The First World War

“Undirected fire is wasted effort, unless observers can correct its fall, order shifts of target, signal success, terminate failure, co-ordinate the action of infantry with its artillery support. The communication necessary to such co-ordination demands, if not instantaneity, then certainly the shortest possible interval between observation and response. Nothing in the elaborate equipment of the European armies of the early twentieth century provided such facility. Their means of communication were at worst word of mouth, at best telephone and telegraph. A telephone and telegraph depended upon preserving the integrity of fragile wires, liable to be broken as soon as action was joined, word of mouth offered the only standby in a failure of communication, consigning commanders to the delays and uncertainties of the earliest days of warfare.”

Here Keegan is discussing how the technology of the war had not yet been integrated into a system for delivering on its promised effectiveness. Massive firepower was useless without the knowledge and technical wherewithal to direct it where it needed to go. This observation also represents a microcosm of the war itself, where enormous effort was directed with little strategic effect because the warring powers lacked the actual capacity to make proper use of the destructive apparatus at their disposal.

“It is not surprising, therefore, to find buried in the text of the Great Memorandum its author’s admission that ‘we are too weak’ to bring the plan to a conclusion and, in a later amendment, ‘on such an extended line we shall need greater forces than we have so far estimated.’ He had run into a logical impasse. Railways would position the troops for his great wheel; the Belgian and French roads would allow them to reach the outskirts of Paris in the sixth week from mobilization day; but they would not arrive in the strength necessary to win a decisive battle unless they were accompanied by eight corps—200,000 men—for which there was no room.”

In the years leading up to the war, the capacity to mobilize millions of soldiers and deploy them over vast distances culminated in the belief that there would be a decisive engagement, awarding victory to whomever moved fastest. In the course of planning its own mobilization, the German General Staff realized that it was logistically impossible for them to deploy a sufficient number of forces at the point where they were most likely to confront the bulk of the French force. They realized this but clung to the doctrine anyway and insisted the strategy must find a way to fulfill it.

“An army which did not strike as soon as time permitted might be destroyed in mid-mobilization; even if it completed its mobilization but then failed to attack, it would have shown its hand and lost the advantage the war plan had so painstakingly devised to deliver. That danger most acutely threatened Germany: if it failed to move to the offensive as soon as the troop trains disgorged their passengers at the unloading points, the unequal division of force between west and east would be pointlessly revealed, and so, worse, would be the concentration against Belgium.”

The fanatical attachment to the doctrine of the offensive was particularly appealing to Germany, which keenly understood the dangers of a two-front war, even as it ended up fighting one. Despite all the manifest limitations of the Schlieffen Plan, Germany would have no choice but to divide its forces westward and eastward in a way that it could not correct until the danger had passed on at least one front. An offense that did not smash the enemy army had to at least tie them down before the French or Russians were able to discern which side was weaker and direct their own forces accordingly.

“It was no treaty, however, that caused Austria to go running to Berlin for guidance and support in the aftermath of the Sarajevo assassination—no treaty in any case applied—but anticipation of the military consequences that might ensue should she act alone. At their worst, those consequences would bring Russia to threaten Austria on their common border as a warning to desist from action against Serbia; Austria would then look to Germany for support; that support, if given, risked drawing France into the crisis as a counterweight against German pressure on Russia; the combination of France and Russia would supply the circumstances to activate the Triple Alliance (with or without Italy); the ingredients of a general European war would then be in place. In short, it was the calculation of presumed military response, of how it was guessed one military preparation would follow from another, that drove Austria to seek comfort in the Triple Alliance, not the Triple Alliance that set military events in train.”

The history of this period has often blamed the alliance structures for ensuring that a local conflict broadened into a continental war. The most obvious response to that is that treaties are not self-enforcing and that they are a result of security problems rather than their cause. Austria and Germany had only recently been enemies but found a common cause in the need to present a united front against Russia; but France would also take any such crisis as a chance to reclaim its lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine.

“Forts—at Maubeuge, at Przemysl, at Lemberg, at Verdun—would form the focus of intense fighting in 1914, 1915, and 1916—but only as fixed points of encounter around which decisive battle would be waged by fluid masses and mobile weapons. Ramparts of men, not steel or concrete, would indeed form the fronts of the First World War.”

One of the most terrifying aspects of the First World War is that soldiers faced the full might of an industrial war machine with minimal protection. Even those who had the benefits of concrete forts or elaborate entrenchments often had to forego those benefits to pursue a fleeing enemy, until they in turn suffered the kind of punishment they had just inflicted on attackers. For all the horrors that surrounded the typical offensive, it remained the only way to achieve victory.

“The thirty-fifth day had an acute significance to the German General Staff of 1914. It lay halfway between the thirty-first day since mobilization, when a map drawn by Schlieffen himself showed the German armies poised on the Somme to begin their descent on Paris, and the fortieth, when his calculations determined that there would have been a decisive battle. That battle’s outcome was critical. Schlieffen, and his successors, had calculated that the deficiencies of the Russian railways would ensure that not until the fortieth day would the tsar’s armies be assembled in sufficient strength to launch an offensive in the east. Between the thirty-fifth and the fortieth day, therefore, the outcome of the war was to be decided.”

For Germany, the Schlieffen Plan was holy writ, and while Moltke may have deviated from it in part by dispatching several divisions eastward, their overall fidelity to its basic premises brought the flaws of the plan into the battlefield. Day 35 called for a major engagement, long enough to penetrate into the French countryside but not so long that Germany would also have to face the immense Russian armies. But as they searched for battle, there was no way the two flanks of the German army were separated from one another and neither could bring their full strength to bear. They could not offer battle without risking both armies.

“The prospect of any offensive, either by the Allies or the Germans, looked far away as winter fell in France at the end of 1914. A continuous line of trenches, 475 miles long, ran from the North Sea to the mountain frontier of neutral Switzerland. Behind it the opposing combatants, equally exhausted by human loss, equally bereft of re-supplies to replace the peacetime stocks of munitions they had expended in the previous four months of violent and extravagant fighting, crouched in narrow confrontation across a narrow and empty zone of no-man’s-land. The room for maneuver each had sought in order to deliver a decisive attack at the enemy’s vulnerable flank had disappeared, as flanks themselves had been eaten away by digging and inundation.”

After the German offensive stalled on the Marne River, the two sides sought one last flanking maneuver in the so-called “race to the sea,” with each side seeking to outpace the other until they reached the coastline. This finally allowed the combatants to pause and reflect on the immensity of their losses and contemplate a strategic situation in total contrast to their expectations. Both had sought, and failed, to find a decisive win by going around their enemy. Now they had no choice but to go through them.

“Tannenberg had a military importance different from its symbolic significance, and far greater. It reversed the timetable of Germany’s war plan. Before the triumph, victory was expected in the west, while the front in the east was to be held as best it might be. After Tannenberg, disaster in the east no longer threatened, while victory in the west continued to elude week after week. Tannenberg temporarily devastated the Russians…”

World War I is better known for its inconclusive stalemate, but the Eastern Front featured many brutally decisive engagements of which Tannenberg was the first. An entire army vanished, and its commander died by suicide. Yet as Russia would also show in the Second World War, it enjoyed vast spaces where it could retreat in the wake of a defeat, and its soldiers displayed an utterly astonishing willingness to keep the fight going. Tannenberg gave the Germans the faulty impression that victory in the east would be easy, and while they would eventually secure it, it sucked up enough of their resources to deprive them of victory in the West.

“The 1914 battles in the Eastern Front therefore closely resembled those fought by Napoleon a hundred years earlier, as indeed did those of the Marne campaign, with the difference that infantry lay down rather than stood up to fire and that the fronts of engagement extended to widths a hundred times greater. The duration of battles extended also, from a day to a week or more. The outcomes, nevertheless, were gruesomely similar.”

Napoleon’s campaigns continued to define the high point of the military sciences for European generals in the early 20th century. The smashing victories he won at Austerlitz, Jena-Auerstedt, and Ulm seemed like the perfect distillation of the military art. Yet Napoleon’s battlefield triumphs failed to translate into lasting political gains, and the generals on the Eastern Front continued to believe that a decisive victory would solve the broader political problems that started the war in the first place. When each victory failed to achieve this, the next one was always held up as the last one.

“Austria-Hungary, by contrast, had lost 1,268,000 men out of 3,350,000 mobilized but had less than a third as many potential replacements; the officials put the number at 1,916,000. Many, moreover, were reluctant servants of empire and would prove growingly so as the war prolonged […] During the fighting with the Russians, the Czechs of IX corps were suspected of large-scale desertion to the enemy. The steadfastness of the army was further undermined by the very heavy losses suffered at the outset among its regular officers and long-service NCOs.”

Austria-Hungary’s generally poor performance in the war, with a few notable exceptions, is often attributed to their ethnic heterogeneity, with the claim that modern war requires a spirit of nationalism to fuel soldiers with the will to suffer, fight, and die together. There is some evidence for this proposition, but the empire was also lacking in the social structures necessary to wage total war. It was a system based on feudal notions of obligation, rooted in a notion of personal loyalty to the emperor. It could not raise up taxes or conscripts on the pace of its more bureaucratically advanced neighbors, and its emperor was 84 years old upon the outbreak of war, and so remembrance of his past deeds only went so far in rallying forces to serve on his behalf.

“The Germans were settling in for a long stay. The French permitted themselves no such comforts. The occupation of France by the enemy—the departments of Nord, Pas-de-Calais, Somme, Oise, Aisne, Marne, Ardennes, Meuse, Meurthe-et-Moselle, and Vosges lay partly or wholly under his hand by October 1914—was an intrusion to be reversed at the earliest movement. Occupation was worse, moreover, than a violation of the national territory. It was a grave disruption of French economic life. […] The ten [departments] occupied by the Germans contained much of French manufacturing industry and most of the country’s coal and iron ores.”

In retrospect, the commitment to the offensive has struck many as a romantic and even irrational commitment to a philosophy that practice was invalidating day after day. There is surely some justice to this charge, but for the French, the offensive was an absolute strategic necessity, even after the bloody offensives of August and September 1914. To accept the German occupation of a significant part of their country was an acceptance of defeat and a grievous loss to their status, far worse than the loss of Alsace-Lorraine in 1914. It would not be hard to imagine the Germans deciding in the near future to take another and even bigger piece.

“The Western Front presented not only militarily but also geographically a strategic conundrum. There was the initial difficulty of how to break through the trench line; beyond that lay the difficulty of choosing lines of advance that would bring about a large-scale German withdrawal. […] The French at Chantilly, the British at GHQ at St. Omer, therefore agreed during January that the correct strategy during 1915 was for offensives to be mounted at the ‘shoulders’ of the salient, in the north against the Aubers and Vimy ridges which stood between the Allies and the German railways in the Douai plain behind, in the south against the Champagne heights which protected the Mézières-Hirson rail line. The attacks would, in theory, converge, thus threatening the Germans in the great salient with encirclement as well as disruption of their supplies.”

Keegan accounts for many of the reasons behind the seemingly senseless style of combat that characterized the First World War. Even after trenches cut across the whole of France and Belgium, geography further confined the potential area for offensives into a handful of sights, land that would become inalterably scarred as a result of the fighting. The combatants had nowhere near the technological wherewithal to turn their plans into battlefield success, but the strategic imperatives were relatively clear.

“It had been a doleful year for the Allies on the Western front, much blood spilt for little gain and any prospect of success postponed until 1916. The Germans had shown that they had learnt much about the methods of defending an entrenched front, the Allies that they had learnt nothing about means of breaking through. It was a bitter lesson for the French, all the more so because, in a widening war, their allies seemed bent on seeking solutions elsewhere, leaving the main body of the enemy implanted in their territory.”

Tactically speaking, the Germans retained the advantage for much of the war. They could dig into their fortifications and withstand the onslaughts of Allies who had to win, whereas the Germans could afford not to lose. In the long term, however, this strategy was doomed because so long as the Allies were committed to winning, their considerable advantage in men and materiel would eventually come to bear, forcing the Germans to take desperate and ultimately counterproductive efforts to achieve a swift victory.

“The victory [at Sarikamis] was, however, to have one lamentable local outcome. Among the troops the Russians had employed was a division of Christian Armenians, many of them disaffected Ottoman subjects, who took the opportunity offered by Russian sponsorship to commit massacres inside Turkish territory. Their participation in the campaign, and the declaration in April 1915 of a provisional Armenian government by nationalists on Russian-held territory, underlay the Ottoman government’s undeclared genocide against their Armenians. Subjects which, between June 1915 and late 1917, led to the deaths of nearly 700,000 men, women, and children, force-marched into the desert to die of starvation and thirst.”

This is the one mention in the book given to the Armenian genocide, widely recognized as the first genocide in modern European history. During the Holocaust, a Polish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin cited this event as a precedent to the mass extermination of Jews and coined the term “genocide” to categorize these events. The events remain politically controversial, as the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge the truth of the events.

“In the crisis of 1914-1915, [the Allies] were prepared to consider opening a new front [in the Dardanelles] as a means of bringing relief to their ally and of breaking the impasse on the Western front. An attack on the Dardanelles, by sea or land, or both, appeared to be one promising version of such an initiative, and during the spring of 1915, it gathered support.”

In many instances throughout the First World War, the emergence of an apparent strategic opportunity led to a determination to see it through with disregard for the obstacles. In theory, a landing on the Dardanelles could have provided considerable relief to Russia and open up a new front from which to threaten the Central Powers. In the actual Gallipoli campaign, this imperative led to excessive optimism, until the facts on the ground placed British forces on the brink of catastrophe.

“Contrary to conventional belief, Jutland was not the German fleet’s last sortie, nor its last action […] the High Seas Fleet steamed as far as southern Norway on 24 April 1918. It had accepted the verdict of Jutland nonetheless, pithily summarized by a German journalist as an assault on the gaoler, followed by a return to gaol. Inactivity and discontent would eventually lead to serious disorder among the crews of Scheer’s surface ships, beginning in August 1917 and culminating in full-scale mutiny in the last November of the war. After 1 June 1916, Germany’s attempt to win a decision at sea would be conducted exclusively through the submarine arm.”

The High Seas Fleet had been a major initiative of the Wilhelmine state, but its very value made the government reluctant to subject it to the risk of a major confrontation with the Royal Navy. Jutland was the one major clash of battleships during the war, the last time in history that surface vessels would constitute the core of dueling fleets, but its outcome left the German navy right back where it started, close to its harbors and concerned more with locking down a portion of the Royal Navy rather than breaking out into the North Sea.

“Falkenhayn’s plan was brutally simple. The French, forced to fight in a crucial but narrowly constricted corner of the Western Front, would be compelled to feed reinforcements into a battle of attrition where the material circumstances so favored the Germans that defeat was inevitable. If the French gave up the struggle, they would lose Verdun; if they persisted, they would lose their army.”

The strategy described above largely worked, as the French indeed identified the defense of Verdun as a sacred task to be pursued at all costs. A country that already suffered a great deal would lose hundreds of thousands more. The one flaw in the German strategy was that they could not wear down the French without also suffering attrition in turn, and the Germans proved unable to match the French army’s determination. France won the battle, but at a frightful cost.

“Almost everything that Haig and Rawlinson expected of the enormous artillery effort they had prepared was not to occur. The German position, for one thing, was far stronger than British intelligence had estimated. The thirty-foot dugouts in which the German front-line garrison sheltered were almost imperious to any shell the British could fire and had survived intact right up to the last days before the attack […] Even more ominous was the failure to cut wire. Later in the war a sensitive ‘graze’ fuse would come into use, which exploded a shell when it touched something as slender even as a single wire strand. In 1916 shells only detonated on hitting the ground and bombardments fired at wire entanglements therefore merely tossed them about, creating a barrier yet more dense than that laid by the enemy in the first place.”

The Battle of the Somme has gone down in history as one of the darkest chapters in British military history, and for all of the structural forces that compelled the combatants to fight under grim conditions, the decision-making of the British commanders appears deeply flawed. They had had enough experience to understand the limits of artillery against concrete and underground fortifications as well as cutting wire, and yet Haig assumed that sheer quantity of shells would make it so that British forces could walk across no-man’s-land and fall upon a paralyzed enemy.

“Most of the accusations laid against the generals of the Great War—incompetence and incomprehension foremost among them—may therefore be seen to be misplaced. The generals, once those truly incompetent, uncomprehending, and physical or emotionally unfit had been discarded, which they were at the outset, came to the main to understand the war’s nature and to apply solutions as rational as was possible within the means at hand.”

This may be Keegan’s most controversial judgment, that the conduct of World War I was generally rational despite its immense costs. There was simply no way to reconcile the strategic imperative to go on the offensive with the technological impossibility of coordination and communication across the front. As those problems became easier to manage, the combatants who mastered them started to win more decisively.

“A strange mutual respect characterized relations between private soldiers and the commissioned ranks during the ‘mutinies,’ as if both sides recognized themselves to be mutual victims of a terrible ordeal, which was simply no longer bearable by those at the bottom of the heap.”

The refusal of many French units to fight in the spring of 1918 is most often called a ‘mutiny,’ but as Keegan points out, this usually implies violence against officers, of which there was none, nor did units make any attempt to leave the front. It is best compared to a strike that also occupies the factory, in this case the soldiers seemingly winning the support of “middle management,” their officers in the trenches. This discipline surely helped their cause.

“Britain had no other army. Like France, though it had adopted conscription later and as an exigency of war, not as a principle of national policy, it had by the end of 1917 enlisted every man that could be spared from farm and factory and had begun to compel in the ranks recruits whom the New Armies in the heyday of volunteering of 1914-1915 would have rejected on sight: the hollow-chested, the round-shouldered, the stunted, the myopic, the over-age. Their physical deficiencies were evidence of Britain’s desperation for soldiers and Haig’s profligacy with men. On the Somme he had sent the flower of British youth to death and mutilation; at Passchendaele he had tipped the survivors into the slough of despond.”

The Somme was such a disaster for Britain’s then-volunteer army that the government adopted conscription as a result. Yet with Britain’s small population, it did not take long for it to reach the limit of its capacity, and there was only so much trust it was willing to put in its colonial units for front-line service. Passchendaele put these conscripts through the kind of hell that the volunteers faced at the Somme, leaving a deep scar on a British army that could otherwise take pride in having never suffered an outright defeat against the Germans.

“There were enough attack divisions which had served in Russia to bring to France some of the confidence won in a succession of victories over the Tsar’s, Kerensky’s and Lenin’s armies. The British, however, were not Russians. Better equipped, better trained and so far undefeated on the Western front, they were unlikely to collapse simply because a hole was punched in their front.”

With Russia defeated and the Americans on their way, Germany made one last attempt to smash the Allied lines in the so-called Ludendorff offensives of spring and summer 1918. The Germans did make substantial gains, taking up enormous swaths of territory and displaying an early vision of the tactics that the Wehrmacht would utilize to such deadly effect in the Second War. But even as their lines withered away, the British maintained discipline, and just as had happened in so many tactical engagements when an attacker outran themselves, the British, French, and Americans were ready to pounce, and at that point Germany had very little left to withstand the counterassault.

“Ludendorff paid a tribute the French would not. He attributed the growing malaise in his army and the sense of ‘looming defeat’ that afflicted it to ‘the sheer number of Americans arriving daily at the front.’ It was indeed immaterial whether the doughboys fought well or not. Though the professional opinion of veteran French and British officers that they were enthusiastic rather than efficient was correct, the critical issue was the effect of their arrival on the enemy. It was deeply depressing.”

Keegan appears to share the opinion of his fellow Europeans that the Americans were not particularly skilled soldiers, that they were more eager than they were sensible. And yet he regards the intervention of the United States as the ultimate factor prompting German surrender, not because of what they did but because of the seemingly unlimited potential of what they could do. With the US having won in the East and returning to the outskirts of Paris, their appearance put the Germans into the position of Sisyphus, having rolled a boulder up a mountain only to watch it roll right back down again.