John Tiller Squad Battles World War I. This one I didn’t expect to see any time soon: a squad/tactical level war game about World War I. I have been playing the grand-tactical/operational level war game France ’14 and boy many things that I’ve seen there now make sense! Like how entangled, protracted and blood-thirsty tactical combat was – even in the so-called “maneuver phase”, 1914- in WWI.
Trench warfare, rolling barrages, gas shelling, storm troopers … All in the game. This game appears to be quite well researched and in the extensive designer notes there is quite an emphasis about it being almost like a study in the transition towards modern tactics. Gudmundsson’s Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army is referred to frequently in the notes, we will see how the game stands against it.
Thus, as the Central Powers began to pull apart, those of the Entente converged. On 29 June 1915 Joffre warned of the dangers of allowing the Germans to pick off one power at a time: ‘An energetic combined offensive, involving all the allied armies other than the Russian, is the only means of warding off this danger and of beating the enemy’. Attacking on the western front was vital not just for strategic reasons: if on the defensive, he argued, ‘our troops will little by little lose their physical and moral qualities’. He had been planning an attack in Champagne since late June. The president of the republic, Poincaré, was among those opposed to further offensives, but British support gave Joffre the leverage over his political masters that he needed in order to go ahead. Operations in Artois in May had convinced the French, like the British, that if they had enough artillery and attacked on a sufficiently broad front they could break through; the key was to have supporting formations ready to carry the attack beyond the first line and so to enable the breakthrough to be achieved in one bound. On a front of 35 km, the French had 900 heavy guns, over 1,000 field guns, and thirty-seven divisions: at the point of attack the Germans could match nineteen divisions with five. On 24 September, after five days of French artillery preparation, Karl von Einem, commanding the German 3rd Army, got Falkenhayn to come to the telephone: ‘I spoke to him for a moment, and so was able to tell him that personally everything was going very well. One must always show these people a serene countenance and a confident spirit, otherwise one would be deemed nervous – whether with good reason or not would not matter.’ At 11 a.m. on the following morning, von Einem spoke to Falkenhayn again. Von Einem had just been told that the French had broken in at Souain, and asked for at least four divisions as reinforcements. ‘He answers me that the British are attacking in the north, and that His Majesty therefore relies on every man to do his duty.’
The British attack was part of a second and simultaneous allied offensive, in Artois, and running from the slag-heaps of Loos in the north to the dominating ground of Vimy Ridge in the south. Joffre later calculated that fifty-four French divisions and thirteen British were engaged on a total front of 90 km. But Falkenhayn’s and von Einem’s sang froid was justified: the Germans had constructed a second position, five to six miles behind the front line, beyond the range of the French artillery, and on a reverse slope so that it was out of direct observation. Total Entente losses reached a quarter of a million for minimal gain. Foiled in his attempt at breakthrough, Joffre fell back on another rationale for his attack: ‘We shall kill more of the enemy than he can kill of us’. It was to become a familiar justification for the failure to break through. But in this case German losses were only 60,000.
Joffre did not fall; Viviani did, albeit over developments in the Balkans rather than on the western front. A new government under Aristide Briand fended off the threat from the left, which was appeased by Sarrail’s appointment to the Salonika command. In the event Loos affected the British running of the war more profoundly than did the failures in Champagne that of the French.
Both British and French generals were agreed that the breakthrough would be achieved not by the first wave of troops, who would break into the enemy front line, but by the second, who would pass through the first wave once it was on its objectives and carry the attack forward. Traditional notions of generalship dictated that the reserve should be in the hands of the supreme commander, who would decide when to commit it in the light of the overall situation. But the delays in communication and in getting forward over a shelled and fractured battlefield in muddy weather argued that control of the reserves – and therefore command authority – should be delegated. Charles Mangin, commanding a French division at Vimy on 25 September, waited thirty-five hours for two battalions to get forward: ‘For fifteen days I have said that it is necessary’, he fulminated three days later, ‘not only to place the reserves near the front, but to put them in the hands of those who have to employ them, the divisional commanders.’ In the British case, Douglas Haig, commanding the 1st Army at Loos, had asked his commander-in-chief, Sir John French, to release two reserve divisions before the battle. French had refused, perhaps in part because unlike Haig he could not persuade himself that the attack was going to succeed. He did commit the two divisions by 9.30 a.m. on the 25th, within forty-five minutes of Haig requesting them, but the disorganisation and the distance of their march meant that they did not enter the battle until the following day. Haig used the episode and his influence with King George V to have French recalled and himself installed as commander-in-chief.
Haig brought to the responsibility he now exercised more than royal favour and a capacity for intrigue. He possessed an inner certainty, buttressed by his Presbyterian faith, which gave him resolve and direction. His biggest difficulty was that which confronted all his colleagues in an army which had expanded so quickly: used to exercising personal command in small formations, he did not know how best to lead a mass army or how to get the best from his staff. He none the less created a team at General Headquarters in France to whom he proved exceptionally – and even excessively – loyal. He also used his position to lobby in London for a change in the strategic direction of the war. The army in France, like the cabinet at home, had lost faith in Kitchener. His insights were not matched by organisational ability, and his enthusiasms could be at variance with the consistent support that French had needed but had not necessarily received. Under Kitchener, the army’s general staff, newly formed just before the war, had been allowed to wither. Haig wanted Sir William Robertson, whose career had blossomed thanks to the opportunities staff-work afforded, appointed as its chief. Robertson had served in France as quartermaster-general and then chief of staff, and ‘contained in his cylindrical person a quite unusual proportion of character and common sense to the cubic inch’. The King not only backed Robertson’s appointment but also agreed that he should be responsible not to the secretary of state for war but to the War Council, the committee of the cabinet responsible for the formulation of strategy. Thus in early December 1915, six months before he was drowned when en route to visit Russia on board HMS Hampshire, Kitchener was being bypassed in the formulation of policy.
Robertson is too often remembered simply as the doughty defender of Haig and the supporter of the western front. He was both those things, in that he saw it as his job to enable the commander-in-chief of the principal British army in the field to get on with the conduct of operations in Britain’s major theatre of land war. But he was far from being simply Haig’s puppet. Robertson had joined the army as a private soldier and lacked the obvious social graces of those with whom he now had to deal: ‘Arrogant, aitchless when excited, and flat-footed (figuratively and physically), he lurched down Whitehall, an ambulating refrigerator’. His difficulties were compounded by the fact that he said not what the politicians wanted to hear but what his professional judgement indicated was right. He could not promise a quick victory. His message on 8 November 1915 was one of realism: the defeat of the Central Powers ‘can only be attained by the defeat or exhaustion of the predominant partner in the Central Alliance – Germany’.
By 1917 the key word here was to be exhaustion, but in December 1915 Robertson, like other Entente commanders, was less sure. Writing to Kitchener on the 27th of that month, he said that ‘we can only end the war in our favour by attrition or by breaking through the German line’. In having it both ways Robertson reflected Joffre’s response to the Champagne battle: designed to achieve breakthrough, it was explained as ‘grignotage’, or nibbling, when it failed. But ambiguity vitiated clear planning. At Neuve Chapelle, Haig had scented the opportunity for breakthrough and had readied his cavalry accordingly, but General Rawlinson had set more limited objectives from the outset. Rawlinson argued that, as a well-prepared and well-supported attack could break into an enemy position but not could not break clean through, this reality should be reflected in planning. Attacks should aim to take a ‘bite’ out of the enemy line, and then hold it; that would force the enemy to counterattack and so confer the tactical advantages of the defender on the attacker.
Rawlinson’s method promised to exhaust the enemy, but it faced two significant imponderables. First, it passed the initiative to the enemy: he might decide he did not need to regain the lost ground, and so call the attacker’s bluff. Rawlinson could guarantee only that this would not occur where it was important for the enemy to regain the ground he had lost. Vimy Ridge, with its commanding height, was an example, as was the ring of hills to the east of Ypres: the town screened the Channel ports and the pivot of the British Expeditionary Force’s supply system, and the high ground guarded the Roulers railway junction and the hub of Germany’s transport network behind the western front. A breakthrough at either Vimy or Ypres might have major operational consequences. As a result attritional battles tended to occur at locations where breakthrough battles also were likely to occur. And that was the second imponderable implicit in ‘bite and hold’. It was only a method, a means to exhaust the enemy; the point would come when that had been accomplished and an allied attack would be able to break through. Haig, both at Neuve Chapelle and at Loos, had persuaded himself that the exhaustion of the enemy and the breakthrough could be part of the same battle. Neither Rawlinson nor Robertson shared that assumption.
Central to Robertson’s thinking about the exhaustion of the German army was the nature of the intelligence that the War Office in London received. Most of it concerned train movements across Europe, showing the deployment of German divisions between east and west, and enabling him to build up a clear order of battle for the German army and its reserves. For Robertson, as a classically trained staff officer, the Germans were operating on ‘interior lines’, able to shift their troops across short chords to meet different threats with rapidity. The allies, by contrast, were ranged round the Central Powers and had to move greater distances and on ‘exterior lines’, often by sea and certainly slowly. His belief that Britain’s principal contribution should be on the western front did not prevent him realising that each of the allied fronts had the potential to support the others if only their efforts could be concentrated in time. If the Central Powers were attacked simultaneously in the west and in the east, and also in Italy, the Germans would not be able to shuttle their reserves along the chords to the circumference.