1917
Page 19
The Nivelle Offensive took its name from Gen. Robert Nivelle, the commander along the Verdun front after the German offensive had died out. In a series of sudden, swift moves, backed by massive artillery bombardments, he managed to recapture nearly all the ground France had lost in that sector since April 1916, including the storied Fort Douaumont, with minimal casualties. His success shot him to the forefront of French generals. When General Joffre lost his job as supreme commander in December, Nivelle was the obvious replacement. His style seemed the perfect antidote to the slow, plodding victory-by-attrition strategy Joffre had followed since the start of the war, a strategy that had nearly bled the French army dry and left the Germans still in possession of much of northwest France.
Nivelle was a star. Intellectually alert and energetic, he combined a sense of personal style with the gift of gab. Observers remarked on how “he explained his methods in the most enchanting way” so that listeners would leave “enthralled and enraptured.”1 It’s not surprising, therefore, that he soon convinced the government that the operational strategy he had used so successfully at Verdun could be adopted at the strategic level. He liked to call it his secret plan to end the deadlock on the Western Front, but it was really not so secret. The key was concentrating all his forces on a single narrow front, and then saturating the enemy with an intense artillery barrage. Trained as an artillery officer, Nivelle knew that the artillery was probably France’s strongest arm. Its primary weapon, the 75-mm howitzer, had a relatively short range but could lay down a devastating volume of fire.2
Nivelle’s idea was to use a vast mass of artillery to bombard a limited area to achieve what he called a rupture, punching a hole “across the whole depth of the enemy position.” Also, there would not be the usual waves of attacking troops advancing shoulder to shoulder through no-man’s-land to the enemy trenches after the bombardment. Instead, small groups of infantry would lead the assault even as the barrage rolled over the enemy positions. The French infantry would sweep over the stunned defenders, bypass any remaining pockets of resistance, and then push out into the open country beyond. Since 1915, what every general, Allied or German, had been dreaming of, breakout, would be achieved with a minimum of casualties and a maximum of damage to the enemy.
That was Nivelle’s promise: a “hard” and “brutal” offensive lasting less than forty-eight hours, during which the entire German position would be overrun in successive two- to three-thousand-yard advances. All he needed, he informed the government, was a suitable front on which to practice his magic. The front along the Somme River, in the center of the Allied line, was too chewed up by the previous year’s fighting to be a good place for launching a breakout. Instead, he aimed to pinch out the German salient straddling either side of the Somme. From the southern edge of the German position, French armies would strike up into the Champagne region of the southern Aisne River, known as the Chemin des Dames; in the northern sector, the British would advance eastward toward Arras, with an eye to capturing Vimy Ridge, the one piece of high ground overlooking the Douai Plain—and what Nivelle hoped would be the entry point into the German rear.3
At a summit meeting in Calais in December 1916, the British had agreed to some kind of combined offensive, so they were obliged to go along with Nivelle’s plan. Starting in January, both armies began assembling their troops and artillery for what looked like the one-two knockout punch that would force the broken Germans to stream back toward the Rhine.
Then the Germans ruined everything.
Even as Nivelle’s staff was putting the final touches on his plan, the Germans began pulling back along the entire sector between Arras and the Aisne. They had no inkling of Nivelle’s impending attack; they had simply decided that with German forces more or less on permanent defense for the rest of the year, they needed to shorten their line by abandoning the Somme Salient. Instead, their forces drew back into the great maze of entrenched fortifications known as the Hindenburg Line. Shortening the German line in this way freed up no fewer than fifteen divisions for action.
The Allies realized what was happening as early as March 15, and by March 18, the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line was complete. Instead of administering an irresistible hammer blow to an enemy just across no-man’s-land, Nivelle’s men would be drifting across a wide, empty plain almost fifty miles deep.4 It made nonsense of the idea of rupture. Generals and politicians on both sides of the Channel urged Nivelle to reconsider his plan. Yet he insisted on pressing ahead. He threatened to quit; the French public would be outraged, he said, when they learned that he had been overruled and that the government had given up this one chance to have British forces do the bidding of the French High Command rather than (as during the Somme offensive) the other way around. Whatever Nivelle lacked in flexibility or insight, he more than made up for in self-confidence and nerve. With deep misgivings, then, Lloyd George and the new French government gave their assent.
The British struck first, on April 9. For the assault, the commander, Gen. Edmund Allenby, had assembled sixteen divisions, including four divisions of Canadians, and 2,817 pieces of artillery and heavy mortars—one gun for every twelve yards of enemy front.5 The key objective was the crest of Vimy Ridge, which the Canadians were supposed to storm and take, opening the way into the unprotected German rear, where the British and Canadians would eventually link up with Nivelle’s French divisions coming up from the south. The weather the morning of April 9 was atrocious, with rain coming down in sheets mixed with snow and sleet. The Canadians were going to have to advance on Vimy Ridge through fields of icy, glutinous mud. Even after an artillery bombardment that would be double that used in the first day of the Somme offensive, the prospect of reaching the summit looked bleak.
The Germans, however, were caught flat-footed. Their commander, the master of strategy at Verdun and the conqueror of Romania, General Falkenhayn, had made a fatal error. He had thinned the German front line down to just seven regiments while holding the rest fifteen miles back, in reserve for counterattacks. Also, four of those seven regiments were out-of-shape, overage reservists.6 When the British bombardment started, every communication line between the front and German headquarters was blown up and severed, as was communication with German artillery. When the British and Canadians finally reached the German line, either the defenders were killed or wounded, or they fled for their lives.
The attack had been a stunning success. The British and Canadians had cut a hole one to three miles deep in the German line; they had taken nine thousand prisoners. Canadian troops standing on Vimy Ridge could see across the entire Douai Plain beyond, and watched German gunners desperately limbering up their guns and heading for the rear. “There appeared to be nothing at all to prevent our breaking through, except the weather,” one of the lieutenants on the ridge later remembered.7 Then the predictable happened—as it always did following every successful initial advance in this war, at least on the Western Front. While attackers moved at foot speed, defenders could move at rail speed. Modern railway networks allowed even a badly shaken defender to move his reinforcements to a threatened sector faster than an attacker could get his troops in position on foot. In the next world war, airpower could be used to sever those railway lines and isolate an enemy position; in 1917, no such option existed. Besides, exploiting a breakthrough required moving hundreds of artillery pieces and hundreds of thousands of artillery shells. That meant more lost time while the defender was shoring up his fortifications, digging fresh trenches, and pouring in fresh troops to close the gap.
This is exactly what happened over the next several days. On April 10, German reserves arrived to pull together the German line. In desperation, Allenby tried a cavalry charge to widen the gap; German artillery and a fierce counterattack held off the attackers.8 By the eleventh, the British and Canadians had suffered thirteen thousand casualties, still a small fraction of those suffered by comparable forces during the opening days of the Somme offensive. But hopes for a signi
ficant breakthrough were fading, as more and more German reinforcements came up. Fighting dragged on for another month, by which time the British First and Third Armies had lost more than one hundred thirty thousand men for no real gain. The Germans had taken similar losses, but their line was reorganized and stronger than ever. There would be no breakthrough at Arras.
There would be none in the Chemin des Dames, either.
For one thing, the Germans learned of Nivelle’s plans even as his headquarters was handing them out to divisional, brigade, and regimental commanders. A French sergeant-major was captured by the Germans with his pockets full of Nivelle’s orders. Also, Nivelle had boasted of his “secret” plan during a series of recent dinner parties in London, so advance warning could have leaked out to German agents in that way. In any case, by the day the assault in the Chemin des Dames was supposed to start, April 16, the Germans had as many divisions in place as Nivelle did.
In addition, the distance between the French and German lines now stretched so far that the tight timetable Nivelle had laid down was no longer feasible. By the time the French reached their initial objectives in the opening hours of their attack, they would still be two thousand yards short of the real German defenses.9
Still, the soldiers under Nivelle’s command were filled with confidence and expectation. A British liaison officer remembered their grinning faces and shining eyes. “The Germans won’t stand there,” they kept saying to him, “any more than they did before you at Arras. They fairly ran away there, didn’t they?”
Then the French artillery began its work, while the German return barrage seemed ragged and uncoordinated. “Almost at once, or so it seemed, the immense mass of troops within sight began to move. Long, thin columns were swarming toward the Aisne” as the artillery barrage intensified. “Then it began to rain and it became impossible to tell how the assault was progressing.”10
Another barrage; another assault on another line of trenches—this had been the story of the world war for almost three years, and each time, it had ended in heartbreaking slaughter and stalemate, for both attacker and defender. This time, however, it seemed to the thousands of men in horizon-blue uniforms, with their blue steel helmets glistening with rain, it would be different.
Except it wasn’t. The rain and mist hid the scene so that the artillery and infantry lost touch with each other. The lines of French troops began to slow as German machine guns popped out of shell holes and the mouths of dugout caves and began taking the same terrible toll on the French attackers in the same old way.
The conditions, in fact, were the other problem that beleaguered commanders in the First World War, and made being on the attack so difficult. The fog of war became virtually impenetrable, and not just because of the miserable weather that was typical of northwestern Europe. While the distances over which battles were fought had vastly increased compared with distances in previous wars, the lack of radio or other wireless communication equipment meant that commanders at headquarters had to rely on telegraph or primitive telephone lines, which were constantly being blown up by artillery or cut by the enemy, or which simply couldn’t be laid down in time to keep up with the pace of the action.
Throughout the Great War, from first to last, by the time a commanding general or one of his staff was able to get an inkling of how an assault was going or what was happening to troops up at the front, either from a stray telephone call or a physical message carried by a runner, the news was usually already out of date. On average, it took eight to ten hours for a message from divisional headquarters to reach the front—by which time the momentum of battle could have changed dramatically, or even been reversed.11
Defenders had a much better time of it. Even if communication lines were cut, officers and soldiers knew that they just had to hold on, and sooner or later the attack would slow down and peter out. This was what now happened along the Aisne.
“Everywhere the story was the same,” the British liaison officer, Gen. Edward Spears, reported. “[T]he attack gained [ground] at most points, then slowed down, unable to follow the barrage which, progressing at the rate of a hundred yards [every] three minutes, was in many cases soon out of sight. As soon as the infantry and the barrage became disassociated, German machine guns . . . opened fire, in many cases from the front and flanks, and sometimes from the rear as well.”12
After an agonizing morning and afternoon, the attack on April 16 halted as night fell. The French had advanced just six hundred yards instead of the six miles Nivelle had promised. On the third day, April 19, troops finally reached the Chemin des Dames road. On the fifth day, April 21, the Nivelle Offensive ground to a halt. The French army had suffered one hundred thirty thousand casualties to gain four miles and take twenty-eight thousand prisoners. But the old pattern had reasserted itself, despite Nivelle’s reassurances. His tenure as commander in chief lasted only eight days after his offensive ended, as he was summarily dismissed. His jaunty, ebullient presence was seen no more at headquarters. But he had left a more somber legacy than just another failed offensive. He had been unable to produce any break in the German line, but he had managed to create one between the average French poilu and his officers.
The first sign of trouble came on April 21, when a convoy of trucks carrying troops from the elite First Colonial Infantry Division was headed from the front to the rear. As it moved along, weary soldiers leaned out of the trucks and shouted at passersby, “We’re through with killing! Long live peace!” while their officers stared in mute embarrassment. Little more than a week later, survivors from a battalion of the Eighteenth Infantry Regiment, which the fight for the Chemin des Dames had reduced from six hundred to just two hundred men, was ordered back into the line. The men point-blank refused.13
Their officers immediately blamed their disobedience on drunkenness, and ordered their men to get back in the line once they had sobered up. Eventually the battalion did—although four of their number were arrested and later shot. Still, their behavior turned out to be more than an isolated case. More “acts of collective indiscipline,” as their officers euphemistically termed it, began to sprout up in the French lines in the days after the offensive stopped. The severity grew to the point where, on May 3, when troops of the Second Colonial Division went to the front, they told their officers they would stay and defend their trenches but would not participate in any further attacks. Other units on other fronts told their commanders the same thing. By the end of the first week of May, the entire French army was on the brink of mutiny.
The reasons for the revolt were many, but they had a good deal to do with what was happening in Russia. Officers searching the belongings of arrested mutineers often found pamphlets preaching socialism and the downfall of the bourgeoisie; some suspected the discontent was being sown by German agents. Most of the revolutionary sentiment among the mutineers, however, was sincere, and much of it was inspired by the news stories from Petrograd of soldiers leaving the misery of the front and joining demonstrators in the streets, to demand change—in the spring of 1917, high prices and dwindling hopes for peace had provoked a wave of strikes across France as well as in Russia—even to the point of overthrowing the existing government. It was a cause that the average French soldier, especially after downing a bottle of cheap red wine and reflecting on all the copains he had seen killed around him, could identify with.
In the French case, however, soldiers did not leave their units to head for the capital—although at one point a band of soldiers armed with red banners did try to hijack a train for Paris (whether to lead a revolution or to get some much-needed rest and relaxation is not entirely clear), and the number of straight desertions did shoot up alarmingly. In most cases, men simply refused to fight anymore. Usually they didn’t blame their officers for their plight. They knew officers suffered an even higher rate of mortality than enlisted men.14 But they did blame the army and the government for the shabby way they were being treated, with bad food, little or no leave, and poor
pay, not to mention their throwaway use as cannon fodder in tactics that had failed for almost three years running. In France, unlike Russia, there were almost no cases of violence against officers, or any violence at all. By and large, the soldiers’ chief demands at organized mass meetings were for better treatment for their families, better food for themselves, the need for “peace,” and an end to “the butchery.” These were demands their officers, if they were honest enough, couldn’t disagree with.
In any case, the French army mutinies soon became a strategic liability. As May passed into June, nearly half the French troops (some fifty-four divisions) were officially in a state of “collective indiscipline.”15 The army mutiny had become a national crisis that, if the Germans had been aware of what was happening and seized the moment, could have delivered victory to Berlin.
But the Germans did not seize the moment, and the one man who could save the French army from collapse was already in command. He was Gen. Henri-Philippe Pétain, and what he accomplished that spring and summer of 1917 may well have saved his country.
Known as the Lion of Verdun, Pétain replaced Nivelle as commander in chief on April 29, five days after his sixty-first birthday. The son of a farmer from the Pas-de-Calais region, Pétain had no aristocratic or political connections, and his army career therefore developed slowly after his graduation from Saint Cyr Academy, with service in various remote colonial posts. A bachelor until his mid-sixties, Pétain was best known in the army for his womanizing and his motto “Firepower kills.” The coming of war in 1914 had proved him right, and soon catapulted him into senior posts, until he took over the Second Army on the eve of the German attack on Verdun in February 1916.
In holding Verdun during those harrowing, horrific months, Pétain raised defense to a military art form—whereas almost all his fellow generals had been entirely focused on the offensive, with predictably horrible results. He understood, as few others did, that the new military technologies favored the defender over the attacker. At Verdun, he succeeded in inflicting unacceptable losses on a German army that had thought it could bleed the French defenders to death; instead, it wound up being bled nearly to death itself. Pétain’s promise “They shall not pass” became a national catchphrase. When someone was needed to replace Nivelle, there was simply no other choice.