(Seriously Delayed) Report from the Fronts #30: June 1917

Aug2

The Big Push for June was the Battle of Messines, which marked the beginning of Britain’s Flanders Offensive; like the French they apparently could not wait for the Americans. The assault was launched on 7 June with the detonation of nineteen mines under the German lines, catching the enemy by surprise and promptly killing 10,000 troops. The mining had begun in 1915 – so little had the front changed – and 454 tons of explosives went up in twenty seconds, dwarfing the Somme mines and creating the largest explosion in history before the Trinity bomb.

Lone Tree mine crater

Destroyed German trench

Battle of Messines Ridge

The effectiveness of the British mines and creeping barrage allowed the most important objective, the Messines ridge, to be taken on the first day, and when the battle ended a week later, it remained in Allied hands. The offensive was certainly a tactical success, gaining the high ground, as it were, and setting the stage for the next advance, but one (who was not an Allied general) might question the strategic gain. The ridge cost each side some 25,000 casualties.

Messines, post-battle

Messines: fake tree observation post

Messines: allied artillery

Certainly a greater boost to Allied morale was the arrival of General John Pershing in France on 13 June and 14,000 troops of the American Expeditionary Force on the 25^th. The Allied commanders wanted to immediately send them to the front, but Pershing wanted more training and was adamant that his boys would fight as American units not simply replacements. The doughboys (from the adobe dust in the Mexican war?) would not hit the trenches for another several months, but their presence was already a clear boost to morale.

American doughboy

Pillsbury doughboy

Foch, Pershing, Pétain, Haig

Speaking of morale, on 8 June the French military began seriously dealing with the mutiny with arrests and courts-martial, but with surprising restraint, which annoyed many of the generals. Nevertheless, Philippe Pétain, the new Chief of the General Staff, and President Raymond Poincaré supported a lighter touch, and while there were 629 death sentences handed down, only 43 executions were actually carried out. More effective in restoring order was the institution of regular leaves and a promise of only severely limited offensives until the Americans arrived in strength.

Poincaré

Pétain

French execution

On the Greek “front” the Allies demanded on 11 June that King Constantine abdicate, which he did the following day, passing the throne to his son, who became Alexander I. Alexander was clearly a puppet of the Allies, who now occupied more Greek territory, but under his “rule” Greece would benefit from the Allied victory. Unfortunately for Alexander, he would die from a monkey bite in 1920, to be succeeded, ironically, by his father. Venizelos, leader of the provisional government in Salonika, became Prime Minister on 26 June and took power in Athens the next day. Greece was now formally at war with Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire.

Venizelos

King Constantine I

Coronation of Alexander

King Alexander I

Off in the new Russian Republic the Provisional Government turned down a German offer of an armistice on 9 June, perhaps not a good decision inasmuch as by 21 June the Black Sea Fleet was in full mutiny. Kerensky believed that a successful offensive in Galicia in July would restore military morale.

In miscellaneous news, Italy announced a Protectorate over Albania on 3 June…and on 8 June the Tenth Battle of the Isonzo ended with no gains and 150,000 Italian casualties. To the southeast Edmund Allenby, formally of the Western Front, took over Commonwealth forces in Egypt, bad news for the Turks. And Colonel Lawrence and Auda Abu Tayi (“I am a river to my people.”) and his Howeitat were on their way to Aqaba.

Edmund “Bloody Bull” Allenby

Lawrence

Auda Abu Tayi

Auda and sundry Howeitat

(Late) Report from the Fronts #29: May 1917

Jun7

May began with the last gasps and final failure of the Nivelle Offensive. The Third Battle of the Scarpe and the Second Battle of Bullecourt began on 3 May; the former ended the following day, while the latter dragged on until 17 May. The Nivelle Offensive was over, but the unexpected repercussions were just beginning.

When the Second Battle of Bullecourt began, the French 2^nd Division mutinied and refused to attack, and the infection quickly began spreading to other units. By early June, when the authorities began responding seriously to the mutiny, half the 112 or 113 divisions of the French army had been affected to some degree.

The mutiny was more of a work stoppage than a revolt. No officers were assaulted, and the strikers, mostly seasoned veterans, were willing to fight, just not engage in more futile offensives that completely ignored the realities of twentieth century warfare. And although pacifist and socialist pamphlets circulated in the trenches, there was no real political movement behind the mutiny. The troops were simply sick of being sacrificed for nothing on the altar of the Big Push by men who appeared to have little understanding of modern war.

Poilus in color

Unsurprisingly, Paris and London promptly attempted to institute a news blackout, fearing the effect of the mutiny on Allied and German morale, a perhaps sensible but certainly unethical and undemocratic move (remember General Westmoreland and Secretary McNamara?). One could argue this was necessary for the war effort (and this war was clearly more vital to France than Vietnam was to the United States), but sealing all the pertinent military and political records for fifty years was simply to protect the generals and politicians, who would be long dead in 1967 (when the first detailed book on the mutiny appeared). And the ultimate silliness: some (apparently) political documents were sealed for a hundred years, a senseless classification procedure that still goes on.

The repression of the mutiny belongs to June, but there was already a major casualty in May. Actually, there were already as many as 187,000 French, 160,000 British and 163,000 German casualties, but on 15 May Nivelle was cashiered and replaced by Phillippe Pétain of Verdun and later Vichy fame; in December he was appointed Commander-in-Chief in North Africa, which is to say, he was exiled from the war. Pétain was replaced as Chief of the French General Staff by Ferdinand Foch, hero of the Marne in 1914.

Ferdinand Foch

General Nivelle

Philippe Pétain

To the south General Cadorna launched the Tenth Battle of the Isonzo on 12 May. What, again? Well, General Haig and the French had resisted PM Lloyd George’s idea of sending Allied troops to help the Italians knock out the Austrians before they were stiffened by German troops, but Nivelle nevertheless pressured Cadorna to plan an offensive to coincide with his own. 400,000 thousand Italians attacked half that number of Austrians and got within ten miles of Trieste before the inevitable counterattack drove them all the way back. The result when the battle ended on 8 June was 157,000 Italian and 75,000 Austrian casualties and no gains. Cadorna would try again.

Italian front

Luigi Cadorna

On the Macedonian front the fighting died down with the end of Second Battle of Dorian on 9 May. A small scale operation in Western Front terms, the battle began on 24 April with an attempt to take the city from the Bulgarians and failed, just like the First Battle of Dorian in August 1916, when four Allied divisions were repulsed by one (larger) Bulgarian with 3200 casualties, four times that of the enemy. This time three British divisions (43,000 men) under General George Milne were smoked again by a single Bulgarian division (30,000 men) under General Vladimir Vazov, losing 12,000 men, six times as many as the Bulgarians. There would of course be a Third Dorian.

Vladimir Vazov

George Milne

Macedonian Front

Other news from Greece: on 20 May the Serbian Government in exile moved from Corfu to Salonika, and more ominous, on 28 May an Anglo-French conference began in London to consider deposing King Constantine and occupying all of Greece.

Finally, there were a number of political and command developments. On 10 May John “Black Jack” Pershing, fresh from chasing Pancho Villa across Mexico, was appointed Commander of the American Expeditionary Force, and eight days later the Compulsory Service Act – the draft – became law. In a very different place, Russia, Alexander Kerensky, who had played a prominent role in the February Revolution, became on 16 May Minister of War for the Provisional Government, which two days later declared there would be no separate peace (as the Bolsheviks wanted).

The Kerensky War Ministry

Black Jack Pershing

And a dramatic forecast on 7 May: a single German plane – probably a Gotha G.IV – made the first night raid on London, anticipating the Blitz a quarter century later.