Forward into Battle

by Paddy Griffin

  Good order alone impresses the enemy in an attack, for it indicates real determination. That is why it is necessary to secure good order and retain it until the very last. It is unwise to take the running step prematurely, because you become a flock of sheep and leave so many men behind that you will not reach your objective.32

  The new discipline which was required would be more individual and internal than before. It would be what the Germans were later to call ‘Innerführung’ or ‘inner leadership’. This would replace the more physical supervision of the past.

  Today the soldier is often unknown to his comrades. He is lost in the smoke, the dispersion, the confusion of battle. He seems to fight alone. Unity is no longer insured by mutual surveillance. A man falls, and disappears. Who knows whether it was a bullet or the fear of advancing that struck him!33

  In order to retain his value as a fighting man, each soldier would henceforth require much greater personal commitment and indoctrination.

  During the late nineteenth century it at least came to be accepted that infantry would no longer fight in closed formations, but in more or less open skirmish lines. Skirmishing would take longer and have greater importance for the final result. Supporting columns would become much lighter than they had been in the past, and their function would be to feed the skirmish line rather than to make the final attack directly. A final attack of some sort would nevertheless remain essential, and it would be delivered with the bayonet. The ‘battle of killing’ was not to be allowed to dominate the scene, since a decisive charge would always remain the ultimate arbiter. The important thing was to keep the men in a sufficient state of enthusiasm and freshness to make such a charge.

  Late nineteenth-century infantry attack – building up the skirmish line on the ‘empty battlefield’.

  1 Enemy engaged by skirmishers.

  2 Line of supports to feed the firing line.

  3 Small columns to feed in reserves gradually.

  4 Attack with bayonet once the line is strong enough to win fire superiority.

  In essence the above was the tactical doctrine adopted by every country during the fifty years before the First World War. The idea was to build up a heavy skirmish line which could wear down the enemy and finally make a bayonet charge. The line would be held together by the training and individual determination of each soldier, who would have been indoctrinated in the need to keep moving forward. Everything possible would have been done to increase his ‘morale’ and to harness his supposed national characteristics.

  At different times and in different nations there were minor variations in the details of these tactics, but it was rare for their basic outline to be changed. Around 1867–87 in France and around 1902–9 in Britain there did seem for a time to be a willingness to fight entirely by fire.34 In these two cases the final bayonet charge dropped temporarily out of official doctrine, to be replaced by a conception of a genuinely ‘empty’ battlefield. In neither case, however, did such a phase last very long. It was soon overtaken by a return to the policy of the bayonet charge and high offensive morale.

  Time after time it was found that in practice the bayonet charge could actually work. In the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, for example, the Prussians adopted a type of attack by self-sufficient fractions which must have been very close to what Ardant du Picq recommended:

  Like wasps, when their nest is disturbed by some blunderer, they swarmed all round their dazed enemy, and put him to flight by the countless attacks of small groups converging at the right time and place. They received no orders to do so any more than the Austrians, but, from Subaltern to General a thorough military education had developed in them the reflexes necessary for the proper exercise of command in war.35

  In the Franco-Prussian War it was certainly found that infantry assaults could be prohibitively expensive, even with troops of exemplary morale. The Prussian Guard attack at St. Privat, in particular, cost 8,000 casualties and left a deep scar on the consciousness of the European military establishment. On the other hand it would be wrong to suggest that infantry attacks were always doomed to fail, even when delivered frontally.

  Prince Kraft zu Hohenlohe Ingelfingen has described a number of successful attacks which took place in the Franco-Prussian War. At Le Bourget on 30th October 1870, for example, the Prussians stormed two villages over perfectly open ground with trifling losses. In one case it was actually done without any support from the artillery:

  At this point there were two battalions of the ‘Franz’ regiment who had to attack over 2,000 paces of open ground. The officer commanding this regiment had already practised it in the attack. In accordance with his practice he sent forward the whole of the leading line, which consisted of two companies, in thick swarms of skirmishers, and made them advance over the open ground in two parts (by wings) which alternately ran in 300 paces. After each rush the whole of the wing which made it, threw itself down, and found some cover among the high potatoes; there they recovered their breath while the other wing rushed in. As soon as they arrived within range of the needle-gun, the wing which was lying down opened a fire of skirmishers on that edge of the village which they were attacking. I can still remember, as I write, the delight which we felt as from our position we watched this attack which had been so carefully thought out, and was so well carried through. The best of the thing was that, as the commander of the regiment assured me, these troops suffered no loss up to the time when they reached the edge of the village.36

  With examples like the above before them, infantry commanders after 1870 can have seen no reason to suppose that modern firepower had really made the attack obsolete. In both France and Prussia, indeed, there was actually a tendency to place increased stress upon the offensive in the training manuals. Especially in France it was felt that excessive caution had been displayed during the war, sometimes with dire results. The very defeat of the Prussian Guard at St. Privat, for example, was a case in point. On that occasion the French had failed to exploit their success with a counter-attack, thus ‘snatching defeat from the jaws of victory’. French writers after 1870 were determined that such lack of resolution should not reappear in any future war.

  In 1877 the Russian army attacked the Turks, who had just been equipped with an excellent new breech-loading rifle. Although the Turkish forces were largely composed of raw conscripts, they exhibited an admirable tenacity in holding defensive positions and blazing away at any Russian who came in range. The Russian General Todleben later wrote that ‘Such a shower of lead as that with which the Turks hail our troops has never before been employed as a mode of warfare by any European army.’37 Western observers also felt that this was something new, and once again the cry went up that firepower had finally made the bayonet attack impossible.

  The war correspondent of the Daily News said that in his opinion:

  … the whole system of attack upon even the simplest trenches will have to be completely changed in the future. Assaults, properly speaking, will have to be abandoned.38

  He felt that only two kinds of infantry action would henceforth be possible – wide envelopments which avoided frontal attacks, or steady sapping forward towards the enemy with the spade.

  Events at the siege of Plevna, however, did not finally justify such complete pessimism. Those who wished to preserve the infantry attack were able to find a number of replies to their critics. As they had in the American Civil War, Western European commentators could show that the two armies at Plevna had been less than excellent in quality. The Russians seemed to have learned little since the Crimean War: their tactics were still ponderous, inflexible, and made inadequate provision for skirmishing. If their heavy columns were shot to pieces, it was scarcely surprising.

  It was also true that in many cases at Plevna the bayonet attack had achieved a measure of success. Time and again it succeeded in capturing the front line of enemy trenches, thus allowing the attackers to install themselves at close range for a subsequent assault. The true failure was
seen as a failure to maintain the momentum which this initial attack had created. It was not so much ‘the bayonet attack’ which was difficult, but rather ‘the second bayonet attack’ with blown troops. If methods could be developed to deliver a quick exploitation of the first success, then infantry offensives would still be quite possible.

  In practice one Russian General, Skobelev, did succeed in devising a method for ensuring a rapid renewal of impetus at the moment when it was needed most. This consisted of committing a new echelon of attacking infantry at the moment when the first wave started to falter. A great deal depended upon good judgment of the psychological moment, and it required the overall commander to be posted well forward where he could see what was going on. In practice, however, Skobelev made the system work in his attack on the Kazanlik redoubts. This was a very costly attack, it is true; but it did reach its objective. Many commentators felt that it had important lessons for the future of infantry.

  There was unquestionably a great deal of genuine bayonet fighting at Plevna, ‘a pure chaos of stabbing, clubbing, hacking, clutching, shouting, screaming men’, as a participant described one such combat.39 There were also many occasions when a defender ran away in front of a threatening charge, before it made contact. We must further remember that this battle was generally considered to be exceptional by observers, insofar as it took on the characteristics of a siege. The general feeling was that the Russians would have done a great deal better if they had stuck to open, mobile warfare. On other fronts of the same war they had indeed done so with a much better outcome.

  It is only too easy for modern writers, with full benefit of hindsight, to assume that the development of firepower in the American Civil War, in the Franco-Prussian War and at Plevna ought to have made frontal attacks unthinkable. The fact of the matter is that contemporaries did ponder the problem at length, but concluded on the basis of the evidence that such attacks could still be made. All they required was a little extra care, and an acceptance of increased dispersion in the skirmish line.

  The most triumphant vindication of this view seemed to be the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Coming as it did immediately after the Boer War, observers had expected to find an even more empty battlefield, with more killing and less decisive results. Instead, they were astonished to find a series of actions similar to the following:

  It was about 3.45 of the clock when the brave Japanese broke cover in one long line and headed due north. The men were almost shoulder to shoulder in single rank. The supports followed at about 200 yards, also in single rank, and behind them came the reserve in double rank. There was no firing. The rank and file marched with sloped arms and fixed bayonets and swung along steadily, almost solemnly, forward … Okasaki’s infantry … reached Kokashi without firing a shot themselves, and without, so far as I could see suffering any loss at all from the bullets which had been raising little puffs and spurts of dust about them as they advanced. As for the Russian guns, they had either failed to detect the commencement of the attack, or else they had been successfully distracted from their legitimate target by the Japanese bombardment.

  It was soon after four o’clock that the Brigade Okasaki disappeared into Kokashi and into a village half a mile to the east of it called West Sankashi. Then there arose a continuous tearing crepitating sound, not very loud, and yet sufficient in intensity and volume to cause us all to shiver with excitement.… It startled me like the sudden snarl of a wild beast. For I knew that thousands of rifles had opened magazine fire and were struggling at from 500 to 600 yards distance for the fire mastery, that fire mastery which, established by the one side would render the assault possible; established by the other must doom it to disastrous failure. Such sounds as these, wafted upon the evening breeze, bore messages of life and death; more – of victory or defeat to all who could grasp their significance.

  For a long, long time the anguish of anticipation was spun out to the uttermost. A quarter of an hour passed, then another quarter of an hour; the General Staff could hardly endure it any longer, but Kuroki (the Commander-in-Chief) remained confident and calm. Then another ten minutes. The tension became unendurable.… ‘Ah,’ said Kuroki, ‘He cannot get on. Today we are stuck fast all along the line.’ In his voice was no tone of regret, no shade of mortification; at the most it could only be said that the actual words betokened some touch of despondency.

  Hardly had he spoken when a sharp exclamation from an Adjutant made me turn my glasses once more upon the deserted plain, and to my amazement I saw it, deserted no longer, but covered by a vast, straggling, scattered crowd of individuals, each racing towards the Russians at his topmost speed. The Okasaki Brigade was crossing the open to try and storm Terayama by one supreme effort; and the only English expression which will convey an idea of their haste is that of the hunting-field, ‘Hell for leather’. Bullets fell thick among those who ran for life or death across the plain, and the yellow dust of their impact on the plough rose in a cloud almost up to the men’s knees. By what magic these bullets almost always struck in the vacant spaces and very rarely on the bodies of the men, I cannot explain, beyond saying that it was ever thus with the bullets of a bad shooting corps. At the first glance it seemed as if there was no order or arrangement in this charge of a brigade over 500 or 600 yards of open plough. But suddenly I realised that it was not chance but skill which had distributed the pawns so evenly over the chess board. The crowd, apparently so irregular and so loosely knit together, consisted of great numbers of sections and half-sections and groups working independently, but holding well together, each in one little line under its own officer or non-commissioned officer. There was no regular interval.…

  In certain respects the startling, sudden onslaught of Okasaki’s Brigade resembled a Dervish rush, but with one marked difference, inasmuch as the formation was not solid but exceedingly flexible and loose, offering no very valuable target even to a machine gun. The speed was marvellous, and the men got across the plain more like charging cavalry than ordinary infantry. Some say that the leading sections paused once to fire. I did not see this happen. To the best of my observation the assaulting infantry ran 600 yards without the semblance of a halt, as their leading files reached the sunken road they dashed unhesitatingly into it, right onto the top of the crouching Russian infantry! Next second the Russians and their assailants were rushing up Terayama slopes in one confused mob, the whole mass convulsively working bayonet and bullet and clubbed rifle as they ran. The hill was carried. Bravo! Bravo!! Bravo!!!40

  Even making allowances for Sir Ian Hamilton’s obvious emotional involvement, it is clear that Okasaki’s charge constituted a serious reproach for those who believed such things were impossible in the age of the magazine rifle. It is true that Hamilton elsewhere lists a number of factors which greatly helped the Japanese, for example the bad Russian marksmanship and their poor artillery co-ordination. Nevertheless the very fact that such attacks succeeded at all was more than sufficient to keep the idea of the bayonet alive.

  There were really two wars in Manchuria in 1904–5. The first was the mobile war which Sir Ian Hamilton reported so vividly. The second was the positional war of Port Arthur and Mukden. It is the latter which in retrospect seems to have foreshadowed the Western Front so closely; but it was the former which attracted much of the attention at the time. It was easy for analysts to dismiss the sustained trench-fighting as ‘sieges’, in the same way as they had done for Plevna, and indeed for Petersburg in the American Civil War or Sebastopol in the Crimea. Military operations had always been divisible into the two general categories of ‘sieges’ and ‘open warfare’ so it surprised nobody when the same pattern was repeated after the introduction of magazine rifles. ‘Sieges are horrible things,’ said Hamilton. ‘A good fight in the open – that is another matter.’41

  It is also very easy for us to forget that until the start of 1915 it looked very much as though the First World War had itself taken on a highly mobile character. In the early months of
war there were some astonishing demonstrations of the power of the offensive. At Tannenburg the Germans manoeuvred between two superior Russian forces and destroyed them both. At Lemburg the Russians in turn effected a breakthrough of the Austrian positions. In the West the Germans had quickly defeated the Belgians in ‘siege’ warfare at Liège, and had then advanced almost a hundred miles into France, pushing all before them. At the Battle of the Marne it was the turn of the counter-offensive to achieve some startling results. To contemporaries all this must have seemed a veritable firework display of offensive action. If not even the Belgian fortresses could hold out for many days, what hope was there for the defensive in general?

  The establishment of a line of trenches from Switzerland to the Channel admittedly represented a pause in the offensive impetus; but even the most doctrinaire bayonet-fanciers had always admitted that some sort of let-up would sooner or later be inevitable. There seemed to be no reason to doubt that in the spring of 1915 the deadlock would be broken and the offensive would again be set in motion. If there was now a momentary ‘siege’ phase in operations, it was presumably the result of a temporary exhaustion of both logistic and moral assets. As soon as these had been made good the armies would surely be free to return to ‘a good fight in the open’.

  Field Marshal Rommel has left us some startling testimony of just how free from casualties the offensive could be in 1914, when he was still only a Platoon Commander. Advancing on a French village in morning fog, he reports that:

  Suddenly a volley was fired at us from close range. We hit the dirt and lay concealed among the potato vines. Later volleys passed high over our heads. I searched the terrain with my glasses but found no enemy. Since he obviously could not be far away, I rushed towards him with the platoon. But the French got away before we had a chance to see him … several additional volleys were fired at the platoon from out of the fog; but each time we charged the enemy withdrew hastily. We then proceeded about a half mile without further trouble.… So far the platoon had suffered no casualties.42