Category Archives: Britain

Report from the Fronts #51: November 1918: Armistice

(If you want more on the end of the fighting, try Joseph E. Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour, an excellent read.  Note: though the hostilities are ending, the war is not, so there will be a few more Reports.)

It is a crime that operations continued on the Western Front when the Germans were clearly defeated and begging for an armistice.  The Allies already held all the cards, but they were wrangling among themselves.  The French, British and Italians were less than enthusiastic about Wilson’s Fourteen Points with their emphasis on self-determination and drawing boundaries according to ethnicity; they already had secret treaties and plans for the post-war environment that satisfied their own interests.  Nevertheless, thousands of men would have to die when the war was obviously over.  So the Battle of Valenciennes began on 1 November and ended with capture of the city on the 3rd, and on 6 November the Americans took Sedan.  On 5 November Marshal Foch was made supreme commander of all forces fighting against Germany.

The end

To the southeast the Serbians retook Belgrade on 1 November, and King Peter I returned three days later, to be crowned King of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (at least until 1921).  The Italians seized Trieste on 3 November, and a day later the Battle of Vittorio Veneto came to an end; the Austrians suffered 80,000 casualties and some 450,000 prisoners, the Italians and allies about 40,000 casualties.  And that same day all hostilities between the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Allies ceased, and the Italians occupied not only the territory they had lost but also the North Tyrol, Innsbruck, Gorizia, Istria and Dalmatia.

King Peter I

Italians landing in Trieste

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The end was also coming for the German Empire, as revolts began breaking out across Germany.  On 3 November the Allies finally agreed to the German proposal for an armistice, as mutiny was exploding among the sailors of the fleet at Kiel.  On 24 October Admiral Franz von Hipper ordered preparations for a final battle against the British and moved part of the High Seas Fleet to Wilhelmshaven, where some sailors refused to obey orders or actually mutinied.  The resistance was defused without violence and the ships returned to Kiel, but the sailors there were also not interested in sacrificing their lives for a pointless foray.

Admiral Franz von Hipper

Hipper’s plan for the last battle

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On 1 November 250 sailors held a meeting, which was followed the next two days by large open-air demonstrations, in which workers and civilians participated.  Local troops fired into the crowd, killing some, and on the 4th more troops were sent in, but these soldiers either refused to obey orders or actually joined the revolt.  By the end of the day some 40,000 sailors, soldiers and workers controlled Kiel and Wilhelmshaven.  On 7 November Bavaria was declared a republic, and the revolt spread to Berlin two days later.  The German Revolution had begun.

The Revolution begins

Sailors on strike

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reaction at the highest level followed quickly.  On 9 November it was announced that the Kaiser would abdicate (the abdication was signed on the 28th), and the next day he went into exile in Holland, where he would remain until his death in 1941.  The almost 900 year old Hohenzollern dynasty (at least as rulers) and the 47 year old Second Reich came to an end.  On 12 November Emperor Karl I of Austria, no longer having an empire, was compelled to abdicate, and left for Switzerland in March 1919 and died in Madeira in April 1922.  The thousand year old Holy Roman Empire and the 51 year old Austro-Hungarian Empire were gone; on the same day Karl abdicated a German-Austrian republic was proclaimed.

Wilhelm II

The now dapper Kaiser in exile

Prince Georg Friedrich, current heir to the Prussian throne

Karl I

Karl von Hapsburg, current heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the war was finally ending.  On 3 November Austria agreed to the Armistice of Villa Giusti with the Allies, which effectively ended the war for Austria, and on the same day the Allies accepted Germany’s armistice proposal. The German delegation arrived at the Allied General Headquarters and were ushered into a specially prepared railway car in the Forest of Compiègne (Foch wanted no press or angry Frenchmen present) on 8 November.  They were informed by Foch that they had three days to consider the Allied demands, which were nonnegotiable, and with little choice – Germany was starving from the blockade – the armistice was signed at 5:10 am on 11 October.  The war was over.

Allied leaders at the Wagon

The signing of the Armistice

The Wagon at Compiègne 1940

The Wagon in Berlin 1940

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, not quite.  The armistice would not take effect until 11:00 am, exactly at the moment Foch’s 72 hour deadline ended.  Whether the Allied commanders considered a delay in order to come up with the nifty “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” is unknown, but many professional soldiers, like Foch himself and General Pershing, who wanted their troops to keep fighting and gain ground that was already due to be handed over.  Officers’ careers could still be furthered, and in the case of the Americans, even at the grunt level, there was still glory to be won.  So, men continued to die.

In the six hours between the signing of the armistice and its implementation both sides suffered, conservatively, 11,000 casualties of which some 2700 were deaths.  The last British soldier to be killed was George Ellison, shot in the vicity of Mons around 9:30, while the last Commonwealth soldier to die, Canadian George Price, bought the farm at 10:58 in an advance north of Mons.  Augustin Trébuchon, the last poilu, was killed at 10:50 during an assault across the Meuse River,  The man recognized as the last soldier to die in action in the Great War was an American, Henry Gunther, who in the last 60 seconds of the war charged at a German machine gun; the surprised Germans attempted to wave him off and finally cut him down.  No one seems to know who the last German soldier was.

George Ellison

George Price

Augustin Trébuchon

Henry Gunther

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The war in Africa, however, went on.  Lettow-Vorbeck and his askaris in the bush were not exactly easy to contact, and on 1 November they invaded Rhodesia and took the town of Kasama on the 9th.  Hostilities finally came to an end on 14 November, and the German force in Rhodesia surrendered on the 25th, two weeks after the armistice.  By that time Lettow-Vorbeck’s army consisted of 30 German officers, 125 other ranks, 1168 askaris and about 3500 porters.  They had led a quarter million Commonwealth troops on a merry chase for four years.  Lettow-Vorbeck returned to Germany a hero, the only undefeated German commander, and though he was an ardent nationalist, he opposed Hitler, suposedly once telling the Führer to fuck hmself.  He was given a state funeral upon his death in 1964.

Surrender of Lettow-Vorbeck

Lettow-Vorbeck in Berlin 1919

The Lion of Africa in 1935

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, the Germans were going home.  On 18 November the last German troops crossed the French frontier (they would be back in 22 years) and the Belgian frontier on the 26th (ditto).  Brussels was reoccupied by the Belgian army on 18 November, followed three days later by the government.  British and American troops crossed into Germany on 24 November, followed by the French two days later; the day before the French had entered Strasbourg in Alsace-Lorraine, lost to Germany almost 50 years earlier.

A peace treaty would not be signed until June 1919, but modern eastern Europe was already emerging from the ruin of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  On 1 November Hungary formed its first independent government, under Mihály Károlyi, and on the 16th declared the 400 year Hapsburg monarchy abolished and the establishment of the First Hungarian Republic.  On 14 November Professor Masaryk was elected the first President of the Czechoslovak Republic, and on the 23rd the Yugoslav National Council voted for union with Serbia and Montenegro, which union was approved by the Montenegrin National Assembly on 29 November.

Proclamation of the Hungarian Republic

Czechoslovakia

Mihály Károlyi

Tomas Masaryk

Austro-Hungarian Empire by ethnicity

 

 

All was now quiet on the Western Front, but violence continued in the east.  On 1 November the new Second Polish Republic under Józef Piłsudski went to war with the momentarily independent Ukraine, seeking new territory in the east, especially Galicia. The war would end in a Polish victory in July 1919, when the Ukrainians would join Poland in the Polish-Soviet War that began in February 1919.

Poland March 1919

Józef Pilsudski

And there was the Russian Civil War, born of the Great War.  On 18 November in Omsk Admiral Alexander Kolchak declared himself the Dictator of Russia and began collecting White forces to combat the Reds.  To the west the other major White leader, Anton Denikin, had by November gained control of all the territory between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.  It was beginning to appear that the Bolsheviks were doomed.

Alexander Kolchak

Anton Denikin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, on 9 November the British and French issued a joint declaration regarding the disposition of the former Ottoman territories of Syria and Mesopotamia, a telling sign that they had their own agendas for the post-war world.  President Wilson’s self-determination apparently did not extend to non-Europeans.

Disposition of the Ottoman Empire

 

 

Report from the Fronts #50: October 1918

By the beginning of October many, especially on the German side, knew that the war was finished for the Central Powers but the killing would continue for another month while an armistice was negotiated. It was hardly “dulce et decorum” to die for your country when there was absolutely no reason to.

On 2 October the Fifth Battle of Ypres and the Battle of the Saint-Quentin Canal came to an end, and on the 3rd the (ironically named) Battle of the Beaurevoir Line began.  The Line was the last string of German trenches, a little more than a mile east of Saint-Quentin, and by 10 October the Americans and French had seized the heights above the Line, marking a 19 mile wide breach of the Hindenburg Line.  General Rawlinson on the operation: “Had the Boche not shown marked signs of deterioration during the past month, I should never have contemplated attacking the Hindenburg line. Had it been defended by the Germans of two years ago, it would certainly have been impregnable….”

Breaching the Line

Rawlinson

Beaurevoir Line

To the north the Canadians handily won the Second Battle of Cambrai on 8–10 October, capturing a city that was largely destroyed and evacuated by the Germans.  The easy victory is understandable: all the pressure on the Hindenburg Line to the south left this sector denuded of troops.  The depleted German divisions were severely outnumbered, had few guns, no air cover and no tanks, of which the Allies had 324.  The end was becoming clearer and clearer.

Canadians on the road to Cambrai

Second Battle of Cambrai

On 14 October the Battle of Courtrai (or Battle of Roulers or Second Battle of Belgium) began, and by its end on the 19th Ostend, Lille, Douai, Zeebrugge and Bruges had been recaptured by the British and Belgians.  On 20 October the rest of the Belgian coast was recovered.

King Albert I at the liberation of Bruges

Courtrai area

To the south the Meuse-Argonne Offensive moved into phase two on 4 October. The exhausted American divisions gave way to fresh formations of eager doughboys, who quickly – and frequently recklessly – cleared the Argonne Forest by the end of the month, during which time they advanced 10 miles.  At the Battle of Montfaucon 14-17 October the Americans broke the Hindenburg Line at the Kriemhilde Stellung, while on their left the French Fourth Army moved 20 miles and reached the Aisne River.  At the onset of Montfaucon legendary American corporal Alvin York singlehandedly captured 132 prisoners, a feat that would have been impossible a year earlier.  Phase 3 began on 28 October and would last until the armistice.

York in action

Alvin York

Meuse-Argonne Offensive

A sign of the impending end: on 27 October Ludendorff, virtual ruler of the German Empire for two years, was asked by the Kaiser to resign, which he did without objection.

Hindenburg and Ludendorff

A more cataclysmic sign appeared in Italy. On 24 October, the anniversary of the Caporetto disaster, General Armando Diaz finally launched the long awaited offensive against the Austrians with an assault on Monte Grappo, while his main armies prepared to cross the Piave River, which was in flood.  The crossing of the swollen river was difficult, but by the 28th the Italians had established several bridgeheads on the northern bank and were advancing.  The Austrian commander, Svetozar Boroević von Bojna, promptly ordered a counterattack, but his men refused to obey the order, not a good sign.  Svetozar Boroević, known as a defensive expert, ordered a general retreat, and on 30 October the Italians took Vittorio Veneto, a dozen miles north of the Piave.

Svetozar Boroević

Diaz

Battle of Vittorio Veneto

On Monte Grappa

Austro-Hungarian prisoners

Abandoned Austrian equipment

Italian cavalry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aiding the Allies was the simple fact that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was crumbling. On 28 October Bohemia (part of Czechoslovakia) declared its independence, and the following day a group proclaimed the independence of the South Slavs.  More crushing, on 31 October the Hungarian Parliament voted for independence, thus ending the Austro-Hungarian state.  By the time the Battle of Vittorio Veneto ended on 4 November Austria was out of the war.

Meanwhile, Allied forces were advancing deeper into Serbia, and in the east the British took Tripoli, Homs and Aleppo in Syria and Kirkuk in Mesopotamia from the Turks; the French took Beirut.  Far to the east the British took Irkutsk (remember Risk?) on 14 October and Omsk on the 18th, although the whole reason for these operations had essentially disappeared.

Diplomatic notes were flying all over Europe. On 4 October Germany and Austria sent notes to President Wilson requesting an armistice, and four days later Wilson told the Germans that evacuating occupied real estate was the first step.  On the 12th the German government agreed, but three days later Wilson set further conditions, including that he deal with a democratic German government, a tough proposition for the Germans.  Nevertheless, Wilson agreed to pass the proposal on to the Allied governments.

The Austrians had to wait until 18 October for a noncommittal reply, and on the 27th the Austrian government sent a second note to Wilson and one to Italy requesting an immediate armistice.  Meanwhile, the Empire was dissolving.  On 16 October a desperate Emperor proclaimed the ancient empire to be a federal state based on national groups, but it was already fragmenting.  On 21 October Czechoslovakia declared its independence, and the Ban of Croatia (the traditional local government) proclaimed its support for the Yugoslav National Council.  On the 29th the Council rejected the policy of the Empire and declared Yugoslavian independence, which was adopted by the Croatian Congress the next day.  Three days earlier the King of Montenegro had announced support for Yugoslavia.  On 31 October there were revolutions in Budapest and Vienna, and Hungary withdrew from the union; that same day Emperor Karl I, no longer possessing an Adriatic port, handed his fleet over to the Yugoslavs.

Czechoslovakia

Croatian Congress

Emperor Karl I

Austro-Hungarian Empire

Yugoslavia (1922)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ottoman Empire was also collapsing.  On 14 October the Turks requested an armistice from President Wilson, and on the 30th an armistice was signed by the Allies and the Turks.  Hostilities ended the next day, and Turkey was out of the war and bereft of their Arab empire.

Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic

On a smaller scale, on 4 October King Ferdinand of Bulgaria abdicated in favor of his son, who became Boris III.  Surprisingly, his throne would actually survive the political cataclysm born of the defeat of the Central Powers.

Ferdinand I

Boris III

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Turkey, Austria and Bulgaria were all out of the war, and Germany was seriously seeking an armistice.  Yet the war and the killing went on as the victors dithered.

 

 

Report from the Fronts #49: September 1918

(OK, extremely late, but wadda ya gonna do?)

100 Days Offensive

 

The Allies were rolling now.  The Second Somme came to an end on 3 September, and Foch determined to launch a broad assault on the Hindenburg Line (Siegfriedstellung).  First, though, he cleaned up the German salients west of the Line in order to attack the entire string of fortifications at once.  The British and French advanced towards the Line in a number of relatively small engagements, heading for Cambrai, Saint-Quentin and Laon.  By 25 September the Germans were pushed back to the Line, having surrendered all the gains of their Spring Offensive.  The Allies nevertheless still believed the War could not be won until 1919.

Battle of Saint-Mihiel

One part of this operation was the Battle of Saint-Mihiel on 12-15 September, the only American-directed major offensive of the war.  Pershing’s First Army (14 American and 4 French divisions) easily cleared the Saint-Mihiel salient – the Germans were already in retreat – but as usual with successful advances the troops (660,000 of them) got ahead of their supplies and artillery and were forced to halt rather than attempt a breakthrough to Metz.  The Battle of Saint-Mihiel, incidentally, was recreated in the 1927 movie Wings, which won the first Academy Award for Best Picture; it also involved the first recorded use of the term D-Day.

Breaking the Hindenburg Line

American engineers

The grand assault on the Hindenburg Line kicked off on 26 September with the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, which would last until the Armistice.  The strike was launched from the southern (Verdun) sector, and the ultimate objective was the city of Sedan, which was an absolutely vital lateral rail hub for the Germans (and the scene of their victory over France in 1870).  The strike force consisted of 15 (later 22) American divisions, which were anywhere from 30% to 100% larger than the European, and 31 French divisions, for a total of 1,200,000 men; they were accompanied by 2780 guns, 380 tanks and 840 planes.  Facing the Allied force were ultimately 44 German divisions, most of them half strength, totaling up to 450,000 generally demoralized men under Fifth Army commander Georg von der Marwitz (remember him?).

German dugout

American gun crew

Meuse-Argonne Offensive

In terms of personnel the operation was a partial role call for America’s next war. Handling the massive Allied logistics was Colonel George Marshall, who as Chief of Staff of the Army would in the Second World War oversee the expansion and supply of the entire US army and the rebuilding of Europe.  Vigorously leading an infantry battalion was Colonel William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who would create and direct the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA.  Colonel George Patton commanded a tank brigade, while an infantry brigade was under General Douglas MacArthur.  And managing an artillery battery was Captain Harry Truman.

Col. Marshall

Col. Marshall

Col. Donovan

Col. Patton

Gen. MacArthur – already the poseur

Capt. Truman

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first phase of the offensive lasted until 3 October, during which period the less experienced Americans gained from 2 to 5 miles, while the French, fighting in more open countryside, advanced their front some 9 miles.  These bare words, of course, cover many French villages being destroyed and many men giving their all, at a time when even the Kaiser knew the war was lost.  Pershing immediately recognized that clearing the Saint-Mihiel salient was nothing at all like frontally assaulting well-established German positions.  On the other hand, the German veterans were impressed by American aggressiveness and the willingness of the doughboys to charge into machine gun fire.

On 28 September the second –and weakest – thrust of the grand offensive, the Fifth Battle of Ypres, was launched far to the north in Flanders.  12 Belgium, 10 British (Second Army) and 6 French divisions (Sixth Army) under the command of King Albert of Belgium struck east from the Ypres area, heading towards Passchendaele and ultimately Ghent.  Initially faced by no more than 5 German divisions, the Allies made good progress despite the rough terrain; by 30 September all the high ground east of Ypres and the area west of Passchendaele had been recovered, and by 1 October units were on the Lys River.  But with German reinforcements arriving and the Allied troops beyond easy supply, the push came to end the following day.

A break from the battle

The Ypres area after five battles

The Ypres salient

The central thrust pushed off on 29 September, attacking one of the strongest stretches of the Hindenburg Line.  The offensive included the British Third Army in the north and the French First Army in the south, but the British Fourth Army in the center faced the greatest challenge, crossing the Saint-Quentin canal.  Army commander Henry Rawlinson had 30 British and Australian divisions and two (oversized) American divisions attached to the Australian Corps, and they faced 39 (generally depleted) German divisions of Adolph von Carlowitz’ Second Army and the formidable defenses along the deep cut of the canal.  The Aussies and Yanks would confront the particularly strong fortifications at the Bony-Bellicourt sector, where the canal ran underground through a tunnel.

General Rawlinson

General von Carlowitz

Battle of Saint-Quentin

The battle began with 1600 guns firing almost a million rounds, the biggest British barrage in the war.  The two American divisions, followed by two Australian and equipped with 150 tanks, headed for the Bellicourt Tunnel sector, their goal the Catelet-Nauroy Line east of the tunnel.  The right half of the advance, led by the American 30th Division, penetrated the Hindenburg Line and by the early morning of 30 September had captured Bellicourt and part of Nauroy, despite taking heavy fire on their left flank because of the failure of the American 27th Division on the left to keep up.  The Australians reported finding large groups of leaderless American troops, who had suffered seriously because of their inexperience.

Yanks after the capture of Bellicourt

Southern end of the canal tunnel

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, immediately south of the Americans and Australians the British 46th Division, followed by the 32nd (home of the poet Wilfred Owen), was able to cross the very deep cut of the canal between Riqueval and Bellenglise, crossing the canal with boats, rafts and lifejackets while artillery kept the defenders pinned in their trenches.  Tanks were brought over the tunnel area captured by the 30th Division and sent south to support the British, who had secured the eastern bank and the German defenses by the end of the day.  The achievement of the 46th Division was just short of incredible, crossing the waterway with anything that would float, climbing the wall of the east bank with scaling ladders (!) and capturing the formidable defenses – with fewer than 800 casualties.

The canal cut in 1918

Riqueval Bridge and the canal cut today

Addressing the troops at the Riqueval Bridge

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the east Allenby’s successful and low cost campaign to drive General Liman von Sanders and his Turks out of Palestine continued with the Battle of Megiddo (actually a number of engagements) from 19 to 25 September.  While Lawrence and Arab Revolt units were harassing and disrupting Turkish communications, Allenby’s carefully planned offensive moved rapidly north and east, establishing by the 25th a line running from Acre on the coast east to the Sea of Galilee and south to Amman (Jordan); Australian units would capture Damascus on 1 October.  During this roughly two week period 75,000 Turkish soldiers surrendered to Commonwealth forces (many to avoid slaughter by the Arab forces) at a cost of about 1500 casualties; only 6000 Turkish soldiers escaped.

Bombed Turkish transport

Allenby’s September campaign

Otto Liman von Sanders

Edmund Allenby

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Off in the former Russian Empire Allied forces were on the move.  On 2 September an Italian force arrived at Murmansk and was joined two days later by General William Graves and more American troops.  On that same day Obozerskaya, 100 miles south of Archangel, was captured by the Allies, and on the 11th Ukhtinskaya on the Murmansk front.  The Canadians showed up in Archangel at the end of the month, by which time Allied troops, aided by Poles and White forces, had pushed 150 miles south up the Dvina River, battling Bolshevik forces on the river and in fortified villages.  In the far east the city of Khabarovsk, 360 miles north of Vladivostok, was taken by the Japanese on 5 September.

Archangel

Allied troops

Red prisoners of Americans

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vladivostok

Allied troops

Japanese troops

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, diplomatic exchanges in September underscored the crumbling position of the Central Powers.  On 15 September Austria requested from President Wilson the opening of peace talks and Germany actually offered Belgium a peace treaty; unsurprisingly, both were immediately turned down.  More successful were the Bulgarians, who on the 28th requested of the Allies an immediate armistice, which was granted two days later; Bulgaria was out of the war.  On 25 September Italy recognized the pan-Slavic state – Yugoslavia – that was emerging across the Adriatic as the Austrian Empire crumbled (more on this in October).

Finally, remember Lettow-Vorbeck and his askaris?  On September 28, nine months and 1500 miles after invading Portuguese East Africa, the Colonel and his ragged but still effective band of mostly native troops slipped across the Rovuma River back into German East Africa.  On their arrival the askaris cheered their German leader with “Bwana Obersti anarudi!” – “The Colonel is back!” The game of dodging a quarter million Commonwealth troops went on.

Jacob van Deventer (seated) – the opposition

Lettow-Vorbeck – the Lion of Africa

Report from the Fronts #48: August 1918

(Late in part because of a cat crisis.  I have been doing this now for three and a half years, and I can hardly wait until the bloody war ends.  Of course, there are the peace negotiations, the post-war environment and the Russian Civil War.)

German Spring Offensive

 

By the beginning of August it was fairly clear the Germans could not win the war; by the end of the month it was equally clear the Allies would. The Allied counterattack in response to Operation Friedensturm had by 6 August recovered virtually all of the Spring Offensive gains, and two days later the Allies launched the first of a series of assaults – collectively called the Hundred Days Offensive – that would push the Germans out of France by November.  The war was hastening to an end, but tens of thousands still had to die.

On 7 August General Foch was made a Marshal of France and the next day began the Battle of Amiens (the French assault in the south was known as the Battle of Montdidier), sending 10 British, Commonwealth and French divisions and over 500 tanks along the Somme east of the city.  The plan, devised by Douglas “Butcher of the Somme” Haig, sought to push the Germans further away from the vital city of Amiens and take advantage of the weakened state of the opposing German Second Army.  The terrain in the area was also excellent for tanks, whose value in penetrating the trench lines – despite the constant breakdowns – was now well appreciated.

General Haig

Marshall Foch

Battle of Amiens

On the first day the Allies blasted a 15 mile wide hole in the German lines and advanced an average 6-7 miles, inflicting 30,000 casualties to their own 6500.  Of those German losses 17,000 were prisoners, as demoralized troops began surrendering in larger numbers; Ludendorff called 7 August “der Schwarzer Tag des deutschen Heeres” (“the Black Day of the German Army”).  But the rapid advance meant the troops quickly outdistanced their artillery and logistical support, and in the following days movement slowed to more familiar rates.  Nevertheless, on 10 August Ludendorff began to evacuate the Amiens salient, established back in March.

The lucky ones – German POWs

The battle had, incidentally, clearly demonstrated the value of the tank in breaking through static defenses; the units without serious tank support simply could not match the progress of those with armor.  On the other hand, the age of Blitzkrieg was still a ways off: of the more than 500 tanks involved only 6 remained operational on 10 August.

The major action came to an end on 12 August, and Haig refused Foch’s request to continue with the offensive, preferring to launch a new advance to the north, between Albert and Arras.  Was the Butcher uneasy about the growing casualties and the old ghosts along the Somme or did he simply desire a push that did not involve the French?  In any case Byng’s Third Army (which included the American II Corps) went over the top on 21 August, smashing into von der Marwitz’s weak Second Army and beginning the Second Battle of Bapaume (and the Second Battle of the Somme).  Albert was captured the second day, Bapaume fell on 29 August, and Australians crossed the Somme on the 31st.  By then the German line had been blasted open along a 40 mile front.

General von der Marwitz (right) and the Kaiser

General Byng

Battle of Bapaume

To the south the French Tenth Army had begun their own offensive (the Second Battle of Noyon) on 17 August and widened the gap in the German line, capturing Noyon on the 29th.  On 26 August the British First Army, just to the north of the French, joined the offensive (the Second Battle of Arras), and far to the north in Belgium the British Second Army began a tentative advance in Flanders on 18 August.  The Great War had become mobile again, and the end was drawing near for the Central Powers.

British gun carrier

The retreat of the Germans, incidentally, forced the withdrawal of the Paris Gun, and the last shells plunged out of the stratosphere into the city on 15 August.  The weapon was a marvelous piece of engineering but had virtually no effect on the war.

Meanwhile, Allied involvement in the Russian maelstrom was growing.  On 1 August the Expeditionary Force under British General Frederick Poole began an assault on Archangel and captured it the following day when pro-Allied forces overthrew the local Soviet.  That same day Japan determined to send troops to Vladivostok, presumably looking for territorial gains, and on the 11th the first units arrived; British troops had already landed at the city on the 3rd.  On 4 August a British force entered oil-rich Baku on the Caspian Sea, and two days later London announced that the British would not be involving themselves in Russian affairs, a declaration that must have rung a bit hollow.

Baku oil field

Japanese print of Vladivostok landing

Vladivostok

Archangel

Frederick Poole

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On 5 August the last German airship raid on England took place, unsuccessfully.  In the course of the war there had been 51 airship and 59 airplane bombing attacks on the United Kingdom, killing 1392 people and injuring 3330.  Apart from initially creating some panic the bombing had no real effect on the war, but efforts to defend against it laid the foundation for British air defenses in the Second World War.

Zeppelin airship

Gotha in flight

Gotha bomber

 

 

Finally, on 13 August the Czecho-Slovaks declared their independence at Prague.  The Austro-Hungarian Empire was breaking up.

Declaration of independence in Prague (October)

 

 

Report from the Fronts #46: June 1918

Spring Offensive

Operation Blücher-Yorck (the Third Battle of the Aisne) came to an end on 6 June, having brought the Germans within 35 miles of Paris.  But no decisive breakthrough had resulted, and Ludendorff was determined to take one more shot before the front was overwhelmed with Americans.  On 9 June he launched Operation Gneisenau (the Battle of the Matz), essential a continuation of Blücher-Yorck, still hoping to draw more Allied troops south from Flanders, but though the Germans advanced nine miles in a few days, a surprise French counterattack (no preliminary bombardment) at Compiègn on 11 June halted the thrust and the operation was cancelled on the 13th.  Those four days cost the Germans 30,000 casualties and the Allies 35,000.

Operation Gneisenau

June also saw more American action on the Western Front. On 2 June American units, including a battalion of Marines, occupied a 12 mile stretch of the front before Belleau Wood, about half a dozen miles west of Château Thierry.  The following day they easily repelled a German assault, ignoring the French, who were retreating; said Marine Captain Lloyd Williams “Retreat?  Hell, we just got here.”  On 6 June the Allies launched a limited offensive in the area, assigning the now enlarged contingent of Marines several objectives, including Belleau Wood, where a regiment of Germans were well entrenched.  Unfortunately, the Marines were unaware of this.

Marines and poilus

Captain Williams

Belleau vicinity

Belleau Wood

Belleau Wood

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Many Marines were mowed down in the wheat fields surrounding the woods, but they achieved their phase one objectives nevertheless.  Late in the afternoon two Marine battalions moved on Belleau Wood, which meant once again crossing a field raked by machine gun fire, prompting Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly to yell to him men “Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?”  Sure enough, the first waves were slaughtered, but the Marines managed to reach the Wood and secure a position, engaging the Germans in hand-to-hand combat.  In terms of casualties this was the worst day for the Marine Corps up to this time.

Killing Germans

Chasing Germans

In Belleau “Wood”

In Belleau “Wood”

Sergeant Daly

The situation now settled into a stalemate of bloody attack and counterattack, until after six American assaults the Wood was finally cleared of Germans on 26 June.  The Americans suffered 9777 casualties, while apart from 1600 captured German losses are unknown.  Belleau Wood was of course a relatively trivial episode on the Western Front (which is why this report is late – I thought it was in July), but it confirmed for the Allies and the Germans that the Americans, who were now flooding into France, were for real.  And that an American Marine with a rifle was an awesome weapon.

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Down in sunny Italy the Allies scored another defensive victory.  On 15 June the Austrians launched an offensive along the middle and eastern portions of the front, the Second Battle of the Piave River.  The Austrians had been reinforced by German divisions freed up by the surrender of Russia and trained in the assault tactics of the Western Front, but disagreement between the two army group commanders, General Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf (west) and General Svetozar Borojević (east), resulted in a broad offensive rather than the narrow attack that had been so successful at Caporetto.

Borojević

Hötzendorf

Second Battle of the Piave River

 

 

Things were also different across the Piave.  General Luigi “Isonzo” Cadorna had been replaced with Armando Diaz, who had learned a few things from the Caporetto disaster: he developed a defense in depth without a continuous trench line, a decentralized command system that allowed tremendous flexibility and small unit autonomy and a central reserve of thirteen “motorized” (they had trucks) divisions.  He had also received eleven British/French divisions, but most were called back west when the German Spring Offensive kicked off.

Diaz

Buoyed by the victory at Caporreto and the prospect of knocking Italy out of the war, the Austrians attacked at 3:00 AM.  Unfortunately, the Italians had discovered the precise time of the assault and at 2:30 AM began raining shells on the troops packing the forward trenches, sending many reeling back to defensive positions.  In the west Conrad made some small gains on the Asiago Plateau, but he was driven back the following day and spent the rest of the offensive making pointless attacks with his dwindling forces.  Borojević, on the other hand, was able to establish a substantial bridgehead along fifteen miles of the lower Piave to the Adriatic, threatening Venice, but the growing difficulty of getting men and supplies across the swollen Piave, whose bridges were continually bombed by the Italians, proved too much to overcome.

Waiting for the Austrians

Waiting…

Waiting…

Waiting…in color

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On 19 June the Italians counterattacked, and while Borojević avoided a disaster, he was ordered by the Emperor to withdraw, and the Italians recovered all the lost territory by the 23rd.  Diaz immediately came under heavy pressure from the Allied command to go on the offensive, but he understood well that his forces needed to be reorganized and that crossing the Piave would put him in precisely the same circumstances Borojević had suffered.  The offensive cost the Austrians 118,000 casualties, the Italians 87,000, nothing new on the Italian front, but though few could have guessed at the time, the Second Battle of the Piave River was the last real offensive of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a state whose political core stretched back to 800 and Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire.

On to victory, Italia!

Perhaps symbolic of the impending end of the Empire was an event that took place the very day the Piave offensive began. The commander of the Austrian navy (and future dictator of Hungary), Miklós Horthy, decided to challenge the Otranto Barrage, the Allied blockade of the Strait of Otranto, which had kept the Austrian surface fleet bottled up in the Adriatic.  Under cover of darkness Austria’s four most advanced battleships left their base at Pula on 8 and 9 June, but before the two squadrons could unite SMS Tegetthoff and SMS Szent István were discovered by two Italian motor torpedo boats early on 10 June.  One went after the Tegetthoff and missed, but the other – MAS 15 commanded by Luigi Rizzo – put two torpedoes into the Szent István at 3:20 AM.

Italian torpedo boats

SMS Szent István

 

Admiral Horthy

Austrian dreadnaughts at Pula

The Adriatic Sea today

The aft boiler room quickly flooded and the ship began listing to the starboard.  All efforts to counter the list failed, and soon the forward boiler room began flooding, ending power for the pumps.  The Szent István was doomed, but no order was given to abandon ship, and as the battleship settled further into the water, the event was filmed from the Tegetthoff (watch the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pSiCjfhUUw), while the ship’s band played the Austrian national anthem.  The ship capsized and slid beneath the surface at 6:05 AM, losing only 89 men out of a complement of 1094 – contrary to usual practice Austro-Hungarian sailors had to learn to swim.  And like the Szent István, the doomed Austro-Hungarian Empire was slowly slipping beneath the waters of history, to disappear forever.  (Well, actually the Szent István was found in the 1970s.)

…and down

Luigi Rizzo

MAS 15

Going down…

 

SMS Szent István today

Meanwhile, the Allies were being sucked further into the Russian Civil War. British marines landed at Pechenga in Murmansk province on 4 June, and three days later another British force arrived at Kem in Karelia on the White Sea.  With German troops in Finland the Allies feared that war stocks in northern Russia would be captured, and they also wished to rescue the Czech Legion (which took the key Siberian city of Omsk just as Tommies were disembarking at Kem).  This of course meant inevitable confrontation with the Bolsheviks, who on 8 June ordered the western forces to leave.  They responded on 24 June by sending more troops to join the North Russia Expeditionary Force already at Murmansk and a week later seizing the northern part of the Murman Railway (now the Kirov Railway), which linked Murmansk to St. Petersburg.  American doughboys would soon be joining them.

At Murmansk

Murman Railway

At Murmansk

 

Murmansk

Report from the Fronts #44: April 1918

Spring Offensive

Operation Michael ended on 5 April, and while it did not achieve all its objectives, Ludendorff nevertheless believed that by sucking Allied troops south to defend Amiens it had opened the way to the Channel ports – and the British supply lines – through Hazebrouck.  He consequently launched Operation Georgette (also known as the Battle of the Lys), pitting the Fourth Army under Sixt von Armin and the Sixth Army under Ferdinand von Quast against the British First and Second Armies.

Herbert Plumer

Henry Horne

Sixt von Armin

Ferdinand von Quast

Georgette

Henry Horne’s First Army was the initial target when the offensive kicked on 9 April and was an excellent choice.  It had become something of a rest home for exhausted and depleted divisions, and as it happened, the main attack was against a seven mile front held by a single division of the understrength Portuguese Expeditionary Corps (the other had been withdrawn three days earlier in order to be replaced).  The 20,000 Portuguese resisted but were overwhelmed by the 100,000 men of eight German divisions, while the British division immediately to their north also crumpled, creating a serious gap in the line.

Portuguese troops

Portuguese prisoners

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The next day the Germans also assaulted Herbert Plumer’s Second Army to the north and forced the British to abandon Armentières (as in “Mademoiselle from Armentières, Parley-vous“). By the 11th the Germans had crossed the Lys River, and Haig proclaimed to his troops: “With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end.”  (One wonders if this obligation applied to the general himself.)  On the 14th the British abandoned the Passchendaele Salient in order to shorten their line, giving up the territory, bought with so much blood the year before, east of Ypres.

The Butcher of the Somme (and other rivers)

German prisoners

British gas casualties

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Germans continued to advance, but slowed by the usual supply and flank problems they were stopped just short of Hazebrouck on 29 April and Ludendorff halted the operation.  The forward German units were just 15 miles from the Channel ports, but now occupied a salient that was being pounded on three sides. Georgette had cost each side about 110,000 casualties.

British defending Hazebrouck

The Germans were certainly doing better in the east, where their victorious forces faced little serious opposition. On 3 April the German Expeditionary Force landed in Finland in order to help the Whites in the Finish Civil War, while in southern Russia Ekaterinoslav was captured the same day.  Kharkov fell on the 8th, and German troops pushed into the Crimea on the 19th.  (Four days later Guatemala declared war on Germany – perhaps the United Fruit Company had interests in western Russia.)  On 29 April a coup led by Pavlo Skoropadskyi and supported by the Germans overthrew the Ukrainian People’s Republic, and Skoropadskyi became Hetman of the Ukraine – at least for a while.

Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi

The Turks, meanwhile, were picking up their slices: on 5 April Van in Armenia was retaken and Batum and Kars in Georgia were occupied on the 15th and 27th.  More ominous for the Bolshevik government, on 5 April British and Japanese troops occupied Vladivostok on the Pacific coast of the old Empire.  Others would follow, as the Civil War tuned all the Russias into an abattoir.

Vladivostok in 1898

Then there was the Czechoslovak Legion. At the beginning of the war the Russians had recruited Czechs and Slovaks to fight against the Austrians, which they did with great enthusiasm, and they participated with distinction in the Kerensky Offensive in 1917.  By the beginning of 1918 the Legion numbered 40,000 troops, the war in the east was over and the men wanted to fight on the Western Front.  But how to get there with Germany in between and most Russian ports in the west blockaded?

Tomáš Masaryk, chair of the Czechoslovak National Council (and future President of Czechoslovakia), decided to go the other way, to travel the 6000 miles to Vladivostok and board transports to the west. In February the Bolsheviks granted permission for the trip, but first the Legion had to fight the Germans in the Ukraine in order to escape to Russia proper, which they did in March.  By the end of the month, however, mutual suspicion and distrust and the Legion’s understandable refusal to give up their arms was clearly heading to a conflict.

A Legion armored train

The Trans-Siberian Railway

Tomáš Masaryk (1925)

This month also saw the emergence of one of the most ephemeral states in history, the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic. The evacuation of Russian troops from the Caucasus confirmed the end of Czarist rule, and while a Transcaucasian delegation from Tbilisi in Georgia signed on to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Caucasus wanted complete independence.  On 22 April the Republic was declared, uniting Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan into a single state, which immediately reopened the war with Turkey.  No one with the slightest knowledge of the Caucasus could have believed this bizarre entity would last very long.

Note the three languages

Banknote of the TDFR

The neighborhood of the TDFR

In miscellaneous news from April, on the 1st the British Royal Air Force was created from the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Services, and on the 10th Parliament passed the Third Military Service Act, which imposed conscription on Ireland and raised the age limit to 50.  Clearly, the British were getting desperate.  But not as desperate as the Bolsheviks, who introduced conscription on 22 April – in the developing Civil War their lives depended on it.

On 23 April the Royal Navy engaged in a memorable action of high drama but little effect. For years German submarines and torpedo boats based in Bruges on the Belgium coast had been raiding Allied traffic in the Channel, but Bruges was some eight miles inland, connected to the sea by canals to Ostend and Zeebrugge. The British consequently decided to sink block ships at the entrances to the canals, two at Ostend and three at Zeebrugge, where the viaduct joining the Zeebrugge mole to the mainland would also be destroyed.

The Bruges canals

Zeebruggge

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The operation at Ostend was a complete failure, but at Zeebrugge two of the block ships were sunk in the narrowest point of the entrance to the canal while the old cruiser Vindictive landed marines on the mole as a diversion.  The viaduct was destroyed by an old submarine loaded with explosives, but the occupation of the mole was a disaster.  A change in wind blew away the smoke cover, and German shore batteries forced the troops to be landed at the wrong place, where they suffered heavy casualties: 227 British dead and 356 wounded to the German 8 and 16.

The block ships

In the end German naval activity out of Bruges was hardly hindered; most of the boats could use the Ostend canal and a passage was dredged around the block ships at Zeebrugge. On the other hand, the Zeebrugge raid, despite its ultimate failure, was nevertheless heroic, earning eight Victoria Crosses, and the British war propaganda machine made the raid an Allied victory.  And the memory endured: at a military tattoo in London in 1977 I saw the assault on the Zeebrugge mole reenacted.

The Vindictive at the mole

The Vindictive back home

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, an event with little drama and little effect. On 10 April (or sometime in June; it is not clear) a German submarine shelled Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, the African state established by emancipated American slaves.  Liberia had declared war on 4 August 1917 and subsequently confiscated German property and sent a tiny contingent of troops to France.  In consequence the Germans decided to lob a few shells at Monrovia’s radio station.  Take that America.

Daniel Howard 16th president of Liberia

Oh, on 28 April Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian nationalist assassin who started all the madness by shooting the Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo four years earlier, died in prison of skeletal tuberculosis.

Gavrilo Princip

Princip’s cell

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Report from the Fronts #43: the Airplane II

German air superiority, the result of the synchronized gun, was over by the beginning of 1916. When the fight for Verdun began in February, the Germans were initially able to dominate the air, but by April the French, with their new Nieuport 11s, had chased them out of the skies.  It was becoming clear that mastery of the air was of growing importance, as artillery developed its coordination with aerial spotting and the idea of close support of infantry (strafing and bombing troops) was emerging.  This in turn forced the development of antiaircraft weaponry and techniques.

British insignia

French insignia

Belgian insignia

Russian insignia

Italian insignia

American isignia

German isignia

Austrian insignia

Ottoman insignia

The Royal Flying Corps and the Aéronautique Militaire were now pumping planes and men into battle, and while pilots were typically poorly trained because of the rush to get them in the air, the Allies were very successful during the Battles of Verdun and the Somme.  The Germans got the message and by October had reorganized their air arm as the Luftstreitkräfte, which now included bomber groups, ground support units and most famously, increasingly well-organized and trained fighter squadrons, the Jagdstaffeln (abbreviated to Jasta).

There was now clearly an arms race in the air.  By the end of 1916 new specialized German fighter aircraft were beginning to win the skies back from the numerically superior Allied forces.  The fragile Fokker Eindeckers gave way to biplane designs, the Halberstadt D.II, the Fokker D.III and the more advanced Albatros D.I; the Fokker and Albatros mounted twin machine guns, giving the German pilots a tremendous advantage in combat.  Further, the Jagdstaffeln were rapidly developing new tactics that emphasized coordinated attacks by the planes in a squadron.  The day of the lone fighter was fast disappearing.

Halberstadt D.II

Fokker D.III

Albatros D.I

By the beginning of 1917 German aviators were again sweeping the skies.  The British had far more planes, but most, like the BE.2, were outdated and little more than targets.  New and better machines were arriving – the Sopwith Pup, the Sopwith Triplane and the SPAD S.VII – but not only were there few of them but they all carried only a single gun.  The result was “Bloody April.”

SPAD VII

Triplane cockpit

BE.2

Sopwith Pup

Sopwith Triplane

Remember the Battle of Arras of April 1917?  While the British were suffering some 150,000 casualties on the ground, the Royal Flying Corps, though numerically superior to the Germans, was undergoing a disaster.  The RFC had about 365 aircraft, a third of them fighters, going up against about 80 German fighters; the British lost 245 planes to the Germans’ 66.  They also lost some 400 aircrew, a number increased by RFC commander Hugh Trenchard’s policy of offensive airpower, fighting on the German side of the line.  German commander Ernst von Hoeppner, with far fewer planes, kept his fighters on his side, thus increasing their range, minimizing wear and tear and safeguarding downed pilots.

Hugh Trenchard

Ernst von Hoeppner

Making life even worse for the British fliers was the presence of Jasta 11, commanded by the already famous Manfred von Richthofen, who had assumed command in January after winning his Pour le Mérite.  In the month of April he alone downed 22 planes in his bright red Albatros D.III (hence the names Der Rote Baron and Der Rote Kampfflieger), which paint job was soon copied by the other pilots in the Jasta.  Richthofen is generally associated with the famous red Fokker Dr.I triplane, which he began flying in July, but only 19 of his 80 victories were scored in this nimble aircraft.

Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen

Jasta 11 – Richthofen in the Albatros

Jasta 11 Albatros D.IIIs

Fokker Dr.I

Richthofen’s Dr.I

In June Richthofen was made commander of the first of the new Jagdgeschwader (fighter wings), made up, in this case, of four squadrons.  By then other Jasta had also adopted distinctive squadron colors, and consequently Jagdgeschwader 1 became known as the Flying Circus.  Incidentally, in Jasta 26 during Bloody April was a young (and thin) ace named Hermann Göring (22 victories); in July 1918 he became commander of the Flying Circus and survived the war (obviously).  At the same time Jasta 14 was commanded by another ace of aces, Rudolf Berthold (44 victories); he won the Pour le Mérite and survived, only to be killed by a leftist mob in 1920.

The Flying Monkey Wrench

Berthold and his Fokker D.VII – the Flying Monkey Wrench

Rudolf Berthold

Hermann Göring

Göring in the cockpit

Jasta 26

In the second half of 1917 the balanced tipped again. The SPAD S.XIII, the SE.5a and the Sopwith Camel entered the fray, all with twin guns, while the new German planes, the Albatros D.V and Pfalz D.III, had many problems.  The Fokker D.VII, perhaps the best German fighter of the war, appeared in May 1918, but not in numbers sufficient to impact the Spring Offensive.

SPAD S.XIII – Rickenbacker’s markings

SE 5a

Sopwith Camel

Fokker D.VII

Albatros D.V

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And not in time for one of the plane’s chief supporters, Richthofen, who was killed on 21 April, shot down not by Captain Roy Brown in a Sopwith Camel, as long believed, but by a single shot from an Australian gunner (identity debated) on the ground. Richthofen managed to land his Dr.I, but died almost immediately, and his plane was virtually dismantled by souvenir hunters.  He was buried with full military honors by No. 3 Squadron of the Royal Australian Air Force.  Honor had not been completely extinguished in this corner of a generally faceless war.

Manfred von Richthofen

His funeral

Remains of the plane

Air losses were heavy for both sides during the Spring Offensive and the counter-offensive that followed, and by September the Allies had lost the most aircrew since Bloody April. The Germans were generally superior in aircraft and pilot experience, but simply no longer had the resources to produce enough planes, and the Allies essentially overwhelmed them with numbers.

1918 also saw the first appearance of American squadrons (as opposed to individual volunteers with the French and British), but the Americans had no fighters and were compelled to use European aircraft. At first they were given older planes, and that together with inexperience led to horrific casualties, but in the last months of the war they were flying the most advanced Allied machines.

The major impact of the airplane in the Great War was what it had been at the very beginning: better reconnaissance, especially for artillery spotting.  The big guns became far more devastating as coordination with observation planes developed, and by the end of the war artillery had become virtually dependent on aerial spotting.  This of course came at a price, though perhaps trivial compared with casualties in the ground war.  Losses of aircraft and aircrew casualties of the major air powers in the course of the conflict: Britain 35,970, 16,620; France 52,640, 7250; Germany 27,640, 16,050.

Ahmet Ali Çelikten, possibly the first Black pilot

The most destructive aspect of the airplane – strategic bombing of civilian targets – would have to wait until the next war.

 

Report from the Fronts #42: March 1918

The big news for March 1918 was the German Spring Offensive, but first there was a flurry of peace treaties. On 1 March Bolshevik Russia signed a peace treaty with the Finnish Socialist Workers’ Republic, which had emerged in the industrialized south of Finland in January.  Unfortunately for Lenin, the Workers’ Republic was not at all popular among most Finns, and the result was a civil war in which the “reds” were supported by Moscow and the “whites” by Berlin, which signed a treaty of peace with Finland on 7 March.  In terms of barbarity the Finish Civil War quickly became a small-scale forerunner of the far greater horror that was the Russian Civil War.

Murdered Whites

Executing Reds

Red Guards

White Guards

The Finnish Civil War during March

On 5 March Romania agreed –what choice did she have? – to a preliminary peace with the Central Powers, Bulgaria and Turkey and four days later signed a peace with Russia, a far easier proposition.  Bolshevik Russia, meanwhile, finally bowed to the inevitable on 3 March (the day after the Germans captured Kiev), and Grigori Sokolnikov (killed in prison in 1939) signed the draconian Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.  Russia lost the Baltic states, Belarus and the Ukraine (as personal possessions of the Czar, Poland and Finland were already gone), which meant that a quarter of the former Empire’s population and industry now belonged to the Germans.

Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

Slivers of the Russian Empire for Turkey

The Treaty itself

Grigori Solkonikov

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This might have been a great deal for the Germans had there not been a Western Front.  Brest-Litovsk did free up several hundred thousand troops needed for the planned Spring Offensive – Germany’s last shot before being overwhelmed by the Americans – but the desire to secure this eastern empire and its resources left a million men scattered from Poland through the Ukraine.  Inasmuch as the attempt to establish a Ukrainian puppet state would fail and the expected resources never appear because of constant revolts against the occupying troops, Ludendorff would have better served his country by evacuating everything east of Poland.

Hindenburg the figurehead and Ludendorff the ruler

The aforementioned Spring Offensive (or Ludendorff Offensive or Kaiserschlacht) began on 21 March.  Ludendorff had collected 74 divisions (out of 192 in the West) and 10,000 guns and mortars, spread along the 43 mile front from Arras south to La Fère on the Oise River.  The German Seventeenth Army, under Otto von Below, the Second Army, under Georg von der Marwitz, and the Eighteenth Army, under Oskar von Hutier, faced the right wing of Julian Byng’s Third Army and Hubert Gough’s Fifth Army.  The strategic aim was to move northwest from the breakthrough and cut the British off from the English Channel and the French to the south, forcing negotiations.

General Julian Byng 3rd Army

General Hubert Gough 5th Army

Spring Offensive

General Oskar von Hutier

General Otto von Below 17th Army

General Georg von der Marwitz 2nd Army

 

The initial phase of the offensive, Operation Michael, would throw 44 divisions, many just specially trained for rapid advance, at the line from Arras to south of St. Quentin.  The northern elements of the advance would take Arras and head northwest, while the southern units would move to the Somme and hold it against counterattacks.  Ludendorff ordered a massive but relatively short initial bombardment in order to preserve some element of surprise, but a week before the launch the British knew from reconnaissance, prisoners and deserters a big push was coming and shelled German assembly areas.

Operation Michael

In the early hours of 21 March the shells began raining done over a 40 mile front, 3,500,000 in five hours, the largest bombardment of the war. The British front lines were severely disrupted by gas and smoke and the rear areas and supply lines pounded by heavy artillery, and more important, communications between headquarters and the fronts were severed.  Further, a thick fog came with the dawn, allowing the German troops to sneak by defensive positions and infiltrate the rear.

Operation Michael would last until 5 April, proceeding through six named battles: the Battle of St. Quentin (21-23 March), the First Battle of Bapaume (24-25 March), the Battle of Rosières (26-27 March), the First Battle of Arras (28 March), the Battle of the Avre (4 April) and the Battle of the Ancre (5 April).  One can see from the names that much of this ground would be fought over again.  (That was a spoiler, I suppose.)

 The offensive got off to a great start, and within days the British were engaged in fighting withdrawals in order to protect exposed flanks and compelled to call in French troops to stem the German tide at the southern part of the front. Not only were the British dramatically outnumbered in divisions, but many were seriously exhausted and understrength.  But it was certainly not a rout, as British and Commonwealth losses demonstrate.

British 6 inch gun in action

Retreating British

German AV7 tank near the Somme

 

 

 

 

 

 

For all the initial success, however, the offensive ran up against the usual barrier: the difficulty of resupply and consolidation in the wake of a rapid advance. Making it even more difficult in this case was the fact that much of the terrain had been fought over two years earlier during the Somme Offensive and was a lunar landscape virtually impassable for wheeled vehicles.  Further, when the Germans withdrew to the Hindenburg Line in 1917, they had destroyed everything that might be of use to the Allies and now had themselves to deal with the devastated infrastructure and poisoned wells.

Advancing over the Somme battlefield

Dragging artillery forward

German supply column

 

 

 

 

 

 

Superficially Michael looked a success.  The Germans had penetrated 40 miles (light years in Great War terms) in the center of the offensive and collected 75,000 prisoners and about 1200 square miles of French turf.  But they had not taken Arras and were stopped short of Amiens, and more important, they had suffered some quarter million casualties, particularly among the elite Stormtroopers (Stoẞtruppen).  The Allies had lost about the same number, but huge American reinforcements were beginning to arrive and Allied war production could easily replace the lost materiel.  The Germans could not.  The Spring Offensive would continue for another three months, but many in the military were already deciding the war was over for Germany.

(For an excellent account of Operation Michael from the point of view of a German infantryman I recommend the personal memoir of Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel (Stahlgewittern).  Jünger was present at the Somme, Cambrai and the Spring Offensive, where he was seriously wounded and concluded that Germany could not win.  He survived the war (and the next as well) and was the rare enlisted man to be awarded the Pour le Mérite.)

Ernst Jünger

Ernst Jünger at 100

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Operation Michael underlined the problems of coordination between the British and French high commands, and on 26 March General Ferdinand Foch was chosen to coordinate Allied activities.  In April he would be named Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies, a long delayed development.

Ferdinand Foch

In other news, on 21 March the Commonwealth troops in Palestine began crossing the Jordan River, heading for the key Turkish position in Amman, which controlled the all-important Hejaz Railway. By the 27th they had occupied the Moab hills and assaulted Amman itself (The First Battle of Amman 27 – 31 March), but Turkish/German counterattacks forced them back to the west bank of the Jordan by 2 April.

Turkish prisoners

Amman

The Jordan Valley and Amman

Bridge across the Jordan

Crossing the Jordan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More interesting, on the same day the Jordan was crossed the Germans began shelling Paris – from 75 miles away. Near Coucy-le-Château-Auffrique, behind their lines, the Germans had emplaced the largest artillery piece (in terms of barrel length – 112 feet) of the war, the 256 ton Paris Gun (Paris-Geschütz), also known as the Emperor William Gun (Kaiser Wilhelm Geschütz). The gun fired yard long 234 pound shells, which traveled 25 miles up into the atmosphere, the first manmade objects to enter the stratosphere, and the range was so great that the rotation of the earth needed to be taken into account in aiming the weapon.

The Paris gun

Emplacing the Paris gun

Paris gun mount

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The guns – there were three of them – were designed by Krupp engineer Fritz Rausenberger and marvels of engineering for the time, but as an effective weapon they had serious drawbacks. Inasmuch as the shell had to be sturdy enough to withstand the pressures of firing, it could only carry 15 pounds of explosive, a trivial amount when the smallest target you could expect to hit was a city.  (A proposal to employ a sabot-mounted shell, which would increase the explosive payload was inexplicably rejected.)  Further, each shot wore down the barrel enough that the next shell had to be slightly bigger, and after 65 had been fired the barrel was sent back to Krupp to be restored.  An average of 20 shells a day were fired, amounting to only 300 pounds of explosive delivered in small packets.

The gun

The shell and propellant

Hello, stratosphere

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clearly the gun was not intended to level Paris, but to undermine morale in the capital.  But when the firing stopped in August (the Allies were approaching the site), only 250 Parisians had been killed and 620 wounded, and after initial confusion regarding the source of the shelling Paris shrugged off the threat.  The psychological offensive had failed.  On the other hand, Germany had reached the stratosphere.

On a lighter note, the first confirmation of a new strain of influenza came on 11 March.  It was found coursing the bloodstream of Private Albert Gitchell at Fort Riley, Kansas, though the ultimate origin of the disease is still in dispute.  This was the “Spanish Flu” of 1918-1919, so named because more cases were reported in neutral Spain, where there was no military censorship.  It would kill 3% to 6% of the human race.

The influenza hospital at Fort Riley

 

 

 

Report from the Fronts #40: February 1918

In February the focus of the war remained in the east, as the Bolsheviks struggled to reach an accommodation with Germany and the incredible horror of the Russian Civil War began to pick up steam.  The German demands for Russian territory and an “independent” Ukraine stirred outrage among the Russians, and on 10 February Trotsky declared his government would not sign a peace treaty but would also not resume hostilities.  The German response was quick: on the 18th they initiated Operation Faustschlag (the Eleven Day War).

Faustschlag gains

On a line from the Baltic to the Black Sea 53 divisions moved east, heading for St. Petersburg, Smolensk and Kiev.  There was little the Bolsheviks could do, especially since on 29 January the supreme commander, Nikolai Krylenko (shot in July 1938), had ordered demobilization of the army, and the German and Austrian forces gained 150 miles in a week.  By the beginning of March the Central Powers had captured Minsk and Kiev and were a 100 miles from St. Petersburg, which prompted the Soviet leadership to move the government to Moscow, where it would remain.

Nikolai Krylenko

German troops in Kiev

Austrian troops enter the Ukraine

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After prolonged debate and threats by Lenin to resign the Bolshevik Central Committee narrowly voted to accept a peace treaty.  It was clear to Lenin that battling the gathering counterrevolutionary forces was at the moment far more important than the territories that would be lost.  Even the Ukraine and its grain supplies would have to take second place to securing Bolshevik power.  There was simply no alternative to signing a formal peace, which the Ukraine had already done on 9 February.

Ukraine and Kuban republics

The storm clouds were already gathering. In the south the Cossacks, always a restless group, were organizing under General Alexey Kaledin, who was joined in November 1917 by Lavr Kornilov (of failed coup fame) and Mikhail Alexeyev (who had arrested Kornilov).  Together they created the Volunteer Army, filled with former czarist officers and virulently anti-Bolshevik; it would form the  core of one of the major White armies.  On 28 January they proclaimed the Kuban People’s Republic, which declared its independence on 16 February.

“Why aren’t you in the army?”

Volunteer Army poster

Kornilov

Alexeyev

Cossack guard with the royal family

Alexey Kaledin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In other news, General Allenby decided in late January that he needed to secure his right flank in Palestine by occupying the Jordan Valley and began preparations in February.  After a three day battle Jericho was taken on 21 February with minimal casualties, and by the 25th Turkish forces had withdrawn to the east bank of the Jordan River.  But the Hejaz railway was still functioning, providing a supply line for Turkish units further south.  Far to the north the Turks benefited from the Bolshevik Revolution when the Russians evacuated northeastern Anatolia; on 25 February they retook Trebizond, lost to the Russians in April 1916.

Hejaz Railway

Marching to the Jordan Valley

Turks at the Dead Sea

Capture of Jericho

 

 

 

 

And on 5 February the British government repeated its promises to the King of the Hejaz regarding the independence of the Arabs, which pledges had already been dramatically undermined by the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of early 1916.  That the Bolsheviks had already published the text of the Agreement seemed not to bother London.

(yes, I posted #41 before #40)

 

 

 

Report from the Fronts #37: the Tank

In a sense the idea of armored vehicles goes all the way back to antiquity, when siege equipment was equipped with wheels to roll it up to the enemy walls and “armor” to protect the machine and its crew, but the serious development of armored vehicles had to wait until the internal combustion engine.  Armored cars were soon developed, but possessing very light armor and wheels, they were unsuitable for the conditions of trench warfare, which demanded a tracked vehicle.  In the early days of the Great War tractors were in fact used to tow artillery pieces and supplies, and it was a short conceptual leap to arming the tractor itself.

Towing 1915

On the way to the Somme 1916

 

 

 

 

 

 

A short conceptual leap, but one that had to confront the innate conservatism of the military establishment, which was already having problems accepting the obsolescence of cavalry.  An official British war correspondent in France in 1914, Major Ernest Swinton, realized that the American Holt caterpillar tractor could serve as the basis of an armored vehicle, and sent a proposal to Lieutenant-Colonel Maurice Hankey, who brought the idea to Kitchener, who, however, showed no interest.  Hankey then went to the Committee of Imperial Defense and caught the attention of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, who in January 1915 scared Prime Minister Asquith into examining the idea by suggesting that the Germans could be developing their own armored vehicle.

Maurice Hankey

Ernest Swinton

The Holt tractor 1914

 

 

 

 

 

Kitchener was ordered to create an Army committee to study the idea, but after trials with a Holt tractor the committee decided in February the concept was not workable.  Churchill, however, was determined and created a Navy operation, the Landships Committee, which began working with the Royal Naval Air Service, which had an Armored Car Division.  Incidentally, in order to disguise the nature of the project it was spread about that the committee was designing mobile water tanks for desert combat, which led to the name Water Container Committee, which was quickly discarded, because it would soon enough be shortened to the WC Committee.  In December the term “water tank” was adopted, and you know the rest.

It was decided that simply transforming Holt tractors into tanks would not work – the suspensions and power plants were too weak – and the committee would design the new machine from the ground up.  Using giant wheels instead of tracks was rejected, as were designs employing a single large or three separate tracks, and the obvious idea of a rotating turret with a gun was abandoned because of weight and center of gravity concerns.

The Tsar (Lebedenko) tricycle tank

The Killen-Straight triple track

The Pedrail monotrack

 

Before anything else, better track systems had to be developed, which was the purpose of the first prototype, tested on 8 September.  Little Willie (named after the German Crown Prince) was simply a metal box on tracks, 20 feet long, weighing in at 16 tons and powered by a 105 hp engine.  This led in early 1916 to the 28 ton Big Willy (or Mother), which had a 25 foot long rhomboidal body and surrounding tracks, providing better traction and ability to cross an eight foot trench.  The “male” version had two 6-pounders mounted in sponsons on either side of the hull and carried a crew of eight; the “female” had only machine guns.  At best they could make four miles an hour with its 105 hp engine.  These were definitely not Blitzkrieg machines.

The Mark I tank

The Mark I tank

Early Little Willie

Little Willie

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Big Willy became the Mark I, of which 150 were produced, and it saw its first service in September 1916 in the Somme Offensive, where both the potential and the many deficiencies of the machine were demonstrated.  The armor could stop ordinary small arms fire, but was vulnerable to armor piercing rounds developed by the Germans and could be disabled by even the smallest artillery round.  Besides the slow speed, often as a little as one mile an hour on the lunar terrain of no man’s land, the tank was difficult to maneuver, requiring half the crew to attend to the steering and drive.  These early machines were also dramatically underpowered, but by far the biggest problem was mechanical, simple breakdowns that left the tank little more than a target.

Life for a tank crew was hellish.  Ventilation was extremely poor, and with the engine in the crew compartment carbon monoxide could reach deadly levels and was supplemented by fumes from the cordite in the shells fired.  The temperature inside the tank might go as high as 120° F, and the crew was forced to wear helmets and special “splatter” masks to protect them from fragments dislodged in the interior by bullets and nearby shell blasts.

Mark IV interior

Splatter mask

The Mark series interior

Nevertheless, for all the problems with this infant technology the tank demonstrated its usefulness, and even Haig, a cavalry officer, was won over and ordered more machines after the Somme.  Development of the Mark I continued, all the way to the Mark VIII, and though the external appearance changed very little, improvements in armor, steering and power plant gradually came about, albeit very slowly.  The Mark IV, which was used at Cambrai, was not very different from the Mark I: it had thicker armor and the fuel tank was moved outside to the rear of the tank.  The Mark VIII (“Liberty”), a joint American-British-French project, featured a 300 hp engine in an enclosed compartment and much better steering and power transmission, but it only went into production after the war.

The Mark VIII interior

The Mark VIII tank

The Mark IV tank

The Mark V tank

The Mark V tank

The French approach differed from the British in that there was no central development authority, resulting in three different designs produced by rival industrial firms.  In early 1915 arms manufacturer Schneider began work on the Schneider CA, an armored box on tracks, mounting a 75 mm short howitzer in a barbette on the right front corner of the box.  It first saw service in April 1917 in the Nivelle Offensive, where its poor mobility and great mechanical unreliability was vividly demonstrated.

A damaged Schneider

The Schneider CA tank

The Schneider CA tank

 

 

Another arms company, Saint-Chamond, used its political influence in 1915 to acquire support for its Saint-Chamond tank, which first saw action in 1917.  The Saint-Chamond carried a full size 75 mm gun (the most powerful for an operational tank until 1941) protruding from the front of the vehicle and an advanced petrol-electric transmission.  But the tank had all the faults of the Schneider, and the new transmission system led to many breakdowns.  Nevertheless, by the middle of 1918 the Saint-Chamond had found a role as an assault gun.

Saint-Chamond tanks

The Saint-Chamond tank

The Saint-Chamond tank

France’s third tank was by far the most successful.  Renault, accustomed to mass production of cars, came up with a design for a light tank, the 7 ton Renault FT, which entered service in late 1917.  This was in effect the first modern tank: the power plant was at the rear, and a fully rotating turret on top housed the armament, either a 37 mm gun or several machine guns.  The design was very successful, and 3700 were produced – more than any other tank in the war – many finding employment in various countries until well after the Second World War.

The Renault FT crew

Interior of the Renault FT

The Renault FT tank

The Renault FT tank

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The French army, however, still wanted a heavy tank, and the 76 ton, 33 foot long 2C was created, the heaviest and most advanced tank yet.  It was, in fact, so technologically complex that only ten were produced and missed the war altogether.  But the 2C remains the heaviest operational tank ever made.

The French Tiny Tank

The 2C tank

The 2C tank

 

Oddly, the Germans showed little interest in tanks and responded to the Allied vehicles by concentrating on anti-tank weapons.  They produced only one tank, the 36 ton A7V, which sported a 57 mm gun at the nose and had a crew of at least 18.  The A7V came into service in March 1918, but only 20 were built and most of the tanks used by the Germans were captured British Mark IVs. They would do better in the next war.

The A7V tank

The A7V tank in action

The A7V tank

The A7V tank

 

 

 

 

 

 

The development of armored vehicles was in response to the demands of static trench warfare, but the tank would become the prime weapon of modern wars of movement.  Tanks would not only exploit a breakthrough, as cavalry was expected to do in the Great War, but also create the breakthrough itself with powerful concentrations of  mobile firepower.  Ironically, it was the Germans, uninterested in the tank in the First World War, who would perfect the tactics and strategy of armored warfare in the Second.

A German tank 25 years later