Reports from the Front #5: August 1915

Sep6

August was a good time to be on the Western Front: neither side launched any serious assaults on the trench lines. It was also a good time to be on the Eastern Front, if you happened to be German or Austrian. The Gorlice-Tarnów offensive, which Falkenhayn had launched at the beginning of May, continued its rapid advance eastward, destroying Russian units all along the line. This operation was remembered by the Russians as the “Great Retreat,” but that retreat, accelerated by the Stavka (the Russian supreme headquarters) saved the army from any large encirclements, especially in the Warsaw salient. On 5 August the Central Powers took Warsaw, on 25 August Brest-Litovsk and on 26 August Byelostok. The Russians were now being squeezed out of Poland.

Poniatowski bridge (Warsaw) destroyed by the Russians

German cavalry enters Warsaw

Moving east

They were not doing so well on the Turkish front either, and on 3 August they evacuated the Van district, which they had captured in May. The Turks reoccupied the area on 5 August, but the next day they faced a serious challenge hundreds of miles to the west. On 6 August the western allies reopened the Gallipoli campaign, landing two fresh divisions at Suvla Bay, just north of “Anzac cove.” The plan was for the two beachheads to unite, seize the surrounding heights before the Turks could bring up reinforcements and then cross to the east coast of the peninsula, trapping the Turkish forces to the south.

Suvla Bay

Kemal in the trenches at Gallipoli - not the cigarette holder

Kemal in the trenches at Gallipoli – note the cigarette holder

Liman von Sanders

The allied failure at Suvla Bay

The plan failed utterly, not so much because of the quick reaction of the (German) Turkish commander, Liman von Sanders, and the equally able Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal, but because of the incompetence of the British command. The Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Herbert Kitchener (of Omdurman fame), refused to appoint a younger general and instead saddled the Suvla landing with the inexperienced and 61 year old Frederick Stopford, who was asleep when the assault began and visited the beach only once. He left the operation in the hands of his subordinates, many of whom were also lethargic, and although the two beachheads were joined, inactivity, confusion and conflicting orders prevented the troops from controlling the heights. By the middle of August the battle was essentially over, and another static trench line had been established on the peninsula. By this time there were over 500,000 allied and 300,000 Turkish troops involved in the campaign.

Aussies in a captured Turkish trench

Lord Kitchener

Yes, that’s Kitchener

Off in the west 10 August saw the culmination of the Second Battle of the Isonzo, which ended like the First: little gained beyond mammoth casualties on both sides. More important, on 21 August Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire. The Treaty of London, signed by Italy and the Triple Entente on 26 April, had lured the Italians into the war with promises of Austrian territory and a protectorate over Albania, but it also confirmed Italy’s possession of the Dodecanese Islands in the Aegean (just off the coast of Turkey) and provided that “in the event of total or partial partition of Turkey in Asia, she ought to obtain a just share of the Mediterranean region adjacent to the province of Adalia (on the south coast of Turkey)…” Diplomatic promises apart, the Italian government apparently felt that being in an actual state of war with Turkey would enhance her position when it came time to dispose of the Ottoman Empire.

Fighting on the Italian front – Austrians

And so it was in August 1915, an excellent month for the Central Powers.

Reports from the Front #4: June to July 1915

Jul17

(Finally. I have found the research for these pieces to be fairly time consuming, so I may have to back off on the detail. It would be nice to comment on other things occasionally. Incidentally, my Latrodectus Hesperus has disappeared – pity, I got used to seeing her there whenever I went into the utility room.)

Im Westen nichts Neues

In June and July of 1915 nothing much was happening on the Western Front: Im Westen nichts Neues. Nothing much beyond a daily death toll from shelling, trench raids and suchlike. But there was plenty of action in the east. At the beginning of June it was decided to continue the Gorlice-Tarnów offensive in Galicia despite the entry of the Italians into the war, and Lemberg was captured on 22 June and the Bug River reached by 13 July. This created a huge Russian salient stretching west to Warsaw, and the next step would be to pinch it off.

Russian prisoners

Bug River

Galician offensive

Further to the south in the Caucasus the Russians launched a new offensive on 19 June and immediately ran into stiff Turkish resistance. Most specifically, on 10 July they attempted to clear the area west of Manzikert, captured earlier, and found themselves outnumbered three to one by the Turks, who promptly counterattacked on 16 July. The Russians evacuated the entire Van region, and on 20 July Turkish forces recaptured Manzikert, site of the monumental victory of the Seljuq Turks over the Byzantine Empire in 1071. Even further to the south the Indian Expeditionary Force was slowly making its way up the Tigris, suffering far more from the heat and disease than Ottoman resistance.

Troops of the Indian Expeditionary Force

Area around Manzikert

Lake Van

Off to the west the Italians struck their first blow on 23 June, seeking to force the Austrians from the Isonzo (Soča) River and capture Gorizia, the key to Trieste to the south. The Italians had a three to one edge in troops, but their equipment was inadequate, the morale of the poorly trained recruits was low and their commander, General Count Luigi Cadorna, unpopular. Cadorna understood only one offensive tactic, the frontal assault, which was certainly a questionable approach against the well-fortified Austrians on higher ground. The First Battle of the Isonzo ended on 7 July with minimal Italian gains and 15,000 casualties against 10,000 for the enemy. Receiving reinforcements and more artillery, he tried again on 18 July, and fierce hand-to-hand fighting characterized the Second Battle of the Isonzo, which came to an end on 10 August when both sides ran out of ammunition. The Austrian lines held, though they lost 46,600 men; Cadorna lost 41,000. There would be more.

Isonzo river

The Isonzo Front

Count Luigi “Isonzo” Cadorna

Meanwhile, far to the south an odd naval war was taking place. Crippled by engine problems, the German light cruiser SMS Königsberg hid in the Rufiji River delta, where she was discovered in October 1914. On 5 November three British cruisers cornered the Königsberg, but they were unable to sail up the delta and after firing a few shells they settled for a blockade. By March 1915 the Königsberg was in trouble with shrinking food supplies, low morale and deaths from tropical diseases, but though a German supply ship pretending to be Danish was trapped in Manza Bay and burned, much of the cargo was retrieved and delivered to the Königsberg and German land forces. In June two British monitors towed from Malta arrived at the Rufiji, and aided by spotter aircraft (before they fell apart in the glue-melting heat), they destroyed the Königsberg, which was scuttled by her captain, Commander Max Looff. Salvaging the cruiser’s ten 105-mm guns, the crew ultimately joined

SMS Königsberg scuttled

Lettow-Vorbeck’s merry band.

One of the Königsberg’s guns

SMS Königsberg

Captain Max Looff

Then there was Lake Tanganyika. At the outbreak of war the Germans had two small warships on the lake, SMS Hedwig von Wissman and SMS Kingani, both in the fifty ton range. They quickly seized control of the lake, sinking a Belgian and a British steamer, and that allowed them to easily send raiding parties into the Belgian Congo and Rhodesia. In February 1915 the Germans launched the 1600 ton SMS Graf von Goetzen, which had been built in Germany in 1913, disassembled and packed into 5000 crates and shipped to Africa. In response the British ordered from England two forty foot motor boats, the Mimi and the Toutou, which were loaded on a freighter and dispatched to Africa on 15 June 1915. Their arrival would set the scene for Hepburn and Bogart in the African Queen.

The Goetzen’s 105-mm gun from the Königsberg

SMS Graf von
Goetzen

Lake Tanganyika

Finally, the Armenians. As non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians had long suffered discrimination and disabilities, but not until the late nineteenth century did the oppression blossom into widespread violence, as growing Armenian resistance, the proximity of the Russian Empire and Great Power interference brought on a Turkish backlash. While the government deliberately stirred rebellions with harsh measures, Kurdish irregulars were unleashed on the Armenians to essentially do as they pleased. The result was the Hamidian massacres of 1894-96, in which between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians were killed. But in July 1908 Third Army officers who were members of the progressive Young Turk movement compelled the despised Sultan Abdul Hamid II to establish a constitutional monarchy. All the minorities rejoiced.

Armenians celebrating the Young Turk coup

Abdul Hamid II

Victims in Erzurum 1895

Early next year there was a counterrevolution, but the government was able to suppress it and depose Hamid in favor of Mehmed V, who would be only a figurehead. During the brief struggle, however, the reactionaries took out their anger on Armenians, and when troops were sent in to quell the massacres, many joined in the looting and killing in Adana province. Anywhere from 15,000 to 30,000 Armenians died in the Adana Massacre. The loss of most of the Ottoman territory in Europe as a result of the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) convinced many Turks to focus more attention on the Anatolian heartland, in which region the Armenians were a large minority. Further, a flood of Muslim refugees from Europe washed across the Bosporus, and perhaps 800,000 settled in Armenian areas, where they would play a major role in the slaughter to come.

Christian quarter of Adana

Victims in Adana

On 24 April 1915 some 250 Armenian leaders and intellectuals were arrested, later to be executed or deported, and on 27 May Istanbul ordered the forced deportation of all Armenians, the notorious Temporary Law of Deportation. Granted, many had been aiding the Russians, but old hatreds mattered more, and it quickly became clear that deportation was simply a mechanism for killing Armenians of all ages. The “deportations” were actually death marches, and for those who survived the depredations and attacks there were “concentration” camps, where the inmates were essentially starved to death. The Turks did not operate with the incredible efficiency later displayed by the Third Reich, but the whole operation was a deliberate attempt to exterminate the Armenians. It was in fact witnessed by many of the German officers aiding the Turks, and they were appalled by what they recognized as simply murder on a mass scale. And a century later Turkey still maintains this holocaust never happened.

Hauntingly familiar

Scenes like this could be seen across Turkey in 1915

Some of the victims of 24 April 1915

This could be Poland in the 1940s.

“Deportation”

Reports from the Front #3: Ottomans and Others – August 1914 to May 1915

Jun30

(This is more work than I anticipated.)

All the operations associated with the Ottoman Empire and the German colonies in Africa were certainly peripheral to a victory in Europe; even the campaigns in the Caucasus, while important to the Russians, had little to do with the European war. But they are part of the Great War, and the campaigns in the Middle East would have an impact on the shape of the post-war

On 2 November the Russians made the first move, sending an army into northeastern Turkey, where they had allies in the form of the Armenians, anxious to escape Turkish oppression. The offensive petered out by 16 November, and the following day the Ottoman Third Army counterattacked, driving the Russians back with heavy casualties. By the end of the month the front stabilized some fifteen or so miles into Turkey, but Russian morale was low, while that of the Turks was high. So high, in fact, that Enver Pasha launched his own offensive towards Sarikamish on 22 December, despite objections from military advisors that the winter conditions would make the campaign extremely difficult.

Kurdish cavalry

The Caucasus front

Well, Enver was a far better politician than general, and the Battle of Sarikamish ended on 17 January, a major Turkish defeat. The Turks suffered some 60,000 casualties, the Russians half that, many on both sides freezing to death. Enver gave up generaling and blamed the Armenians for the defeat. On 20 April the Armenian population of Van, fearing massacre, revolted, and the city was besieged by the Turks until May, by which time the Russians had occupied the province of Van; they entered the city on 23 May. The Caucasus front was then relatively quiet until late in the year.

Baron Kress von Kressenstein

For good reason: the British had begun putting pressure on the Empire’s southern provinces and the Dardanelles, drawing Ottoman troops away from the Caucasus. In the far south the Turks decided immediately to attack Egypt, which though nominally a part of the Empire, had been occupied by the British since 1882. On 18 November Baron Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, one of the clutch of German advisors in Istanbul, was given command of part of the Turkish Fourth Army and began preparations for an advance across Sinai, which the British had evacuated. Since the coast road to Egypt would mean being shelled by the Royal Navy, Kress von Kressenstein had to take his 20,000 troops through the Sinai desert, which he did with little loss of life, no mean feat. The Turkish force reached the Canal on 2 February, and the following day the battle proper began. Some units actually crossed near Ismailia, but 30,000 troops (most of them colonials) and gunboats on the Canal and lakes were too much, and the battle ended on the 4 February with the Ottoman army retreating to Palestine.

Iraq before it was Iraq

The British had meanwhile gone on the offensive, landing a mostly Indian force at Fao on the Shatt-al-Arab in Mesopotamia (Iraq) on 6 November in order to protect the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s refinery at Abadan, just across the frontier in Iran. The automobile had arrived and more important, navies were switching from coal to oil, and suddenly the Middle Eastern backwater was emerging as a center of imperial attention. On 22 November the Indian Expeditionary Force captured Basra (sound familiar, Americans?) and continued up the river to Qurna at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, where after being surrounded the Ottoman force of a thousand men surrendered on 9 December. The Turks, hard pressed at Gallipoli, did not counterattack until 9 April, when they assaulted the British position at Shaiba, near Basra. The 14,000 Arab and Kurdish irregulars were easily scattered, but it took the 7000 man British garrison two days to defeat the 4000 regular troops. London ordered the local commander, Charles Townshend, to continue advancing up the Tigris.

Prince Mubarak of Kuwait

General Charles Townshend

The British successes in lower Mesopotamia, albeit against weak Turkish forces, enhanced their credibility in the Arab world. Even before the invasion Sheikh Mubarak Al-Sabah, ruler of Kuwait, nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, had sent forces to drive out the small garrisons in southern Mesopotamia, and in return London declared Kuwait an independent state under British “protection.” Arab nationalism had begun to emerge in the previous century, competing with the Pan-Islamism represented by the Ottoman Empire, but demands on Istanbul were still moderate in the early twentieth century. The British Foreign Office understood the value of encouraging local insurgencies once the war started, but the great Arab Revolt would not occur until 1916.

Of greater concern for the Empire was the Allied assault on the Dardanelles, the narrow straights that lead from the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara and through the Bosphorus to the Black Sea. When the Turks entered the war in November, they immediately closed the straights and began to mine them, choking off the major Allied supply route to Russia (the German fleet blocked the Baltic, and Vladivostok might have been the other side of the moon). Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, suggested forcing the straights with a fleet of obsolete warships that were useless against the German navy, thus risking little for huge rewards: Russia could be supplied by sea, Istanbul could be bombarded and the Bulgarians and Greeks, who hated their one-time Ottoman masters, might enter the war.

Admiral John de Robeck

Guess who?

The Dardanelles fleet

On 2 January 1915 Russia, dealing with the Ottoman offensive in the Caucasus, asked the Allies to divert Turkish troops by attacking in the Aegean, and the Dardanelles operation was set in motion. On 19 February the Anglo-French squadron began shelling the forts on both sides of the entrance to the straights and by 25 February had destroyed them and cleared the entrance of mines. The problem was the mobile artillery batteries, which could evade the naval gunfire and attack the minesweepers, but pressed by Churchill Admiral Sackville Carden planned an all-out attack, claiming that the fleet could be at Istanbul in two weeks. Because of illness Carden was replaced by Admiral John de Robeck, and on 18 March eighteen old battleships and a supporting cast of lesser vessels headed up the straights towards the “Narrows,” where most of the forts and minefields were.

(An historical note: some fifteen miles past the Narrows on the European side is a small river called Aegospotomi by the Greeks. It was at this point in the straights in 405 BC that the Spartan Lysander and his Persian-supported Peloponnesian fleet annihilated the last Athenian fleet, bringing about the surrender of Athens the following year and ending the twenty-seven year-long Peloponnesian War.)

The Bouvet

Naval gunnery was able to destroy communications among the forts and take out some guns, but despite ammunition shortages (it was later learned) Turkish fire continued, and the minesweepers, which were crewed by civilians (!), decided the party was over and left. The French battleship Bouvet was the first to strike a mine, capsizing with almost all hands lost; two other French battleships were damaged. Two British battleships were sunk and a third severely damaged, and the fleet retreated to the Aegean. Some of the captains wanted a second shot at the Turks, but de Robeck and important figures in the Admiralty opposed it, and the operation was abandoned.

HMS Irresistible sinking

The Bouvet sinking

That left Plan B, an amphibious assault on the Gallipoli Peninsula, which formed the European bank of the Dardanelles, in order to silence the Turkish guns on the northern bank of the straights with troops. This was a mighty ambitious undertaking, given that no one had ever conducted a landing against opposition with twentieth century weaponry, but the Allies presumed there would be no problem since Turkish soldiers were very poor, a conclusion reached from Turkish losses in the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 and traditional European notions of superiority. Further, British intelligence underestimated the number of defending troops and had only vague ideas concerning the terrain.

Cape Hellas, Gallipoli

The 78,000 men of the Mediterranean Expedition Force gathered in Egypt, where Imperial troops training for France were organized into the first Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), which would be forever associated with Gallipoli. Novel logistical problems and weather prevented the Expedition, under Sir Ian Hamilton, from reaching Gallipoli until late April, during which time the Turks were able to reinforce their positions and prepare defenses. The Ottoman Fifth Army, some 60,000 men, was put under the command of a German officer, Otto Liman von Sanders, who set up a flexible and mobile defense; one of his division commanders was Mustafa Kemal, later known as Atatürk, who would become the founder of the Turkish Republic.

Mustafa Kemal

Sir Ian Hamilton

Otto Liman von Sanders

On 25 April the main landing commenced at Cape Hellas on the tip of the peninsula, while the Anzacs went ashore some ten miles up the northern shore near Suvla Bay. The landings were relatively unopposed, but a swift counterattack by Kemal pinned the Anzacs on the beach. The main force pushed about two miles inland, but counterattacks drove them back, and by 8 May both fronts were static, replete with the trenches and wire. The Western Front had been recreated on Gallipoli, and Hamilton had already suffered 20,000 casualties. Nothing much more would happen until August, leaving the troops to be worn down by heat, disease and Turkish shelling.

In the trenches at Gallipoli

Gallipoli landing

Off in the west of the Mediterranean the Italians finally got involved. Italy had in fact been allied to the Central Powers, but was lured away by the Allies with promises of territory, notably the southern Tyrol, taken from the Austrians after the war. On 23 May Italy declared war against Austria, despite not being really prepared for warfare in the mountainous terrain against well-fortified Austrian positions (though it should be noted Italy entered the Second World War with less and poorer quality artillery that it did the First). The result would be twelve Battles of the Isonzo River from June 1915 to November 1917.

The Italian front

Meanwhile, Austrian and German foreign possessions were quickly overrun at the outbreak of the war – with the exception of German East Africa (Burundi, Rwanda and part of Tanzania), where the local commander, General Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck, would lead the British on a merry chase for the entire war. To conquer the German territory and stop the raiding into British East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Zanzibar and part of Tanzania) the British brought in Indian troops for a two pronged attack. The German garrison was all of 260 colonial troops (Schutztruppe) and 2472 native levies, the Askari, who proceeded to set the pattern for the next four years. On 3 November 86 mounted Germans and 600 Askaris defeated the northern prong of 1500 Punjabis at the Battle of Kilimanjaro and then raced south to join the Battle of Tanga, where on 4 November Lettow-Vorbeck’s 1000 troops routed the British force of 8000 men. There would be no easy pickings for the British here, and more than 200,000 Indian and South African troops would be kept busy until the end of the war.

German cavalry at Kilimanjaro

Battle of Tanga

Askaris

Genera Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck

East Africa

Finally, two ominous incidents occurred during these first ten months of the war. On 7 May the German submarine U-20 sank the liner RMS Lusitania (which was carrying small arms munitions), killing 128 Americans, and this, together with the dramatically inflated atrocity stories about Belgium, began swaying American opinion against Germany. Berlin made the case that a surfaced submarine was easy prey for an armed merchant vessel and had publically warned Americans about traveling to Britain, but in response to a warning from President Woodrow Wilson submarines were directed to steer clear of passenger liners.

U-20 (second from left)

RMS Lusitania

And on 27 May the Turkish Minster of the Interior ordered all Armenians deported from Ottoman territory, and the killing began. Yes, President Erdoğan, there was an Armenian Genocide.

Reports from the Front #2: the East – August 1914 to May 1915

Jun5

(Yes, the maps are hard to read because of the small size, but I have no idea how to make them bigger or create a link to the original. But I will continue to include them – I like maps.)

While the men on the Western Front were quickly learning about industrialized warfare, in the east, where the front ran for almost a thousand miles from the Baltic to the Black Sea, things were a bit different. Because of the difficulty of fortifying and manning such a long line, the war was more fluid, with impressive breakthroughs that the generals in the west kept spending men on but could not achieve. On the other hand, the Russian and Austro-Hungarian armies were far inferior in quality and their communications more primitive, which meant that while penetrating enemy lines was much easier, sustaining any advance was more difficult. Austrian troops would need constant help from the Germans.

On 12 August Austria invaded Serbia with 270,000 troops, a fraction of their total operational force of some two million, and they faced a poorly equipped Serbian army, whose entire operational strength at the time was about 250,000 men. Nevertheless, despite two more Austrian invasions, by the middle of December virtually nothing had changed – except the loss of men: 170,000 for Serbia, 230,000 for Austria. Even without a static front industrialized warfare did not come cheap.

Russian infantry

Serbian infantry

Austrian infantry

Meanwhile, on 17 August the Russians invaded East Prussia, but the Russian Second Army was annihilated by Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg at the Battle of Tannenberg from 26 to 30 August; the Russian commander, Alexander Samsonov, shot himself. The engagement actually took place near Allenstein, 19 miles to the east, but as a symbol of revenge for the Polish-Lithuanian defeat of the Teutonic Knights in 1410 it was named after Tannenberg. Hindenburg and his chief of staff, Erich von Ludendorff (who would become virtual dictator of Germany in 1918), then took the Eighth Army east and in the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes from 7 to 14 September destroyed the Russian First Army as well,

Hindenburg and Ludendorff

despite being heavily outnumbered. Russian troops were driven from German soil and would not return again until late 1944.

Alexander Samsonov

Battle of Tannenberg

The major problem for the Russian army was incompetent and corrupt officers. The individual soldier was tough and at least initially willing to fight for his country, despite its oppressive and brutal government, but he was very badly led and constantly short of supplies. Not only were Russian industry and transportation far less developed than that of her allies and Germany, but selling army supplies was a thriving practice among senior officials and army officers. (One is perhaps reminded of the current Iraqi army.) Further complicating any advance into Germany – and vice versa – was the broader Russian railway gauge, which would plague the Wehrmacht in the next war.

On the other hand, as the Serbian campaigns demonstrate the Austro-Hungarian army was nothing much to write home about either. On 23 August the Austrian First Army met the Russian Fourth Army near Lublin on the border between Russian Poland and Austrian Galicia (parts of modern Poland and Ukraine), inaugurating the Battle of Galicia. The Fourth Army was driven back, as was the Fifth Army immediately to the southeast, but unfortunately for old Franz Joseph, in the southernmost sector of the front the Russians actually had an able commander, Aleksei Brusilov, who broke the Austrian advance. Defeat turned to flight, making the Austrian gains in the north untenable, and when the battle ended on 11 September, the Russian front had advanced a hundred miles to the Carpathian Mountains. The heart of the Austrian army had been ripped out, and the Germans were forced to send troops to Austria’s defense and thus limit their advance into Russian Poland.

Aleksei Brusilov

Battle of Galicia

A month and a half of war in the east demonstrated what everyone had already suspected: the Germans were good and the Austrians and Russians were not. The Germans had lost 24,000 men, including captured, the Austrians 684,000 and the Russians a 605,000. But the Russians now occupied Galicia, balancing the disaster in the north and perhaps keeping Nicky on his throne a bit longer.

The Russian supreme command was in fact contemplating an invasion of Silesia, which would expose the flanks of the Germans in the north and the Austrians in the south. The Germans got wind of this, and Hindenburg, now supreme commander in the east, sent the Ninth Army under August von Mackensen southeast to forestall the invasion. The Russians countered by ordering the Fifth Army to forget about Silesia and withdraw to the area of Łódź to deal with the threat from von Mackensen, who struck Paul von Rennenkampf’s First Army (yes, he is a Russian) on 11 November. Thus began the Battle of Łódź, which went on until 6 December, when the Germans finally gave up trying to capture the city. The Russians then nevertheless moved east towards Warsaw to establish a new defense line, and Rennenkampf, who had already been accused of incompetence at Tannenberg, was canned. Another 35,000 Germans and 90,000 Russians down the tubes.

Paul von Rennenkampf

August von Mackensen

Battle of Lodz

On 7 February Hindenburg resumed the offensive with a surprise attack in the midst of a snowstorm and drove the Russians back some seventy miles, inflicting heavy casualties and accepting the surrender of an entire Russian corps. But a Russian counterattack halted the advance, and the Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes ended on 22 February with the Germans down 16,200 men and the Russians 200,000. Well, one death is a tragedy, 50,000 is a statistic. More uplifting (if you happened to be a German or an Austrian), on 2 May von Mackensen, now commanding Austrian forces, began an offensive near Gorlice and Tarnów (southeast of Krakow); this was the beginning of a push that would ultimately become known from the Russian point of view as the Great Retreat of 1915.

In other news from the east during the first ten months of the war, on 29 October the weakling Ottoman Empire, seeking to regain territory lost in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, shelled the Black Sea ports of Sevastopol and Theodosia. There had been no declaration of war, and the two warships, recently acquired from Germany, were under the command of German officers, who may have acted on their own. Seeking another front against Russia, the Germans had been putting pressure on Turkey to enter the war and found a willing accomplice in the most powerful man in the Empire, War Minister Ismail Enver, better known as Enver Pasha, who admired the German army. In any case, Russia declared war on 1 November, promptly followed by Serbia and Montenegro, and before the Turks could negotiate Britain and France also declared war on 5 November. In response the titular head of government, Sultan Mehmed V, declared war on Britain, France and Russia, and on 14 November the head sky-pilot of the Empire, the Sheikh ul-Islam, issued a series of fatwas that declared this to be a jihad, a holy war against the infidel enemies. Now the Turks were in on the fun. Only the Italians were missing.

Sultan Mehmed V

Enver Pasha

Der Drei Kaiser Bund

Reports from the Front #1: the West – August 1914 to May 1915

May23

(OK, it took me a long time to get around to this. In any case, this is the first of a series of pieces following the course of the Great War as it happened a century ago – assuming I live another four years. I should have begun this last July, but the idea only now occurred to me, and consequently this first two articles carry the war up through May 1915. Note: “Casualties” includes dead, wounded, missing and captured, and “dead” typically includes accidental and disease related deaths. Military deaths through disease may have been a third of the total, but that is partly due to the influenza pandemic of 1918-1920, and in earlier European warfare disease inevitably accounted for the vast majority of deaths. The ratio of dead to wounded would have varied dramatically from one theater to another but it appears 1-2 to 1-3 was the average for the war. The official figures are not always accurate, and accounting varied; e.g., British figures did not include colonial troops.)

One hundred years and 296 days ago the Great War began when on 1 August Germany declared war on Russia because the Czar, who had pledged to defend Serbia against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, refused to cease mobilizing his army. On 2 August the Germans invaded Luxemburg and the next day declared war on France, which had refused to declare neutrality and was also mobilizing. On 4 August the Germans also declared war on Belgium, which had denied them passage through its territory, and in response Great Britain joined the Entente and entered the war against the Central Powers. Train schedules, lust for glory and willful stupidity had brought the European great powers to the brink of the abyss, into which they all leaped with no little enthusiasm.

Russian Czar Nicholas II

Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph

German Kaiser Wilhelm II

The greatest cataclysm in European history since the barbarian invasions of the fifth century had begun, all because a Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, took it upon himself to shoot the heir to the Austrian throne and provide the Austrians with an excuse to make impossible demands of Serbia. Certainly the fate of Serbia was of some importance to the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, but the partition of the Balkans was a peripheral concern for Britain, France and Germany. Yet all these powers, little understanding how industry and technology had changed the nature of warfare, jumped eagerly into a conflict that would slaughter millions upon millions of young men, destroy three dynasties and exhaust the economies of even the victors. To what end? A peace that would lead in two decades to an even greater catastrophe.

French PM Rene Viviani

British PM Herbert Asquith

Serbian Assassin Gavrilo Princip

“Paris/Berlin by Christmas” was the cry, as both sides expected a short war. The German plan was to seek a decisive victory in the west while much smaller forces in the east were on the defensive before the notoriously cumbersome Russian army and the Austrians were crushing tiny Serbia. Helmuth von Moltke, the Chief of the German General Staff, intended to employ a variation of the so-called Schlieffen Plan, which in fact was a thought exercise for a single-front war with France. Weak German forces in the south would remain on the defensive and even retreat, while the immensely powerful right wing in the north would sweep through Belgium and the Netherlands and then turn southwards west of Paris, trapping the French armies. Whether the Schlieffen Plan could have worked is certainly debatable (the problem was not so much German transport capabilities as the state of Europe’s roads), but inasmuch as this was a two-front war and sufficient forces had to be sent east, the western army was simply not strong enough to carry out the aggressive strategy.

Helmuth von Moltke

The Germans swept through Belgium and northeastern France, generally overwhelming the opposing forces, but in September the exhausted troops were stopped some 40 miles from Paris at the First Battle of the Marne. Repulsed by the French under Joseph “Papa” Joffre and the British (BEF) under Sir John French, the Germans withdrew north of the Aisne River, and both sides then stretched their lines northwards, establishing a fortified line that ran 460 miles from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier. The essentially static Western Front was now in place.

Sir John French

Joseph Joffre

Western Front 1915

Meanwhile, the offensive-minded French, whose basic war aim was to avenge their defeat in 1871 and recover Alsace-Lorraine, promptly invaded those provinces, but the advance was soon thrown back with immense casualties, as generals learned – not very well, it seems – what happened when masses of infantry assaulted fortified positions. In just two months the French had suffered 360,000 casualties, the Germans 241,000; by way of comparison the Roman Empire at its greatest extent (early second century) was secured by perhaps 250,000 troops.

1914 ended with complete stalemate in the west. Unwilling to change their tactics, both the Allies and the Germans would continue to throw men into the meat grinder of fruitless assaults, looking for the elusive breakthrough that would end the war. But at Christmas a startling event had taken place. During the unofficial truce soldiers on both sides began entering no-man’s land and fraternizing with one another, singing carols, swapping souvenirs and drink and playing football. There could be no greater evidence that the men actually fighting the war bore one another no particular grudge, at least at this early stage of the war. This was of course anathema to the generals and politicians of both sides, who quickly put an end to such unpatriotic behavior.

Christmas Truce

Joffre’s strategic plan for 1915 was to pinch off the Noyon (near Compiègne) salient, a huge westward bulge marking the limit of the German advance, by attacking its flanks. As part of this on 10 March the British, who occupied the far northern section of the trench line, launched an attack on Neuve Chapelle. They achieved a tactical breakthrough, but the Germans counterattacked the next day, and though fighting continued, the offensive was abandoned on 15 March with no significant changes in the line. General French blamed the failure on insufficient supplies of shells, which led to the Shell Crisis of May and the creation of a Ministry of Munitions that could feed the growing mania of all the belligerents for artillery barrages. Although this was a very minor operation, the British (including Indians) and Germans lost over 20,000 killed, wounded, missing and captured.

On 22 April the Germans took their shot, initiating a series of battles that would be known as the Second Battle of Ypres (or “Wipers,” as the British troops called it). The First Battle of Ypres had taken place from 19 October to 22 November of the previous year and while indecisive had resulted in more than 300,000 combined casualties, leading Erich von Falkenhayn, who had succeeded Moltke as Chief of Staff, to conclude the war could not be won. Unfortunately, when on 18 November he proposed seeking a negotiated settlement, he was opposed by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and his Chief of Staff Erich Ludendorff and Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, condemning millions to die in the next five years.

Erich Ludendorff

Erich von Falkenhayn

Paul von Hindenburg

This time around the Germans began their offensive – after the inevitable artillery barrage – with poison gas (chlorine), the first use of this new technology on the Western Front. The surprise and shock opened a gap in the British line, which the Germans, themselves surprised, were unable to exploit, and soon the development of gas masks rendered the new weapon far less effective. The main struggle for the Ypres salient would go on until 25 May, by which time the Germans had pushed less than three miles westward. It cost them 35,000 casualties, but the Allies suffered twice as much. And Ypres was destroyed.

Ypres

Second Battle of Ypres

Meanwhile, on 9 May some 30 miles to the south in the Arras sector the French 10^th Army launched an offensive against the Vimy salient, attacking Vimy ridge, while the BEF attacked a dozen miles to the north at Aubers. This was the Second Battle of Artois and would last until 18 June. Joffre’s strategic goal was to cut a number of vital German rail lines, which would require an advance of ten or more miles beyond Vimy Ridge, something that might have struck a competent general as highly unlikely, given the experience of the last nine months. And sure enough, the initial attack took Vimy Ridge, but lost it to a German counterattack, and a month later when the battle ended, the French line had moved less than two miles eastward. The initial British assault was a disaster, allowing the Germans to send troops south, and in the end the Tommies had gained almost two miles. The cost? Officially, 32,000 British casualties, 73,000 German and 102,500 French. During the offensive the French alone had fired 2,155,862 artillery shells.

See a trend in these battles? If the generals did, their response was simply more of the same, producing even more casualties as defensive measures became more elaborate. A continuous line from the sea to Switzerland, the western front offered no possibility of outflanking the enemy, and the weaponry of the time – machine guns, rapid fire artillery, mortars – made frontal infantry assaults very costly, if not suicidal. Inasmuch as the breakthrough weaponry – tanks, motorized infantry and artillery and ground support aircraft – did not yet exist, remaining on the defense and negotiating or at least awaiting developments on other fronts seemed the reasonable course of action. But with Germany holding almost all of Belgium and a huge and economically important chunk of France the Allies were not about to bargain from a position of weakness, and the reasonable expectation that the Central Powers would sooner or later crush the Russians and ship more troops west goaded the Entente, especially the French, into offensives.

Already in the spring of 1915 defensive systems and tactics were rapidly improving. A more elastic defense was being adopted: rather than a single heavily fortified line, there would be a series of trench lines (three was a standard number), separated by strong points and barbwire entanglements. This meant the attacker had to cross multiple killing grounds just to get to grips with the enemy, often out of the range of their own guns. The clever response to this by the “chateau generals” was longer periods of artillery bombardment and sending larger numbers of men over the top, approaches that were both ineffective and extremely costly. The storm of shells, besides alerting the enemy to an attack, hardly damaged the wire, and defenders simply took cover in their dugouts, ready to pop out and kill when the shelling stopped. A rolling barrage with the troops following was more effective but very difficult to manage without blowing up your own men. And gas was extremely hard to control and use effectively, which is why it has been so rarely used, even by the seriously nasty creeps who have appeared in the last hundred years.

French trench

British trench

German trench

British-German Trench Lines

Gas attack

Gassed British trench

Australians in gas masks

One final noteworthy event in the west during this period. On 1 April French aviator Roland Garros shot down a German plane. Both sides had been using aircraft for reconnaissance, and in September 1914 a Russian pilot had taken out an Austrian plane by ramming it. Soon pilots and observers were using pistols and rifles, but it was clear that only a machine gun could be at all effective in bringing down another plane. The problem was the propeller. “Pusher” aircraft (the propeller mounted in the rear) were too slow, and placing the gun on the upper wing of a biplane made it very difficult to deal with the frequent jams, as well as producing too much vibration for accurate fire. Garros’ approach was to attach metal plates to the prop in order to deflect rounds that actually hit it, and he shot down three aircraft before the strain placed on the engine by the prop being pummeled by bullets brought his own plane down behind German lines. This crude solution would not work with steel-jacketed German ammunition, and the engineers at Anthony Fokker’s aircraft plant produced a synchronization device that allowed a Maxim machine gun to be mounted directly in front of the pilot and shoot through the prop. On 1 July Kurt Wintgens, flying a Fokker E.I., became the first pilot to score a kill with a synchronized gun. Suddenly the Germans had the first air superiority in history.