Falkenhayn and his staff of the German 9th Army during the Romanian Campaign, World War One, 1916. There are Hungarian hussars on the picture.
At the end of August 1916, Romania declared war on
Austria-Hungary, and shortly afterwards found herself at war with all four
Central Powers. Since 1914, men had been waiting for this. Romania awaited
national unification, and coveted the tracts of Austria-Hungary inhabited by
Romanians. So long as the Central Powers appeared invincible, Romania could not
risk intervening against them. Her strategic situation was peculiarly
vulnerable. But with the great run of Russian victories, her confidence rose.
Moreover, by August 1916, the western Powers were prepared to guarantee much
more territory than hitherto: the French, in particular, with an eye to the
post-war situation, wanted to establish a greater Romania as a bulwark against
Russia. On 17th August, a military convention was signed, providing for
extensive Entente assistance, financial and military. The twenty or so Romanian
divisions would, it was thought, decisively affect the eastern front as a
whole. With 366 battalions of infantry, 106 squadrons of cavalry and 1,300 guns
(half of them modern) the Romanian army could invade Hungary and turn the
Central Powers’ lines to the north.
It is not altogether easy to see why men expected the
intervention of small powers to be so decisive. No doubt it was an illusion
that—like much else in this war—owed something to misreadings of Napoleonic
history. The nationalistic vibrations of Madrid and Lisbon were thought to have
shaken the French Empire at its foundations; the Peninsular War to have exposed
the ‘soft underbelly’ of Napoleonic Europe. In reality, nationalism had been
much less important than the heavy pounding to which the French armies had been
subjected in Austria and Russia; and men also forgot that the Peninsular War
involved an army that was, by the standards of the time, large and efficient.
The Romanian army could not stand comparison. Of its 620,000 soldiers, a third
would be taken up in supply-lines, and almost all were illiterate. The officers
lacked experience, and were also inclined to panic. All foreigners noted the
incidence of what was delicately known as ‘immoralité : indeed among the first
prescriptions,, on mobilisation, was a decree that only officers above the rank
of major had the right to use make-up. Langlois, not an unfriendly observer,
thought the ‘soldat excellent, officier dépourvu de toute moralité militaire,
Etat-major et commandement presque nuls’ . British observers felt that the
operations of the Romanian army would make a public-school field-day look like
the execution of the Schlieffen Plan; while the comments of Russians who had to
fight side-by-side with the Romanians were often unprintable. As things turned
out, it was the Russians, and not the Central Powers, who suffered from a
Romanian ulcer. Almost a third of the Russian army had to be diverted to the
south. This did not save Romania. On the contrary, the Central Powers conquered
the country easily enough, and, in the next year and a half, removed far more
from it than they could have done had it remained neutral: over a million tons
of oil, over two million tons of grain, 200,000 tons of timber, 100,000 head of
cattle, 200,000 goats and pigs, over and above the quantities requisitioned for
maintenance of the armies of occupation. Romanian intervention, in other words,
made possible the Germans’ continuation of the war into 1918.
The essential reason for this, as for the halting, overall,
of Russian victories, was the Central Powers’ capacity to shift their reserves
quickly. In Napoleonic days, sea-power had allowed the British to shift their
troops faster than the French, who were dependent on horses. Now, railways gave
much the same advantage over sea-power that sea-power had had before over
horses. Provided the railways were properly-managed, they could shuttle troops within
a few days from Italy to Volhynia, France to the Balkans. It had taken the
Germans, in spring 1915, hardly more than a week to assemble their XI Army
against the Russian lines at Gorlice, whereas it took the western Powers six
weeks to assemble an equivalent force for their assault on the Dardanelles at
the same time; and even the Turkish railways were such that the western Powers
had to face a superiority to two-to-one within a few days of their landing at
Gallipoli. In September 1916, the Central Powers sent 1,500 trains through
Hungary—not far short of the number used by Austria-Hungary to mobilise against
Russia two years before—and assembled a force equivalent to the entire Romanian
army within three weeks of Romania’s intervention. In the First World War, it
was the great profusion of reserves that counted for most. Contrary to legend,
it was not so much the difficulty, or physical impossibility, of breaking
through trench-lines that led to the war’s being such a protracted and bloody
affair, but rather the fact that even a badly-defeated army could rely on
reserves, moving in by railway. The conscription of whole generations, and
particularly the enlarged capacity to supply millions of soldiers, meant that
man-power was, to all intents and purposes, inexhaustible: even the total
casualties of this war were a small proportion of the available man-power.
The basis of Brusilov’s great successes in June and July
1916 had been the Central Powers’ inadequate use of their reserves. To some
degree, this was a consequence of Brusilov’s own methods: a broad-front,
well-prepared, many-front offensive between Volhynia and Romania. Local
reserves had been frittered away between the various points of attack. In the
southern sector, on both sides of the river Dniester, the Central Powers had
been particularly embarrassed by Brusilov’s methods. They left troops to cover
the Romanian border, as well as troops to cover the Dniester flank of Südarmee,
on which their Galician lines depended. Seven Austro-Hungarian divisions, and
even a German force, the Karpatenkorps, had been pushed in to defend the
Hungarian border and the southern Bukovina: a force contained, as things turned
out, by little more than a Russian cavalry corps. The Russians had been able to
win further great victories along the Dniester, which had forced a further
diversion of German and Austro-Hungarian reserves and thus allowed the Russians
in Volhynia to win successes in July. It was of course true that the Russian
army, by following Brusilov’s methods, itself dispensed with reserves that
might have followed up the victories it won. But the prizes were great enough:
by the end of August, the Austro-Hungarian army had lost 614,000 men in the
east, and the Germans, by their own account, 150,000.
More important, however, had been the confusion among the
Central Powers’ leaders. Ludendorff would not help Falkenhayn, and Falkenhayn
would not help Conrad, since each one had his priorities, of which even
military disaster produced merely a re-statement. Falkenhayn’s priorities had
been in the west: Verdun, then the Somme, preliminary bombardment for which had
begun on 24th June. He resented any diversion of troops from France, and
demanded that Conrad should give up his Italian offensive first. Conrad was
reluctant to do this, because that offensive seemed to promise real success. In
this way, only five divisions were sent from the west for most of June, and
initially only two and a half from Italy. The divisions were also tired from
fighting—in the case of the German divisions, tired from Verdun to the point of
virtual uselessness in the field, as the fate of Marwitz’s offensive on the
Stokhod showed. At the same time, both Conrad and Falkenhayn appealed to
Ludendorff, commanding the greater part of the Germans’ eastern front. But
Ludendorff also made out that he could not afford to part with troops, and in
June sent only two under-strength divisions to help in Volhynia. He had good
excuses. His troops faced twice their numbers, and although Kuropatkin and
Evert seldom bothered to attack with any seriousness, the threat was always
there. In any case, none of the men in Ludendorff’s headquartersfelt any
sympathy with Falkenhayn. Hoffmann thought that ‘the Austrians’ defeat is no
doubt deplorable, but that is no reason for us to tear our hair out’. On the
contrary, since Falkenhayn had reduced Ludendorff’s sphere of responsibility,
the business must be settled by him and Conrad. Maybe, too, Ludendorff secretly
calculated that withholding reserves would so embarrass Falkenhayn and Conrad
that they would have to let Ludendorff once more control most of the eastern
front. Whatever the case, throughout June 1916 the Austro-Hungarian front
acquired only a dozen reserve divisions, at that frittered away between the
Dniester and the Stokhod. This had allowed Brusilov to win a further set of
victories in July.
However, these conditions were not to be repeated. In the
first place, the realisation—as distinct from the threat—of allied offensives
allowed troops to be made free from the other fronts on a scale that few people
had imagined possible. In the west, the Anglo-French offensive on the Somme was
effectively contained by half the numbers of men and a third the number of guns
that the attacking armies used. Similarly, the Russian offensive at
Baranovitchi turned out to be a bungled, ineffective affair that cost the
attacker 100,000 men for nothing in particular. On the Italian front, a renewed
Isonzo offensive, though leading to the fall of Gorizia in August, did not
prevent departure of another four Austro-Hungarian divisions for Russia in
July, and more than that later on.
In any case, the divisions among the Central Powers’ leaders
were overcome by establishment of an increasingly united command, dominated by
Ludendorff. This was the outcome of a crisis inside Germany and Austria-Hungary
that owed its existence to much more than military factors. Discontent inside
Germany had been building up throughout 1916. Emergence of a large-scale
left-wing opposition to the war—the creation of a dissident socialist group,
the strikes of spring 1916—prompted demands for a military dictatorship that
would at once win the war and control the working-class. The run-down, relative
and absolute, of the comfortable middle-class world had now progressed so far,
as inflation bit into ‘fixed incomes’, as to drive a large section of
propertied Germany to desperate courses, in which the existing, relatively
moderate leadership of men like Bethmann Hollweg and Falkenhayn had little
place. There were demands for unlimited war-aims, for use of any and every
weapon, however barbaric, that could win the war: hence the widespread campaign
for resumption of unrestricted U- Boat warfare, the sinking of any ship neutral
or not, within the ‘war-zone’ of British and French waters.
Characteristically, this situation drove Bethmann Hollweg
and Falkenhayn further apart than ever, as each sought to sacrifice the other
for his political life. Falkenhayn tried to pin the blame on Bethmann Hollweg,
and picked up the cause of submarine-warfare. Bethmann Hollweg knew in his
heart that this weapon would fail. It would provoke the United States into
declaring war, and that would be the end of Germany. At the same time, the
desperate temper of propertied Germany was now such that a demagogic campaign
for U-Boat warfare could sweep Bethmann Hollweg away. He had to try for
something equally popular, and hit on the scheme for putting Hindenburg and
Ludendorff back in charge of the eastern front. These two men enjoyed a vast, and
not wholly deserved, reputation: they were the men who produced
newspaper-headlines, and public opinion resented the whittling-down of their
power in 1915. By championing them, Bethmann Hollweg could pose as nationalist
demagogue. At the same time, he appears to have had secret schemes. He knew,
now, that Germany had little chance of winning the war. But to obtain peace,
with the atmosphere as it was, would be impossible. It was not just that the
Entente’s demands would be impossibly high; it was also that a large and
powerful section of German public opinion demanded crushing victory, and
resented any whisper to the effect that Germany’s gains could be renounced for
the sake of a compromise-settlement. Bethmann Hollweg seems to have supposed
that, by putting Ludendorff in Falkenhayn’s place, he could satisfy the
nationalists; then he could smuggle peace in through the back door. In this
roundabout way, Bethmann Hollweg came to support the ostensibly ‘jusqu’
au-boutiste’ generals, but for the sake of his private limited goals. The tone
was altogether that ascribed to Low to Baldwin: ‘If I hadn’t told you I
wouldn’t bring you here, you wouldn’t have come.’
Falkenhayn’s position really depended on his having the
Kaiser’s confidence, and the confidence of military leaders whom the Kaiser
respected. His victories in 1915 had strengthened his position; but defeat at
Verdun, and the embarrassments of the summer of 1916, much weakened his hold on
power. Above all, the eastern front showed that Falkenhayn’ methods had failed.
His relations with the Austro-Hungarian high command were so bad that, in the
decisive days of the Dniester collapse, not a single communication between
Falkenhayn and Conrad von Hötzendorf was made for several days. Relations with
Ludendorff were such that Ludendorff, with forty-four infantry divisions, would
do nothing to help: he sent a few battalions in June, and two divisions early
in July. The Verdun campaign had to be abandoned. It also became clear that
matters in the east would not be settled until Ludendorff somehow got
sufficient responsibility to make him part with reserves for the front south of
the Pripyat: and from Falkenhayn’s viewpoint, the difficulty was to combine
extension of Ludendorff’s responsibility with containment of Ludendorff’s
power.
One obvious way was for Falkenhayn to promote schemes by
which the whole of the eastern front—including the Austro-Hungarian army—would
come under Hindenburg’s command, and then to stir up opposition from the
Austro-Hungarians. This method was tried early in July. Ostensibly, it
succeeded. Conrad von Hötzendorf produced a litany of grievances against the
scheme: German command in the east would make the war one of ‘Germandom against
Slavdom’, and would therefore offend the Slavs who made up half of the
Austro-Hungarian army; German command would mean that the Habsburg dream of
reigning in Poland would be rudely destroyed; it would prevent free movement of
troops against the hated Italians; it would prevent a separate peace. Instead,
schemes were promoted by which Archduke Friedrich, nominal commander of the
Austro-Hungarian army, should nominally take over the whole of the eastern
front, with Hindenburg as his chief of staff for the German part. This did not
meet an enthusiastic response from Hindenburg. Falkenhayn seemed to have
parried the threat: he had ostensibly promoted Hindenburg’s cause, and the
Austro-Hungarians had turned out to be the obstacle. But his calculation went
wrong. With the disasters of mid-July, indignation in Berlin, Vienna and
Budapest rose beyond Falkenhayn’s barriers. Highly-placed
Austro-Hungarians—including Andrássy—demanded establishment of a
Hindenburg-front; Bethmann Hollweg also demanded it, as did the Kaiser. In the
end, Austro-Hungarian resistance gave way. By the end of the month, after a
meeting in Pless, a new system of command was adopted, by which Hindenburg ran
the eastern front virtually as far as the Dniester. In theory, he accepted
orders, as far as the Austro-Hungarian sector was concerned, from Conrad. In
practice, this was as meaningless as it had been in the days of Mackensen. The
only area still commanded by Conrad was the front of Archduke Karl’s Army
Group, on the southern sector of the front; even it had a German chief of
staff, Seekt; and an increasing proportion of its troops was German. Later on,
the system was extended to take into account other allies. When Romania
intervened, the German Kaiser became commander-in-chief of all of the Central
Powers’ forces, a device to prevent the Bulgarians from making separate
arrangements. At the same time, Falkenhayn was finally dismissed, and replaced
by Hindenburg, whose place as Oberbefehlshaber Ost passed to Prince Leopold of
Bavaria.
In this way, central control of reserves became increasingly
possible, and in August there was little of the confusion that had marked June
and July. In June, a dozen divisions, mostly tired, had been sent; but by
mid-August the eastern front had received a transfusion equivalent to the
entire Austro-Hungarian Galician army of 1914: thirty infantry and three and a
half cavalry divisions, of which ten infantry and almost all of the cavalry
divisions came from Ludendorff’s front once Ludendorff was made responsible.
This transfusion matched what Brusilov was sent: three divisions to mid-June,
fifteen more to mid-July, eight more to mid-August. When the Romanians
intervened, the Central Powers’ system for pooling reserves worked equally
well: the Romanian offensive was stopped in its tracks a mere fortnight after
the declaration of war, as all four Central Powers mustered substantial forces
against Romania almost at once.
At the same time, the Russians now abandoned the Brusilov
method that had brought such remarkable results: they returned to the old
system of attacking a narrow front in a predictable way with a huge phalanx. In
the first half of July, repetition of Brusilov’s methods had brought, again,
great successes. The Central Powers’ salient on the Styr had collapsed; there
had been great advances along the Dniester; and even the German Südarmee had
been forced back in Galicia. But the Brusilov method could succeed, in the
first place, only if new troops were constantly fed to the front. But this
would depend on the generosity of the other two army group commanders, who effectively
controlled the reserves. As usual, the only way of achieving this turned out to
be appointing them to command the offensive. Consequently, Evert was now put in
charge of the northern part of Brusilov’s front, and was given responsibility
for the offensive of III Army, the Guard Army and VIII Army against the Central
Powers’ positions before Kowel. With this, the Brusilov offensive came to an
end, since Evert had no faith in Brusilov’s methods. On the contrary, he, with
Alexeyev’s blessing, returned to the ‘phalanx’ system: a vast attack on a very
narrow front, with so much artillery mustered that nothing living would remain
on the enemy side. III Army deployed eighty-six battalions against sixteen, and
was to attack on only eight kilometres; the Guard Army deployed ninety-six
battalions against twenty-eight and attacked on a front of fourteen kilometres.
Stavka could either renew the Kowel offensive or,
particularly after Romania’s intervention, attempt some repetition of the
Brusilov successes by attacking virtually everywhere along the line, if need be
diverting substantial Russian forces towards the new Romanian front. In
practice, Alexeyev opted for the renewal of the Kowel offensive, and continued
to place most of the reserve troops with the three armies engaged in this.
Later, when that offensive produced huge casualties for no significant return,
and when Romania collapsed, this decision was made out to be criminal. It did,
certainly, betray much want of imagination. On the other hand, from Stavka’s
point of view, it seemed to make sense. The British and French were attacking
on the Somme, and Russia must also mount some powerful offensive at a point
where the Germans could not afford retreat. A proper offensive would also
prevent the Germans from shifting troops against Romania. It was true that the
Brusilov methods—a many-front offensive, with long fronts of attack at each of
the points—had succeeded in June and July. But they needed extensive
preparation, for which there was no time; and in any case the fact that they
had succeeded against Austro-Hungarian soldiers damned them in professional
soldiers’ eyes, for the Austro-Hungarian army was now thought to have reached
such a state that it could be beaten by an army commanded by a rocking-horse:
victories won against Austro-Hungarians proved nothing. Now that the Germans
had arrived, something serious must be tried. The ‘phalanx’ levelled at Kowel
was the only answer to this problem, or so Stavka supposed.
There was a further justification for renewal of the Kowel
offensives, which gave them a prima facie case of unfortunate strength. In the
offensive of late July, there had been respectable tactical successes. The two
Guard Corps had lost heavily towards the end of July, but in doing so they had
captured over fifty guns and some enemy bridgeheads on the Stokhod. If the
troops could get over the Stokhod marshes into easier country beyond, then they
might turn such tactical successes into a strategic victory—the more so as the
Central Powers’ defence still depended to some degree on the soldiery of the
Austro-Hungarian IV Army which, as Hoffmann said, resembled ‘a mouthful of
hyper-sensitive teeth: every time the wind blows, there’s tooth-ache.9 In the
fighting of late July, almost a whole Austro-Hungarian division had been
captured—12,000 men—with only two guns: a sign that the forces were simply not
fighting. Hell, Linsingen’s chief of staff, regarded the whole thing as ‘a
powder-barrel’; and Marwitz himself thought that the Russians’ weight was now
such that battles before Kowel ‘resemble conditions in the west’. Alexeyev
opted for renewed attacks on Kowel, and neglected the chance of winning victory
further south. To some degree, he even managed this with Brusilov’s consent.
Offensives against Kowel were mounted on 8th August and at
more or less fortnightly intervals for the next three months. The Russian superiority,
overall, was two-to-one at least: north of the Pripyat, 852,000 to 371,000 and
south of it, 863,000 to 480,000. On the Kowel front, a great local superiority
was built up: III Army, the Guard Army and VIII Army had, together, twenty-nine
infantry and twelve cavalry divisions to twelve Austro-German infantry
divisions. This, rather than the Romanian front, constituted Stavka’s main effort.
It was a complete failure. Heavy artillery would be concentrated on a narrow
front. But the shell was not particularly effective, since marshy country
masked the explosion. The attacking troops had to stumble across marshy
country, pitted with shell-holes, and found in the Stokhod marshes an
impassable obstacle. Moreover, the tactics used were much like the strategy
itself: theoretically the obvious answer, in practice calamitous. Troops
advanced in ‘waves’, one after another, and were therefore very vulnerable to
heavy rifle-fire, traversing machine-guns, high-explosive shell. The Guard—and
especially the Semenovski and Preobrazhenski regiments—attacked seventeen
times, with wild courage, and made none but trivial gains, So many Russian
corpses lay stinking in no-man’s land that Marwitz, the German commander, was
approached with a view to establishing a truce, so that they might be buried.
He refused: there could be no better deterrent to future offensives than this
forest of rotting corpses. But for Stavka, these tactics seemed to be the
obvious answer. It was easy enough for men simply to walk forward from a
trench, in a long line; and troops that followed them into the trench would
walk forward similarly. Again, a long, thin target was seemingly less
vulnerable to artillery-fire than the thick masses which had been the rule for
attackers in 1914–15. But at bottom, these tactics reflected the commanders’
opinion of their men. Generals—who had found that it took ten years to make a
‘real’ soldier of the kind of volunteer they had found before the war—could not
imagine that the raw recruits of 1916 could perform any manoeuvre but the
simplest. If anything complicated were tried, the troops would break down into
a useless mob, given to panic. It was easy to have the troops walk forward in a
long line, dressing to the left, their officers in front and their
sergeant-majors behind, ready to shoot any man who left his place. Commanders
therefore neglected tactical innovations—in particular, the principle of fire-and-movement,
by which small ‘packets’ of infantrymen, moving forward in bounds, diagonally,
from shell-hole to shell-hole, could alternately offer each other cover. These
principles were used, first, in the German army, mainly because it suffered from
a severe crisis in man-power and had to think of some way by which lives could
be saved. Other armies, with a longer ‘purse’, were saved the effort of
thinking things out, or of applying doctrines the truth of which they
half-suspected. Yet in 1918, the allied victory owed at least as much to
tactical innovations as to improvements in weaponry, including tanks.
In these circumstances, the Kowel offensives turned into an
expensive folly. The Germans were able to re-form their weak Austro-Hungarian
partners, to the extent that the Austro-Hungarian IV Army became infiltrated,
even at battalion level, with German troops. Its Austro-Hungarian command
became a stage-prop, contemptuously shifted around by one German general after
another. The method worked. Czech and Ruthene soldiery did not respond to
Austro-Hungarian methods. But the arrival of competent German brigade-staffs, a
battery or two of German artillery, and some Prussian sergeant-majors was
generally enough to lend the Austro-Hungarian troops a fighting quality they
had not shown hitherto—‘corset-staves’, in the current phrase. In August, there
was an extension of this method to all parts of the eastern front, and on the
Kowel sector there were no more easy Russian victories. Just the same, Alexeyev
went ahead, into mid-October. When huge losses were recorded, the commanders
reacted as they had always done: there must be more heavy guns, and then
everything would be all right. Evert, indeed, learnt so little from Kowel that
for 1917 he demanded sixty-seven infantry divisions for a further offensive,
with ‘814,364’ rounds of heavy shell, to be used on a front of eighteen
kilometres. As ever, when the old formulae failed, generals did not suppose
that this was because the formulae were wrong, but because they had not been
adequately applied. In the end, Russian soldiers were driven into attack by
their own artillery: bombarding the front trenches in which they cowered.
The successes won by the Russian army in August were on
parts of the front still subjected to the Brusilov method. XI, VII and IX
Armies in eastern Galicia and the Bukovina ‘walked forward’, as before. XI and
IX Armies in particular did this to great effect. Brody fell, and Halicz, in
the south, as the multiple offensive on a broad front disrupted Austro-German
reserves. It was the victories of IX Army that finally prompted Romania to
intervene, since Lechitski’s drive almost brought the Russians into Hungary,
and hence into occupation of lands coveted by the Romanians. Yet because so
many Russian troops were now involved in the Kowel battles, there was almost
nothing to back Lechitsky, whose victories were achieved with a mere eleven
divisions of infantry (and five of cavalry). By the end of August, his drive
had slackened, while the incurable tendency of Shcherbachev and Golovin, of VII
Army, to apply French methods meant that Brusilov’s prescriptions were ignored,
and the attacks against Südarmee turned into a minor version of Kowel.
