Forward into Battle

by Paddy Griffin

  In summary, there were relatively few regiments involved in the French Lorraine offensive that did not sooner or later make an attack of some kind, but in few cases were these attacks run according to the textbooks. Many were only partial, or poorly supported by artillery, or awkwardly thrown on to the defensive by the enemy’s unexpected advance. At the level of corps and army, furthermore, the higher commanders do not always seem to have wished to push forward au fond in the way de Grandmaison might have wanted.

  Some French attacks succeeded through luck, surprise, good artillery preparation or the skilled use of phased bounds by skirmishers in open order; and rather more German attacks did so. It was certainly not the case that every attack was inevitably doomed to collapse. However, there is no doubt that the attack had become more difficult than in the past, especially if the enemy was alerted and enjoyed an open field of fire. When the conditions for an attack were not especially favourable, therefore, it might all too easily resemble the following action that took place soon after the battle of the Marne:

  … as soon as the first silhouettes are outlined against the bare plateau, they are pinned to the ground by the fire of infantry and artillery. No cover, no fold in the ground permits an effective movement. The losses are high for an advance of twenty metres. Give oneself help by one’s own fire? So be it! – the section leader commands “Fire at Will” … but against what? The target remains invisible and our men give an impression of firing straight ahead of them, without looking. Soon there is immobility, for anything that moves is spotted. Face down to the earth one waits for the storm to pass, and any movement of retreat itself becomes difficult before nightfall.109

  Just as many American Civil War attacks failed when organised in defiance of Hardee’s system of tactics, so there were many French mistakes in 1914 made despite, rather than because of, de Grandmaison’s recommendations for the offensive. It would take experience, time and painful losses to learn how to put the essence of his vision to practical effect. On the other hand, it is probably quite fair to blame him, along with most other designers of tactical methods, for imposing unrealistically complex ideas upon ordinary soldiers. In common with the rest of his generation, furthermore, he may be blamed for leaving the army badly prepared for defence.

  A striking feature of all these battles is that the Germans could apparently bring something extra to bear in their attacks – probably a greater weight of supporting artillery110 – which for various reasons the French seemed badly equipped to counteract. Perhaps French trenches were less deep, and French soldiers less well indoctrinated in the idea that the defensive might sometimes be honourable. Maybe there was even some truth in the often-claimed racial differences between the stolid Teuton and the impatient Latin. Whatever the true reason, there was scarcely anything radically new in the general shape of the Lorraine battles of 19–20 August. The frontages were longer than might have been expected in Napoleonic times, but the duration was, if anything, shorter, and the leaders less experienced in the art of battle-handling.

  4

  1916–1945: The Alleged Triumph of Armour Over Infantry

  If our ideas about the First World War are tinged with a lack of sympathy for pre-war tactical analysts, they are also marked by a correspondingly strong admiration for the post-war champions of tanks. We tend to think of the war as a demonstration that infantry had become ineffective, while armour could break through. We see it as a victory of technology over outdated spiritual principles.

  There is a lot more to the story than this, however, since the tank turned out to be considerably less useful than one might imagine, and the infantry continued to enjoy a very great importance on the battlefield. Its evolution did not stop in 1914, but continued in the same directions it had been taking since Napoleonic times. The skirmish line became ever looser, while individual skill and initiative became ever more important.

  Whereas Wellington’s two-deep line had been considered a dangerously loose formation in 1808, the Japanese of 1904 were finding that even a solid single line was too heavy. By 1914 the accepted arrangement had become a line with intervals of several paces between each man. It is in this formation that we tend to visualise First World War soldiers ‘going over the top’ in the attack, or firing over their trench parapet in the defence. If we stopped to think about it a little further, we might add that each attack would probably be made up of several battalions or at least several companies at a time, and that each trench would be essentially linear. This is the common image we have of what fighting was like between 1914 and 1918.

  In fact, however, tactics underwent considerable modifications as the war progressed. The formations and methods used by the end were very different indeed from those which had been used in the first two or three years. At some time after the Battle of the Somme (1916), there took place yet another lightening of the battle lines in almost every army which was engaged. Instead of attacks by whole battalions or companies, the new tactics called for skirmishes, infiltrations or raids by platoons or even squads. As for defensive positions, they were often given a strength of only one machine-gun team. Continuous lines of trenches started to look decidedly antiquated. By 1918 the infantry had increased its dispersion to an extent which would have been unimaginable even four years earlier. There had been nothing less than a complete and rapid reorganisation of tactics to meet the various new challenges of the battlefield.

  The story of the development of infantry tactics in the First World War is really the story of what the Germans called the ‘storm trooper’. He was to be a foot soldier of a new type, adapted for the conditions of the modern battlefield and employing a range of new weapons to the full. He would be given even more flexibility and independence than ever, and would fight in particularly small groups. In the attack he would skirmish forward cautiously and attempt to infiltrate through an enemy position, rather than tackle it head-on. In defence he would act as an immediate counter-attack element in support of a dispersed ‘web’ of small strongpoints. The enemy would be enmeshed in the web and then struck with violent blows at the moment when he was least prepared to receive them.

  The above is a summary of modern battle as it was generally accepted by the end of 1918. It was a conception which had apparently first occurred to a French officer, Captain André Laffargue, when his attack was held up on Vimy Ridge on 9 May 1915.1 He realised that he would have done better had he sent forward small groups of men to engage the enemy from the flank, as well as some light mortars to provide indirect fire at the time and place it was required. It was apparent to him that the trust placed in formal artillery support was exaggerated, since the artillery of 1915 lacked the flexibility to respond immediately to the infantry’s need. Laffargue’s vision was therefore of an infantry unit which could fight its own way forward with its own weapons.

  In 1914 the infantry had been armed with three different weapons – rifle and bayonet, pistol for officers, and perhaps the occasional machine-gun. After 1918, by contrast, Colonel de Gaulle reported that the French infantry needed a total of sixteen types.2 Many new weapons had emerged in the course of the war; a range of mortars, a range of light machine-guns, a flamethrower and, perhaps most significantly of all, a variety of hand grenades. It was in the First World War that the hand grenade displaced the bayonet as the arm par excellence of the close quarter fighter. It was the principal weapon of the storm trooper.

  A squad of storm troopers could be built around a mortar, a light machine-gun or both. These weapons would provide heavy covering fire while the riflemen and bombers worked their way forward in short rushes to the enemy’s line. While they were still keeping their heads down from the covering fire, the enemy soldiers could be bombed out of their trenches.

  Ironically it was not to be the French army which first put these ideas into practice but the German. In the First World War as in the Second it was the Germans who felt the greatest need for innovative fighting methods, since they suffered from a marked numerica
l and material inferiority relative to their enemies. For every shell they fired, half a dozen or more seemed to be returned. In these circumstances it became especially important for them to use high quality soldiers and effective tactics. They found they simply could not afford the same margins of error which the Western allies seemed to enjoy.

  This view is faithfully reflected in the memoirs of Ernst Jünger, a German subaltern who received storm troop training. By the end of the war he had been wounded more than fourteen times, and yet he remained a keen enthusiast for trench fighting. Despite the ‘physical effects on his memory of repeated blows from great pieces of metal,’3 he has left us a cogent picture of these developments in German tactics.

  It was in the Battle of the Somme (1916) that he first realised that the material balance had decisively shifted. The terrific barrages which he underwent …

  … first made me aware of the overwhelming effects of the war of material. We had to adapt ourselves to an entirely new phase of war. The communications between the troops and the staff, between the artillery and the liaison officers, were utterly crippled by the terrific fire. Despatch carriers failed to get through the hail of metal, and telephone wires were no sooner laid than they were shot into pieces. Even light-signalling was put out of action by the clouds of smoke and dust that hung over the field of battle. There was a zone a kilometre behind the line where explosives held absolute sway.4

  All this tended to isolate the front line soldier and thow him back on his own resources, or at best, those of his NCOs:

  One hears it said very often and very mistakenly that the infantry battle had degenerated to an uninteresting butchery. On the contrary, today more than ever it is the individual that counts.5

  This, indeed, was a realisation which had been growing for many decades among German analysts; but it finally came to fruition only after the Battle of the Somme. Before then there had still been a counter-current of thinking which had clung to the old idea of massed or at least linear action. On the Somme, however, the shape of the future was finally appreciated by the Germans in all its aspects:

  Chivalry here took a final farewell. It had to yield to the heightened intensity of the war, just as all fine feeling has to yield when machinery gets the upper hand. The Europe of today appeared here for the first time on the field of battle.…

  The terrible losses, out of all proportion to the breadth of front attacked, were principally due to the old Prussian obstinacy with which the tactics of the line were pursued to their logical conclusion.

  One battalion after another was crowded up into a front line already over-manned, and in a few hours pounded to bits.

  It was a long while before the folly of contesting worthless strips of ground was recognised. It was finally given up and the principles of a mobile defence adopted. The last development of this was the elastic distribution of the defence in zones.6

  German ‘web’ defence, First World War, after the Battle of the Somme. Attacks are split up and canalized as they advance into the web, and are then counter-attacked.

  After the Somme the Germans abandoned their continuous lines and moved to a system of defence designed to save casualties. This was the ‘web’ defence, with a front line consisting of scattered outposts covering successive deep layers of a main position. Behind these, again, would be further scattered machine-gun nests backed up by strong reserve forces. In every layer of the defence there would be groups of specially-trained storm troops, poised to counter-attack any enemy lodgement.

  In 1937 Rommel described the system as follows:

  Modern defence organisation differs greatly from 1914. Then we had a front line with the remaining troops disposed in a second line. Today a battalion position consists of an outpost line and a main battle position through which the forces are organised in great depth. In an area 1100–2200 yards wide and deep, we have dozens of mutually supporting strongpoints garrisoned by riflemen, machine-guns, mortars and anti-tank weapons. These dispositions cause the enemy to divert his fire and the defence to concentrate on its own fires. Local manoeuvre under covering fires is possible, and aggressive counter-measures can be instituted should the enemy succeed in penetrating the main battle position. The enemy has a long and very difficult road before breaking through.7

  German offensive technique, 1917–18.

  If we make allowances for the increased emphasis on anti-tank guns by 1937, we find that Rommel here describes exactly the layout adopted for German defensive positions in 1917 and 1918. It was a system which depended upon great depth; upon the use of small groups delivering flanking rather than frontal fire with their machine-guns; and also upon a decentralisation of initiative to local counter-attack forces. Another aspect which Rommel does not mention, but which was equally important, was the arrangement for gaining artillery superiority. Because the Germans expected to face superior enemy artillery strength, they tried to nullify its effects by the use of ground. Their forward outposts would be deployed on the crest of a hill so that as soon as enemy infantry had advanced through them into the web, its supporting artillery would be denied observation of the battlefield. The Germans alone would be in a position to bring observed artillery fire to bear at the point of contact on the reverse slope. The enemy spearheads would thus be isolated from their supports, confused and surrounded by hostile strongpoints.8

  A further refinement was added to this system in 1917, when the Germans sometimes took a step back with their front lines just as the attackers commenced their barrage. The heaviest and best-prepared fire would thus fall into a vacuum, and would serve only to make the ground more difficult for the attacking troops to cross. The Germans would meanwhile have retired to new positions in rear, where they would be waiting unscathed for the arrival of an exhausted and disorganised pursuit. This technique proved to be very effective on the Chemin des Dames in 1917, and in the summer of 1918 it had almost become a routine procedure. In the Second World War it was again often used to good effect on the Eastern Front.

  It is important to realise how far from traditional conceptions these German defensive tactics had moved, if we are also to appreciate their new methods of attack. What seemed to happen for their offensive technique was that many of the features of the defensive battlefield were almost ‘turned inside out’ and superimposed upon the enemy’s line.

  Thus the aim of the attack would be to penetrate the enemy’s position in depth at the first onslaught, and to surround his strongpoints with small groups built around light machine-guns and mortars. Initiative would be fully decentralised to these groups, whose only orders would be to keep pushing forward. A second echelon of more conventional infantry could then follow up to eliminate the enemy positions which had been cut off. In order to achieve artillery superiority there would be only a very short barrage; but one of great violence and depth. It would play up and down the enemy’s area from front to rear and then back again, and would particularly aim to neutralise his artillery with a surprise gas bombardment. It would also be followed up very rapidly by the storm troopers who might hope to reach as far as the enemy gun line in their first bound.

  In the attack as in the defence these tactics were designed to spring a series of nasty surprises on the enemy, to deprive him of his artillery support and to surround bodies of his troops so that they could be wiped out in detail. They represented a coherent way of looking at the whole battlefield, and in practice they turned out to be very strong indeed.

  It is General Hutier who is generally credited with making the transformation from the Germans’ defensive system into the offensive one described above, following his experiences at Riga on the Eastern Front. In the West his ideas were first applied on a grand scale during the Battle of Cambrai in late 1917. This battle had started with an astonishing British surprise attack using tanks en masse, which had been stopped only on the Germans’ final defensive line. The ‘Land Ironclads’ had swept up a great number of prisoners and trophies in their initial onslaught, altho
ugh it must be admitted that their many defects had shown up clearly to those who had eyes to see. To most people it seemed that an answer had at last been found to the supposedly impenetrable German defensive system.

  It was in a large scale counter-attack that the Germans then gave their first great demonstration of the new offensive tactics, winning back lost ground almost as quickly as the tanks had taken it. Without the benefit of any revolutionary new weapon, they too showed the potential power of deep infiltration and surprise. It is ironic that the enthusiasts of armour were seeking to exploit precisely these qualities in their own way, since the Germans showed they had nothing to learn in those areas. At Cambrai the combination of storm troopers and well-orchestrated artillery proved to be as much of an answer to the problems of modern battle as the tank itself.

  Ernst Jünger took part in the Cambrai counter-attack and concluded that it was the courage and daring of well-formed infantry which held the key to tactical success. Even in the summer of 1918 he remained unimpressed by tanks, and experienced a sense of sadness mixed with a slight awe at the hopeless plight of the men who went to war in them. When he inspected a number of these machines which had been destroyed by German shells he found:

  … they were all in a pitiable plight. The little cabin of armoured plate, now shot to pieces, with its maze of pipes, rods, and wires, must have been an extremely uncomfortable crib during an attack, when the monsters, hoping to baffle the aim of our guns, took a tortuous course over the battlefield like gigantic helpless cockchafers. I thought more than once of the men in these fiery furnaces.9