The First World War

by Hew Strachan

By 1 May forty French divisions had been through the ‘mill on the Meuse’. Pétain’s policy was to rotate units in and out of the battle fast enough to prevent its physical and psychological toll destroying their fighting effectiveness.

As the battle lengthened and its demands on French manpower multiplied, Joffre came to regret his selection of commander, but he could not avoid scaling back the French contribution to the Somme offensive. By 26 April the French planned to attack on a 25-km, not 40-km, front with thirty divisions, not thirty-nine, and 312 heavy guns, not 1,700. In the event, on 1 July the French attacked on a 15-km front with twelve divisions but with 688 heavy guns.

Britain therefore found itself moving from a limited liability on the Continent to taking the principal burden in the major Entente offensive in the west in 1916. It did not do so primarily to relieve the French at Verdun. That particular task was accomplished by the Russians. Their principal contribution to the allied joint plan was to have been an attack in the north, near Vilna, but it was usurped by the diversion that preceded it. Mounted by Brusilov in Galicia, it

employed principles for the achievement of breakthrough similar to those in the west: careful preparations, a broad front but one within the compass of the artillery, and reserves well up to exploit the initial success. In two days, by 6 June, the Russians had broken the Austro-Hungarian 4th Army, and advanced 75 km on a front of 20. They took 200,000 prisoners within a week, and captured so few guns only because the bulk of the Austro-Hungarian heavy artillery had been redeployed to Italy. Conrad’s offensive in the Trentino, which had overrun the Asiago...

Conrad to recover the situation by withdrawing troops from Italy and looking to Hindenburg to provide Germans from the northern section of the eastern front. None the less he had to release four divisions from the west. Although he was able to attack at Verdun on 23 June, the advance was on too narrow a front and the French were able to counterattack. On 24 June the allied artillery bombardment opened on the Somme.

The first cause of the British failure on the first day of the Somme, therefore, was that its planning was the result of compromise. Rawlinson went along with his chief’s desires but retained features reflecting his own. The accusation to be levelled against Haig was not so much that he was wrong to seek a breakthrough, for there were moments in the course of the battle when such opportunities beckoned, but that he failed to impose his vision on his subordinate commanders.

However, the Somme front was twice as long as that of Verdun, reflecting Haig’s determination to avoid flanking fire. The effect was scattered, especially as only 182 of the 4th Army’s guns were heavy. Bad weather spread what had been designed as a five-day bombardment over seven days, further diluting its effect. The principal targets were

the enemy wire and dug-outs, but that left the German artillery free of counter-battery fire, and so able to concentrate on the attacking infantry as it formed up to go over the top. Some of the gunnery problems were technical, others were issues of command and training. Britain was improvising a mass army in the middle of a war, and the preparation and equipment of a scientific arm like the artillery took longer than those of the infantry. For the gunners, the Somme had come a year too soon.

Some went out into no man’s land before zero hour, and were on the enemy trenches before the German infantry could emerge from their dug-outs and man their machine-guns. Like Rawlinson himself, corps and divisional commanders were left to develop their own ideas. One or two adopted creeping barrages, allowing the infantry to follow up close behind the fall of their own gunfire, but this was a new, experimental idea. Progress was greatest in the south, nearest the river. But

Tawney found that his unit’s advance could not keep up with the artillery as it lifted onto more distant targets.

of the 57,470 British casualties that day 19,240 did not.

The pattern continued over the next ten days, when Rawlinson abandoned the logic of his own approach, which required progress in the centre and north, for that of Haig, which required the exploitation of the gains in the south. A total of forty-six separate attacks were launched by individual corps but without coordination and with a further 25,000 casualties. A night attack at Longueval on 14 July, orchestrated according to Rawlinson’s principles, succeeded but left its author pondering the missed opportunity for a breakthrough.

Between mid-July and mid-September Haig convinced himself that the Germans were ‘off balance’ and about to collapse. Many of the ninety attacks

launched in this period were small affairs: ill-coordinated, hurried and launched on narrow fronts, they gained under three square miles of ground for 82,000 casualties.

The attack at Flers on 15 September, when tanks were used for the first time, like the Longueval night attack, fleetingly raised hopes of breakthrough.

South of the river the French had much greater initial success. They did so because they had 688 heavy guns on a much smaller front. But the momentum was not sustained. Foch was as divided as Falkenhayn and Haig as to whether his objective was breakthrough or attrition, and like them tried both.

This battle has ... always been a battle without an objective. There is no question of breaking through. And if a battle is not for breaking through, what is its purpose?‘

On 19 April 1916, Joffre had resolved his frustration with Pétain by promoting him to the command of an army group, and introducing Robert Nivelle as his replacement at Verdun. Nivelle orchestrated a series of counterattacks in the autumn which resulted in the recapture of Forts Douaumont and Vaux. He found that the emphasis on method could be counter-productive when the enemy held improvised positions which he had just captured. Nivelle therefore stressed speed in the attack. On the Somme Fayolle, too, reacted against the influence of Pétain, when he reminded the soldiers of the 6th Army that they could not expect the artillery to do everything for them: the role of the infantry was not just to occupy ground neutralised by shellfire but to fight. On 16 December the French army

was told to aim its attacks as deep as possible, up to and including the German gun line; it was warned not to be ‘surprised by a success that one had not believed would be so easy’.

Total German losses on the Somme are the subject of dispute, and range from 465,000 to 650,000, depending on whether the lightly wounded are included. The latter figure is significant because of the profit-and-loss accounting generated by attrition: allied casualties reached 614,000, 420,000 of them British.

At the end of August the Brusilov offensive had at last persuaded Romania to throw in its lot with the Entente,

The blow to German expectations toppled Falkenhayn, who ironically went off to the Romanian front and - together with Mackensen - had overrun most of it by Christmas. Hindenburg and Ludendorff became chief of the general staff and first quartermaster-general respectively.

And in December the War Office steered through the Reichstag a law conscripting all males aged seventeen to sixty for the purposes of war production.

At the front itself, Hindenburg and Ludendorff put in hand the construction of a series of defensive positions in the west, of which the most important was the Siegfried position

the Germans released thirteen infantry divisions, fifty batteries of heavy artillery and a comparable number of field guns. In February 1917 the Germans fell back, leaving a wasteland of poisoned wells, razed villages and felled orchards.

Attritional battles fought over terrain without significant objectives could simply be negated by the refusal to fight. Attrition and breakthrough were not alternatives but two sides of the same coin, and it was for precisely this reason that so much of the thinking on the topic had proved either confused or vague. Battles on the western front did and would wear out the enemy, but only where he could not afford to give ground.

Beatty had been Churchill’s naval secretary before the war, and in 1912 had spelt out for his political master the geographical realities that were to shape Britain’s conduct of the war at sea: ‘The British Isles form a great breakwater across German waters thereby limiting the passage of vessels to the outer seas to two exits, the one on the South, narrow, easily blocked and contained, and the other on the North of such a width (155 miles) that with the forces at our disposal it could be easily commanded so as to preclude the possibility of the passing of

any hostile force without our knowledge and without being brought to action by a superior force.’

If those ships spent the war safely in the harbours of Wilhelmshaven and Kiel, apparently doing nothing, while the army overran much of Continental Europe, continued high spending on the fleet after the war would be hard to justify. The answer was Kleinkrieg, small operations to erode the Royal Navy’s superiority through the use of mines, coastal batteries and submarines. When the Grand Fleet had lost a few battleships, the strengths of the two sides would be more equal and the High Seas Fleet would be able to risk a battle.

As Beatty’s memorandum for Churchill made clear, the Royal Navy did not need to do this to achieve its objectives. Closing the exits from the North Sea, a ’distant’ blockade, was just as effective in denying Germany access to the world’s oceans

and trading routes, and obviated the risk of losses caused by Germany’s maritime defences.

German attacks on the British coast, as opposed to British attacks on the German coast, might sting the British into a response and so enable the German navy to take on fractions of the Royal Navy and gradually whittle away its strength.

ten British capital ships set out in search of twenty-four German.

The German navy attacked the British mainland from the air as well as by sea On 8 September 1915 a Zeppelin commanded by Heinrich Mathy, the greatest airship commander of the war, killed twenty-two people and caused £500,000 worth of damage to Aldersgate in London

In this there was a double irony. First, the British were as a general rule far more observant of radio silence than the Germans, preferring to use flags for tactical communications, even when the weather or smoke obscured visibility and made the flags hard to read. Second, the fact that the encounter had taken place at all was the product of German wireless transmissions, intercepted by British signals intelligence.

Within four months of the war’s outbreak the British were in possession of all three German naval codes. The Australians laid their hands on the code book for merchant shipping; the imperial naval code book was taken by the Russians from a cruiser which went aground in the Baltic; and the traffic signals book from a sunk destroyer was picked up in the nets of a British trawler. Listening stations were set up along the east coast, so that cross-bearings could enable the position of the vessel sending the message to be fixed, and the intercepted signals were analysed in a newly created department within the Admiralty Old Building, Room 40. Staffed by academics, not professional sailors, its operational effectiveness was principally the achievement of the director of naval intelligence, Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, so

Room 40’s work was aided by the Germans’ belief that wireless might offset their numerical inferiority: it enabled real-time communication and so facilitated the concentration of forces in space and time. The effect was that their chatter, which continued between ships even when in harbour, conferred exactly those advantages on their enemy.

Intelligence created opportunities for the budding Nelsons of the Great War but then curbed their initiative.

On 23 January 1915 Room 40 warned Beatty and his battle cruisers that Hipper’s Scouting Squadron was once again putting to sea. But the Admiralty assumed that the Germans planned to raid the east coast as before, and therefore put the weight on the defence of the British mainland and not on cutting Hipper off from his base.

At 8.34 Beatty ordered his battle cruisers to raise their speed to 27 knots, four knots faster than the maximum speed Hipper could maintain. Twenty-six minutes later his flagship, HMS Lion, opened fire at a range in excess of 20,000 yards. The wind was north-easterly, with the result, according to her captain, that ‘the smoke of the enemy coming almost straight towards us, combined with the gloom, made spotting very difficult.

Ultimately, of four German ships, only the weakest and oldest, the Blücher, a so-called ‘five-minute’ ship in reference to her likely survival time in battle, was sunk. The restrictions of flag signals created ambiguity in Beatty’s orders. Greater use of wireless would not only have ensured the more effective distribution of his ships’ firepower, but also have prevented him breaking off the action prematurely. At 10.54, Beatty persuaded himself that he saw the wash of a periscope. Fearing that Hipper might be luring his battle cruisers over a submarine screen, he turned away rather than risk being torpedoed. There were no submarines in the vicinity, a fact known to Room 40 but not relayed to Beatty.

The Dreadnought was an evolutionary design, a staging post to the battle cruiser, a vessel which would have the speed of the cruiser but the punch of the battleship. The first Dreadnought mounted 12-inch guns and could maintain a speed of 21 knots; in December 1914 Fisher secured approval for battle cruisers with 15-inch guns and a speed of 30 knots.

But in the pursuit of speed he had shed armour, particularly on the deck, which was rendered vulnerable to the plunging fire that long-range gunnery encouraged. The ship’s survivability depended on her speed and on the range at which she fought, but the pursuit of both these attributes militated in turn against effective gunnery. Gunnery was the most venerated specialisation of the Royal Navy, but it was not very good at it. At the Falklands Invincible and Inflexible achieved one hit per gun every seventy-five minutes, and took five hours and 1,174 shells to sink two inferior

vessels. At the Dogger Bank, when confronted with more equal opposition (if the Blücher is discounted) only six heavy shells out of 1,150 had found their targets.5 The response was to stress the rate of fire over its accuracy, and therefore cordite charges, ready for use, were stored in the gun turrets themselves, and doors to magazines were left open...

The Germans concluded from the battle of Dogger Bank that relative technological advantage was more important than numbers. They did not come out again for over a year, but when they did - on 31 May 1916 - they deployed ships whose key characteristic was survivability. Armour was thickened, anti-flash precautions improved, and the quantity of ammunition ready for use in each gun turret was restricted. But in another sense the gap between the German navy and the Royal Navy only widened. The numerical difference in capital ships, having closed in the winter of 1914-15, increased again. The Grand Fleet contained thirty-seven capital ships to the High Seas Fleet’s twenty-seven, and its guns mounted a broadside that was twice as great.

The Germans were the last of the major powers to develop submarines and in 1914 had only twenty-eight, compared with fifty-five in the Royal Navy and seventy-seven in the French navy. But their late entry to underwater warfare meant that they profited from the trials and errors of the pioneers, and they were therefore building better vessels at a faster rate.

If warships exercised basic precautions, above all those of steering a zig-zag course and of maintaining a reasonable speed, they were safe. The submarine had to submerge to attack but in doing so she restricted her speed to about 10 knots, half that of a warship. She therefore could not act in conjunction with surface warships unless she was already in position.

Room 40 gave Jellicoe warning of Scheer’s intentions from 28 May, and late on the night of 30 May, over two hours before the Germans left their base in the Jade, the Grand Fleet and the Battle Cruiser Fleet both got up steam with a view to reaching positions off the Skagerrak. But on the following morning, at 11.10 Greenwich Mean Time, misreading of the German call-signs, and poor liaison between Room 40 and the operations division of the Admiralty, placed Scheer, and therefore the High Seas Fleet itself, still in Wilhelmshaven. The result was that the Grand Fleet advanced slowly, so conserving fuel but losing daylight. At 2.20 Beatty signalled that Hipper’s Scouting Squadron was in sight. He manoeuvred on a south-south-easterly course in order to cut the Germans off from their base, while Hipper also turned south, aiming to draw Beatty on to the approaching guns of the High Seas Fleet. In this ‘run to the south’, German gunnery proved more accurate than British. Beatty’s principal armament was the 15-inch guns of the latest Dreadnoughts of the 5th Battle Squadron, which had been detached from the Grand Fleet to support the Battle Cruiser Fleet in February. However, the yeoman on the battleship Barham could not read the flags signalling Beatty’s decision

to turn south-south-east, and initially the 5th Battle Squadron drew away from the Battle Cruiser Fleet, assuming that the intention was to sail north-west to rendezvous with the Grand Fleet. The battleships were marginally slower than the battle cruisers, and fell behind. At about 4.00 they still had not opened fire, when a midshipman on one of them, Malaya, suddenly said to Sub-Lieutenant Caslon, “‘Look at that!”’ Caslon ‘thought for an instant that the last ship in the line had fired all her guns at once, as there was a much bigger flame, but the flame grew and grew till it was about three hundred feet high, and the whole ship was hidden in a dense cloud of yellow brown smoke. This cloud hung in the air for some minutes, and when it finally dispersed there was no sign of the ship.’

The battle cruiser Indefatigable had blown up within thirty seconds of being hit. All but two of her complement of 1,019 were killed. Lion, Beatty’s flagship, had dropped out of the line: she had already received a direct hit on one of her turrets, which set the cordite charges ablaze, and the ship herself had been saved only by the timely closing of the magazine doors. Now two German battle cruisers, Seydlitz and Derfflinger, were able to concentrate their fire on a third British battle cruiser Queen Mary. Following a hit on her centre turret, the explosives throughout the ship were detonated, and she sank in two minutes.