Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  7

  Crisis at the Front

  BLOOD

  The year 1916 brought the Central Powers new crises. German and Habsburg leaders had long known that in any extended conflict their forces risked being crushed under the weight of larger armies. After a year and a half of fighting, despite the vast conquests in the east, there were plenty of signs that this time was approaching. British and Russian recruitment had proceeded apace, the Central Powers’ fickle former ally Italy had thrown in its million-strong army against them, and as a result the Entente outnumbered its enemies by 356 to 289 divisions.1 The Entente had also made great progress in ending the material shortages that from late 1914 had hampered its campaigns. By the autumn of 1915, French factories were daily assembling 100,000 shells for their army’s feared 75mm guns. The Russians had simultaneously mobilized their smaller industrial base, expanding production of field artillery munitions fourfold to an output of 50,000 per day. To the outrage of the German public, who read about the deliveries in their newspapers, neutral America was supplying millions of pounds worth of arms and equipment for Britain’s New Armies, recruited in wartime to deliver the final blow for victory.

  Entente generals were not just accumulating massive material superiority; they were also learning how to employ it effectively. Germany had profited throughout 1915 from the failure of its western and eastern enemies to coordinate their offensives. The French commander-in-chief, General Joffre, was determined not to repeat this mistake. At his headquarters in the town of Chantilly on 6–8 December 1915 he prevailed upon British, Russian, Italian, Belgian and Serbian military representatives to agree for the coming year a ‘simultaneous and combined offensive’. The German and Austro-Hungarian armies would be overwhelmed by assaults on all fronts, forcing peace by the close of 1916.2

  German leaders too wished to end the war, although where the Entente was hopeful, they were pessimistic. Erich von Falkenhayn, the man appointed as Chief of the General Staff after Moltke’s failure on the Marne, estimated gloomily that Germany’s allies would not survive past the autumn and, as he told Bethmann Hollweg in January 1916, the Reich’s own ‘economic and internal political conditions’ also made a speedy conclusion to the conflict ‘extremely desirable’.3 However, while it was easy to assert that the war must be ended rapidly, it was far more difficult to know how this could be achieved. The Western Front, the war’s decisive theatre, was heavily fortified. Since the autumn of 1914, armies had entrenched all along the 750 kilometres from the Swiss border to the Flanders coast. The Germans had learned at Ypres in October and November 1914, and again in the spring of 1915, how hard it was to break through even rudimentary earthworks. The failure of repeated French attacks in Artois and Champagne, despite the expenditure of millions of shells and hundreds of thousands of lives, had offered further bloody confirmation. Some generals had concluded it was useless even to try to break through. ‘There will be no decisive battle as in other times’, the future French commander-in-chief, General Philippe Pétain, had argued in June 1915, when he was leading the Second Army in Artois. ‘Success will come eventually to the side that has the last man. The only objective we should seek is to kill as many Germans as we can while suffering a minimum of losses.’4

  The new difficulties posed by trench warfare had prompted commanders on both sides to shift their attention from territory to body counts. Yet Pétain’s pessimism about the possibility of breaking through remained a minority view. The fighting in 1915 had also shown that with enough heavy artillery even strong and well-defended trenches could be penetrated. The problem for Entente leaders at Chantilly was how to convert such tactical success into a decisive operational victory. By the year’s end, the Germans had laid out second and third lines behind their front defences. After any break-in, an unequal race to bring up reinforcements began. The defence had a natural advantage, for having been pushed closer to its railheads it could usually add troops quickly to plug the gap or retake lost positions. By contrast, reinforcements for the attackers were slowed by the need to carry up supplies and munitions across broken land, in which they were vulnerable to enemy shellfire. At Chantilly the Entente resolved not to try to win this race but to abolish it by eliminating the enemy’s reserves. A ‘wearing out’ phase, a euphemism for a period of preparatory killing, would be necessary to make possible a genuine breakthrough. The British had started seriously to analyse German manpower and casualties over the summer. In December 1915 the Entente’s military leaders settled on a monthly quota of 200,000 German soldiers killed, maimed or otherwise disabled. Only once this bloodshed had been completed was the great combined offensive to be launched.5

  Falkenhayn also embraced a strategy of attrition, but his version was more cunning and complex than that of the Entente. Unlike his Habsburg counterpart Conrad von Hötzendorf, Falkenhayn no longer believed in a decisive breakthrough or total victory. He saw attrition not as a prelude to an offensive that would return movement to the battlefield but as a strategic tool, capable of bringing at least one of Germany’s opponents to the negotiating table. He judged Britain too strong to be defeated. Russia also appeared unpromising: despite over two million casualties and the loss of Congress Poland in 1915, the Tsar had proved frustratingly unreceptive to any separate peace deal. Falkenhayn’s gaze therefore focused on France as both the most vulnerable Entente power and ‘England’s best sword’ on the continent. The plan that he formulated at the end of 1915 to force France out of the war was no less cynical than his enemies’ ambitions to ‘wear out’ German reserves but tactically far cleverer. The German army would exploit the defensive advantage offered by the Western Front. It would choose a point that the French could not surrender – the fortresses of Belfort and Verdun were both considered – and through massive artillery superiority and limited use of infantry, advance at little cost to tactically advantageous positions. It would then halt and permit the enemy to counter-attack in highly unfavourable conditions. The French, as Falkenhayn explained, would ‘thereby bleed themselves white’. The inevitable catastrophe might, it was hoped, prompt the British to launch a premature offensive with their untried New Armies to relieve their ally, which would grind down their strength against the well-fortified German line. If the calamitous losses and British failure did not force France out of the war, then Falkenhayn’s army would go over to the attack, delivering the final blow to the already exhausted French and driving the British from the continent.6

  These intentions shaped the war on both sides of Europe in 1916. Three great battles defined the year: the German offensive at Verdun and the two major Entente campaigns in east and west, the Brusilov offensive and the Somme. The Germans attacked first. Falkenhayn regarded his Habsburg allies with contempt and did not inform them of, let alone request support for, his plan. In consequence the Central Powers dissipated their strength just as their enemies were beginning to move in lockstep. Conrad’s own ‘Punishment Expedition’ out of the Trentino against the Italians began a full three months after Verdun, and within weeks was overtaken by the start of the Entente’s combined offensive. The Russian Brusilov offensive opened this drive in June and was followed by the Anglo-French offensive on the Somme from July. Subsidiary attacks by the French at Verdun and, in August, by Italy and another of their former allies, Romania, stretched the Central Powers’ manpower and material resources between distant fronts. In the summer and autumn of 1916 the survival of Germany and Austria-Hungary hung in the balance.

  THE GROGNARDS

  At the start of 1916, the Central Powers’ armies were no longer the forces that had gone to war in 1914. They were far larger. The Habsburg army had not merely replaced the horrific losses of the conflict’s first years but had nearly tripled its manpower to reach an average strength of 4,880,000 men in 1916. Its German ally had doubled its complement to 6,791,733 soldiers by the start of the year.7 Both armies were also far less professional than ever before. Career soldiers had been diluted in the expansion and their nu
mbers depleted by heavy casualties. Most personnel were civilians in uniform, some with peacetime military experience but ever more of whom had been hastily trained during hostilities. Contrary to the assertion often made with regard to the German army by historians seeking to excuse woeful British and French performance on the Somme, neither the Habsburg nor German force was ‘at the height of its morale and physical effectiveness’. In fact, the armies’ casualties, the need to absorb millions of new men and the strain of two years’ intensive warfare had made their adaptation to the unfamiliar conditions of combat more challenging, heavily diluted their expertise, and brought new and unexpected problems.8

  The fighting effectiveness of the German and Habsburg forces had suffered its most damaging blow through the losses inflicted on their professional officer corps in the early campaigns. These tend to be glossed over by British historians, but they were staggering. Nearly one in eight Habsburg and one in six German active officers had been killed by the end of 1915.9 Many more–German medical statistics suggest nearly twice the number – had been wounded. Numerous junior leaders had also been lost by the Austro-Hungarian army as prisoners during its defeats in Serbia and Galicia. Some 30 per cent of its officer casualties were missing or captured; the equivalent proportion of the German officer corps’ casualties was 5.2 per cent.10 The creation of new units, a measure necessitated by the exponential growth of enemy forces, had raised the demands on a shrinking pool of career officers. The German army had gone to war with ninety-two infantry divisions but by the end of 1915 it had created another seventy. All needed professionals to fill senior command positions.11 Many career officers were withdrawn from front-line posts to take up staff work in the rear. Peacetime-trained reserve officers had also suffered heavy casualties and were too few to replace them; even on mobilization in August 1914, neither army had sufficient peacetime-trained reserve officers, and retired officers, cadets and NCOs raised to ‘Deputy Officers’ (Offizierstellvertreter) had been used to fill gaps in the command structure.12 In order to provide leadership for the expanded armies and substitutes for fallen, wounded and captured peacetime-trained officers, the German army thus commissioned 220,000 and the Austro-Hungarians nearly 200,000 so-called ‘War Officers’ (Kriegsoffiziere). Frequently young and hailing from lower sections of the middle class than their socially elite forebears, these hurriedly trained wartime leaders shouldered the burden of front-line command in 1916.13

  Professional non-commissioned officers had undergone a similar but less drastic cycle of loss and replacement. The 148,229 regular and peacetime-trained reserve NCOs in the German Field Army after mobilization in August 1914 had given it an edge over its enemies, as they were better trained and more numerous than non-commissioned ranks in other forces. The German military’s innate conservatism had helped to maintain their quality. Most German NCOs were blocked from rising to the officer corps by its high educational requirements; an important distinction from French practice in which efficient NCOs were generally commissioned, leaving the less competent carrying stripes on their sleeves. Some long-serving soldiers resented this, especially when they were placed under young and less capable War Officers, but the practice did preserve the prestige and efficiency of the German NCO corps.14 With 362,304 NCOs deployed in the Field Army in January 1916, and heavy casualties in earlier fighting, the professionals’ influence was nonetheless reduced, if still less than in most other forces. The Habsburg army was in a far worse position. Its peacetime professional NCO corps had numbered just 18,000 men and, although the force was smaller than its ally, casualties had been far greater. Permanent losses during the first twelve months of hostilities, swollen by epidemics and frostbite, amounted to 2,738,500 soldiers, NCOs and officers.15

  The Central Powers’ rank and file had also dropped in quality. Men trained in peace had been quickly expended. Already by the end of 1914, the 1.3 million men needed by the German army for casualty replacement and for building new units nearly equalled the 1,398,000 trained reserves that had not been immediately mobilized in August. The Habsburg force was again at a disadvantage, for the low rate of conscription in peacetime meant that nearly all trained reservists had already been used to fill units on mobilization, and when these were squandered during Conrad’s botched summer campaigns in Galicia and Serbia the pre-war expertise was largely lost.16 The soldiers recruited in wartime were on average less effective than their predecessors for three reasons. First, they were often less fit. To meet urgent manpower needs, the German army had lowered its medical requirements drastically at the end of 1914, drafting even the partially disabled, mentally ill and deaf. Predictably, these proved poor soldiers, and in the spring of 1915 medical entry standards were again raised and a new gradation system dividing men as fit for front, garrison or labour service was introduced. Second, the wartime replacements were often a little too young or too old than was optimal for soldiering. The Habsburg and German armies both lowered their drafting age to eighteen in 1915. The Austro-Hungarians also raised the upper limit for military service from forty-two to fifty years old.17 The changing age composition of the forces’ combat units was reflected in fatality statistics. The contingent in their twenties who had borne the brunt of the fighting in the opening campaigns had been squeezed by 1916 between older and, especially in the Habsburg force, very young soldiers (see Fig. 2). These age groups found the physical hardship and sleep deprivation at the front difficult to endure. Psychiatrists reported that both were especially prone to collapse with hysteria, a contemporary diagnosis that covered states of extreme nervous agitation and somatic manifestations of mental anguish such as compulsive shivering, cramps, strange gaits, paralysis, deafness and loss of speech.18

  Finally, these new soldiers had passed through only brief military training. In peacetime, drafted men served for two years. In war, recruits in the German army received eight weeks of basic instruction in home camps plus another four in field recruit depots, where veterans taught them the latest lessons from the front.19 In the Habsburg army, regiments were filled with so-called Ersatzreservisten and recruits who had passed through crash courses in rudimentary soldiering of just six or eight weeks.20

  The changes in the armies’ composition, combined with the onset of material shortages and the peculiar circumstances of static warfare, brought new disciplinary and morale problems. In the German army, the relations of officers with their soldiers had generally been harmonious in the first two years of hostilities, but from early in 1916 these began to deteriorate: one critic even wrote with hyperbole of infantrymen’s ‘irreconcilable hatred’ for their officers.21 Left Liberals and Socialists interpreted the discontent as a manifestation of class: the army, with its officer corps barred to working men due to its high formal education standards, operated on an ‘obsolete military model’. This argument made little sense, however, for inter-rank animosity came about just as the army’s leadership was becoming less elite, with increasingly lower-middle-class officers replacing the socially superior and, as was universally acknowledged, popular professionals.22 The ‘Officer Hate’, as contemporaries called it, was in fact an amalgam of two different grievances. The first was growing front-line antagonism towards the staff; a phenomenon not unique to the Germans but faced by all armies embroiled in static warfare. German critics stressed that the primary targets of troops’ animosity were middle-ranking staff officers down to battalion commander, not junior officers.23 The staff who planned operations and placed troops in extreme danger lived safe beyond the range of most artillery and all small-arms fire. Combat soldiers accused them of being out of touch with battlefield conditions and resented their better pay, quarters and more generous leave allowances. Their superior rations and the preference given to them in the distribution of medals were felt to be especially unjust.24

  Figure 2. Fatalities in the Austro-Hungarian and German armies by age, 1914 and 1916 (per cent)

  Sources: Germany: R. Bessel, Germany After the First World War (Oxford, 1993),
p. 9. Austria-Hungary: Percentages have been calculated from statistics in W. Winkler, Die Totenverluste der öst.-ung. Monarchie nach Nationalitäten. Die Altersgliederung der Toten. Ausblicke in die Zukunft (Vienna, 1919), pp. 47–54.

  Nonetheless, in the German army, junior War Officers also became a second target of criticism. In part, this was a result of overly heavy demands placed on these new leaders. Many soon found themselves at the head of companies of 150 men, and not all coped with the responsibility. Ironically, given the Socialist interpretation of the army’s social shortcomings, the fact that these officers were of more modest background than the pre-war professionals may also have exacerbated the disgruntlement of troops, for the new men lacked their predecessors’ paternalistic instincts and upbringing. Yet crucially, they also worked in far more difficult circumstances. The food shortages that the German army began to suffer in the spring of 1916 were especially damaging, causing the once unquestioningly accepted privileges of officers to become objects of bitter jealousy. The army’s tardy response did little to allay the anger. Only at the end of the year were commissions comprising men of all ranks set up to ensure the fair distribution of rations. The only effective solution, an order to officers to eat with their men, was ruled out on the grounds that discipline depended on keeping the ranks separate.25