliged to comply, though personally in strong disagreement with the decision. One point was that while Sir John Simon could resign as an individual without affecting general Liberal support for the government, Labour resignations would imply total withdrawal of Labour support for the War government. Fully alive to these implications, Asquith pressed Henderson to continue in attendance at Cabinet meetings, following up this request with a firm assurance that there was no question of the introduction of industrial conscription. Accordingly, Henderson and his two colleagues remained de facto in the coalition until the whole matter could be thrashed out again by the Labour Party Conference meeting at Bristol.

This conference demonstrated the patrisentiments of the Labour movement as a whole; apart from some of the I LP members there was almost unanimous support for the war effort, the political truce, and the recruiting campaign. Conscription remained too bitter a pill for the party to swallow, but even though it was now a fact of life, a motion calling upon the party to institute a campaign for repeal of the Military Service Act was defeated. otic

But conscription of single men only proved to be quite inadequate to the everincreasing demands of the trenches. Thus, on April 25 Asquith felt bound to introduce a new conscription measure, which nonetheless fell short of total compulsion for all men. So unhappy was he about this that the House of Commons met in a secret session; so fumbling was he in his attempt to reconcile past pledges with present necessities, that the government found itself running into insurmountable criticism, particularly from the Conservatives who now wanted a root-and-branch hill without compromise. Reporting on the Cabinet meeting held immediately after this fiasco, Asquith wrote to the King that 'The government has no alternative hut to proceed at once with legislation for general compulsion'. Thus, at the beginning of May a new Universal Conscription Bill, which became law almost at once, was m 1

For many, conscription had been a bitter to swallow, but it was now a fact of life: here, recruits march to the station led by a band Left:

pill

L283

troduced. Once more, the withdrawal of the Labour Ministers was announced; once more, after a decent interval, the with-

drawal was withdrawn. Hie principle had been swallowed, although the detailed working of the conscription acts continued to give rise to resistance within the Labour movement. For the hulk ol' the population, it seems fairly clear that conscription

was accepted

as a hard necessity: at least it offered solid evidence that a genuine equality of sacri-

was at last being imposed. The Trades Union movement was sufficient 1> strong to be able to assert some confice

over the exemptions granted to men held to be in skilled occupations necessary to the war effort, but increasingly the government was forced, in the charming phrase of the time, to 'comb out' skilled labour for service in the trenches. 'Probably there are very few of our readers who do not know at least one case of men who should be serving but have escaped', declared Lord Northcliffe's Daily Mail in the heavy black lead which it reserved for such patriotic announcements. Yet the trol

fundamental problem remained

that,

how-

ever pressing the needs of the trenches, a modern technological war would not be fought if industry was denuded of its workers. As an ancillary to the Derby scheme there had been a Reserved Occupations Committee; its functions were taken over in March 1916 by a central Cabinet Committee, which in turn was replaced by the Manpower Board. The real resistance to conscription came from a range of idealists of varying description. As early as December 1914, Fenner Brockway, Clifford Allen and C. H. Norman founded the No-Conscription Fellowship (NCF) for young men of military age; this body fixed coldly appraising eyes on the various government manoeuvres which pressaged the actual introduction of conscription. From November 1915 the NCF was in a complete state of preparedness. Modelling itself partly on the Irish Sinn Fein movement and partly on the suffragette movement, it developed a complicated network of communications, hold-

ing together branches which spread throughout the country; each one of its leaders was provided with a 'shadow' to carry on his duties should he himself be arrested.

The

NCF was

set

up

to act as,

pressure group upon Parliament; secondly, as a semi-legal organisation disseminating its propaganda under the heavy shadow of the Defence of the Realm Regulations; and, thirdly, as a clandestine conspiracy maintaining contact among its members as they dis-

firstly,

an

open

appeared into prison.

The

first 'conchies' Partly as a consequence of NCF pressure, made more effective by the support of a handful of ILP and Labour MPs, the first Conscription Act included a provision that the tribunals, originally set up under the Derby scheme, should hear appeals based on 'a conscientious objection to the undertaking of combatant service', as well as appeals based on national and personal grounds. A new term had entered the English language: 'conscientious objector', often shortened to 'conchy'. But the NCF was not fully satisfied: its opposition, it declared, was not to 'fighting in particular' but to 'war itself. Again it had some suc-

1284

cess in that the second Conscription Act did state clearly that in certain cases absolute exemption from all duties connected

with the national

effort

could be granted

to conscientious objectors.

The

NCF

held

its first

national conven-

Memorial Hall in November 1915 while the Derby scheme was still in full swing. At the conclusion of his presidential address Clifford Allen called upon the conference to rise to its feet and by standing in silence signify its agreement to tion at the

the following resolution: 'that we, fully conscious of the attempt that might b~ made to impose conscription on this country, recognising that such a scheme must destroy the sanctity of human life, betray the free traditions of our country and hinder its social and industrial emancipation, though realising the grave consequences to ourselves that may follow our decision, hereby solemnly and sincerely affirm our intention to resist conscription, whatever the penalties may be.' Although this was a fellowship of those who would actually be liable for military service, the NCF National Committee was now reinforced by the inclusion of a number of associates who, because of age or sex, would not themselves be eligible for conscription: Edward Grubb, a liberal Quaker who became treasurer, appropriately enough since the organisation was to depend for financial support upon the generosity of wealthy Quakers; Alfred Salter the ILP doctor from Bermondsey; Bertrand Russell, the philosopher; and Miss Catherine Marshall, who brought more than a whiff of suffragette subtlety to the NCF. At the centre of the NCF organisation a Political Department was established to exert pressure on Parliament through a

group of about 40 sympathetic MPs (who ranged from the ILP group of five, to Gladstonian liberals), and to make direct representations to ministers and government departments. Closely associated with it w^as the Records Department which kept a card index of every known anti-conscriptionist, and, once the struggle had begun in earnest the record of his movements through army camp or prison cell, derived from the ever alert observation system based on the picketing of prisons and camps. Soon there was a department for organising visits to prisoners, partly errands of mercy, but also a means of maintaining efficient communications or of frustrating prison discipline.

Against the torrent of pro-war literature a Publications Department pressed over a million copies of leaflets and pamphlets, and from March 1916 produced the weekly organ of the movement, Tribunal, and also a valuable parliamentary record. The CO's Hansard. Backed up by fervent patriotic sentiment, and themselves composed almost exclusively of solid local bigwigs, the tribunals could scarcely be expected to treat the claims of conscientious objectors with sympathy: the exposure of 'conchies' and 'shirkers' became an easy way of vicariously performing a patriotic duty. A few tribunals did endeavour to pay scrupulous attention to the letter and spirit of the conscience clause of the Military Service Acts, but all found great difficulty in understanding the point of view of the 'absolutist', the man who declared. he could play no part at all in the war effort and demanded absolute exemption. From January 1916 a steady flow of

young men poured through the tribunals, had their objections rejected, and were handed over to the military authorities. Three groups, deemed to have enlisted in the non-combatant corps, were smuggled out to France, where the death sentence was pronounced upon 34 men, commuted (after a calculated pause) to ten years penal servitude. But the secVet service of the NCF was already on the trail of this incident and it was able to get its friends in Parliament to secure from Asquith, who was himself appalled by the action of the military authorities, a public statement that there would be no executions. A further triumph for the anti-conscription movement was the promulgation on May 25, 1916 of Army Order X, which laid down that after being court martialled, objectors should be returned to the civilian authorities for punishment in one of His Majesty's prisons. The second national convention of the NCF met in April 1916 at Devonshire House, Bishopsgate, the then Quaker headquarters, at a time when the hysteria and persecution were reaching a peak. In advertising this event widely, the popular press hinted that it would be the ideal occasion for a display of patriotic rowdyism. Every precaution was taken, and on April 6 Allen notified the Commissioner of Police of the meeting. But as the delegates, showing their cards, were admitted one at a time through the strong iron gates, the mob gathered. Each time Allen's address from the chair was applauded by the 2,000-strong gathering there was an ominous echo from outside. Towards the end of the speech, which again took the form of a resolution of dedication, it seemed as though those outside were about to storm the doorway. Thus when Phillip Snowden followed with a passionate defence of individual liberty, the assembly foreswore the luxury of applause which might serve as further incitement: instead, at frequent intervals, the hall burst into a blaze of white handkerchiefs, vigorously waved by the delegates. Three sailors did succeed in breaching the defences of the hall, but were quickly charmed into accepting a cup of

tea from their adversaries. The question of alternative national service was one which threatened to divide the anti-conscription movement. Actuated by the best intentions, the government set up the Pelham Committee to assist in the problem of finding work for men who were prepared to accept alternative service; and the Home Office Scheme was evolved

providing such work directly. There was little understanding of the position of the 'absolutists'. Of them, Lloyd George, at this time Secretary for War, said: 'I do not think they deserve the slightest consideration. With regard to those who object to the shedding of blood it is the traditional policy of this country to respect that view, and we do not propose to depart from it: but in the other case I shall only consider the best means of making the path of that class a very hard one.' On May 17 1916 eight members of the National Committee of the NCF were prosecuted under DORA for publishing a pamphlet calling for the repeal of conscription. Three of the guilty paid fines; the other five, including Fenner Brockway, went to jail. In the course of the trial the crown advocate, Mr. Bodkin, remarked for

still

become impossible if all have the view that war was wrong'. Without comment, but with obvious delight, the NCF published the statement and its source as a poster, thus inviting further prosecution. On June 5 — the day that Bertrand Russell was fined £100 upon his first brush with the law — the head office was raided by the police. In August Allen went to prison for his that 'war would

men were

Volunteers Conscripts

to

1915

ittttttt

January

(Grade

1)

727 122

each man represents approximately 100 000 men

stretch as a conscientious objector. It

first

was agreed that Brockway's fine should be paid so that he could come out of prison to carry on as acting chairman. In due time,

when he

too disappeared back into prison, Bertrand Russell took over, and, then, later

still,

1916 (Grade

January

ItttttM 1)

151 266

379 020 (Grade

to

/L^-v-^tX*"

.

&

R.

j._

ENGLAND EXPECTS

I

t

q

M***JLl

m

.

Above: Bertrand Russell in 1916. Agamstthe torrent of pro-war literature he pressed the

No Conscription Fellowship The chart shows the decline in

leaflets of the

Above

right:

vol-

unteers as the Conscription Act came in. Right: By January 1916 this plea had become an order In total throughout the entire war period there were about 16,000 conscientious objectors. About 3,300 agreed to serve in the non-combatant corps. Rather less than 3,000 undertook various forms of ambulance work or work allocated to them by the Pelham Committee. Rather more than 6,000 went to prison at least once. Of these 6,000 over half were subsequently employed under the Home Office scheme, leaving 1,300 intractable absolutists. For the absolutists the Government provided only a dismal treadmill of arrest, court martial, imprisonment, release, arrest, court martial, imprisonment and so on. Clifford Allen was imprisoned three times (with hard labour) before becoming so seriously ill that the Government, reluctant to have him die on their hands, gave him a conditional — that is conditional upon his remaining seriously ill -release Allen's case was typical of many; about 70 men died from their prison treatment.

Further Reading J Conscription and Conscience

Graham. (Allen

W

and

Unwm

1922)

Marwick. Arthur, Clifford Allen: the Open Conspirator (Oliver and Boyd 1964) The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell Vol. 2 (Allen

\t'or

683 149

/J-t-f-^*"*-*--^

Christ,. ><

soi.

2)

2>v~

_

G.

PERSo:-

152 863 (Grade

1)

June

Dr Salter.

Issued

575.

727 122

June

and

Unwm

EVERY

MAN

TO DO HIS DUTY 55

AND

JOIN

the

ARMY

TODAY

1968)

Arthur Marwick's biography, see page

IHIiml

IT T»« P«>lUMiKTA»T

MCMITUM MMMTTU,

I

HN I

.

lMb,m

>lllu

|

l

285

Lake Narotch

Lake Narotch relief-offensive

for\ferdun Ward Rutherford The Allied war plans for 1916, prompted by the disasters of the previous year, focused on attacks that would drive into and crush the Central Powers from both east and west. But the Germans struck first, and the Russians were once again forced to come to the aid of the French by launching a virtually suicidal offensive near Lake Narotch. All they had in their favour was numbers, and their efforts were further hampered when the spring thaw set in, making any advance a painful task and destroying vital lines of communication. The disasters of 1915 in both West and East had one good effect. They forced all the Allies to accept the need for greater unanimity of effort — 'Unity of Front', as the French Prime Minister, Briand, called

it.

Instead of a series of disjointed assaults, the

Entente Powers would aim at corporate action. The governments of Britain, France, Italy and Russia were in full agreement with this broad principle and their General Staffs met to draw up their joint plans. Offensives in 1916 on both Eastern and Western Fronts were proposed. General Mikhail Alexeyev, the Russian Chief-of-Staff, suggested June as the earliest time his own forces could be ready. In view of what had to be done, so early a date was surprising. Britain did not expect to be ready before July, and her army had not been defeated in 1915 as the Russian army had. Yet, by the turn of the year, the Russians had performed once more that act of regeneration which seemed to the western nations little short of miraculous. At the beginning of 1916 there was every indication that the Russian Commander-in-Chief, Tsar Nicholas II, would be able to keep his side of the bargain; but the situation was suddenly and drastically changed. At four o'clock on the morning of February 21, as Churchill recalls, a 14-inch howitzer shell hit the Archbishop's Palace at Verdun and battle was joined in one of the bloodiest encounters of the war on the Western Front. Joffre had no option but to press the Tsar to mount a diversionary offensive as quickly as possible. The Tsar, it has frequently been pointed out, was a weak man. He was probably never so weak as when he gave in to French importunings on this occasion. A hasty council of war was convened, and according to General Yuri Danilov, Quarter-MasterGeneral of the Russian armies, 'the Russian High Command decided, in principle, to come to the aid of their allies, although the season was hardly propitious for an offensive on our part'. It was a gallant decision, but it must be seen as the product of one of those waves of emotion which occur in time of war and to which a naturally emotional people must be particularly susceptible. If June was the first nj nent at which an attack could possible to think of mounting be confidently launched, how was oner? Pro-French sentiment one at short notice, five months was the main contributing factor to he decision. Maurice Paleologue, the French Ambassador in Russia, records in his diaries i I

.-

t

1286

RUSSIA

GERMANY Left:

The

Battle of

Lake Narotch AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

Right: Confident Russians wait for the offensive to start.

how

frequently the Tsar, as well as Russian generals and polifound occasion to express admiration of French courage. From the public point of view, it seemed that the Russian army was engaged in what looked like a 'phony' war, facing the Germans in trenches which were being made ever more comfortable. 'Some,' says General Alexei Brusilov, 'were genuinely cosy.' They had planked walls, wood or stamped-earth floors, potbellied Russian heating stoves and beamed ceilings. These things, added to the natural human instinct to help those who are courageously defending themselves against stronger enemies, must certainly have played their role, particularly in view of the time chosen. The area designated for this offensive was the sector occupied by the right wing of the Second Army on the west front. The sector fell within the command of two army groups: that of Kuropatkin, the general defeated in the Russo-Japanese war, which extended from the Gulf of Riga to Dvinsk (Daugav'pils), and General Evert's Group, whose zone of command extended down to the Pripet Marshes. Attacks were planned to take place on either side of the Sventsiany (Shvenchenis)-Postavy railway line and between Lakes Vishniev and Lake Narotch. At the same time a third attack would be launched from the Jakobstadt (Yekappils) bridgehead further north. It was hoped that the convergence of these armies would envelop the German XXI Corps under General Hutier and make a breach in the German line before Vilna (Vilnyus), and so bring that town and Kovno (Kaunas) 50 miles west of it, within reach. The objective of this stage of the plan was to break up the northern wing of the German forces and, that done, to throw it towards the coast north of the River Niemen. There were compelling reasons for choosing this particular ticians,

sector of the front. Imperial Russia was short of railways. She had only one tenth the length of railway track per square kilometre of Germany. One of the most important railheads on the whole front lay in the Lithuanian town of Vilna, now in German hands. From it, tracks radiated in every direction, including north to Riga, the capital, and south to Baranovichi. The city was also the centre of a major road network. The loss of this area was a considerable disadvantage to the Russians and at points, between

Postavy and Smorgon', Vilna lay only 40 to 60 miles from the Russian lines. It represented a tempting prize within reach.

its safety was an essential pre-requisite to any on the northerly sector of the front between Dvinsk and Baranovichi. And it was from this quarter that the Russians widely expected the next German blow to fall. But the choice of the Vishniev-Narotch-Postavy sectors for their spearheads by the Russian General Staff had been a good one — even the Germans had to admit this. The Germans had not enough reserves at these points to close gaps if any were forced. Furthermore, rail connections to Lake Narotch were bad — although the Germans were in the process of laying track there. If a gap were once opened, the rest of the plan would be likely to follow and the way to Kovno would be open. Like the Russians, however, the Germans had not been idle during the winter's halt in campaigning. They had built an intensive and highly efficient defence system. It must be remembered that German war aims, now that their own borders had been cleared of the Russian invaders, were primarily defensive. Their main concern was to free as many troops as possible for the Western Front and the Verdun offensive. On the Eastern Front their lines were intended only to parry Russian blows. The German and Austrian trench systems in many parts of the Russian front were indeed models of their kind. Concrete had been widely used. The trench systems were equipped with light railways, and often had their own electricity generating plants. There were bombproof shelters, and not far behind the lines recreation areas had been established. The sector was adequately if not over-garrisoned, but such was German confidence in their defences and in the terrain, which was largely a chain of lakes offering considerable defensive advantages, as well as in the depleted state of Russian forces, that much of the line was held by reserve regiments and units of the

To the Germans,

German

offensive

Landwehr (the German equivalent of the Territorials). Lake Narotch lies about 100 miles north of the Pripet Marshes in a region of pine forest, marshy valleys, and lakes so cold that even on a summer's day the sight of those tracts of slate grey water evoke an involuntary shiver. In winter they freeze hard. The Russian concentration in the area consisted of two groups: the northern group on the Dvina — comprising from right to left the Twelfth and Fifth Armies — and the western group which extended from there south to Pinsk. This was composed of five armies: the First, Second, Tenth, Fourth and Third. Concentration

of the Russian forces in the area began in mid-February, so there | is evidence that the intention to mount some sort of assault came S 2 before the Verdun attacks. The Russian General Staff had been concerned at certain characteristics of their own line, in particular the existence of a salient — nicknamed 'Ferdinand's Nose' — between Narotch and Vishniev and it is possible they regarded the liquidation of this as a necessary precondition to a first stage in a larger assault. They may have planned to rid themselves of this embarrassment before their summer offensive. Alternatively they may have feared a German initiative in this sector and intended to pre-empt it with a limited-objective attack of their own.

The fact that they had such an attack in mind in the area could well be a compelling reason for choosing to attack where they did and could well explain why, when the French appeals came, the Russians could so readily mount an offensive as early as four months before the previously agreed date. They were in fact simply enlarging the scale of an operation they were already preparing. Existing forces were augmented by two Guard corps, and XXIV Corps was sent from the south-west front to reinforce the Tenth Army. Three divisions were also sent north from the west front. The attack on either side of Lake Narotch was to be left to the Second Army. While the right of the Fifth Army, commanded by General Pleshkov, would attack from the Jakobstadt bridgehead and over an area from Postavy to Lake Drisviaty. The Twelfth Army on the lower Dvina as well as the Dvinsk group of the Fifth Army and the First Army were also to initiate attacks at various points along the battle front which extended from Jakobstadt in the north to Smorgon, in the south. These were intended to detain German reserves and divert attention. On the German side, the main brunt would Call on General Hutier's XXI Army Corps, whose front lay between Lakes Svir and Vishniev on the right, and the River Komai on the left. Further right was Carlowitz's /// Reserve Army Corps and, to the left, Garnier's Cavalry High Command 6. The three corps commanders were all experienced, resourceful officers. From right to left the units along Hutier's front were: the 9th Landwehr Brigade, the 9th Cavalry, and the 75th Reserve Division, with 80th Reserve Division available, holding the front between Lakes Vishniev and Narotch; the 31st and 115th Divisions, then holding a long front from south of the Postavy-Sventsiany railway up to

1287

Recipe for disaster — delay, inefficiency

and appalling weather

i

«

i

mm —in

i

mm

mm

,0r*

m

m

m

»

**»

•

the right of Garnier's front, the 42nd Infantry Division. After them were the 3rd Cavalry Division. The 107th Infantry Division, however, lay in reserve to be brought into the line at this point, should the need arise. Through February and early March the gathering of Russian forces continued. On the area of the Second Army on the west front, where it was intended that the main thrust was to be made, no fewer than ten infantry and one cavalry corps were assembled. This army, under the command of General Smirnov, covered a front of 60 miles, of which 17 miles were lake. The Third Army at the far left of the line was to hold its front of 175 miles of marshy land with seven infantry and six cavalry divisions. For purposes of the attack the Second Army was broken into three groups: a right group under General Pleshkov, a centre group under General Sirelius and a left group under General Baliuev. In the right group were I, XXVII and I Siberian Corps and III Cavalry Corps: in the centre were XXXIV and IV Siberian Corps; and on the left V, XXXVI and III Siberian Corps. Pleshkov (I Siberian Corps) and Baliuev (V Corps) were soldiers of considerable reputation and it would be their function to make the real attack. Sirelius' centre would remain passive. For the exploitation of gains the Commander-in-Chief of the front had at his disposal XV Corps in the rear of the right group and XXXV Corps in the rear of the left. In addition to these there were also available III Caucasian Corps on the right and XXIV Corps on the left. When the armies were finally gathered there were an estimated five Russians to every two Germans. Concurrently with the build up of troops the Russian armies were collecting materiel on a scale never witnessed before on this front. The artillery backing for the three groups involved in the main attack totalled 271 guns ranging from 4.2-inch quick firing guns to 6-inch guns. Of this number 116 were on the right, 119 on the left and 36 in the passive centre. Quantities of shells equivalent to a daily average expenditure of 100 shells per gun were also amassed. By mid-M;. h all was ready. The assembly and concentration of the enormous irces and munitions for the operation had been carried out wit! as much secrecy as possible, but it had taken longer than was in: ided. Some of these delays were due to the problems inescapable n any large-scale enterprise. Others arose from sheer organisat. ial ineptitude. For example, part of the Twelfth Army had had to withdrawn after reaching

1288

the line because they were unfamiliar with the Japanese rifles with which they had been equipped before being sent forward. But delays of this type made it inevitable that the Germans should gain some intimation of what was happening.

Saboteurs caught the. night of February 27, two Cossack officers and 32 crossed over the frozen Lake Narotch, penetrated the German lines and reached Vilna. Disguised as Lithuanian peasants, they carried explosives to destroy communications. The attack failed after the saboteurs, having passed safely through several German checkpoints, were detected by a sentry. They made a run for it and tried to hide in the, woods, but were caught. The Germans drew the only possible inference from this — that the Russian attack would come in this area — and their suspicions were confirmed early in March when concentrations of Russian troops were seen east of Smorgon'. The Germans, however, took the precaution of reinforcing the whole of the front. Between March 14 and 28 they moved up 45 battalions, 12 from the north front, the rest from the Minsk front to the south. This included the 86th Infantry Division which had been moved from its reserve position with XL Reserve Corps to a position between Lakes Narotch and Vishniev. By mid-March it could be said that preparations on both sides were ready. The only remaining imponderable was the weather. The whole area lay under deep snow and rivers and lakes were frozen, but at any moment the thaws might begin. When this happened the countryside lapsed into its annual 'roadless period' as the Russians called it. At this time all but the very few metalled roads disappeared under water for weeks at a time and communications and movement of troops became almost impossible. At that stage, however, there was nothing left for the troops and their officers to do but wait for the final order which would begin the attack or else call it off altogether, and many people, even among the Russian General Staff, believed that because of the lateness of the season the attacks should be abandoned. The strain of waiting proved too much for Smirnov, commander of the pivotal Second Army. He was taken ill and his place was taken at short notice by General Ragoza, a fiery and dynamic officer, who had been commander of the Fourth Army. March reached its high point and the thaw was holding off. A decision could be delayed no longer.

Then, on

men

Above: The frozen and

Russians had attacked while the ground was still hard, they might

have stood a chance But preparations took too long and the attack was launched after the thaw, which served to magnify the defensive strength of the already well-prepared German positions. Right:

General Alexei Kuropatkin.

commanderof

the Russian Northern

'Army Group

On March

21 the

1

French Ambassador, Paleologue, recorded

in

demands

of the public conscience, the Emperor has just ordered a serious offensive, south of the Dvina in the direction of Vilna. Yesterday the Germans lost several villages.' But his information was late and also incorrect. On the night of March 17 it had thawed. The ice on the lakes over which the advancing forces were to move became unsafe. The frozen swamps, which formed a large part of the battle area, were covered with a layer of water nearly a foot deep. But the Russians had already begun their artillery bombardments and everyone now realised the offensive would have to go forward. The shelling concentrated on two parts of the front: on the region north of Lake Miadsol held by the German 115th Division his diary: 'To satisfy the

and further north round Vidzy, The point chosen here was one at which Garnier's and Hutier's fronts abutted: it was the custom of Russian High Command to launch attacks at such points as this where liaison was likely to be weakest.

A third major bombardment took place along the 8-mile isthmus between Lakes Narotch and Vishniev and the German command rightly deduced that it was hero that one of the main blows was

By the standards of the Western Front this was small, but in Russia it was a considerable amount and in view of the slender resources available, it was extravagant. At 1020 hours that morning General Baliuev's V Corps began storming the isthmus and an hour later units of General Pleshkov's 34th Division attacked north of the Postavy-Sventsiany railway, held by the German 42nd Infantry Division. The weight of the Russian attacks across the isthmus fell just south of hake Narotch in the area hePd by the 75th Reserve Division. But coming, in wave after wave, they were able to make no progress against accurate German artillerv fire. About noon Baliuev switched his attacks to the right wing of the German line, to the region held by the 9th Cavalry Division. Even though they persisted till nightfall, the Russian attackers were held back by gunfire supported by the artillery at Dubatovka, 15 miles south, on General Carlowitz's front At the same time, minor attacks were mack in other sectors of the front, but these were recognised by the Germans as diver sionary and in no way upset their balance. Russian casualties during the first day of the attack wen- estimated at 4,000, The Germans had lost 200 dead. Next day, March 19, the Russians resumed their assaults on the 42nd Infantry Division at Postavy, his time with General Ragoza's forces attacking their left wing, but though they struck over a wider front now, taking in the right of Garnier's front, there was no more success than on the previous day. leavv pressure w as applied at Vidzy, between Postavy and Dvinsk. and at Jakobstadt, further north. The lines held by the Body Hussars and the West Prussians respectively did not break though at tunes the situation calibre shell.

relentless plains of western Russia. If the

to fall.

At 0800 hours on the morning of March 18 the artillery barrage reached its greatest intensity. During the next eight hours the Russians fired .'50, 000 rounds of 3-inch and 9,000 rounds of heavier

(

t

!

was

critical.

On March

20, Ragoza's forces persisted in their attacks north of Postavy, while in the south Baliue\ 's forces made fresh assaults in the words of Colonel Max Moll' 'bravely, obstinately and with utter disregard for human life'. But still the attacks were of no avail, and further diversionary attacks also failed in their intent ion. During the night the thaw of the past days came to an abrupt il

on the isthmus, attacking,

man, of Oberost's

staff,

temporary end. The temperature fell to 13 F and snow fell. At mid night Bahuev began a heavy artillery bombardment which, according to some German reports, was accompanied In a gas :YM) hours the Russian VII, X, XXV and attack. At \\ III Corps again attacked across the isthmus The same day, on he northerly 1

I

I

1

289

4il

lU

part of the front, an attack which began at five in the morning penetrated the German trenches near Postavy and captured approximately a third of a mile of the first line. At the same time the German 75th Reserve Division, defending south of Lake Narotch, was forced back from its first two lines of trenches by V Siberian Corps. Russian 'bravery, obstinacy and utter disregard for human life' that night had its first reward. Daylight on March 21 revealed its price. The Russians have a saying, much quoted in times of war, 'It is pleasanter to die in company.' Their assaults on the German defences might have been intended to prove its truth. In the no-man's land between one row of obstacles and another bodies were littered as far as the eye could see. And the area through which the attack had been made was, on the Russian side, largely swamp and during the

night this had frozen. The next day 300 men of the V Russian to be hacked alive and frost-bitten from the ice. The greatest advance made by the attackers was a penetration on the isthmus 2,000 yards deep on a front 4,000 yards wide. Yet, ironically, there were frequent occasions on the Western Front when — as the Russians were quick to point out — such an advance as they had made would have signalled a major victory. Nor were the Russian gains without strategic importance. The trenches they

Corps had

ground and their loss was one which accept with equanimity. The German High Command ordered the 80th Reserve Division, which had been some miles behind the line, down to the isthmus and on March 21 it launched an unsuccessful counterattack. The Russian attacks throughout the next day were repulsed, but at 1700 hours they succeeded in taking a position about 450 yards long from the 42nd Infantry Division at Postavy. For the had taken were on

the

hilly

Germans could not

this might have meant disaster, but their commander, Bredow, was able to keep control of his forces and in a counterattack the next day he regained the lost position.

Germans

Top: Lull before the storm. Russian infantry shelter in their trench as a German shell explodes in front of them just before the start of the offensive. Above: General Alexeyev, the Russian Chief-of-Staff

1290

The thaw was now making the battle increasingly difficult. The snow which had started falling in November and had reached a depth of 18 inches a few weeks before, was turning to mud 'and slush. It came over the tops of the Russians' high leather boots, it soaked into their heavy, grey-brown overcoats and made them still heavier. Declivities and shell craters were filled with water, blackly reflecting a wintry sky. Roads had disappeared and to make any progress at all involved tramping through icy water. But these conditions were affecting defenders as well as attackers,

*

k

fe for trenches were filling and communications had become so bad that the Tenth Army reserves could only reach the front from the Vilna-Dvinsk railways by wading through swamps. Added to this the rising temperature which brought the thaw also brought heavy fogs. Units lost touch with each other; and reconnaissance aircraft were grounded. That night further assaults were launched against the Germans south of the Postavy railway line. The Russians reached the first line of German trenches held by the 42nd Infantry Division, but by about 0300 hours their assault had been stemmed. By dawn, because of the weight and accuracy of German shelling and machine gun fire, the Russians were forced to withdraw. By March 21 the Germans were convinced that a clear picture of the Russian attacks had emerged and modified their own command pattern accordingly, transferring the right of General Hutier's army group to the command of General Carlowitz. This reduced General Hutier's responsibility and brought a general hitherto largely unoccupied into the battle. It also meant that the Russians were no longer attacking at the junction of two zones of command. The day showed, despite the fact that the thaw was continuing, there was no break yet in the Russian attacks. In General Scholtz's region further north the Russian IV Corps attacked the 3rd Infantry Division's front and the 87th Infantry Division's front at Lake Drisviaty, and also launched an attack on the Riga bridgehead which was assumed by the Germans to be a feint. The German High Command now warned the commanders of the 10th Landwehr Division south of Vishniev to be prepared for heavy attacks. These came the next day with the Russians storming both sides of the lake. The front at the isthmus had now been reinforced, however, not only by the 80th Reserve Division, but also by the 86th Infantry Division sent north from General Litzmann's command zone. Other reserves from the south were also expected so that the Germans were fully confident of their ability to contain the Russians. The attacks were renewed at the most northerly points of the Russian front, towards Riga, but without success and with heavy losses. The German High Command believed that this area was somewhat sensitive and were afraid of a Russian breakthrough. Accordingly, the 2nd Infantry Division was moved up from the Austro-Hungarian front south to the town of Mitau. By March 24 the Germans looked on the situation as favour-

able. The Russian spring offensive was a week old and its only gains were two lines of trenches between Lake Narotch and Lake Vishniev. The thaw now made the marshes in the centre of Baliuev's front impassable. Movement had now been so slowed down by the weather that the 20-mile journey from the nearest railway station to General Baliuev's HQ was taking seven hours. In the trenches water was more than three feet deep. Nonetheless, on March 26 the Russians attacked the left wing of Hutier's army group, again choosing the point of junction with Garnier's region. They were no more successful than they had been on any earlier occasion, and after this last vain attempt General Plashkov had to call off all further operations. His whole front had become a lake. German Intelligence believed that the Russians Were wifhdmw-"* ing troops from the front and this was confirmed by air recon-^** naissance. On April 3 monitored Russian radio messages gave further corroboration of the German view that the offensive had

come

to

an end.

'Ferdinand's Nose' fact was that water was coming in everywhere so that renewal of the attack by the Russians was impossible, though the German High Command warned that this lull might well be temporary and last only until the roads had cleared. But it was not quite the end. With the trenches south of Lake Narotch in his hands Baliuev tried to straighten the line along the isthmus still further by attacks on the salient nicknamed 'Ferdinand's Nose'. Attacks on March 25 and 27 and another on April 7 failed to dislodge the defences and a final attempt on

The

April 14 was equally ineffective. In late April the Germans began their own artillery bombardment before an effort to retake the trenches remaining in Russian hands. The shelling was carried out under the orders of a Lands wehr commander of artillery, Lieutenant-Colonel Bruchmiiller. Colonel Bruchmiiller was, in Hoffman's view, an artillery genius and he had already proved his worth in helping to stem the Russian attacks. He was able, says Hoffman, to judge the weight of shells necessary to render a target harmless by instinct alone Certainly the high quality of the German artillery fire from a much lower concentration of guns was repeatedly shown during this battle. The Russians, after firing off a record weight of metal, were only able to capture a single line of trenches. On the other

12!>1

The battle bogs down as the thaw sets in Here a German gun moves up

to the firing line

"-"SU*

hand, the lines they took in the Postavy area had had to be abandoned because of German shelling. In one day the Germans repossessed their sole remaining lost terrain. The Russian offensive had been a complete failure. Russian losses were estimated at 110,000. German losses were round 20,000. It is a truism that casualty figures never tell the whole story, and it certainly applied in this case. Rarely have men fought under more deplorable conditions and no casualty list exists to show the thousands on both sides who were permanently injured or disfigured by frostbite. Some may still survive. It was claimed a decade later that the Narotch offensive failed because the Russians, out of loyalty to their allies, launched it at a totally impracticable time and so made defeat inevitable. Theie can be no doubt of the pressure that Joffre was bringing to bear, through Paleologue, as well as through the French military attaches. Junior Russian officers were convinced these pressures were the sole reason for the Narotch attacks being undertaken. 'We Russians are so noble we are always ready to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of our allies'; they told foreign observers, 'no one does the same thing for us, though.' Against this there is of course the evidence that a great concentration of German forces was taking place before Verdun. If the intention had been to mount a local offensive and this had been expanded into an onslaught to assist the French only to be catastrophically defeated, one wonders what chance the small offensive could ever have stood. General Baliuev gave as his reason for the failure of the offensive the insufficient technical equipment. He pointed out that only one of his spotter aircraft had radio. Battles are won, as Napoleon pointed out, by the 'big battalions' — it went without saying that 'big battalions' also meant the most efficient and best equipped battalions. Perhaps it can only be expected that the nation which had witnessed the retreat in disorder of the Grande Armee should ignore its founder's precepts. One has, on the other hand, as a counter to this the fact that in terms of artillery, as well as manpower, the Russians were on this occasion better off than the Germans. The truth may well be, as many Russian field officers believed at the time, that the attacks were indeed aimed at helping the French, but that far from taking place earlier than intended, they had — through Russian tardiness in organisation and the shortage of rifles — taken place later. The

1292

original date, they said, was to have been March 1. By delaying ~ the attacks had come too late; the Germans were prepared; the m thaw was imminent. Even though the Russian General Staff knew the. risks, political considerations apparently superseded all others. Whatever the reasons, the mismanagement of this campaign had a disastrous effect on morale, and such waste of human life — without victory or the hope of victory at the end of it — could not be other than disintegrating to the nation as a whole. If the attacks were a military failure, did they succeed in their declared object of relieving the pressure at Verdun? It has been pointed out by Russian writers, as well as those of other nationalities, that the Narotch offensive forced the Germans to hold their forces on the Eastern Front and to halt plans for the movement of troops westward. This could well have been the case, but relieving pressure' entailed drawing forces from Verdun and all the Russian attacks did was to maintain a status quo in the west against which the French were struggling for their survival.

Further Reading Brusilov, Gen. A.

A., A Soldier's Notebook (Macmillan) The World Crisis (Thornton Butterworth 1923-9) Y., La Russie dans la Guerre Mondiale (Paris: Payot) Der Weltkrieg 1914-1918 Winter 1916 (Berlin: Reichsarchiv) Falls, C, The First World War (Longmans Green) Francois, Gen. von, Gorlice 1915 (Leipzig: Kochler) Hoffman, M., The War of Lost Opportunities (Seeker) Knox, Gen. Sir Alfred, With the Russian Armies (Hutchinson) Ludendorff, Gen. E., My War Memories (Hutchinson) Paleologue, M., An Ambassador's Memoirs (Hutchinson) Tuchman. B., The Guns of August (Constable)

W

Churchill, Danilov, Gen

S.,

was born in 1927 He lived in Jersey during the German Channel Islands during the Second World War and was in 1945 by the Germans for possessing a radio In 1947 he went to Britain and worked as a reporter on the Essex Weekly News and the Hackney Gazette and as a sub-editor on the Lincolnshire Echo In 1957 he established a

WARD RUTHERFORD

occupation imprisoned

of the

news agency

in

Jersey, supplying

news

to the British national press, to the

BBC

and to the Independent Television Authority. In 1962 ITA appointed him head of Channel News and local programmes, and in 1964 he joined the BBC He has made frequent broadcasts on all BBC services, and has contributed articles and stories to publications throughout Britain, Europe and the USA

an

PBMH
THE EASTER In 1914 Home Rule for Ireland had been postponed for the duration of the war: with the emergence of a common enemy, Irishmen agreed to resign themselves for a bit longer to the familiar pattern of government from Dublin Castle. But dedication to the ideal of national independence had not died with the call to arms: in Dublin, at a secret meeting of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, an insurrection was planned to take place before the end of the war. In Easter week 1916, members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army —the two militant arms of the Republican ideal— joined together to start a rebellion. Even before it began, its leaders knew that it was doomed, but it was a gesture of defiance that altered for ever the pattern of Irish history. Above: The Post Office, of the rebels, in ruins

HQ

On

Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, a force Irishmen under arms estimated at between 1.000 and 1,500 men and women attempted to seize Dublin, with the ultimate

of

intention o( destroying British rule in Ireland and creating an entirely independent Irish Republic to include all 32 counties of Leinster, Monster. Ulster and Connaught Their leaders. Patrick Pearse, lames Connolly and the others, knew that their chances of success were so slight as to he almost non-existent. Yet they fought,

•

and

died. Why'.'

The circumstances

that led to the Irish rebellion of 1916 are of an intense complexity, historical, social, political and, perhaps above all, psychological. The Irish writer. Sean O'Faolain, has written of his country: 'Most of our physical embodiments of the past are ruins, as most of our songs are songs of lament and defiance.'

The Easter Rising was a complete which

failure,

large parts of Dublin in ruins; yet without it Ireland might never have been free of English rule. The leaders, left

alive, had very few supporters even among the Irish patriots; dead, they became and have remained their country's heroes. It was a great historical paradox, and one that to this day the British have perhaps never understood. Had they understood it, it is conceivable that the British might still have an empire, since the overthrow of British rule in Ireland marked the beginning of the overthrow of British imperial might in Asia, in Africa, and elsewhere. The historical complexity, from the British point of view, can be traced to a general misunderstanding of the Irish character and of Irish desires. The English were bewildered by the fact that most Irishmen, and all educated Irishmen, spoke English, and wrote it, as well as, and often better than, most Englishmen. They were further bewildered by the fact that a very large proportion of the Irish governing class was of English or Norman ancestry. In 1916, the English had not grasped the fact that for two centuries — since the brutal smashing of the old Irish governing class and the theft of their lands — it was precisely these people, Grattan, Tone, Parnell and so on, who had led the Irish in their longing to be free of alien rule. And the reason for this gross misunderstanding was that the English in England did not realise that the Irish way of life was in many ways — at least in terms of human relationships — culturally superior to the English way. Always technologically backward, the Irish were overwhelmed in the course of 1,000 and more years by waves of conquerors. If those conquerors remained in Ireland, they became, as the English would and did say, seduced by the ease and pleasure of an Irish attitude that looks for charm, gaiety and wit as well as for profit: they became 'more Irish than the Irish'. And this the English, in England, dismissed as fecklessness. The fact that the Irish had different values from their own was regarded as funny — and the 'stage Irishman' was created in London. The fact that English might had always, even-

tually, crushed Irish rel ^llion

was remem-

mien had

fought with immense distinctio in all the major armies of Europe, and nc 'east in that of Great Britain, was som mes ignored a hall at the From the point of view of W turn of the century, Paddy-am .is-pig was bered; the fact that

Iri

.

an essentially comical, 1294

childlikt figure.

He

should know, in English terms, his proper station in life. Perhaps, at a pinch, the Anglo-Irish (an odious and meaningless term) might administer this province of Great Britain, but Paddy, never. On the other hand, these people were politically troublesome and, furthermore, the English of the late Victorian age were a decent lot on the whole. During the Great Famine of 1846 the English liberals had let Ireland starve in the interests of their laissez-faire ideology — to have fed them would have interfered with the workings of the free market so far as corn chandlers were concerned — but later second thoughts prevailed. The Irish were to be given partial

sovereignty over their

and a

Home

Rule

the First World

was postponed

Bill

War

own

affairs,

was passed. But then began.

Home

Rule

until victory over the Ger-

mans should have been achieved. The Irish would not mind, why should they? Paddy would join the British Army, as he had always done and as scores of thousands of Irishmen did. The Irish would not understand — and many, perhaps most, did not.

Secret society But some Irishmen did understand. The most important of these were the members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood or IRB (which must not be confused with the Irish Republican Army, or IRA, a later creation). The IRB had been formed in 1858. It was a secret society which probably never numbered more than 2,000 including those Irishmen who belonged to it and who lived in England, America or elsewhere. The majority of its members were what might be loosely called 'intellectuals' and in this, in their determination, and in their secrecy they bore a certain resemblance to their Russian contemporaries, Lenin's small Bolshevik Party. However, their aims were political rather than economic. They were patriots, dedicated to the ideal of national independence, and were prepared to use all means — including force — to achieve this end. They provided, as it were, the general staff of the mass movement for Irish freedom from British rule, and their fortnightly publication, Irish

Freedom (founded in 1910), advocated complete republican government for the whole of Ireland.

men who

significant that all the signed the proclamation of an It

is

Republic on Easter Monday were of the IRB. When the First World War began, John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Nationalist Party and Parnell's heir, immediately proclaimed his acceptance of the postponement of Home Rule, both for himself and for his followers. These included the Irish Volunteers, perhaps then some 200,000 strong (of whom maybe 2,000 were trained and armed). This force had been created in November 1913 as a counter to the Ulster Volunteers, an organisation originally formed to fight against Home Rule. The Ulster Volunteers were also prepared to postpone a struggle that had recently seemed both inevitable and imminent, and from the North of Ireland as from the South scores of thousands of young volunteers went off to fight, and only too often to die, in Flanders. Indeed, Redmond suggested to the government in London that they could Irish

members

British troops from Ireland: his Volunteer force and the Ulster Volunteers were quite capable of seeing that there

remove

all

were no disturbances in Ireland throughout the period of the war. The IRB had other ideas. At a meeting of their supreme council, as early as August 1914, the decision was taken — in secret of course — that there must be an Irish insurrection before the end of Britain's war with Germany. Until Easter Week 1916 the active members of the IRB were fully occupied in mounting this revolution. They had at their disposal brains, a fairly considerable amount of money — mostly Irish Americans — and little else. to act through the Irish patriotic organisations, over many of which they had obtained partial control, and if the rising were to be a military success they had to acquire arms, either from British arsenals, or from abroad, which meant in

from

They had

from Germany. The balance sheet as follows: with the exception of Ulstermen and certain landlords and ineffect

was roughly

dustrialists, a large

number

of the Irish

wanted freedom from British rule. However, the people were temporarily agreeable to the Home Rule solution, even though the postponed bill gave Ireland less than Dominion status in fiscal and other matters. Furthermore, the farming community was doing very well out of the war. Thus the IRB could rely on considerable emotional sympathy but little, if any, practical help from the mass of the people. And since the Irish are in some measure a volatile race, there was no telling how they would react to a rising. Certainly the

Roman

Catholic

Church would be against such a deed: and the Parish priests were very powerful spokesmen in Ireland. So far as fighting men went, any insurrection would seem doomed to certain defeat. Redmond's huge numbers of Volunteers were mostly unarmed, or were fighting for the British in France. However, some of those who remained in Ireland and were armed and trained could be relied upon. Their Chief-of-Staff was the historian Eoin MacNeill, and their commandant a schoolmaster named Patrick Pearse. Both of these men were members of the IRB, but as events will show they did not see eye to eye on tactics. The Volunteers were scattered throughout Ireland.

Another private army The other para-military

force

was James

Connolly's Irish Citizen Army. Connolly was a socialist who in 1896 had founded the Socialist Republican Party. He was a trained soldier. In 1908 James Larkin had created the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union. When that union organised a strike in 1913, and the strike was broken by strong-arm methods, Connolly decided that a workers' defensive force was needed and created his Citizen Army. It was led by himself and by an ex-British army officer named Jack White. It has been said that this was the most efficient military force at the disposal of the Republicans. It was, however, very small. When it came to the actual fighting, it was only some 250 men who went out, as opposed to about 1 ,000 from the Volunteers. Supporting these was the women's organisation.

Countess

Markiewicz — an

Irish woman, born a Gore-Booth, and of aristocratic ancestry — was one of the most

prominent. She fought as an officer of the Army throughout the Easter Rising for she was not only a patriot but a socialist. There were also the so-called Citizen

Above

left:

John Redmond, leader

of the Irish

Nationalist Party, reviewing a parade of Irish Volunteers. Above right: F. E. ('Galloper') Smith, later Lord Birkenhead. His vehement opposition

Home Rule was echoed by the majority of Ulstermen. Below: The slogan of Connolly's Irish Citizen Army, seen here outside Liberty Hall, reflects its commitment to the Republic

to


'Fianna Boys', lads who enjoyed the manoeuvring before the Rising, as most boys would, and who also showed guts and resourcefulness when the real thing happened. The\ wore messengers, runners

and so

THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT

British power was Dublin Castle, and 'the Castle' relied on the RIC for its field Intelligence.

REPUBLIC

IRISH

on.

Against them they had what was, on paper at least, a most formidable force. To maintain their control over Ireland, the British relied primarily on the Royal Irish Constabulary, an armed police force, living largely in barracks, some 10,000 strong. They were almost all Irishmen, knew their districts thoroughly, and were in 1916, with a very few exceptions, entirely loyal to the Crown. They were well trained, well equipped, only moderately unpopular (the Irish do not love police forces* and well informed. The centre of

politics, the Castle was supposed to know what the IRB was planning. The Special Branch did not seem, however, to have

POBLACHT NA H E IREANN.

TO T3P PEOPLE OF IRELAND. IRISHMLN AND IRISHWOMEN Id th* na. of God and of the dead generations from which sbe receives bw old tradition of nationhood. Ireland through us. suramoaa h, children to her Hag and strikes Tor bar freedom Having organised and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary rganisauon the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open oscular, oiganisalions. the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Ciljien Army, having patiently penciled her discipline, having resolutely waned for the right mooeenl to reveal .!., now seues that moment, and. lupponed .i>, by bar nailed children 1a America and by gallant allies 1a turope. but relying in the Ural oa bar strength, she i

I

on

strikes ib

full

confidence of vietery

We

u

declare the right . the people a/ Ireland la Ike esrneeehlp of Ireland, and theunfettered control of irte* aatxiaiee. le be sovereign and indefensible Th. lorag usurpation of thai right by a foreign people and govammeat no, eituigconhad la. right, aor caa u ever be eilingalshed except by Ihe daslructian of the Irish people In esery generation Ihe Irish people have iss.rud their right to aalianal freedom and sov.ieignly all limes dunag Ihe past thro hundred y.ars th.y have I

hu

iu.rt.1

at

arms

in

Standing on that fundamental njhl and again assorting it in arms in ilia face we tur.by proclaim th. Irish Republic as a Sov.nigo Ind.psnd.nt Slate and w. pi.dg. our liv.s and th. Iiv^of our comradasin arms to the causa of its Ireedem of its welfare, and af ita exaltnlaoo amoag the ruttioaa of Ihe world,

Ihe Irish Republic tl entailed U. and baraby claims, ihe .allegiance of every shrnan and Irishwoman. ' The Republic guarantees raaajious and civil liberty, equal equal opportuniliea 10 all as cimans. and declares, tu .resolve la pursue e r ippiness and prosperity of the aholo nation and of all its parts, cherishing all ilii children of the nation equally, andebliiious of the differences carefully festered j an alien government, which have d-vidcu a minority from the majority in Ihe

It

ihls and

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arms have brought the oppurlune moment Tor the establishment of a National Government. rcir*:.i—liiveof Use, whole people uf Ireland and ..led by the sulliaaesol all liec men and women. Ihe Provisional flovei nuient. Until our

.

On the other hand the blame may rest with those in the Castle to whom they sent their reports. The evaluation of Intelligence is infinitely more important than its accumulation. And behind those 'occupation' forces tent.

there was a large British

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place the cauae of the Irish jfpnublic under the pi election of the Most High Gael ^ ti. se blessing we to . eke upon aur anus, and we pray that no one who serves thai iu.se will dishonour it by lewerlece. inl-.-uanity. or rapine In this supreme nan,' uh nation must, by Us valrHir adjl - ,-iplehc and by the readiness of childrn. '.o .u. illce tneonvalvee for the c.nsauu „ .ad, prove isawtf worthyof Ihe august dastin ,ruck a a calked

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and what, in wartime and in Irish terms, were almost infinite reserves in Great Britain. If it were a mere question of manpower, the Irish had not a hope. As for firearms, the David and Goliath ratio was even more vivid. Before the outbreak of the First World War the Ulster Volunteers had bought some 35,000 Ger-

man

i...,iianl

hereby

In Dublin itself the police were not armed, though of course, there were arms available. They numbered about 1,000 and were organised on the model of the London police. The Special Branch was concerned with politics. Through its investigations, and general infiltration of Irish republican

been particularly good at this job, nor to have infiltrated the IRB to any great ex-

1,000.

the Irish Volunteers about And, of course, the British army

rifles,

had everything, including artillery of all sorts. The Irish made an attempt to rectify this by getting rifles from Germany. Sir RQger Casement, an Irishman with a distinguished past, went to Germany from neutral America. He was to bring the weapons for the Easter Rising that the IRB

Above: The proclamation of the Republic by the seven rebel leaders. Their action took the British by surprise. Below: Lord Wimborne reviewing British troops. As Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, Wimborne was sympathetic and alert to the dangers of the Irish situation, but nonetheless he personified the essentially remote and imposed nature of British rule •

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had agreed on. His mission was a failure. British Naval Intelligence had broken some German cyphers. The British navy

was thus able to intercept the German ship carrying the guns. Casement himself was immediately arrested when he came ashore from a U-Boat near Tralee, in County Kerry, on Good Friday. The guns on which the Irish had been relying, even for this forlorn hope, had not arrived. Were they still to go on? It is here that the different personalities and attitudes become important. We must pause to look at the men, English and Irish, involved; and also at the whole meaning of Sinn Fein.

Irish let

down

Sinn Fein

usually translated as 'ourthis is perhaps the best rendering in English of a complicated Irish is

selves alone',

and

concept. It means above all, independence from British rule. But since Irish history was in those days so much bound up with contemporary Irish politics, it had a secondary meaning. For many centuries the Irish had hoped for the help of England's enemies to get rid of the English. The Spaniards and the French had let them down as the Germans were to do in 1916. This was not so much because Britain's enemies lacked the anxiety to defeat Britain in Ireland but because of geographical-military complications (tides, prevailing winds and so on). Thus Sinn Fein also meant that the Irish must rely upon themselves alone in order to rid themselves of their British rulers. For the British, in the years to come, the 'Shinners' were to be the epitome of violent republicanism in Ireland. In fact, the party,

which only had

its first

knew

and on Sunday the 23rd (that is to say only a matter of hours before the Rising took place) demanded of Nathan that he immediately arrest 'between 60 and 100' of the Irish leaders. Had this been done successfully, it seems unlikely that any Rising would have taken place at that time. However, it was probably too late for a mere police action by that date. The men of the Citizen Army and the more militant

changes of the tenant-landlord relationship. He was popular with the Irish govern-

Volunteers were under arms and ready to fight. As it was, Nathan persuaded his 'constitutional monarch' that there was no need for action. And Birrell was in London.

in Ireland was a Major-General Friend. He, even more, seems to have had no idea of what was going on in Ireland at all. And finally there was Lord Wimborne, the LordLieutenant and the King's representative,

who presided over the British administration as a sort of constitutional monarch with all the powers, and most of the limitations, that that implies. However, he Ireland well. He had sponsored the Land Act of 1903, which had pacified the Irish countrymen by further advantageous

ing class, as was Birrell; but, unlike his Chief Secretary, he did not at all care for the situation that was developing. The British Intelligence services had, as we have seen, infiltrated the various Irish 'resistance' movements. The Volunteers, it must be assumed, had few secrets not known to Dublin Castle. And the Castle knew that a rising was planned to take place as soon as possible after the landing of Casement and his German guns. On April 21, 1916, Casement landed and was

immediately arrested. Wimborne, who was have gone to Belfast, cancelled his visit

to

Failing of British Intelligence? It would seem probable that Nathan's

In-

had briefed him as to what was happening within the high command of the Volunteers after the news of Casement's arrest, and that he knew Eoin MacNeill had decided that without the guns the Rising must be cancelled or at least postponed. What Nathan presumably did not know was that this decision finally split the Volunteers, and that the IRB was almost solidly behind Patrick Pearse and those other Irish patriots who were pretelligence service

annual convention

as late as 1905, was essentially democratic. It had run a parliamentary candidate (who was defeated) in the Leitrim election of 1908. But as time went on it gained an increasing number of the extremists from Redmond's Nationalist Party. Arthur Griffith, its leader and also the editor of the United Irishman, was never a fanatic. He believed in constitutional tactics — and was thus far less of an extremist than many of the IRB leaders — but, unlike Redmond's and Parnell's old party, he no longer trusted the alliance with the Liberal Party in Great Britain. 'Ourselves alone' — to many young men it was a most attractive idea. The British rulers were, on the whole, a shadowy lot. The Liberal government in London was inevitably devoting almost all its attention to the gigantic struggle on the Continent. Since Ireland appeared so placid in 1916, neither the best politicians nor by any means the best British soldiers were in the country. Augustine Birrell was Chief Secretary. Possessed, it was said, of extreme personal charm, he was a belle lettrist whose books, now forgotten, enjoyed in their time considerable esteem. He appears to have regarded his job in Dublin -which might be described as active head of the administration — as something of a sideline to his career as a litterateur, and spent a very large proportion of his time being charming in London. His principal Assistant Secretary, responsible for political affairs, was a civil servant experienced in colonial administration, Sir Mat-

thew Nathan. He seems to have had little comprehension of the Irish temperament and to have been happiest behind his desk, dealing with routine paperwork. The gencommanding the British army

eral officer

Above: Mrs Erskine Childers and Mary Spring-Rice on board the Asgard which brought guns rebels. British Intelligence had arrested Casement but failed to intercept this arms shipment

to the

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go ahead with the Rising even in disadvantageous, indeed well-nigh suicidal, circumstances. All this sounds very neat when put down on paper, but of course the reality was far more chaotic, involving a clash of personalities, orders and counterorders and very considerable bitterness. Indeed, MacNeill's decision to call off the Rising, and Pearse's to go ahead, was really the death-knell of the Volunteers and of the Nationalist Party whose armed force they were supposed to be. After the Rising, the political leadership of those hostile to British rule in Ireland passed to the Sinn Fein, while those who fought in Easter week became the nucleus of the Irish Republican Army. Certainly MacNeill's last-minute proclamation that the Rising be cancelled — he had boys bicycling all over the country, and even announced this supposed non-happening in the Sunday papers — cannot possibly

pared

to

these

have been unknown to Nathan. He must have taken into account the fact that a few hot -heads were likely to ignore this order: he must also have known that the vast bulk of the Volunteers would breathe a sigh of relief and that the clergy — to whom the English have often attached an exaggerated political importance in Ireland as a result of their ubiquity and their marked difference from the Anglican clergy in England — would support MacNeill and the mass of his supporters, content with the promise of eventual, diluted Home Rule. The handful of extremists could be dealt with — though not at all as easily as the English thought — by the overwhelming forces arraigned against them. No special precautions were taken, despite Lord Wimborne's fully justified fears. Indeed, on Easter Monday, the first day of the Rising, a great many British officers were at Fairyhouse Races.

The Easter Rising was suicidal. Patrick Pearse was well aware of this. Before ever it happened he said to his mother: The day is coming when I shall be shot, swept away, and my colleagues like me.' When his mother enquired about her other son, William, who was also an extreme nationalist, Pearse is reported to have replied: 'Willie? Shot like the others. We'll all be shot.' And James Connolly is said to have remarked: 'The chances against us are a thousand to one.' On the morning of the Rising, when asked by one of his men if there was any hope, he replied, cheerfully: 'None whatever!' It

was hard

for

the staff officers and

colonial administrators of Dublin Castle, accustomed to weighing possibilities so far as their own actions were concerned, to realise that a group of men, perhaps 1,250 strong (the Citizen Army took no notice of MacNeill), was prepared to fight and die in such circumstances. But they should have been wiser in their age: Langemark was recent, Verdun was going on. Seldom in history have men been so willing, indeed so eager, to throw away their lives for an ideal, almost any ideal, and the Irish ideal

had long

roots.

The men went out and

too,

was an

illusion.

The

Irish march out H-hour was 12 noon and since this was a Bank Holiday there were crowds in the streets, and these witnessed the small bodies of Volunteers and of the Citizen Army marching, armed, through the city to seize their various strongpoints. It went, on the whole, remarkably smoothly. Five major buildings or groups of buildings were seized north of the River Liffey, nine south of it, and some of the railway stations were occupied. Headquarters were established in the massive General Post Office in Sackville Street (now O'Connell Street)

from which Irish flags were flown and where Patrick Pearse announced the creation of a provisional government of the new Irish Republic. With him in the Post Office were Connolly as military commander, Joseph Plunkett (a very sick man), The O'Rahilly, Tom Clark, Sean MacDermott and other leaders. There, too, was a young man named Michael Collins. The rebels immediately set about preparing the Post Office against the attack which they expected almost at once. The four other principal strongpoints seized were the South Dublin Union, a congeries of poor-houses and the like (commanded by Eamonn

Ceannt); the Four Courts, the headquarters of the legal profession, where heavy law books were used as sandbags (Eamonn Daly); St Stephen's Green, where trenches were dug and barricades of motorcars

erected (Michael Mallin and Countess Markiewicz), and Boland's Flour Mill, which covered the approach roads from Kingstown, now Dun Laoghaire, where any reinforcements from England would almost certainly disembark (Eamon de Valera). An attempt to seize Dublin Castle failed. An attempt to capture a large quantity of arms and ammunition from the arsenal in Phoenix Park known as the Magazine Fort, was not very successful and only a few rifles were seized. On the other hand, the rebels successfully cut telephone lines, and the Castle was for a time almost isolated. A further success was that a troop of Lancers which attempted to charge down Sackville Street was repulsed with casualties.

In the dark

The British had been taken by surprise and were now almost completely in the dark. The Castle immediately ordered troops up from the Curragh and other camps outside Dublin and appealed to London for reinforcements. There, Lord French was Commander-in-Chief. He was an Irishman and an ardent Unionist. He immediately ordered that no less than four divisions be

fought.

The essence

of the Irish plan was to seize certain key points in the city, and hold tssible, thus disthese for as long as rupting British control f the capital. It was then hoped that one of three things might happen: the country might rise in sympathy; the British migi: realise the ultimate impossibility of controlling Irej

1300

land and pull out; and last and faintest of hopes, the Germans might somehow come to the rescue of the rebels. Since the rebels had no artillery of any sort, their strongpoints could only hold out provided that the British did not use their artillery. Connolly and the socialists hoped that the British would, for capitalist reasons, not bombard Dublin and thus destroy their own — or largely their own — property. This,

alerted for transfer to Ireland. British policy was in fact thrown into reverse. Appeasement of the Irish was out; the rebels were to be crushed, rapidly and massively. But if the British in Dublin were in the dark, so were the rebels. They had no wireless links either between the strongpoints they had seized or with the

outside world.

became

Communication by runner and eventually impossible

difficult

when the fighting reached its peak. From a military point of view, Tuesday was comparatively calm. The British were closing in cautiously. Their strategy was to throw a cordon around that area of Dublin where the rebels' strongpoints were, then cut that area in two, and finally mop up. They moved artillery and troops into Trinity College, a natural fortress which the rebels had failed to seize, though they

had planned to do so. The reason was the small number of fighting men available. Looting by the crowds began. Martial law was declared. British reinforcements arrived at Kingstown. A mad British officer, a Captain Bowen-Colthurst, had three harmless journalists shot 'while trying to escape' — a phrase to become hideously familiar, and not only in Ireland. The 'atrocities' had begun. By Wednesday morning the rebels were outnumbered 20 to one. The British now began to attack in earnest. Their first major action was to destroy Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Labour Party and of the trade unions, by shellfire from the gunboat Helga. As it happened, the rebels had anticipated this, and the building was empty. The British gunfire was inaccurate and many other buildings were hit and

many

civilians killed.

The army

also

was

using artillery: a 9-pounder gun was fired against a single sniper. Dublin began to burn, and the Dubliners to starve, for there was no food coming into the city. This was no longer a police action but full-scale war in which no attempt was made to spare the

Meanwhile, British reinforcements marching in from Kingstown were ambushed by de Valera's men and suffered heavy casualties, but by dint of numbers civilians.

forced

their

way

through. St Stephen's

Green had been cleared of

rebels,

who

re-

treated into the Royal College of Surgeons, and established a strongpoint there.

Ruthless commander On Thursday the new British commanderin-chief arrived. Since Ireland was under martial law, he held full powers there. This was General Sir John Maxwell, a soldier of

some

distinction

who had

return-

ed the month before from Egypt, where he had been Commander-in-Chief of the Anglo-Egyptian armies. Although he numbered the Countess Markiewicz among his relations, he had no knowledge of the current political mood in Ireland, and, indeed, as events were to prove, did more to undermine British rule in Ireland than all the rebels put together. He had been ordered by the British Prime Minister, Asquith, to put down the rebellion with all possible speed. And this he did regardless of political consequences. The reinforcements from England were now in action. These were largely untrained men, and when they discovered that many of the men of the Irish Republican Army — as the rebels now and henceforth styled themselves — were not in uniform (how could they be?) they began shooting male civilians on sight. On that day (Thursday) attacks were made on Boland's Mill, the men in the South Dublin Union were forced to give ground, and there was shelling of the General Post Office, which began to burn from the top down. Connolly was wounded twice. The first wound he hid from his men:

\

Irish

British 1200 to 2500 troops

represents Citizen Army

Reinforcements: 2 Brigades (8000 men), 4 18pdrs,

1

gunboat

BRITISH-HELD KEYPOINTS REBEL-HELD KEYPOINTS

Richmond Penitentiary

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Royal Barracks

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Pearse\\by Connoll X&\

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shelling Liberty Hall

Post

Four Courts Daly

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Eammon

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St Stephens Green

Michael Mallin Nil Countess Mairkiewicz

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Barracks

Bolands Portobello Barracks

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left: The chart shows the number of rebels and British troops at the outbreak of the fighting and the massive reinforcement by the British which soon followed. Before the Rising, Patrick Pearse, said to his mother: 'The day is coming when shall be shot, swept away and my colleagues like me.' Left: The map shows an aerial view of Dublin and the strongpoints held by the rebels. An attempt to take Dublin Castle was made- and failed, but lines of communication there were temporarily cut. Above top: An artist's impression of the Easter Rising by Joseph McGill. Above centre: The ORahilly fought in the Post Office with Pearse and Connolly. Above: A British view of Ireland - loyal and sentimental I

1301

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the second was more serious, for one foot was shattered and he was in great pain. With the aid of morphia he carried on, directing the battle as best he could. The Dublin fires were now great conflagrations. With the streets full of smallarms fire and the water supplies often cut, these could not be dealt with. Still, no major rebel strongpoint surrendered. On Friday, Connolly ordered the women who had fought so bravely to leave the General Post Office building, which was now cut off and burning. Later that day he and Pearse and the remaining rebels escaped from a building that was by now almost redhot and about to collapse. They found temporary refuge nearby, while the British continued to shell the empty building. All knew that the end was near. A last battle was fought for King's Street, near the Four Courts. It took some 5,000 British soldiers, equipped with armoured cars and artillery, 28 hours to advance about 150 yards against some 200 rebels. It was then that the troops of the South Staffordshire Regiment bayoneted and shot civilians hiding in cellars. And now all was over. On Saturday morning Pearse and Connolly surrendered unconditionally. Like so much else about the Easter Rising, casualties are hard to estimate. It would seem that those of the British were about 500; those of the Irish, including civilians/about twice that figure. Material damage was estimated at about £2,500,000. Large parts of Dublin lay in ruins. When, on Sunday, the arrested rebels were marched across Dublin from one prison compound to another, they were at times jeered at and booed by the crowds, and particularly in the slum areas. The mass of public opinion had been against the rebels before the Rising and remained so until the reprisals began. On the direct orders of the cabinet in London, punishment was swift, secret and brutal. The leaders were tried by court martial and shot: only when they were dead were their sentences announced. Among those thus killed were Willie Pearse, who was no leader and who, it was generally believed in Ireland, was killed because he

followed his famous brother, the invalid Plunkett, and, most disgusting of

Opposite page Brief moment

of

triumph tor

the rebels as the Republican flag flies above the General Post Office in Sackville Street.

The ORahilly

damaged beyond

had

Insert:

all to Irish minds, Connolly, who was dying and who had to be propped up in bed for the court martial in his hospital room. He was shot in a chair, since he could not

repair in the street fighting. The ORahilly was killed in Moore Street just before the rebels surrendered. Above top: The armoured car, made from a railway boiler by the British Army and used against the rebels Left: A building in Earl Street crumbles

stand.

A wave

of disgust crossed all Ire-

s car,

during the bombardment by the Helga (below) GPO clock stopped when fire broke out The fire eventually compelled the rebels to

land.

That wave did not subside when Asquith defended these measures in the

Above: The

did it subside when he realised that a mistake had been made,

abandon the building, and the to bombard the burning shell

Commons. Nor

British

continued

and sacked Maxwell. When London at last understood that its methods were uniting all Ireland against Britain, there was yet another change of British policy. Many of the 3,000-odd men arrested after the Rising were released from British gaols. They returned to Ireland and began immediately to reorganise a new and more powerful IRA, now with the backing of the people. There was a gesture of appeasement by Lloyd George, the new Prime Minister, who called an Irish Convention intended to solve 'the Irish problem". Since the Sinn Fein boycotted the Convention, it was a complete failure. Again British policy was thrown into reverse, and the leaders of the new independence movement were arrested in the spring of 1918. Michael Collins, how-

L303

ever, escaped arrest, though there was a price on his head, dead or alive, which eventually reached the sum of £10,000. He was to be the great guerrilla leader in the next round of the struggle. The Irish leaders, with much backing from the United States, both emotional and financial,

about

set

creating

a

viable

alternative

government which could and did take over when the British should have at last seen that they could not win. The Sinn Fein triumphed, and won most of the Irish seats in the 1918 election. The elected members, however, formed their own 'parliament', Dai/ Eireann, rather than sit in Westminster. Collins drew up a strategy of resistance, first passive, then obstructive and finally active, which has since been pursued elsewhere against British imperialism, and indeed against the imperialisms of other nations. And in January of 1919 the first shots of the new rebellion were fired in County Tipperary. After Easter Week 1916 permanent English rule in Ireland became an impossibility. One tragedy was a triumph. Other tragedies were to follow before the Irish achieved their goal of independence. Further Reading

A History of Ireland (Methuen) Six Days to Shake an Empire (Dent 1966) Jackson. T A Ireland her Own (Cobhott Press) Curtis. E Duff.

C

.

..

CONSTANTINE FITZGIBBON was educated

principally

in

born in 1919 and Great Britain and on the

He served in the British and American armies in the Second World War. At the end of the war he was a major in Military Intelligence and a specialist on the subject of the German General Staff Since the war, he has been a free-lance writer, resident in Italy, the United States and Great Britain Continent.

His

books include novels, history (The Blitz) and biography

Shirt

Nessus, The

1

Eamon de

Valera under arrest

of the fighting. 2

A

at

the end

British soldier holds

a captured Republican flag. 3 Countess Markiewicz and Michael Mallin under British escort in Ship Street barracks. 4 General Maxwell, British C in-C in Ireland. His action did more damage i British rule than any other aspect of the R mg .5 Irish prisoners

are

marched

to Englis

jails

of

Punishment was

1 James Connolly, in command at the Post Office; executed while wounded and unable to stand. 2 Thomas J. Clarke, a veteran Sinn Fein supporter; executed 3

Thomas MacDonagh; executed.

swift, secret

and brutal

patriot,

Countess Markiewicz, socialist, and officer in the Citizen Army; imprisoned. 5 Joseph

Ceannt, held out in the South Dublin Union, executed 8 Patrick Pearse, barrister, most outstanding

Plunkett, an invalid; executed. 6 Sean MacDermott, also at the Post Office; executed. 7 Eamonn

of the rebel leaders; executed Also executed, his young brother Willie aged only 18

4

On the Eastern Front the Russians were not doing too well. But in the Caucasus the Russian armies were grinding forward over the dismembered and disarrayed Turkish armies. Erzerum had fallen to them,

and the Russians' next target was Erzincan. But first Trabzon had to go, and this fell to a series of brilliant combined land/sea operations. Robert Walton. Below: The governor of Trabzon (centre) surrenders his ancient city to the Russians

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1306

TRABZON Russian Success in Turkey ^

mittMitl

several thousand years Trabzon (Trebihas been one of the important Black

I)

Sea ports. Xenophon's 10.000 Greek mer cenaries in Persia saw the sea again at Trabzon after their escape in 400 bc. The city survived the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in L453, but fell a few years later and has remained Turkish ever since. It is the chief seaport of Eastern Anatolia and is the terminus of the Erzerum-Kars road, which was then the only really passable road in the area. Before 1878, Trabzon had been a prosperous town, but after Kars fell to the Russians in that year, trade declined. Erzerum is snowbound six months of the sear and the heights around it frequently register temperatures cold enough to freeze whole units in a few hours. By contrast Trabzon. a city of about 50,000 inhabitants, enjoys a mild climate, and more than adequate rainfall which does its part in encouraging the lavish growth of rhododendra along the whole Lazistan coast. The Pontic Alps, which follow the coastline, protect the region from the rigours of the inland winter. The rocky coastal heights to the east of the city are interspersed with deep ravines and narrow river valleys which empty the rains and melting snows of spring into the Black Sea. Some forest remains in this region but the best forests were long ago cut down and the space filled with rhododendra. The terrain of the coastline makes large scale operations difficult and, as long as the defender controls the sea, favours the defence, especially as the mountains make flanking movements on the landward side virtually impossible. However, once the coastal positions have fallen. Trabzon itself presents no real obstacle. Except for a very few coastal defence guns, the city was not fortified at the time. The campaign reveals once again the skill of the Russian commander, General Yudenich; the 'bullet-headed' little man was master of the field. It also displays the bravery of his troops and the superiority of the Russian navy. The story is also one of bleak defeat and disaster for the already battered Turkish Third Army. The Turkish commanders and troops on the spot come out well enough, but the plight of the army raises questions about the wisdom of the government which put good troops in to such a sorry situation. The Turks had no real chance against the superbly executed combined operations of the Russian army and navy on the Lazistan coast. The fall of Trabzon was the logical consequence of the fall of Erzerum and marked the end of the second stage of Yudenich's overall plan. In the course of the ensuing months it was to be followed by the defeat of the Third Army, reorganised for the second time and now under the command of Vehip Pasha. This defeat was to lead to the Russian capture of Bayburt and then in the summer Erzincan, the headquarters of the

Turkish Caucasus command and the defeat of

Ahmet

finally to Izzet Pasha's Second

Army, which had been given the task

of

counterattacking from the south to cut the Russian lines of communication. Before the Second Army could attack in August, Yudenich had succeeded in crippling the Third Army so completely that it was not able to co-operate in the counteroffensive. The plan he had conceived in December 1915 was carried out just about as he had desired. By the fall of 1916 the way was i for a further Russian advance. The Pan-Turanian dream of the Partv of Union

1308

A tea-break in the mountains. The road into Turkey was long and arduous for the Russians and only the great hardiness of her soldiers made the success of these campaigns possible

and Progress seemed shattered. Enver Pasha had not really believed Erzerum was in serious danger and had not pushed for the dispatch of reinforcements as quickly as he might have. The delay was viewed with growing concern by General von Falkenhayn, Chief-of-Staff of the German Field Army, who feared that the Third Army would collapse if it was not immediately reinforced. The news of Erzerum's fall reached the German High Command indirectly. Li man von Sanders heard of it first in the bazaars of Constantinople and was given official notification only later. At the same time he also discovered that the other Turkish field commanders had not

been

fully

informed of what was happening

the Caucasus. Such information only worsened the bad relations between Sanders' mission and the Turkish government. It convinced Falkenhayn that the Turks needed more technical aid if they were to be kept in the war at all, which may well have been the impression Enver desired to convey, for he was a genius at extracting more from the Germans than they intended to give. in

Communications

to be cut was Falkenhayn who first suggested a counterstroke by a Turkish army which was to attack from the south and cut across the main Russian lines of communication. Though Falkenhayn knew Turkey and was far more realistic about what the Turks could do than were many German officials and soldiers, he too overestimated the It

Turks' capabilities. At least one reason for this was that he knew he could depend upon the cadre of German staff officers in Turkey to make it possible to attempt such a plan, once the Turkish authorities agreed to

it.

Everything depended upon Turkish

willingness to co-operate. The Germans assigned to the Turkish forces were subordinate to their Turkish commanders. What these subordinates could achieve is illustrated by the fact that the Turks rallied sufficiently after

Erzerum

to

defend

the approaches to Erzincan and Trabzon at all.

The loss of the Kopriikdy position and Erzerum took place while Major Guse,

Chief-of-Staff of the Third Army, was on leave in Germany recovering from a bout of

typhus, and

OHL

ordered Guse back to

service long before he had recovered. He rejoined what was left of the Third Army on February 23, 1916, before its new Commander, Yehip Pasha, who had been sent to replace the unfortunate Mahmut Kamil, could arrive. Major Prigge describes the Third Army at tbe time as 'in ziemlicher Auflosung' (in quite an advanced stage of

Major Guse watched what was more than a mob of 20,000 to 30,000 terrified men, mixed with crowds of dissolution).

now

little

frightened

civilians,

block the

Erzincan

To make matters worse, a thaw began, and this turned the road into a morass. Looking at the scene, Major Guse could only remark it was fortunate for the Central Powers that disaster had not road.

struck the previous year, while the Allies still on Gallipoli and the Armenians

were

in revolt.

The first task was to clear the road to Erzincan, and with Major Guse's energetic encouragement this was done in a few days. Once this had been accomplished, it was necessary to decide what could be done with troops whom Guse described as 'the remnants of the army' which was 'no longer capable of serious resistance to the Russians'. From the point of view of holding what was left of Armenia and defending Eastern Anatolia from invasion, the retreat to Erzincan was a serious mistake, compounded by the fact that IX Corps had moved even further south below the Hobek Dag massif. The logical move to hold the entire region would have been to retreat up the Trabzon road to Bayburt — the best place from which to organise a defence. Only the 30th Infantry Division had done this and had taken up a position before Bayburt in the Kop Pass. Guse noted that the Third Army was in such a state that the direction of the retreat might not at first have seemed to matter, but it did. The east bank of the Firat (Western Euphrates) and the heights of Kesis Daglari which commanded Erzincan appeared to offer a safe haven for X Corps, which took up a position there in support of XI Corps, which in turn occupied the Mamahatun

response and a new defensive position on the River Biiytik-dere, ten miles west of the River Abi Vice and east of the village of Atina, was reinforced by several thousand men from the Trabzon garrison. The Turks assumed that it would be virtually impossible for the Russians to turn them out of their trenches. An attack was only possible through the river valley which was dominated by their position. Their right was secure because of the terrain, while on their left the cliffs fell off straight into the sea. But they had not reckoned with Lyakhov, for whom the sea served as the 'impassable' Kargabazar ridge had for

Yudenich

The wastes of eastern Turkey cold, distance and mountainsovercome by Yudenich and his subordinate Lyakhov position on the far side of the Kotur bridge. In fact the whole position was exposed.

Erzincan's communications depended upon one only moderately good road via Enderes (Suschehir). A direct assault upon Erzincan was difficult especially because the Firat bridge could be blown up, which is exactly what the Turks were later to do, and an enemy would have a hard fight to cross the river. But if Bayburt were taken either by an attack up the road from Erzerum or down the road from Trabzon it would open the way for an assault through much less defensible terrain along the Bayroad to burt, Karahissar (Schebbin) Enderes. Once Enderes had been taken, Erzincan would have no other adequate alternative roads by which it could be supplied. Its defenders would be compelled to withdraw.

•all

problems

for the

Russians ably

ready begun to exert upon the Turkish units defending coast was increased. The Pontic Alps made it impossible to outflank the Turks and the ravines and river valleys made an advance by land very costly. But the sea offered endless possibilities to the Russians, who had flat bottomed coastal

dreadnought Imperatriza Maria, which had been launched at Sevastopol in the summer of 1915, to the Black Sea fleet.

Of the ships

of the Central Powers, only able to move freely in this part of the Black Sea. The Russian right wing on the Black Sea coast was commanded by General Lyakhov, who was particularly interested in combined land and sea operations. He had already employed the combination success-

Division, under a

German U-Boats were

Hunger.

during the previous year while taking of the advantage of 'enfilading fire from the sea against an enemy entrenched to defend the successive lateral valleys which are characteristic of

bring reinforcments by sea to Trabzon. The navy had replied that they could not stop every Turkish sea movement because of their distance from their own base and the danger that prolonged patrols would expose their ships to attack by German U-boats. The navy had also objected to keeping ships in constant support of the Russian land

at

tion of the

Hopa and had experience

general as adept opponents' position as Yudenich to ignore this possibility. He had already thought of it. For Yudenich the best approach to Erzincan was in this case the indirect one via Bayburt and Trabzon. But first, to prevent the forces of the at

turning

his

Turkish Second Army, which were just beginning to trickle into Bitlis in the south, from causing trouble he urged IV Caucasian Corps forward from Mu^. Bitlis fell to it on March 2, just as the advance guard of Mustafa Kemal's army corps were beginning to arrive in an effort to shore up the front. A junction between Turkish forces in the south and the troops of IX Corps, which had retreated south, was for the moment avoided. Around Erzerum the Russians took time to regroup and improve their supply lines and make ready for the next stage of the campaign. They did succeed in driving the Turks out of Mamahatun and forcing

them

attempt of

across

the

Firat,

but the

Turkestan Corps to drive up the Erzerum-Bayburt road to Trabzon was blocked by elements of the newly arrived V Corps under Fevzi Pasha, now at last employed in the area he knew best. The centre of the stage was taken by the events on the coast. The pressure which the Russians had alII

Erzerum. The Russians used

of the River Kalopotamos, 30 miles from Trabzon. The commander of the coastal region, Awni Pasha, did a surprisingly good job of gathering together another Turkish force which was further reinforced by a newly arrived regiment of the 10th

hand and whose command of the sea was further bolstered by the addivessels

fully

Advance in the south One could not expect a

at

their ample supply of shallow draft cargo boats, elpidiphores, which could operate near the shore in areas where harbour facilities were at best limited. Together with members of Admiral Eberhardt 's naval staff, Lyakhov arranged for two battalions arid several mountain guns to be landed in the rear of the Turkish position. The Turks at Buytik-dere were subjected to a naval bombardment, while Russian troops were embarked and landed under cover of darkness at the village of Atina behind the Turkish lines. Additional forces were landed later with the help of a barrage from the Rostislav's 10-inch guns. The Turks abandoned the Buyuk-dere position and literally fled into the mountains. Rize fell the same way on March 6/7 and the Russians found themselves on the right bank

the coast of Lazistan.' Even before the fall of Erzerum a Russian squadron led by the battleship Rostislav (four 10-inch and eight 6-inch guns) had been assembled at Batum under the command of Admiral Eberhardt. The Rostislav was supported by two heavily armed gunboats both of which mounted two 6-inch guns, four destroyers and several armed steamers. The squadron provided a powerful floating battery, far superior to anything the Turkish artillery could produce. While the Turkish positions were attacked from the land, they were also taken from the rear by an intensive naval barrage which usually rendered the positions untenable. The first blow fell on Februarys, 1916. The Turks were well dug in on the left bank of the River Arhavi, supported by machine guns and eight field guns, and were confident of holding their position. After a sudden combined Russian attack, they withdrew after losing 500 dead. Ten days later their defences on the River Abi Vice suffered the same fate. The Russians had begun their drive down the coast towards Trabzon. The Russian success stimulated a Turkish

German

Renewed Turkish

officer,

Major

resistance and other

factors caused the Russians to suspend their advance for a while. By February, the Russian naval staff and Yudenich had begun to disagree. Yudenich complained that the navy had allowed the Germans to

and had demanded instead a short large scale combined operation. Yudenich, who had finally been promised a reinforcement of two brigades by the Russian General Staff, always reluctant to commit troops to a secondary theatre, immediately proposed a combined assault on forces

term,

Trabzon. Before

considering the execution of Yudenich's proposal, the naval situation on the Black Sea requires a brief discus sion. Russian fears of German U-Boat activity were exaggerated. The Germans had only one U-Boat, V 33, in he area and she had been sent to prevent Enver from demanding that the Breslau and the (loebcn be employed any further to reinforce Trabzon. Both ships had made trips to Trabzon, but the Breslau had taken the last group of soldiers only as far as Tiroholu and her captain had reported that the nun were so badly equipped it was no! worth the risk of shipping them. Many were with out shoes. The German naval authorities knew that their two modern ships were im t

L309

Russian Black Sea Fleet and Envei that the loss of either ship would deprive the vital coastal coaling trade of naval protection, It this should occur, it would be impossible for Turkey's railways to continue operation. What is more surprising was the extreme caution of the Russian naval command, which hesitated to use Batum as a base for fear of a raid b) IheGoeben and the Breslau.

The

ch for the led

Seaborne landings planned Yudenich and Admiral Eberhardt agreed that

dun n.c

the

first

week

of April rein-

forcements were to be picked up by ships (>l' the Black Sea Fleet and brought from Novorossiysk to assembly points east of Trabzon. At the last minute Yudenich and his staff tried to change the planned operation because o( faulty Intelligence reports, provided by local Greeks. According to the Greeks, Turkish reinforcements in divisional strength, supported by at least 5.000 Germans, had reached Trabzon. The city itself was said to be protected by masfortifications in which numerous sive batteries of modern long range fortress guns had been emplaced. The Greeks said that the Russians faced a far superior

The Russians had not force. learned to 'fear the Greeks bearing gifts'. Including the first regiment of the 10th Division under Major Hunger, the Turks could muster just 12.000 men and some of these were only partially trained irregular troops. Their artillery support consisted of a mere 20 guns, most of them obsolete. Turkish

real trouble

was

that

when Lyakhov

land some of the troops immediately behind Lyakhov's front, so that they could help him fend off the feared Turkish counterstroke. The admiral in charge of the transports refused to do this for his orders were to land the troops at Rize much farther behind the front. Admiral Eberhardt agreed with his subordinate that the U-Boat danger was too great to move that close to Trabzon. The fleet was ordered to return to shelter at Sevastopol as soon as the reinforcements were landed well behind the Russian front. In the end Yudenich had to order a brigade moved forward to

heard these reports, a fear which had already begun to nag him seemed to be entirely confirmed.

He knew

of a

mountain

over the Pontic Alps to Bayburt along which he feared portions of the large Turkish force now reported at Trabzon might move to attack him on the flank and in the rear. In this wild country the prospects of such a development were indeed dreadful. Actually, as Lyakhov was considering the fate which might befall him, the already half-beaten Turks were retreating back to positions on the far side of a stream called the Kara-dere (The Stream), in order to hold out a little longer against a foe whom they recognised as superior. trail

Lyakhov's front in unarmed coastal vessels without any naval protection at all. This reinforcement, plus the arrival of the rest of the fresh troops by land from Rize on April 10, greatly relieved the strain upon Lyakhov. The appearance of the Breslau on the scene, while the Russian fleet was on its way back to base, seemed to add sudden confirmation to all of Lyakhov's fears, but after firing a few shells at the Russian positions, the Breslau sailed away again, happy to avoid an encounter with the Russian fleet. Meanwhile, Admiral Eberhardt had a change of heart and the fleet returned two days later. Its commander was now fairly sure that the submarine danger was not as great as he had thought. The only German U-Boat in the area, U 33, had been damaged by one of his destroyers. Admiral Eberhardt now agreed to keep the navy on the coast and to support the land forces

Lyakhov abandoned all thought of another attack and prepared to ward off an imagined Turkish counteroffensive. The Turkish retreat to the Kara-dere position looked sinister to the Russians, and Lyakhov imagined a large German-Turkish force awaiting him in a very strong natural

He feared that his troops would held there while still another large Turkish force took him in the flank. Consequently, he bombarded Yudenich, who had not yet arrived on the scene, with warnings of dire danger. Yudenich apposition.

be

peared

at

Lyakhov's

headquarters

on

April 7, while the transports from Novorossiysk were still at sea with the bulk of the Black Sea Fleet as escort. For a time he accepted Lyakhov's information as accurate and acted accordingly with his usual dispatch. He asked Admiral Eberhardt to

until

^sTt-jr^^

PP

>--

* •fcT>n

*;^

Trabzon had

fallen.

The attack upon the Kara-dere position began early in the morning of April 14, 1916. The navy served as the heavy artillery for the infantry assault. The Turkish infantry stood firm under the bombardment of the battleships Rostislau and Pantelimon until 1400 hours and then began to run. The Russian infantry had trouble on the far right of the Turkish position, which was out of effective range of the naval guns, and there at Ahu-dag thev suffered 1,000 casualties. The Turks fell back on Trabzon in panic; an occasional salvo from the Russian battleships was enough to hurry along their rearguards. Lvakhov's troops advanced to the villages of Kalafka-dere and Dorana, eight miles east of Trabzon, on April 16. The Turks withdrew from Trabzon during the night of April 15. Lyakhov sent a column to cut off

March4 Russians land v. Anl.jlun,

Sankamis,

the retreat inland, but this took position astride the road to Bayburt only after the Turks had passed by. With naval support a second column landed at Polathane to the west of the city. Trabzon had fallen. The fall was not as dramatic as the Allied press described it. The loss of the town was less

significant for Turkish morale than

was that of Erzerum. Much of its importance had already been lost because the Turks did not have control of the sea. For the Russians, who dominated the sea, it was the perfect addition to enable them to support

adequately

the

continuation

their advance into Eastern Anatolia.

of

Com-

1

LAND OVER 2000 METRES Miles

pared to the Dardanelles campaign, the Russian combined operations had worked

Kins

Below: The defences of Trabzon, paltry and obsolete by the meagrest of standards

Above: The Russian advance on Erzincan and into Trabzon, meeting virtually no opposition

itSi&fe

mm

m.

Jm .-•

v:

m

mm

*%

"*&&

,n Al «ed

fi e (

U r,TK

hands b

Af,ussi «n

well but not as well as they might have. This was due to the timidity of the Russian naval command. In all the Russian successes the masterful hand of Yudenich can be seen. He chose a good, if sometimes overanxious, subordinate in Lyakhov and got him the support he needed. In the end both Yudenich and Lyakhov were able to do their jobs well because the Grand Duke Nicholas trusted them to do so and gave them the material and the freedom of action which they required. As far as the Turks were concerned, once again too much had been asked of them. After being turned out of several good positions by the Russian naval bombardment and by landings in their rear, it is no wonder that they lost their nerve. They knew they had nothing with which to answer the guns of the Russian fleet.

Trabzon was lost because there was no way for the Turks to hold it. The plight of the Turkish army here raises again the question of whether or not Enver and the steering committee of the Union and Progress Party had been wise to commit

Turkey to war when her own resources were so slender and her army scarcely trained, organised and equipped for modern war. German staff officers, artillery and supplies were by far not enough to redress the balance. The Turkish soldier often ran, but again and again he came back to fight once more. Considering the odds and the conditions under which he had to fight, he is worthy of respect.

La Russie dans la Guerre Mondiale Payot 1927) Danilov, Y., Grossfurst Nikolai Nikolajejewitsch Sein Lebun und Wirken (Berlin: Schroder Danilov,

Y.,

(Paris:

1929)

C, The Great War (New York: G.

P. Put1959) Golovine, N. N., The Russian Army in the World War (Yale University Press 1931) Gourko, B., Russia in 1914-1917 (Murray 1918) Guse, P., Die Kaukasusfront im Weltkrieg, bis zum Frieden von Brest (Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang 1940) Larcher, M., La Guerre Turque dans la Guerre Mondiale (Berger-Levrault 1926) Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg Volumes IX to XII

Falls,

nam

(Berlin: Mittler

& Sohn)

Sanders, L. von, Funf Jahre Turkeii (Berlin: Scherl 1919)

Further Reading Allen,

W.

E.

Battlefields

D. and Muratoff, (CUP 1953)

P.

Caucasian

[For Robert p. 1268.]

C.

Walton's biography, see £

The

Allies

had taken

German West

Uli r

|fi

\{ ^T

MJA.1.-F

VmITIV n illllA

Cameroons.

all

of

Africa but

Now they

made the last effort. The Germans resisted with great tenacity but the sheer weight of Allied numbers, plus their superior logistic support, finally told. David Chandler. Right: British West African troops at the front

*

t]

B£

capture ofDouala and its partially-dismantled radio station Major-General C M Dobell's Anglo-French force on September 1914 see Issue 14 p proved only the opening phase of a long and hazardous campaign in the German West African colony of Kamerun Cameroon). There wore throe mam reasons why the dramatically rapid conquest ofTogoland could not be repeated. First, the territory was far larger 306,000 square miles) and contained many variations o\ climate and terrain, of which the steaming coastal rain-forest belt, its ten-month -a-year wet season and the great mountain range stretching from the Bight of Biafra almost to Lake Chad, 1,000 miles away inland, constituted formidable military obstacles. Secondly, the forces commanded by Colonel Zimmerman (originally 200 Europeans, 3,200 African troops, 1,500 armed constabulary and three artillery batteries) were rapidly expanded, 2,600 more German nationals and perhaps 17,000 native levies being enlisted on the authority of the Governor, Herr Ebermaier. These forces were well equipped (each infantry company had three machine guns* and generally well-led. Thirdly, Dobell's original 5,000 men found themselves hard-pressed to hold the line running from Edea to west of Bare, which they had managed to occupy by March 1915, together with the posts at Campo and Kribi on the coast. It was true that French forces advancing from Chad and Equatorial Africa w ere taking up much of Zimmerman's time and attention, but the Allied troops were in many ways less well-equipped than their opponents. Indeed they had set out the previous September supplied with only one month's rations, and even the considerable booty captured at Douala only temporarily eased the logistical problem. Moreover, a significant r

British

West African troops

drill

proportion of the meagre resources to hand had to be devoted to the needs of the extemporised military government in the conquered areas. Without substantial reinforcements of men and material, therefore, it was hard to see how Dobell could advance from his present positions. The fortunes of the French columns invading from the north and east had proved very mixed. Colonel Brisset (from Chad) had joined Captain Fox in a fruitless assault on the mountain fortress of Mora, and had then pressed on through Maroua by mid-December 1914. Two months later Dobell entrusted the northern sector to Brigadier-General F. J. Cunliffe, who eventually commanded some 4,000 Allied troops. Rather more dramatic events had transpired on the eastern front, commanded by General F. Aymerich. Colonels Morisson and Hutin had executed a rapid advance from Zinga and Bonga respectively through mainly friendly territory settled by ex-colons to link

up

at

Bania

in

Crossing the River Sanga at Carnot, they pressed ahead for Bertoua. This threat to Yaounde, the summer capital which was now the centre of German authority in Cameroon, Zimmerman could not long ignore. A strong column executed a forced march from Molundu to seize N'Zimu on the Sanga, thus effectively severing Hutin's communications. General Aymerich personally led up a Franco-Belgian force to redress this inconvenience, and after a tough three-day combat along the river, drove the Germans out of N'Zimu (October 29). Thereafter the French marched on Molundu to create yet another avenue of approach to Yaounde. Zimmerman, meanwhile, was concentrating his forces against Morisson and Hutin near Doume as they moved westwards from Bertoua and, after a considerable local late October.

| $

2

| *

£ £

German

Allies Europeans

2

'{*

19 500

800

Africans 20 200

Constabulary 1

500

Artillery

K

27

Lake Chad Norwich*

# Northampton

Colonel Brisset's

Column

The end in Cameroon, Germany's last outpost of empire in West Africa Top: The balance of forces in Cameroon. Although the Germans had been able to recruit

many Africans as well as German nationals during the lull after the first campaign, the fact that they were cut off from any other source of supply and reinforcement meant that the Allies were able to keep up a relentless pressure and whittle away the German forces. Above: British troops rest by a waterfall during their advance into Cameroon. Because of the sheer size of the country, the climate and conditions varied very greatly, from the tropical rain forests near the coast to the dry highlands of the north. Left: The last campaign in Cameroon. Well placed after the first campaign and as a result of their possessions surrounding the Cameroons, the Allies were able to close in upon the Germans and force them to flee over the border into Spanish Rio Muni. Below: The ruins of one of the German forts near Mora, one of the last German strongholds to fall, in the highlands Lukolela

m m Wi«

•

1 £m£ 1317

A combined British,

Left: A British infantry cross

French and Belgian

rivers over a spoils of victory- part of the loot taken

effort to drive

machine gun section and one of the Cameroons' wide pontoon bridge. Below: The

by the Allies

the

fort in

Germans from their last stronghold

in Africa

t$

**\j

at

Mora, the

Cameroon

to

fall

last

German

victory over the French columns, forced them to retire in some disorder on Carnot. These German successes were achieved at the price of weakening their troops facing Dobell on the Douala front, but by early January Zimmerman had redeployed facing Edea, which he attacked on the 5th. Although unsuccessful, this attack induced Dobell to assume the defensive, shorten his line and await reinforcements. A lull ensued, apart from patrols and intermittent German raids on the Nigerian frontier.

Wish for revenge General Uobell was soon under pressure to resume the offensive. The home authorities were still anxious about the possibility of the Germans establishing a radio station at Yaounde; the French were eager to avenge their defeat at Doume, complete the conquest of the colony and regain the 100,000 square miles of territory they had been forced to cede to the Germans in 1911 after the Agadir crisis. There was also much to be said for moving Dobell's troops out of the disease-ridden coastal forests into the more temperate and healthier plateaux and plains to the east. These interests were all aired at a conference held at Douala, attended by M. Fourneau, French Governor of the Middle Congo, in March 1915, and Dobell agreed to mount another pinning attack towards Eseka in association with Aymerich's drive on

Yaounde. Accordingly, early in April, two columns led by LieutenantColonel A. Haywood of the West African Frontier Force and Colonel Mayer of the Senegalese Tirailleurs set off eastwards. Both columns met fierce resistance, but by May 5 the British had captured Biagas, and the French were: soon masters of

Wum

Eseka on the railway. Yaounde was now only 50 miles away, but a combination of appalling wet weather, the exhaustion of the troops and German determination reduced the advance to a bare mile a day. These circumstances induced Dobell to cancel the advance on June 14, and withdraw to Ngwe and the Kale River. Illness had taken as heavy a toll of fighting power as the enemy, the bearers suffering especially gravely. The authorities had to

month at one stage. Simultaneously with the attack in the west, Brigadier-General Cunliffe moved against Garoua, whose garrison had recently raided the Nigerian frontier post at Gurin April 29). To take the place, Cunliffe realised he needed heavier guns than he possessed, and applied accordingly to Force Headquarters at Douala. Soon Lieutenant L. H. Keppel-Hamilton, RN, was making his way from the coast in charge of a naval 12-pounder taken out of HMS Challenger; after an epic journey of some 700 miles — first up the Niger, then along the Benue, and finally 50 miles overland — Keppel-Hamilton delivered his charge. By late May Cunliffe had also received a 95-mm gun from the French, and was in command often infantry companies (three of them French), detachments of cavalry and mounted infantry, five guns of all sizes and 11 machine guns — perhaps 1,900 men in all. Garoua was defended by Hauptmann von Crailsheim with some 500 men. Its strength was due to its position on the Benue River, which protected it from the south, and to seven outlaying forts dominating the other sides. Cunliffe opened regular siege lines against the northernmost fort, which he judged to be the key to the position, and yard by yard sapped his way forward under cover of heavy bombardments to within 1,000 yards of his objective. find 1,500 replacements a

I

Men

of the 1st Battalion, the Nigerian

Regiment, on the march. By

this time they haa been equipped with the short Lee-Enfield and standard webbing equipment.

I

i

w'

N§f 4

t

\

^F

*

*

:

t

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.

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.;,

Although Crailsheim had conducted a vigorous and active defence, now considered the loss of his post to be imminent, and on June 9 attempted to break out with his garrison over the Benue. The river, however, was in Hood, and many were drowned before the attempt was given up. That night the native troops in Garoua mutinied— demoralised by the incessant shelling — and the next day Crailsheim and the 249 survivors of his garrison surrendered. This was no small achievement for the Allies, but it was capped on the 28th when Colonel Webb-Bowen stormed the provincial capital of N'Gaoundere under cover of a tornado. In General Dobell's opinion, these successes in the north were the key to the whole campaign. Progress was also being made again in the east. Morisson captured Moopa (June 23), reoccupied Bertoua a month later, and took Doume (July 25). By this time Hutin had taken possession of Lomie (June 25) and Lieutenant-Colonel Le Meillour was master oi' Bitam (June 17) near Rio Muni in the south. In other words, the Germans were under heavy pressure everywhere except in the west, where bad weather conditions continued. Yaounde would soon be threatened from three directions, and Colonel Zimmerman's Fabian strategy (his whole purpose was to delay the final conquest of Cameroon for as long as possible and thus tie down Allied troops) was likely to founder before the beginning of 1916.

While the rains poured down, M. Merlin, Governor-General of French Equatorial Africa, met Generals Aymerich and Dobell at Douala for talks. By late August plans had been agreed for a fourfold drive against Yaounde, to be launched as soon as the weather allowed. During the lull, considerable reinforcements reached Dobell's command, including the 5th Light Infantry (Indian Army) and further companies from the West India Regiment at Freetown. There also arrived a company of Ford vans, each of which, the staff was delighted to learn, could carry as much as 150 porters could manage (at 60 pounds a head) in a single journey, and which were capable of travelling 100 miles a day. A single Rolls Royce armoured car also made its appearance, together with a 4.5-inch howitzer and a number of wireless sets. Minuscule though these arms consignments must appear to any student of the major war fronts, their significance in these remote parts was considerable. By September 1 the following forces were assembled in Cameroon: Dobell was in personal command of 324 officers, 405 European other ranks and 7,555 African rank and file (of which just under half were French or Belgians); Cunliffe's strength was in the region of 4,000 rifles; Aymerich's in the east was about 7,000; in all, therefore, perhaps 19,500 Allies were waiting to close in around possibly 1,300 Germans and 9,000 native troops which made up Zimmerman's remaining forces.

Slow Allied progress By the third week in September sufficiently in the

west

the weather had improved

to allow Dobell's

two-pronged offensive

commence. The British column moved off towards Wum Biagas building a road behind them; the French under Colonel Mayer marched further south along the railway line, repairing bridges as they went. Progress was slow, for Zimmerman contested every

to

yard of the way. Cunliffe had moved off from his strong line running from N'Gaoundere through Tinguere to Gashaka some weeks earlier,

intent on reducing the stalwart garrison of Mora, far to his rear, once and for all. The new assault began on August 23, but once again the mountain fortress proved impregnable, although at one stage the 1st Battalion of the Nigerian Regiment fought its way to within 60 yards of the main defences on the top and then held its ground for two days without being resupplied. Even this valiant force had to fall back in the end, and on September 9 Cunliffe had again to call off the entire enterprise as Dobell was almost ready to move in the south-west and the major offensive was about to open. Cunliffe accordingly set out against the remaining German strongpoints on his front, namely Bamenda, Tibati and Banyo. The first two fell to subsidiary columns on October 22 and November 3 respectively, and the township of Banyo was occupied on October 24 without too much difficulty. The adjacent defended k ality was quite another problem, however, as it comprised a C0i ^lex series of trenches linked by loopholed stone walls, each of v iich had to be individually fought for. It took three days of the fie. est close-range fighting before this engagement, which Dobell lo er described as 'one of the most arduous ever fought by nativ African troops', ended in final success (November 4-6). November 6 also saw Mayer's Frc nchmen in possession of Eseka, Gorge's British column moving on Ngung from Biagas

Wum

1320

(reoccupied on October

9).

German

resistance in the area promptly

and although the British took Ngung by the last day of November after ferocious fighting around Lesogs, Mayer could only become master of Mangales on December 21, although only ten miles divided it from Eseka. Heavy losses were sustained by stiffened,

both sides during this period, but towards its close the British forces of Colonel Gorges at last broke out of the tropical forest onto the open country beyond. The fate of Yaounde now hung in the balance. Allied forces were converging on the town from all sides, as Cunliffe marched on towards the Nachtigal Falls (some 40 miles from Yaounde) to rendezvous with General Aymerich's foremost column for the final advance. The net was about to close around the town. So, also, thought Ebermaier and Zimmerman. On December 25 they decided to abandon the town and attempt to break away to the south towards neutral Rio Muni. As his northernmost column was within striking distance of the town, Dobell ordered Colonel Gorges to make the final advance. Yaounde was at long last occupied without further fighting on New Year's Day, 1916. Cunliffe and Aymerich arrived on January 4. The German governor, Herr Ebermaier, and Colonel Zimmerman were meanwhile marching determinedly southwards, intent upon reaching neutral Spanish territory some 120 miles away. Allied columns were soon in hot pursuit, but although Haywood brushed with a German rearguard on the River Nyong on January 8, freeing many Allied prisoners of war, the sparse Allied forces that attempted to head Zimmerman off by moving from Campo and Bitam were wholly insufficient to seal off the 150-mile frontier, and so early in February Zimmerman led his surviving 800 German and 6,000 African troops over the Spanish frontier, there to pile arms and be interned for the duration of the war. The Imperial German flag now only flew over far-distant Mora. The intrepid Hauptmann von Raben and his garrison had sustained a blockade and several major attacks over a period of 19 months. On February 18, Raben was induced to capitulate. The survivors of the garrison— 11 Germans and 145 Africans, were accorded the honours of war. The European officers were permitted to retain their swords in captivity in Britain as prisoners of war; their loyal native troops were given safe conduct home. The German colonial experiment in West Africa was over. On April 1, General Aymerich assumed a French mandate over the whole territory; some little time later, a broad strip of Cameroon adjoining the Nigerian frontier was remandated to Britain and became the British Cameroons. The cost to the Allies of this lengthy and difficult campaign was some 3,000 lives (including bearers) besides many more thousands of sick and wounded. In terms of money, the total cost to Britain of the 18-months campaign has been put at £2,700,000 — which was not excessive. That it had been kept so relatively low was no small tribute to the administrative skill of General Dobell (subsequently knighted) and Colonel R. H. Rowe, his Administrative Staff Officer, whose tireless extemporisations enabled the campaign to continue. Allied co-operation had been of a high order from first to last, although the most daunting problems of intercommunication had been encountered. The British and French force headquarters were 500 miles apart, and Aymerich's men alone had covered 1,000 miles before all was over. The wireless sets made available in August had proved useless in the forests and mountains, and the land-lines had frequently been cut by 'falling trees, roving elephants and bearers cutting out pieces to tie up their loads'. Nature had proved as inveterate an opponent as the Germans, who had certainly fought an extended rearguard action with the greatest determination and tenacity, as their opponents were the first to acknowledge. General Dobell was highly impressed with the qualities of the men he had commanded. The conduct of the African troops, French and British, was beyond praise throughout; all ranks displayed the very greatest gallantry in most exacting circumstances,' he stated some time later. 'The West African Frontier Force more than No day appeared to be fulfilled what had been expected of it. too long, no task too difficult for them.' In most respects, the conquest of Cameroon had far more in common with the colonial wars of the 19th Century than with the titanic struggles raging in Europe. From first to last no military aircraft had taken to the air (although early in the campaign the Allies had captured two machines still in their crates); modern communications had played scant part — most messages being passed by runner, flag or heliograph; above all, it had been a struggle fought and won at company level against a background of administrative adaption; it had been very much a soldier's war. .

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[For David Chandler's biography, see page 365.\

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