53 pages • 1 hour read
John KeeganThe First World War
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Victory and Defeat in the East”
Chapter 5, “Victory and Defeat in the East,” turns to the initial battles on the Russian front, where the sheer vastness of the spaces created a much different strategic environment than that in the West. Russia committed the bulk of its forces toward East Prussia, directly threatening Berlin, while also keeping the Austrians engaged near the Carpathian Mountains. The Russian force had enormous manpower reserves, but it had in many respects failed to prepare for the challenges of modern warfare: It lacked heavy artillery, its officers often rose through the ranks through prestige rather than merit, and poorly educated soldiers would struggle to adapt when plans went awry. The Russian forces then undercut their advantage in numerical superiority by failing to keep its armies close together as they marched through East Prussia. Vastly superior German intelligence also discovered the Russian position well before the Russians could get an accurate read on the Germans. After an initially successful attack on Russian forces, however, the German Eighth Army was repulsed by Russian artillery and entrenched infantry, suffering enough casualties that its commander contemplated a withdrawal from East Prussia. Aghast at the prospect of losing the home territory of many senior officers, von Moltke dispatched Ludendorff, fresh off of his successes in Belgium, and Paul von Hindenburg.
The two would prove an effective pairing, and their partnership would dominate much of German strategy for the rest of the war. Russian forces prepared to lay siege to the city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), and Hindenburg received word that the First Army preparing for a siege would not be able to help the Second Army on its way to join them. Just as the Second Army crossed into East Prussia, it found itself surrounded and proceeded to suffer 50,000 killed and wounded with nearly 100,000 taken prisoner. Tannenberg, as the battle was called, proved Germany’s most decisive of the entire war, saving Germany from the prospect of a Russian invasion. Even so, the First Army managed to hang on, conducting a fighting retreat back into Russian territory.
Along a 300-mile front with Austria-Hungary, the Russians mobilized relatively quickly while the Austrians struggled to decide whether to prioritize Serbia or Russia as their main focus. They anticipated a quick victory against the Serbs, whom they considered savages, but instead the Serbs inflicted enough damage to drive Austria out of their country entirely by late August. After attempting their own offensive, the Austrians repulsed them and occupied the capital Belgrade, only to have the Serbs launch yet another offensive, which drove the Austrians out once more. Around that same time, Austro-Hungarian and Russian forces clashed in the region of Galicia, which now extends across Poland and Ukraine, and at first the ethnically segregated regiments of the Hapsburg empire performed well, but they gave up defensible positions in an attempt to encircle Russian forces on difficult territory, enduring horrific casualties from Russian artillery fire. Eager to prove their worth to their German allies, Austro-Hungarian forces made another advance, but their attempt to turn the Russian flank opened up gaps to which the Russians responded with a devastating encirclement of their own. The Austrians suffered 400,000 casualties, 75% of them prisoners, and the most experienced units suffered the worst. The precise details of the war on the Eastern Front are harder to reconstruct than on the West, in part because most illiterate Russian soldiers left few testimonies. There is proof that the armies generally marched in mass formations with direct support of nearby artillery, usually suffering grievous casualties.
Russian victories over Austria revived the threat to Germany, which Tannenberg was supposed to foreclose. After Falkenhayn succeeded Moltke as chief of the General Staff, he ordered an offensive into war to strike at the center of Russia’s operations. In response, the Russians relied on their time-honored strategy of using their immense space to their advantage, letting the enemy advance until it was overextended and exposed. The Germans fell back once they discovered the Russians around Warsaw were far better prepared than they anticipated, and the Austrians retreated to Krakow after another failed offensive. Reinforcements from across Russia swelled their ranks still further, but Germany also drew on soldiers relocated from the Western Front, and they struck into central Poland again, stalling out near the city of Lodz while Austrian forces near Krakow once again took the offensive and retreated with heavy casualties.
Russia’s vast forces lacked the supplies to capitalize on Austria’s setbacks, and still another Austrian offensive pushed Russian forces back enough to prevent an invasion of Germany. Austria would never again win a victory without considerable German assistance. It suffered tremendous casualties and could rely on relatively few reserves, and the traumatic first few months of war exposed resentments among many of its ethnic contingents. In the winter of 1914-1915, Germany reorganized its forces to create eight new divisions for the Eastern Front, and a successful offensive ended any prospect of a Russian threat to East Prussia for the remainder of the war. Even so, they could take little consolation, for a Russia that suffered two million casualties still posed a severe threat to Austria, an ally that would no longer be capable of fighting effectively on its own.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Stalemate”
Chapter 6, “Stalemate,” finds the Europe of 1915 divided between a total of 1,300 miles worth of fortifications. Trenches were deep enough for a man’s height and narrow enough to blunt artillery fire, and they zigged and zagged to prevent an enfilade of fire from attacking infantry. In the Eastern Front, thousands of yards could separate the combatants, while in the West, “no-man’s-land” could be as short as 25 yards and as long as 300. Trenches were connected to support and communications trenches, presenting a dizzying maze for attackers unfamiliar with their specific layout. Rainfall could ruin a trench, requiring constant digging of new lines, a process that exposed the diggers to sniper fire. Germany had the luxury of choosing the grounds of their own entrenchment, on higher ground that was less muddy in wet weather and that was extremely difficult to outflank. Falkenhayn insisted on the army holding on to every inch of this advantageous territory while large numbers of reinforcements went east. German forces built highly elaborate concrete fortifications capable of accommodating a long stay, while France insisted on recovering its lost territory as soon as possible.
At the same time, France was cognizant of its relatively limited manpower, and by early 1915 it built backup trenches as far as two miles back so as to discourage suffering excessive casualties to hold a single position. The British, by contrast, favored putting constant pressure on enemy trenches, often with small and fast nighttime raids. Despite these tactical differences, the lines in the Western Front mainly held for more than two years and in some cases until the last stages of the war. The British were strongest north of Ypres in Flanders, the Germans at Vimy Ridge in the Calais region of France, and the French near the city of Nancy in Lorraine.
Within this landscape, there were only a handful of territories suitable for a major offensive. With so many German forces moving east, and France and Britain creating nearly 100 new divisions between them, the German high command was divided among the next steps, with Falkenhayn calling for an offensive westward and Hindenburg for an offensive eastward, each appealing to the kaiser for support against the other. The British and French were agreed in the need to push the Germans out, and they agreed to focus their efforts on the German rail lines between Flanders and Verdun, where the two forces would ideally encircle the Germans, flush them out of their trenches, and destroy them in the open. The subsequent spring offensive, known as Neuve-Chapelle, began with an immense bombardment, providing enough cover for tens of thousands of troops to advance within 100 yards of the German front line.
The attackers overwhelmed the defenders and opened a large breach in the German line, but they failed to press the advantage, and while they waited for orders to move forward, the Germans recovered and delivered a crushing counterblow from places British artillery either could not hit or could not see. British officers in the thick of combat had to somehow maintain communication with headquarters, while their German counterparts enjoyed much more freedom to act on their own. Even so, the British managed to hang on to their gains and repulse the German counterattack. This battle established a familiar pattern whereby attackers gained early successes, only to fall back as they outpaced their communications and establish a defensive perimeter in time to hold their modest gains. Falkenhayn also launched another offensive in Ypres, and for the first time used chlorine gas, inflicting tremendous misery but failing to break the Allied line. Gas would continue to bedevil troops throughout the war, inflicting large casualties against Russians in the spring of 1915, but it was too dependent on wind to break an enemy formation. British and French efforts to dislodge the Germans from their high points failed throughout the spring and summer, and while they reorganized their position and awaited fresh shipments of munitions in preparations for another offensive later in the year, the Germans enhanced their defensive positions even further, utterly defeating an attack near the city of Loos and rendering British attempts to use poison gas ineffective and even in some cases counterproductive. The year 1915 ended on so painful a note for the Allies, especially for the French, who saw no way of pushing the Germans out of their country, so that even successes in other fronts would not be enough to defeat the Germans.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
The Eastern Front confounds the typical image of the First World War. Instead of soldiers stuck in rat-infested trenches, hurling themselves into the same no-man’s-land containing the rotting corpses of previous assaults, the war in the East was remarkably dynamic, with armies moving hundreds of miles in either direction. A big reason for the difference was geographic; the scale of the Eastern Front was vast, making it impossible for even the millions of Russian soldiers to cover its entire expanse. Flanking maneuvers that were impossible in the narrow confines of the Western Front were commonplace on the east. The mobility of armies led to an entirely different style of fighting. Still, events on the Eastern Front also spoke to the theme of Incompetence and the Limits of Technology, as even outside of the trenches military leaders did not seem to able to conduct a modern war with their old-world sensibilities.
Keegan vividly describes the Russian armies as “moving, in dense masses, to assault enemy positions held by infantry also densely massed, if behind improved defenses, with the field artillery, deployed in the open at close range behind the firing line, delivering salvos in direct support” (162). Russian soldiers were more than capable of digging trenches, but there was no point in setting up the long-term defenses that peppered the Western Front, since there was absolutely no way that a static position could avoid being outflanked when the front extended from the Baltic to the Carpathians. This in turn made it impossible to set up even the rudimentary communication systems of the Western Front, even if a largely illiterate army could have made effective use of them. Like armies of old, the Russians maintained discipline and concentrated their fire by marching en masse. This made them a fearsome opponent when their position was well chosen, but also left them acutely vulnerable to encirclement. One of the most striking statistics to come out of the Eastern Front was the number of Russians taken prisoner:
By the end of 1917 nearly four million Russians were in German or Austrian hands, so that the old imperial army’s prisoner losses eventually exceeded battlefield casualties by three to one […] The Russian peasant soldier simply lacked the attitude that bound his German, French, and British equivalent to comrades, unit, and national cause (343).
It would take the Soviet government to fashion an ideologically infused variation of Russian nationalism that would lead them to triumph when the Germans invaded once again in the next generation. This notion speaks to The Composition of Armies and How They Function, as it shows a key way in which the Russian army was deficient: It lacked the levels of nationalism possessed by its opponents, which, when it came head-to-head with the German war machine, gave Germany an advantage.
In the East, Keegan shows how there were structural reasons for the grim and ultimately pointless offensives of 1915. Geography mandated an assault in relatively few places, and despite the extreme tactical limitations, an attack was a strategic necessity. France of course was invaded and was desperate to regain its lost territory that was also the heart of its wartime production. The British could not accept a situation that left Germany as the dominant power of the continent, a position from which it could then challenge their naval superiority. Maintaining consistent pressure on the Germans was also necessary for keeping a sizable portion of their forces on the west, lest they go east and deliver a knockout blow and then concentrate on the whole of their forces for a decision in the west. The Germans, for their part, were of a mixed mind; defeating France had to be the superior strategic priority, but defeating Russia seemed the easier course, especially in light of Tannenberg and then Gorlice-Tarnow. The immense space of the Russian frontier counseled against any effort to chase their army, but defense alone would not suffice for an Austrian army clearly ill-equipped to waging a long war on its own. The end of the war’s second year found Germany in a paradoxical position. They had established favorable ground in the West from which it would be extremely difficult to dislodge them, and they battered the Russian enemy, but their long-term prospects were still worrisome. With their allies fading and a British naval blockade choking them off from the outside world, they could not rest on their laurels. In the following year, they would look for a final victory.
