Report from the Fronts #20: September 1916

Oct1

September 1916 is depressingly similar to August: more British attacks on the Somme front, more French assaults on Fleury, another Isonzo and the never-ending chase in East Africa. The novelty is the entrance of the Romanians into the fray, but in the end (spoiler alert!) they will only reprise the poor Serbians.

The detritus of death

Death in the trenches

Life in the trenches – British

Life in the trenches – some German

Over the top

On the Somme, in order to protect the Delville Wood salient the British launched an assault towards Guillemont to the south on 3 September (the same day the Battles of Delville Wood and Pozières ended), capturing the village on the first day. Meanwhile, the French captured Clèry, but on the 4^th the Germans counterattacked – possibly their biggest in the Somme campaign – almost stopping the entire offensive, which was already bedeviled by poor Allied coordination and British supply deficiencies. The Battle of Guillemont ended on 6 September – to be followed on 9 September by the Battle of Ginchy, which was seized, and small advances by the French south of the Somme.

Guillemont – High Street

On to Ginchy

German trenches and wire on the Somme front

Battle of the Somme

The eternal face of war

The new face of war

On 15 September the third and final general offensive by the British in the Somme campaign began with the Battle of Flers–Courcelette, situated roughly a mile north of Bazentine and Pozières. The British and French, who advanced in the south, failed to encircle Combles, the strategic objective, when the battle ended on 22 September, but the assault was resumed on 25 September with the Battle of Morval, followed a day later by the Battle of Thiepval Ridge. (Getting confused? So were the Allied commanders.) When the offensive ended on 28 September, Combles had been captured but the British were still short of their ultimate objectives – Thiepval was not captured – slowed by the weather and crumbling coordination among the various units. The Germans allowed no serious breakthrough, but suffered very heavy casualties – 135,000 for the month of September.

Battle of Thiepval at night

Thiepval

Bombardment of Thiepval

British plane with reconnaissance camera

(The one noteworthy development in this dreary series of battles for a few thousand yards of territory was the first appearance of the tank. This will be examined later.)

Meanwhile, down the road from the Somme the French carried on with their own show. On 9, 13 and 15-17 September assaults were made on Fleury – or what was left of it. The beat goes on.

In Italy General Cadorna decided it was time for another shot, and on 14 September the Seventh Battle of the Isonzo began. Quick to learn, Cadorna abandoned the wide front offensive and instead focused on a specific object: extending the Gorizia bridgehead. But making no headway, he called off the assault on the 17^th. The score for the seventh inning: 17,000 Italian casualties, 15,000 Austrian. In fact, he was wearing away Austrian resources, though one wonders how excited his troops were to know that.

The real action was in southeastern Europe, where the Central Powers were responding to the Romanian attack into Transylvania. The Allies had apparently assumed that because of the Somme and the still moving Brusilov Offensive the Central Powers would have difficulty dealing with Romania. They were wrong.

Romanian invasion of Transylvania

It is true that once the Romanians made their way through the difficult passes in the Carpathians, which bordered Transylvania on the east and south, they encountered weak resistance, but the Austrians sent in four divisions and the Germans eight under Falkenhayn (who was looking for work). Though the Romanians felt they were on the verge of breaking through into the Hungarian plain, on 18 September Falkenhayn launched an offensive in the southeast and the Romanian push halted, partly because of Falkenhayn and partly because of growing threats to Romania itself. (Incidentally, in the course of the war 150,000 Romanians died as soldiers of the Austrian-Hungarian army.)

Queen Maria decorating troops

Joffre inspects Romanian troops

Romanian troops in Transylvania

On 1 September Bulgaria declared war on Romania, presumably elated at the prospect of crushing her neighbor and gaining more territory. The next day General Mackensen’s Danube Army, a mixed bag of Bulgarians, Turks and some Germans, invaded the Dobruja, the Romanian province stretching along the Black Sea from the Danube delta south to Bulgaria. By 16 September Mackensen, brushing aside Romanian and Russian troops, was just short of the key port of Constanza, where his drive was halted by the Russians and Romanian troops pulled out of Transylvania.

No medals for these Romanians

Mackensen crossing the Danube

Counter-offensive against Romania

Another reason the Romanians were having difficulty was the failure of the Allies to live up to their agreements. They were receiving only ten percent of the ammunition they were promised, the Russians had failed to send sufficient forces into the Dobruja and the promised offensive on the Macedonian front produced very little. And speaking of Greece, the Albania government showed up in Salonika on 20 September, and on the 29^th Venizelos, having fled Athens four days earlier, formed an opposition government on Crete.

In miscellaneous news, though losing town after town, Lettow-Vorbeck and his askaris nevertheless continued to elude a quarter million South African troops in East Africa. By the end of September Arab forces had captured Ta’if and with the help of the Royal navy the Hejaz coastal towns of Rabegh, Yenbo and Qunfida. During these operations 6000 Ottoman prisoners were taken, and of those POWs 700 Arabs from Mesopotamia joined the Revolt; one of these was Nuri as-Sa’id, who would later be Prime Minister of Iraq.

Nuri as-Sa’id

Arab mounted troops

The Hejaz

On 1 September the New Zealand Compulsory Military Service Bill became operative, filling the need for more Allied bodies to feed into the meat grinder. And on 2 September 16 German airships, the largest airship attack of the war, bombed London and on 24 September Allied aircraft bombed the Krupp works in Essen. In both cases the damage was negligible – as was the case with strategic bombing throughout the war – but the raids underlined what the Great War was already revealing: the world was changing dramatically. Not that this would stop Europe from rushing into another war.

A Schütte-Lanz airship

The British Handley-Page bomber

Gotha bombs

The German Gotha bomber

A Zeppelin airship

Reports from the Front #10: January 1915

Jan12

Most of the action in the first month of 1916 was in the Balkans and Mesopotamia. The troops on the Western Front were busy enough fighting the mud and cold, little realizing that the cataclysm of Verdun would get underway the following month. The Eastern Front was quiet: the Russians were recovering from the disasters of 1915 and planning a new offensive, while the Germans and Austrians were engaged in picking apart the Balkans. Even General Cadorna was taking a break from his Isonzo Follies.

The destruction of Serbia

Serbs were raining down on Greece. On New Year’s Day King Peter I of Serbia arrived at Salonika, and on 17 January he moved to Aidipsos on the Greek island of Euboea to take the waters at the thermal springs (he was old and ailing). Meanwhile, his troops were going to Corfu. On 10 January the allies informed the Greek government that the remnants of the Serbian army would be moved to the island, and three days later the Greeks refused. Well, the French had already occupied Corfu two days earlier, and on 15 January they began to ship something like 100,000 exhausted Serbs to the island and other locations, where they would die in droves from malnutrition and disease. The Serbian government in exile was established at Brindisi.

Serbs on Corfu

Peter I of Serbia

Hard on the heels of the Serbs came the Austrians, who by the end of the month occupied all Albania except the far south. Albania had only come into existence a few years earlier in the wake of the Second Balkan War of 1913 and was assigned territory, Epirus, in the south that was ethnically Greek. (This disregard for ethnic realities would become endemic in the formation of countries in eastern Europe in the wake of the war.)

As a result the Greeks, who had already occupied the territory earlier and left, sent in troops (with allied approval) on 27 October 1914, while the Italians seized a number of islands. The result was the Macedonian Front, running along the northern Greek frontier through southern Albania to the Adriatic, and any Austrian or Bulgarian advance further south was thwarted. The Albanian monarch (a German), Wilhelm I, fled. Albania, incidentally, was not a belligerent.

Wilhelm I of Albania

On 10 January the Austrians began nosing into Montenegro, leading to an armistice between the two powers two days later. But Montenegro had helped the Serbs and in any case was important to Austria, being situated between the Empire and their new possession of Albania, and on 20 January the armistice ended. The country fell to the Austrians, and King Nicola I fled to France and the Albanian government was ensconced in Bordeaux.

Montenegran soldiers

The Montenegro campaign

Nikola I of Montenegro

The other hot spot in January 1916 was the Tigris River. On 4 January a force of some 19,000 troops, mostly Indian, under General Fenton Aylmer began moving north to relieve Kut. They encountered Goltz Pasha at Sheikh Sa’ad on 6 January, and although the Turks were outnumbered four to one, Goltz managed to hold out until 8 January, when he moved about ten miles up the river to Wadi. On 14 January the British attacked this new position, and while they failed to break through, Goltz retreated another 5 miles to the Hanna defile.

Goltz Pasha

General Fenton Aylmer

British artillery at Sheikh Sa’ad

On 19 January General Percy Lake replaced Nixon as supreme commander of the Mesopotamian campaign. It made no difference. The British attacked at Hanna on 21 January and failed, and having suffered heavy casualties in the battles and from disease, the relief force retreated south to Ali Gharbi, where they had started. In the three battles the British had suffered 8600 casualties, the Turks 2230. The siege of Kut would go on.

General Percy Lake

British hospital ship on the Tigris

British troops on the Tigris

Another failed operation finally came to an end when on 7-8 January allied troops were evacuated from Helles beach at the tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula. The evacuation proved to be the most successful operation of the whole campaign, and not a man was lost, though the Turks knew it was about to take place. The Gallipoli campaign proved a disaster, with tens of thousands of lives lost for absolutely no gains, hardly surprising since the landings resulted almost immediately in a mini-Western Front on the peninsula. Both sides suffered about a quarter million casualties, though the Turks could of course claim a victory.

Helles beach

The political repercussions had a more lasting effect. Winston Churchill, who had been an instrumental force behind the operation, lost his job as First Lord of the Admiralty and went off to fight on the Wester Front. Kitchener’s influence began to wane, and the failure would contribute to the fall of the Asquith government at the end of the year.

Churchill would earn a reputation for hare-brained military schemes, but to some extent this was unfair. The basic idea made sense. It is very unlikely that a naval bombardment of Istanbul would drive the Turks out of the war, but an allied naval presence in the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus would take pressure off the Russians and render communications between the European and Asiatic parts of the Ottoman Empire far more difficult.

Churchill on the Western Front 1916

The problem was not the idea but rather extremely poor operational planning and execution, in which Churchill had no real role. The naval component was woefully inadequate and poorly led, especially the minesweeping units, but the land campaign had a reasonable chance of seizing the forts on the European side of the straights. That they did not was due to poor planning and intelligence (tourist maps had to be used), overconfidence, insufficient artillery and above all, terrible leadership at all levels. There were any number of instances in the early stages at Helles when the troops could have kept the initiative and rolled over Turkish positions, but few of the commanders were actually on the beaches, communications were hopeless and requests for support were ignored. The Turks thus had the time to bring up reinforcements and prepare their defenses, and the result was stalemate.

In other news, on 13 January the Turks began occupying positions in western Iran, partly in reaction to Russian forces in the northwest of the country and British in the south. Iran was neutral but was in no position to resist these incursions, any more than she could resist the later violation of her sovereignty during the Second World War. Or the CIA engineered overthrow of their democratically elected government in 1953, which resulted in the ascendancy of the brutal US supported Shah. What would you be chanting in the streets if this had happened to your country?

On 22 January Romania, encircled by belligerents and avid for territorial gains, specifically Transylvania, opened negotiations with Russia for aid. Rumania was bound by treaty to come to the aid of Austria were she attacked, and the Rumanian king, Carol I, was a Hohenzollern, the ruling house of the German Empire. When the war broke out, Carol wanted to enter the war as an ally of the Central Power, but the government and public opinion preferred the allies, particularly since Transylvania was a Hungarian possession. Rumania decided she was not bound by the treaty, since Austria had “started the war,” and the country initially remained neutral. In October of 1914 Carol was succeeded by Ferdinand I, who was more amenable to honoring the will of the people.

Carol I of Rumania

Ferdinand I of Rumania

Rumania in 1914

Finally, as a sign of the times, on 27 January the British Parliament passed the first Military Service Act, in effect establishing conscription, which already existed in France, Russia, Austria and Germany. Defended by its navy and requiring only relatively small forces to secure the Empire, unlike the continental powers Britain could make do with a volunteer army, and in 1914 the regular army was just short of a quarter million men, half of whom garrisoned the Empire. The BEF initially comprised only 150,000 men; the Germans fielded 1,850,000 and the French 1,650,000. That certainly would not fill the maw of the trenches, and single men without children in the 18 to 41 age group would henceforth (it would become effective on 2 March) be liable for service unless they were in a war related occupation. Subsequent acts would expand the pool, as the meat grinder of the Western Front demanded more and more bodies, and by 1918 the British had some 4,000,000 men in uniform.