The Allied offensives of 1915 had been time-limited: two or
three weeks at the most, with the final stages increasingly episodic,
broken-backed. On the Somme “the enemy just kept coming at us, day and night,”
with a “grim obstinance” as certain as the turning of the earth, and about as
easily stopped. The French had always been formidable in the attack. The
British were improving significantly. As battalion and brigade commanders
learned their craft the hard way, their infantry was taking more ground and capturing
more positions, albeit still at costs high enough and with fiascoes
sufficiently frequent that the summer of 1916 is commemorated rather than
celebrated in regimental histories. The decreased frontages and the limited
objectives increasingly characterizing British planning after July 1 enabled an
increased concentration of guns, the crews and commanders of which were also
learning from experience.
German casualties increased exponentially. A single
battalion lost 700 men in four days “under the violent fire of enemy heavy
artillery.” Casualties of three and four hundred per battalion in a single tour
were common; after two weeks in the line, the 16th Bavarian Infantry was down
to fewer than 600 men, a fifth of its authorized strength. When the battle was
at its height, two weeks was about the maximum time a German division could
remain in the line before being “bled out” (ausgeblutet): no longer fit for
combat. Even small-scale reliefs were risky, costly, and often random; a
regimental sector might be held by three battalions from different units,
entirely unknown to each other. Communications were not so much disrupted as
suspended. Even deeply buried telephone cables were severed; dispatching
messengers amounted to a death sentence for no purpose. The Allies increasingly
dominated the entire “battle space.” Their artillery and aircraft were reaching
well into the German rear consistently and effectively, disrupting resupply and
reliefs, punishing local and sector reserves. Regiments pulled out of the line
had minimal opportunities to rest, reorganize, and retrain before being
recommitted. Fresh divisions—and these grew fewer as the summer progressed—were
worn down materially and morally by the weight of Allied firepower even before
being committed to combat.
Sustained Allied fire superiority made fixed trench systems
increasingly vulnerable. It also made anything like a flexible defense of
forward positions through temporary withdrawals an unacceptably high-risk
option. Especially as losses were replaced by recycled wounded and
inexperienced replacements, flexibility made demands the ordinary infantrymen
could not predictably meet. On the other hand, disrupted organizations,
ruptured communications, and the consistent Allied artillery superiority randomized
counterattacks, reducing them to small scales, battalion levels or less, and
making determination a substitute for both shock and sophistication. The
British had a platoon-level technical advantage as well: the Lewis gun, a light
machine gun that gave even outnumbered men in improvised defenses a useful plus
in firepower and morale. Thiepval Ridge and High Wood, Longueval and Pozières,
and a dozen other sites of memory and mourning were brutal mutual killing
zones. A German officer spoke for them all when he described Delville Wood: “a
wasteland of shattered trees, charred and burning stumps, craters thick with
mud and blood, and corpses, corpses, corpses piled everywhere … Worst of all
was the lowing of the wounded. It sounded like a cattle ring at the spring
fair.”
On the Somme there was another common denominator: the
Germans were increasingly failing to recover lost ground. Max von Gallwitz
summarized the reasons: the defending units were exhausted; the
counterattacking ones lacked relevant knowledge and training. Results in the
French sector, though more or less lost to Anglophone history, were similar. In
the process the innovators addressed two general institutional problems not
originated on the Somme, but exacerbated there. Both reflected the Somme’s
fundamental nature as a battle the German Army was visibly and viscerally
losing. Verdun might be a meatgrinder, a butcher shop, a mill that ground
death. But it was an offensive. The Germans set the agenda; the French
responded. The Somme was exactly opposite. The Allies were the attackers. They
kept on attacking. And from the beginning of the preliminary barrages, it was
increasingly and unpleasantly clear from front-line shell holes to army
headquarters that the Germans were on the permanent short end of a “materiel
battle” (Materialschlacht) unprecedented in the history of war. No matter what
resources could be scraped up and thrown in to balance the odds, the Allies
seemed able to meet the rise and raise the stakes almost effortlessly. When on
July 30 Max von Gallwitz issued an order of the day stating that the next
assault “must be smashed before the wall of German men,” he was making an
unmistakable point that blood must be matched against steel. The past six
months made the probable results impossible to ignore. They also encouraged the
questioning of military and national cultures of competence at levels and on
scales no less impossible to overlook.
The relationship between soldiers and states has an
elementary and significant contractual element. The state is expected to
provide those who fight its battles a fighting chance—the best one it can. When
that contract is perceived as broken, the “employees” may seek its
renegotiation. The French Army would do this in spectacular public fashion in
1917. The Germans on the Somme were arguably a year ahead, using a different
method: what the workers in Scotland’s factories and shipyards called
“ca’canny,” or going slow. German intelligence calculated the Allies had
thirty-four divisions in the Somme sector. The Germans had at best a round
dozen. They faced odds—as long as no one checked official figures too
closely—of almost two to one in infantry, one and a half to one in artillery,
two to one in aircraft.
And on September 15 the Allies raised the stakes again. “The
enemy…” recorded a staff officer, “employed new engines of war, as cruel as
effective.” Reactions to the tanks varied widely, but of the more than 1,600
casualties taken by the regiment that bore the weight of the attack, almost
half were listed as missing—and most of those were prisoners. This was an
unheard-of ratio in an army priding itself on its fighting spirit. Was it also
a portent? A division of the Prussian Guard, the Second Reich’s institutional
elite, when ordered back to the Somme for a second tour in August, had its
command declare the men were unfit for combat because of the nonstop British
artillery. By early September an increasing number of regimental histories
speak of having reached the limits of endurance under the never-ending flail of
the Allied guns: “Today’s fire was the worst ever … The enemy artillery was
firing brilliantly, directed from the air of course. German aircraft were
nowhere to be seen.” This was death uncontrollable and unavoidable. These were
men rendered helpless and out of control by the enemy’s technical dominance. In
November a British battalion commander described the Germans as “very different
Huns to fight than the Delville Wood lot. Boys … and oldish men. One of his
soldiers, escorting prisoners to the rear, discovered that the original seven
had become eight: “when he saw us coming along he [just] fell in.” Nor is it
any disrespect to the battalion involved to describe it as “warriors for the
working day,” as opposed to shock troops like the 29th or 51st divisions. What
had happened in a matter of a few months? And what—if anything—was the remedy?
It is a trope, almost a cliché, that the German Army on the Somme suffered an irreparable loss
of its best officers and men. The career professionals, the high-spirited
volunteers, the shrewd reservists who had survived the earlier bloodlettings
vanished into the mire of the Somme, never to be replaced. To a degree this
narrative reflects a dominant aspect of German regimental histories: a tendency
to construct their stories on a framework of inspiring leadership.
There were men at the front who saw the war as an
opportunity to be reborn and remade in Nietzsche’s concept of the “overman” who
might be killed but could not be conquered. These were few and far between. The
men immortalized in unit histories are better understood as those who met
situations while others followed or watched. This is a common, arguably a
universal, pattern in mass armies on Western lines: citizen-based, where the
ideal is the soldier rather than the warrior, where discipline trumps
initiative, and where the average man in the ranks, in Kipling’s words, “wants
to finish his little bit/and wants to go home to his tea.” In that structure
leadership tends to be from the front and personal. Casualties tend to be
heaviest among junior officers and NCOs. And when the agents, the actors, the
visible ones, are lost—a near-inevitable reality, especially in the
circumstances of 1916—they tend in any narrative to acquire mythical qualities.
German accounts from the Somme for the summer of 1916 in particular tend
towards a necrology of the irreplaceable. Thus an undistinguished and
indistinguishable regiment of the line commemorates a captain “whose
personality and powers of leadership were incomparable, a man apart in the way
he rallied his men around him … He is not dead. He lives on in the ranks of
his 2nd Battalion.”66
The prospect for relying less on individual example-setters
than on the cooperative, integrated small group as showcased by the Rohr
Battalion was still in experimental stages. It was questionable in any case
whether the appropriate training and tactics could be generally applied in an
ordinary rifle company, as opposed to an elite of volunteers and picked men. Prussian
and German practice since the days of Frederick the Great emphasized a high
general average in the ranks and among the units. The previous year had, as
previously mentioned, been focused on improving those averages.
Taken together, Verdun and the Somme drove home the same
point. German material inferiority was the crucial factor on the Western Front,
unlikely to be altered in Germany’s favor by continuing the same policies and
practices. The most direct and immediate prospects for a balance shift were specific
and operational: overhauling structures, doctrines, and tactics so as not
merely to take account of the new way of war, but to move ahead of the curve.
Robert Foley describes a process of “horizontal innovation.” Its transmission
system was based on the reports submitted by units from battalions to army
groups. These were not narratives, but analytical, lessons-learned documents
describing enemy methods and approaches, critiquing what worked and what did
not in countering them. In the war’s early years they had been ad hoc,
informally circulated. On the Somme they became a key intellectual force
multiplier in a military learning culture that historically emphasized
flexibility, independence, and sharing information and ideas.
In particular, German staff officers were not mere
subordinate advisors. Nor were they responsible only for a specific function:
intelligence, operations, logistics. They shared responsibility for making and
implementing decisions. They were a small group, homogeneous in backgrounds and
attitudes. Though not precisely a band of brothers, they were accustomed to
working with, and getting along with, each other. Prior to 1914, unlike
far-flung Russia, distracted Austria-Hungary, and imperial France, they had had
a single dominant mission: preparing for and winning a specific kind of war.
Within their limits they could and did develop and introduce specifics: how to
fight and, in particular, how to fight on the Somme in the summer of 1916.
The Germans reacted incrementally, like a clever boxer being
driven towards the ropes. They restructured an overstretched command structure,
giving Lossberg and Below the sector south of the Somme with a new First Army
headquarters and assigning the quieter zone north of the river to the Second Army
under Max von Gallwitz, bringing his own trouble-shooter’s reputation from the
Eastern Front and Verdun. Gallwitz also donned a second helmet as army group
commander, responsible for coordinating operations in the Somme theater. Corps
were reconfigured on the now-standard model of being responsible for sectors,
with divisions rotated to meet needs and resources. On the tactical level,
Lossberg responded to the disruptions of communications caused by Allied
artillery and ravaged terrain by decentralization and simplification. Battalion
commanders were given complete control over their sectors. Their decisions were
final while the immediate fighting lasted. They commanded all reinforcements
regardless of seniority. Division commanders played the same role two steps
higher, exercising full authority in their sectors, over reinforcements and
over almost all their supporting artillery. The latter, a sharp difference from
the French and British norm of centralizing artillery command at higher levels,
accepted some sacrifice of massed fire support in favor of prompt response to
changing situations.
Historically, corps and regiments had been the German Army’s
most important headquarters. Now they were becoming essentially transmitting
agencies, responsible for forwarding reinforcements and supplies. This role
reversal was correspondingly revolutionary, regarding significant attitude
adjustments and serving as a useful litmus test for the flexibility
increasingly demanded of senior officers in 1916. Reducing for practical
purposes the chain of command to two links, each in full control of its sphere,
also addressed a practical problem of implementing counterattacks. These were
increasingly configured on two levels. The counterthrust (Gegenstoss) was the
battalion commander’s province: an immediate, improvised exploitation of the
structural confusion and emotional letdown that accompanied even the most
successful attack. The counterattack (Gegenangriff), methodically prepared and
systematically supported, was usually a divisional matter.
The new approach was codified in two manuals. Conduct of the
Defensive Battle, issued on December 1, 1916, described a zone defense. The
outpost zone might be as wide as 3,000 yards in open terrain or as narrow as a
few hundred in broken ground. The battle zone was defined by a main line of
resistance and a second line 1,500 to 2,500 yards to the rear, both as far as
possible concealed from enemy artillery observers and in full view of their
own. The normal deployment in a regimental sector of a front-line division was
one battalion in each of these zones, with a rear battle zone, as far as three
or four miles back, occupied by the third battalion as a reserve. Specifics
were outlined in Generalizations on Position Construction, issued in January
1917. Overmatched sentries and outposts could fall back on a network of
resistance centers, dugouts and shell holes held by a half-dozen men, and
regroup for a counterattack. Should enemy strength and shelling make that
impossible, the defenders could again fall back and then mount an improvised
counterattack (Gegenstoss), supported by regimental reserves. Entire Eingreif
divisions (whose mission was mounting immediate counterattacks against enemy
breakthroughs against the Stellungsdivisionen—line-holding divisions) could be
committed as well and if necessary stage a formal counterattack (Gegenangriff)
with up to several days of comprehensive preparation.
Initiative, mobility, flexibility, counterattacks on an
unpredictable schedule and an increasing scale—these were the keys to achieving
the ultimate objective of restoring the original position. The battle was still
to be fought for the front line, but no longer in it. And the ultimate option
now involved a command decision. Was the restoration worth the price in
casualties? The question could no longer be overlooked, either at the front or
at home.
Lossberg’s innovations were sufficiently effective even when
applied ad hoc that one of his junior officers nicknamed him “defense lion”—and
even as a captain Erich von Manstein was not easily impressed. But an even more
comprehensive example of horizontal innovation was developing at the other end
of the German military spectrum, where Lossberg had a counterpart and
counterpoint. Hermann von der Lieth-Thomsen was a general staff officer
assigned before the war to monitor aviation developments who became an
enthusiast. In March 1915 he was named commander of the army’s field air
forces, and since then had advocated enthusiastically for an independent air
arm, on a par with the army and navy. Coming from a lowly major the initiative
was quickly sidetracked, but Thomsen made his mark nevertheless on the men and
organizations of his embryonic service. The year 1916 brought a spectrum of new
challenges as the Allied air forces grew numerically stronger and operationally
superior in the areas of observation, reconnaissance, and bombardment.
Thomsen’s response was to concentrate the fighters. There were not many
Eindekkers that spring—only ninety or so, distributed by twos and threes among
the army cooperation squadrons. Initially they were grouped into ad hoc
detachments. One of these became Jagdstaffel (Fighter Squadron) 2, under the
command of Oswald Bölcke. Bölcke’s reputation as a tactician was already high
enough that he had been tasked with codifying a set of guidelines for
air-to-air combat. He proved no less able to impart these Dicta Bölcke to the
men of his squadron. Bölcke was a supporter of concentrating fighter power.
Most of his pilots were accustomed to lone-wolf tactics. But most of those who
survived the summer of 1916 were able to see the advantages of cooperation in
the face of superior numbers and superior aircraft.
The Jagdstaffeln, in contrast to their Allied opponents, did
little escort work. They were conceived as an instrument of air superiority, to
counter the observation planes so important to Allied artillery. At Verdun they
managed to hold their own. But the demands of the Somme, where the odds were as
high as four to one and the Allies dominated the air for two and a half months,
stretched the new organization to its limits. As more and more fighters were
sent north, by the end of October in the Verdun sector a half-dozen or so
German aircraft were facing French formations of up to forty-five planes. The
Germans responded institutionally at army levels by giving the aircraft and the
ground defenses a common command and a common telephone network. Operationally,
the practice of reacting defensively to Allied incursions gave way to an
emphasis on carrying the fight across the front—a doctrine easier formulated
than implemented, at least initially, given the odds.
Front-line squadrons benefitted as well from an improved
training program. Nurtured and galvanized by Lieth-Thomsen, it also gained from
1915’s overhauling of the ground forces’ training programs. During 1916 it
developed to a point where most pilots had sixty-five hours of cockpit time
before being sent to the front and to a further one-month course in current
combat tactics, taught by men fresh from tours at the front. That kind of
instruction gave fledglings something more than an actuarial chance in their
first crucial days and weeks on operations. And beginning in autumn 1916 they
began gaining a technical advantage as well. For a year German designers,
manufacturers, staff officers, and combat flyers had been developing and
evaluating not merely a replacement for the Eindecker, but a successor. The
Albatros D I was the archetype of future Great War fighters. A single-seat
biplane with two forward-firing machine guns, fast and maneuverable, it entered
squadron service in September and contributed heavily to stabilizing the air
battle at Verdun and on the Somme.
What integrated and synergized these improvements and
innovations was institutionalization. Thomsen, like Lossow, was a mere
lieutenant-colonel. But for over a year his observations, recommendations, and
urgings had proved too prescient to ignore. In October 1916 the Air
Service—henceforth the words merit capitalization—was assigned control of all
aspects of military aviation: production, training, administration, ground
defense, communications—even weather research. The Air Service remained under
the High Command, but each field army had an Air Service commander and the
army’s air assets reported to him.
For such a relationship to function effectively, fog and
friction must be kept to a minimum. The Air Service benefitted from arguably
the best commander/chef team Germany fielded during the war. Ernst von Höppner
had begun in the cavalry, served on the general staff since 1902, and since
1914 had been both an army chief of staff and a division commander. He knew the
system, had the seniority to make it work, and was an enthusiastic advocate of
military aviation. His chief of staff, not surprisingly, was Hermann von der
Lieth-Thomsen. In a relatively small service where everyone had started the war
as a junior officer, it was easier to introduce and implement change and to
react promptly to new situations. Air officers with field armies systematically
submitted reports and recommendations. The Air Service, like its ground
counterpart, also solicited reports from the front, and captains and
lieutenants were more likely to be listened to than their counterparts in the
infantry and artillery. Beginning in 1917, a series of manuals and instructions
provided a clear structure of principles and doctrines.
The institutional result of all this was to enable the
German Air Service to maximize its increasingly inferior material resources and
hold the aerial ring until the war’s final weeks. The first effects would
become apparent in the early weeks of 1917 during the Battle of Arras. That,
however, left Verdun and the Somme still to be fought out in 1916. Verdun might
have slacked off in its final weeks, with fighting becoming as routine as
anything ever became at Verdun. The Somme was a different matter. At Verdun,
the battle of attrition had been essentially a German initiative. If one
emphasized lines on a map and overlooked strategic intentions and casualty
lists, in terms of ground gained Verdun might even be claimed a victory. The
Somme was an essentially different matter. On the Somme, attrition had been
forced on the Germans. The lines on the maps had moved in one direction:
backwards.
By the end of September the German Army on the Somme was
showing fundamental strain. The artillery fired five million shells during the
month. But guns were wearing out and fire control was becoming erratic.
Casualties in the same month were close to 135,000—most of them, as usual, in
the infantry but with a disturbingly high number of surrenders. In October and
November the British were less successful in the center, but on both flanks the
Allies pushed forward in the face of worsening weather, despite—and sometimes
because of—depending heavily on divisions making their second or third
appearance. German divisions rotated back had less time for rest. Their
replacements were fewer, too often too old or too young. The mediatizing
innovations on the ground and in the air were still in their preliminary
stages. As Robert Foley states, horizontal innovations can improve methods—but
at best they do so incrementally, as a blood transfusion rather than a cardiac
stimulant.
Thiepval, as much a symbol to the Germans as Douaumont had
been to the French, finally went under on September 27. Württembergers of the
180th Infantry had held the position on July 1. At the finish they held it
still, as close to the last man as made no difference. But six weeks later, on
November 13, the British 51st Division overran Beaumont Hamel, Hawthorn Ridge,
and Y Ravine, also icons of the first day on the Somme, taking 2,000 prisoners
including a whole battalion caught by surprise. In six days of fighting the
British accounted for a total of over 7,000 prisoners. The First Army command
blamed the defenders’ lack of alertness and awareness from divisional
headquarters down to the rifle companies; the divisions holding the sector were
relieved twice in less than a week.
An unacknowledged subtext of these and similar reports submitted as the year waned was that an improvised army led by amateurs was taking the measure of the world’s most professional and self-confident, not to say arrogant, competitor. A trope for German soldiers in the final weeks on the Somme might be the dead man seen with a prayer book in one hand and the other in a bag of grenades. On the other hand, there were lucky ones, like the messenger lance corporal of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment who on October 7, his third day at the front, was hit in the leg and spent the next two months in hospital with a million-mark wound. At the other end of the power spectrum, in December the German government called for peace negotiations. It may have been a trial balloon or a diplomatic feint. It was also a recognition that the balance of war might be shifting in the Allies’ favor—one corpse at a time.
