Such results were even less likely from tanks, which the
British used on the Somme in September 1916 and at Arras, and the French in the
Nivelle offensive. Tanks were initiated independently in Britain and France,
the Germans making no move until they saw the Allied weapons in action. In
France the visionary behind them was Colonel J. E. Estienne, who secured an
audience with Joffre in 1915 and was authorized to work in conjunction with the
Schneider armaments firm. However, it was in Britain that the first
combat-ready tank, the Mark I, was built by Foster & Co., a Lincoln
agricultural machinery company, under the aegis of the Landships Committee at
the Admiralty, which Churchill had set up and funded. Churchill in turn had
been fired by a memorandum that Hankey had submitted to the cabinet after
meeting Estienne’s British equivalent, Lt.-Colonel Ernest Swinton. Both Swinton
and Estienne had seen the Holt tractor, an American vehicle with caterpillar
tracks, and both viewed it as a model for a trench-crossing device. And if
Joffre’s backing was crucial to Estienne, Swinton (who headed a new Tank
Detachment created in February 1916) enjoyed Haig’s enthusiastic support once
the latter heard about the project. Indeed, Swinton found the enthusiasm
excessive: he would have preferred to wait until a mass attack could be
unleashed without warning. All the same, neither Haig’s use of tanks on the
Somme nor his use of gas at Loos suggest that he was blindly resistant to new
technologies.
Tanks achieved little at this stage not because of
obstruction by the military establishment but because they were far from being
the weapons of 1939–45. Even if deployed en masse, they could not have restored
open warfare. The basic problem was that they were underpowered. The British
Mark I to Mark V tanks weighed approximately thirty tons and had engines of up
to 100 horsepower; the Shermans and T-34s of the Second World War were of
similar weights but had engines of 430 and 500 horsepower respectively. The
Mark I had a top speed of three to four miles per hour, and a maximum of eight
hours’ endurance. It was lightly armed, with machine-guns or two small cannon.
It was difficult to drive, hot and full of carbon monoxide fumes, an easy
target for artillery, and highly susceptible to breakdown. Despite its weight,
the Germans’ new armour-piercing bullets could penetrate it. It could not
negotiate the ruined Somme woods and was vulnerable in villages. Nor could it
climb steep slopes and extricate itself from shellholes. Of forty-nine machines
fit for duty on 15 September 1916, thirteen failed to reach the start line. The
preparatory barrage left ‘lanes’ along which they could travel over undisturbed
ground, but because so many failed to move forward the supporting infantry
walked into intact German machine-guns. However, three reached and helped to
capture Flers, one mile from the start, and two carried on to the next village
before German guns halted them. On day one at Arras sixty were available but
again many broke down before the start of the offensive, to which they contributed
little. On day two eleven tanks had been detailed to support an Australian
attack on the village of Bullecourt, but they failed completely and an
unsupported infantry assault was repulsed with 3,000 casualties, creating a
legacy of bitterness against the British high command and tank crews. On the
Chemin des Dames the heavy French Schneider models suffered even more severely
from breakdown, their fuel tanks were located where they were easily ignited,
and German gunfire set many ablaze. The state-built St-Chamond machines
presented even easier targets. The tanks’ debut was patchy, to put it mildly.
They seemed best suited to small-scale infantry support, crushing wire,
silencing machine-gun posts, boosting the Allied troops’ morale, and unnerving
their opponents. These accomplishments were enough to convince GHQ that
hundreds more should be ordered, while the French responded to the Chemin des
Dames débâcle by pinning their faith on lighter Renault two-man vehicles.
During the central period of the war, however, neither tanks nor gas could
restore mobility.
This being the case, the best prospect remained with the
infantry and artillery, and better co-ordination between them. Another new
technology – that of aircraft – was mainly important precisely for improving
artillery effectiveness, both through direct observation (used by the British
as early as the September 1914 battle of the Aisne) and especially through
aerial photography, which was practised from spring 1915. In 1914 aircraft had
had a prominent reconnaissance function – a French plane had observed von
Kluck’s First Army turning east of Paris and German planes had monitored
Russian movements before Tannenberg – but this became less crucial once the
fronts stabilized. An independent ground attack role was only just beginning,
essentially planes had monitored Russian movements before Tannenberg – but this
became less crucial once the fronts stabilized. An independent ground attack
role was only just beginning, essentially because the aircraft were
underpowered for carrying heavy payloads, although German aircraft dropped
bombs in the opening phase at Verdun while British ones bombed five enemy
trains during the battle of Loos and strafed German troops and dropped fifty
tons of bombs during the Somme. Finally, a strategic bombing role was also in
its infancy, and it began not with aircraft but with the German navy’s Zeppelin
airships, which lay unused because of the High Seas Fleet’s inactivity.
Initially raiding near the British east coast, they first hit London in May
1915, killing 127 people and injuring 352 during the year. Typically they
arrived on fine, moonless nights, and although the British soon learned how to
detect their movements by intercepting their wireless messages, at first there
was no means of destroying them. In 1916 they ranged more widely, reached the
Midlands and Scotland, and forced widespread blackouts. From September 1916
onwards, however, the defenders got the measure of the problem, locating the
airships by eavesdropping on their radio messages and then shooting down
several with anti-aircraft artillery and with fighter aircraft firing new
explosive ammunition. From 1917 Gotha bombers replaced the airships as the main
air weapon against Britain. The Zeppelins set a precedent for new forms of
attack on civilians and reinforced the British public’s sense that its enemies
were beyond the pale, but their damage to the Allied war effort was slight.
Assistance to the artillery was therefore the crucial role
of the new arm. By 1915 British aircraft were carrying radio and evolving
special codes to communicate with their gunners and monitor the effects of
their fire, but the task of direct observation was mainly accomplished by
tethered balloons, linked by telephone cables to their batteries. The balloons,
however, were obvious targets for enemy fighters, and soon aerial combats
swirled round them. Aircraft defended the balloonists, and carried out photographic
reconnaissance themselves. In general the advantage in these operations lay
with the Allies, and especially with the French, who had far more planes and
pilots than Britain or Russia in 1914 and owned the world’s biggest aircraft
industry. The British Royal Flying Corps (RFC) lagged behind France and Germany
for the first two years. Yet at first there was barely an air war in the
literal sense, as neither side’s aircraft had machine-guns mounted, and many
more casualties resulted from accidents than from enemy action. Most aircraft
had ‘pusher’ engines situated behind the pilot, even though these provided less
power and manoeuvrability than a ‘tractor’ propeller at the front, the problem
with the latter being that a fixed machine-gun might damage the blades. In
spring 1915, however, the French aviator Roland Garros equipped his aircraft
with a machine-gun that fired through the propeller, which had blades fitted
with plates to deflect any bullets that hit them. The Germans downed and
captured his machine, and the Fokker firm used the information derived from it
to pioneer a synchronization device, enabling them to fit a forward-facing
machine-gun that fired through the propeller of a new single-engined monoplane
without hitting the blades. For several months in the winter and spring of
1915–16 the ‘Fokker scourge’ gave the Germans the edge, though more because of
the intimidation created by their monopoly of the new technology than because
many Allied aircraft were shot down. By concentrating their airpower round
Verdun the Germans partially concealed their preparations for the battle, and
they enjoyed control of the skies in the first weeks of action. But by May they
had lost it, the Allies capturing a Fokker plane as well as devising their own
synchronization system and introducing new models with ‘pushing’ propellers
that did not need such equipment and yet still outperformed German aircraft. In
the opening phases of the Somme, the RFC commander, Hugh Trenchard, shared with
Haig a commitment to a ‘relentless and incessant offensive’, and to driving the
Germans out of their airspace, even if this meant neglecting the defence of
British spotter aircraft and accepting punishing casualties among his crews.
Beginning the battle with 426 pilots, the RFC lost 308 killed, wounded, and
missing, and a further 268 were sent home, to be replaced by cursorily trained
novices whose life expectancy by the autumn was barely one month. By September,
however, a new generation of German Albatros D.III fighters was helping to
redress the balance once again, and in the ‘bloody week’ of April 1917 the
German ‘circuses’ or fighter groups inflicted unprecedented losses on the RFC
at Arras and commanded the sky over the Chemin des Dames, virtually halting
French photographic reconnaissance and balloon observation. Only in May and
June, with the arrival of a further generation of aircraft, including the
British S.E.5 and Sopwith Pup and the French Spad, did the Allies regain the
edge. In the skies as on the ground, therefore, the initiative passed backwards
and forwards, yet ultimately air combat was still marginal. Crushing air
superiority helped the British very little on 1 July 1916, and its loss did not
prevent much greater success on the first day at Arras, even if at other times
(the first phase at Verdun, the last stage on the Somme, the Chemin des Dames)
the Germans’ air superiority reinforced their effectiveness on the ground.
Aerial observation and photography contributed, however, to
a less glamorous but more significant trend towards greater artillery
effectiveness. By 1917 the French and British had more and heavier guns firing
larger numbers of more reliable shells, and a greater proportion of high
explosive rather than shrapnel. They were also achieving improved accuracy. One
manifestation was ‘map shooting’: the ability to hit a map co-ordinate without
giving prior warning to the enemy and disclosing one’s own position by
registering. This became easier once the BEF had prepared new large-scale maps
of the entire British front, and was linked to a second development, which was
improved counter-battery fire, the British using new techniques such as
flash-spotting and sound-ranging to catch up with the French expertise in
detecting enemy guns. These were highly skilled techniques, and it took months
or even years for men from civilian life to learn them. The third was the
creeping barrage, which was first attempted at Loos and become general in the
later stages on the Somme. Infantry followed as closely as possible behind a
barrage that advanced as little as twenty yards ahead of them, its purpose
being less to destroy than to neutralize the enemy defences by forcing the
Germans to take cover until the attackers were almost upon them, denying them
the moments after the barrage lifted when they could take up firing positions
on the parapet. Its effects were even greater when combined (from Arras
onwards) with new ‘106’ fuses that detonated the shells when they hit the soil
rather than after burying themselves, thus causing much more damage to barbed
wire. In the Allied attacks of 1917–especially later in the year – more of the
German artillery was silenced beforehand and the attacking infantry were better
protected.
To some extent also, the infantry’s own conduct when
attacking had altered. The notorious waves sent walking forward on the first
day of the Somme were atypical by this stage in the war. The Germans began in
1915 to experiment with surprise attacks and raids by prototype units for their
later stormtroop forces: specially trained and equipped squads moving
independently and using flamethrowers, trench mortars, light machine-guns, and
grenades. On day one at Verdun pioneer units with wirecutters and explosives
cut the French wire, flamethrowers were turned on the strong-points, and
although the main assault came in a wave it followed behind a creeping barrage.
When Ludendorff took over at OHL he demanded an assault squad in each army, and
issued new instructions on assault tactics. On the French side, Pétain used
aerial photography as early as May 1915 to assist his gunners before attacking
Vimy ridge, and trained his infantry to advance as soon as the barrage lifted.
The French amended their tactical doctrine after the 1915 offensives and
Verdun, and at the start of the Somme their infantry dashed forward in small
groups that gave each other covering fire to distract the defence. Nivelle’s
Verdun counter-attacks followed a similar model, and the French created their
own special assault formations, the grenadiers d’ élite, in January 1917. These
new practices foreshadowed a transformation in doctrine. The French captain
André Laffargue’s pamphlet on ‘The Attack in Trench Warfare’, written in the
light of his experiences in the Artois offensive of May 1915, has attracted much
attention from historians as a pioneering statement of the need for
infiltration tactics, though it was neither completely innovative nor the sole
source of the doctrinal changes. None the less, it was used as a French army
manual and by 1916 had been translated into English and German, influencing
both Nivelle and OHL. Even the British, whose commanders appear to have
followed their unimaginative tactics on 1 July 1916 because they doubted the
New Armies had the skill, experience, or cohesion to behave more independently,
reconsidered in the light of the Somme and issued new guidelines early in 1917.
In short, Verdun and the Somme were a learning process, although no combination
of tactics without massive material superiority was likely to spare attacking
forces from slow and difficult progress at high cost.
A final reason for the tactical stalemate was that the
defenders too were on a learning curve. Falkenhayn’s insistence on holding the
first line was increasingly criticized in OHL’s Operations Section in 1915–16,
its officers foreseeing that as Allied artillery improved, the cost of
garrisoning it would rise. Both sides suffered at Verdun from concentrating men
in the forward trenches, and in the early stages on the Somme the Germans
suffered again. As the battle developed they mounted a more dispersed defence,
which Fritz von Lossberg, the Second Army’s chief of staff, encouraged by
devolving tactical decisions to battalion commanders, recognizing that messages
from divisional headquarters took eight to ten hours to reach them. After
Hinden-burg and Ludendorff closed down operations at Verdun, fresh troops and
guns became available while the Germans challenged Allied air superiority, thus
succeeding after September 1916 (assisted by the weather) in bringing the
Anglo-French advance virtually to a halt and repulsing offensives with
counter-attacks. In response to the greater weight of enemy artillery they
evolved a more flexible system of defence, despite the misgivings of many of
their own commanders. Ludendorff wished to fight a more economical defensive
battle in the west and had a more open mind than Falkenhayn about how to do it.
As well as approving in September 1916 the construction of what became the
Hindenburg Line he asked his staff to prepare a new text on defensive doctrine,
which was issued – not without criticism – in December 1916. Its authors
advocated a thin forward line that would lure the attackers into an extended
battle zone where they would be fired on from all sides before being repulsed
by counter-attacks from fresh troops stationed beyond artillery range in the
rear, and in April 1917 the front lines were indeed less densely garrisoned
than in July 1916. At Arras the German Sixth Army was surprised with its
counter-attack divisions fifteen miles distant when the British attacked at
5.30 on a snowy April morning, their barrage having lifted earlier than the
defenders had anticipated. On the Chemin des Dames, in contrast, where the
Germans knew exactly what to expect, they held the front line thinly, and the
French infantry who got beyond the first defences found themselves ringed by
fire from concrete machine-gun posts. If Arras demonstrated how the methods and
technology of attack had moved on, the Chemin des Dames underlined that the defence
had evolved too, and still retained the overall advantage.
How far can this analysis be extended to other theatres? The
Gallipoli peninsula was a tiny battlefront in which the force-to-space ratios
were even greater than in Western Europe. As it had no railways both sides were
supplied by sea, the British and French from Mudros and the Turks from
Constantinople across the Sea of Marmara. The Allies were less well endowed
with munitions and supplies of all kinds than on the Western Front, they had minimal
air support, and they lost their backing from naval guns when the U-boat threat
prompted the Admiralty to withdraw its battleships. None the less they
attempted to fight up more precipitous hills than any in France against a
determined enemy equipped with modern rifles and machine-guns. Once the Central
Powers could transport heavy artillery by rail to Constantinople the Allies had
little alternative to disengagement. In general terms high force-to-space
ratios and the firepower revolution operated similarly at Gallipoli and in
France.
The same applied to the Italian front, where by 1916 1.5
million Italian troops faced perhaps half that number of Austrians. Although
the Austro-Italian border was some 375 miles long, its two active sectors – the
Isonzo and the Trentino – formed only a small portion of the whole, the Isonzo
front being some sixty miles long. Hence the force-to-space ratios were again
high. Along most of the border the Alps rose like a wall from the north Italian
plain, effectively inhibiting the attackers. Conditions here were far worse
even than in France: trenches had to be blasted out of the rock with
explosives, or cut into the sides of glaciers. Thousands of soldiers froze to
death, were asphyxiated at high altitudes, or were buried by avalanches. In the
Isonzo sector a narrow gap existed between the Julian Alps and the limestone
plateau known as the Carso, but the river Isonzo itself formed a barrier and
the Austrians established fortified positions parallel to it. Stalemate set in almost
immediately on the Isonzo and persisted down to 1917, while the 1916 Austrian
attack in the Trentino, though gaining more ground (and in more mountainous
terrain) than the Italians on the Isonzo, had been contained even before
Brusilov’s offensive distracted Conrad. In 1915 the Austrians were relatively
more outnumbered than the Germans in France, but they had the benefit of
topography – arid and rocky plateaux rising to the east of a fast-flowing
watercourse – and they had been improving their railway infrastructure for
years. The Italians were less well supplied with heavy guns and munitions than
the French and British, and the Austrians outnumbered them in machine-guns.
Halting the attacks proved unexpectedly easily. According to a French observer the
Italian artillery, dispersed along too wide a front, simply failed to destroy
the Austrian guns and trenches and the high command seemed not to know how much
preparation was needed. A year later the position was similar: because the
Italians’ artillery failed to destroy the Austrian second-line defences and was
poor at counter-battery fire, their infantry ran into accurate defensive
barrages and counter-attacks. They took more prisoners and gained more
territory than in 1915, but were still only crawling forward. Although Cadorna
increased the troops and guns at his disposal as the war progressed, his army
seems to have learned little from the Western Front, experimenting with the
creeping barrage only in spring 1917, and reforming its infantry tactics very
slowly. Yet the Austrians themselves were too weak to attack, and the endurance
of the ordinary Italian soldier should not be underestimated. Until the Germans
arrived in autumn 1917 neither side could break the impasse.
If at Gallipoli and on the Italian front the tactical
dynamics of the fighting resembled those in France and Belgium, elsewhere this
was less true. The force-to-space ratios in the Middle East and Africa were
infinitely lower and the logistical circumstances vastly different. The initial
problem might be in locating the enemy, rather than reconnoitring across no
man’s land. The Caucasus front, an unknown theatre with extremes of climate and
terrain, is difficult to compare with anything in Europe, though the mountain
warfare of the Carpathians and the Trentino may offer analogies. On the other
hand attacking forces were frustrated by entrenched defenders with rifles and
machine-guns at Tanga in November 1914, at Ctesiphon a year later, and when the
British relieving force failed to break through the Turkish siege positions
round Kut. When Murray attacked Gaza in spring 1917, he launched tank attacks
against barbed wire and trench defences, though the Turks left an open flank to
the interior, which the British would later exploit. Despite the vastly
different operational circumstances outside Europe, Western Front tactical
conditions still tended to develop wherever modern weapons and high
force-to-space ratios coexisted.
The Eastern and Balkan Fronts fell into a category midway
between France, Flanders, the Isonzo, and Gallipoli on the one hand, and
Mesopotamia and Africa on the other. Measuring some 1,060 miles at the start of
1915, the Eastern Front was more than twice the length of the Western, though
the Russian retreat shortened it to about 620 miles before the Romanian
campaign extended it by more than another 250. As the armies fighting there
were significantly smaller than in the west, the force-to-space ratios were
lower. In the winter of 1915–16 the western Allies were deploying 2,134 men per
kilometre of front, but Russia only 1,200. Germany garrisoned with
one-and-a-half divisions in the east a sector in which it would have deployed
five in France or Belgium, while Austria-Hungary manned its Italian front six
times more densely than its Russian one. Machine-gun and artillery densities
were also lower in the east and no man’s land was wider. Sometimes livestock
grazed between the armies. With less risk of bombardment, trench systems were
thinner, with more men bunched in the front line and smaller mobile reserves.
Yet the east also had fewer railways, making it slower to move up
reinforcements. All these factors made breakthrough easier, and both the
Germans at Gorlice-Tarnow and Brusilov at Lutsk achieved it, if in
significantly differing circumstances. At Gorlice the Russians had stationed
their field artillery in earthwork bastions on low hills, from which they
commanded the intervening trenches. The sector was strong by Eastern Front
standards, though not by Western ones (its barbed wire was rudimentary). The
Germans’ bombardment was the biggest yet seen in the east, but their artillery
superiority was less than France and Britain enjoyed in 1915 or on the Somme
and their infantry tactics were not innovative. The assault forces moved up
during the previous night and trenches had been dug towards the Russian
positions, but on the day the troops advanced in thick skirmishing lines
(supported by aerial strafing) and took considerable casualties from rifles and
machine-guns. They were fortunate that in most of the sector resistance
collapsed quickly, the Russians surrendering or being hastily pulled back
because their generals feared encirclement. By 1916, in contrast, the Austrians
opposite Brusilov had constructed three fortified lines, each of three
trenches, with machine-gun nests, deep dug-outs, and extensive wire, though his
aerial reconnaissance established they had few reserves. Brusilov’s men
achieved surprise by digging trenches up to the enemy lines and unleashing a
rapid bombardment, followed by an assault with specially selected and trained
units. In other words the defensive positions were more elaborate and the
attacking tactics more sophisticated than a year before.68 Along a shorter and
more static front than in 1915, conditions here too increasingly approximated
to the Western Front norm. The obstacles to mobility increased on other fronts
even while the armies in the west fumbled towards solutions to them. Essential
though considerations of tactics, technology, and logistics are in explaining
the course of the war, however, if treated in isolation they are insufficient.
After Brusilov’s triumph the later Russian attacks against the Germans round
Kovno, though delivered on a narrow front and with heavier barrages, were unavailing.
The Eastern Front still differed from the Western in one major respect. The
British, French, and German armies were not equally effective, and the Germans
tended consistently to inflict higher casualties than they suffered.69 But all
three were comparable until 1917 in their willingness to persist in action even
when taking very heavy casualties. In contrast Brusilov overwhelmed prepared
positions that neither side would have abandoned so easily in the west, and the
Germans broke through at Gorlice with far less firepower and tactical skill
than they would have needed in France. Many Austro-Hungarian units were as
inferior in cohesion, morale, and equipment to the Russians as the latter
tended to be to the Germans. Developments in arms production were fundamental,
too, in accounting for the contrasts between the theatres and the general
pattern of the fighting. The quality and quantity of military manpower and the
successes and failures of the war economies must now be brought into the
equation.
