Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  The collapse of the Habsburg Fourth and Seventh Armies in the first half of June was followed by heavy fighting, panic and retreat. The entire front pulled back. The Russians pursued, but overextended supply lines and a lack of cavalry hindered their pursuit. Brusilov turned against the German Army of the Bug on his right flank, though neither his attacks, nor a much larger offensive 260 kilometres to the north near Baranovitchi by massive Tsarist forces under General Everth at the start of July, were successful. The pressure on the defence nonetheless did not ease. Habsburg troops found the Russian soldier, contrary to his image as a stolid peasant, to be an imaginative adversary in the fluid fighting further south. One ambush on a Habsburg cavalry squadron, for example, was carried out by 300 Russians who approached at night by ringing cow bells, a deception that really could only have worked on the Eastern Front. When the sun rose, the ‘cows’ gave a ‘wild roar’ and attacked from three sides. Half the Austrians ran, the rest were taken prisoner or killed.92 Conrad, who had first dismissed the offensive as no real threat, panicked and absurdly tried to evacuate his wife, Gina, from the distant Teschen headquarters. More rationally, he also swallowed his pride and on 8 June travelled to Berlin to beg an unimpressed Falkenhayn for reinforcements. Falkenhayn initially dispatched four divisions, the first on 6 June, but he made Conrad close down his offensive in Italy to free up strength for the Eastern Front. By 20 June ten and a half divisions had been sent to help stem the break-in. However, these troops could only prevent total collapse, not reverse the situation. They arrived gradually and were fed into the battle piecemeal. Moreover, casualties in the demoralized Habsburg army continued to mount. By the end of June, the force had lost 6,740 officers and 319,500 men, of whom 186,850 were ‘missing’. A month later, total losses had reached 475,138, of whom 265,931 were missing or captured.93

  Austro-Hungarian soldiers were not alone in their despair. Habsburg civilians in the battle zone were also terrified by the Tsarist army’s advance. In Galicia, Russian gains were modest, for the line advanced only 20 or 30 kilometres. In neighbouring Bukovina, into which the broken remnants of Seventh Army flooded in mid-June, the consequences were more serious. Dr Alfons Regius, a court official in the Crownland’s capital, Czernowitz (today Chernivtsi in south-western Ukraine), who had lived through the Russian occupation of 1914–15, spoke for many when, already on 6 June, he declared himself ‘VERY worried’. He had learned to read between the lines of official dispatches and found the telegram reporting the battle ‘so ambiguously framed that one could assume we had taken back our line along the entire front around five to six kilometres up to the Styr’. In the following days, anxious silence in the streets of Czernowitz was replaced first by the clatter of people rushing to leave and then by the crash of shellfire, as Habsburg batteries took up position in the city. On 17 June, Regius was able to watch through opera glasses Russian infantry storming forwards outside the city. At this point, the inevitability of a renewed occupation became obvious: ‘I felt as if a cold hand grasped my heart,’ he wrote, ‘and the realization dawned on me that our poor soldiers, already partly rendered hors de combat by the artillery fire’s destructiveness would not WITHOUT machine guns be able to repel this enemy flooding onwards in dispersed masses.’ There was not long to wait. That night, at quarter to two, four drunken Russian soldiers armed with rifles and bayonets kicked down his door and looted the house. In spite of this beginning, the Tsarist army behaved more humanely than during its previous sojourn. The atrocities perpetrated in 1914 and 1915, above all against the Jewish population, were not repeated. The occupation was long, however: Czernowitz was finally liberated on 3 August 1917. Its loss was yet another blow to the sinking prestige of the Habsburg Monarchy.94

  THE SOMME

  The Central Powers’ acute crisis in the summer of 1916 started in the east but spread to other fronts as the western Entente implemented its plan for simultaneous offensives. The idea of launching an attack on the Somme River in north-western France had first been raised by the French in December 1915, and in the early months of 1916 generals Haig and Joffre had agreed on the region as the site of a combined Anglo-French offensive. Initially, the area was earmarked as the location for a mid-April preparatory assault to wear down German reserves. By mid-February, this idea had been abandoned in favour of a much larger operation with twenty-five British and no fewer than forty French divisions operating north and south of the river. The jump-off date was set for 1 July. However, soon after this decision, Falkenhayn opened his attritional battle at Verdun and Joffre’s army lost so heavily that he was compelled to reduce its contribution to the Entente’s offensive.95 In consequence, the Somme became a British-led campaign. In the context of the concurrent Russian victories over Habsburg forces in the east, the French army’s successful though costly defence of Verdun, and in August the opening of an Italian offensive and the entry of Romania into the war on the Allied side, an Anglo-French victory on the Somme offered a chance to deal a death blow to the now vastly outnumbered and overstrained Central Powers.

  The Somme offensive’s failure to meet its potential was to a great degree the fault of the British Expeditionary Force’s commander, General Sir Douglas Haig. The first plan of attack was drawn up by General Sir Henry Rawlinson, the officer Haig appointed to command the Fourth Army, the formation that would conduct the offensive, and the plan was admirably realistic in setting limited objectives. By preparing smaller attacks during 1915, Rawlinson had gained insight into operational dynamics on the Western Front. After the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in March, he had recognized ‘that it is always possible by careful preparation and adequate Art[iller]y support by heavy Howitzers to pierce the enemy’s line’, providing also that field guns could cut the enemy wire. At Neuve Chapelle he had deployed one gun for every six yards of enemy trench and won an initial success. Experiments in later battles with weaker artillery support had failed.96 His plan for the Somme drew on this lesson, for the offensive’s scale and objectives were calibrated according to the guns and men available. The Fourth Army’s ten divisions and 200 howitzers were reckoned to be sufficient for a 20,000-yard (18-kilometre) front. Rawlinson’s preferred option was a two-stage advance. After a bombardment of between fifty and sixty hours, troops would initially capture only the Germans’ forward position and key tactical points. Thinking in somewhat similar terms to Falkenhayn, Rawlinson conceived this ‘bite and hold’ method as a means ‘to kill as many Germans as possible with the least loss to ourselves’.97

  Haig was shown the plan at the beginning of April and immediately extended the offensive’s objectives. In so doing, he disregarded not only Rawlinson’s advice but also the views of all of his corps commanders. The commander-in-chief insisted in his response to the draft that Fourth Army should capture the entire German second line above Pozières, in the north of the battlefield, in a single bound, and also push further in the south. He doubled the average advance of around 2,500 yards (2 kilometres) envisaged by Rawlinson. Later, Haig’s imagination swelled further. He spoke of distant objectives; Douai, 110 kilometres ahead of Fourth Army, was mentioned. By June, the attack’s aim had become ‘to break the enemy’s defensive system’.98 Although his later self-exculpatory talk of the offensive as a ‘wearing-out battle’ disguised it, the British commander was seeking a decisive breakthrough. Yet to sweep into open territory, it was first necessary to break into German lines, and by pushing back the objectives, Haig was ignoring the key lesson of 1915, that defences must be saturated with high explosive. The number of heavy guns and amount of ammunition available were simply inadequate to bombard thoroughly the territory Haig wished to conquer. By one calculation, under his modified plan each 10 square yards of German line would receive just a single pound of high explosive from the offensive’s preparatory bombardment.99

  However, any claim about the inadequacy of the British army’s resources in 1916 can be made only in the context of its commander’s surfeit of ambition. The well-established portr
ayal of the British and their ally as underdogs on the Somme, a narrative of victimhood that still crops up in history books today, has little basis in fact. A glance at the figures for opposing forces at the start of the offensive illustrates in just how much trouble German defenders were on the 40-kilometre Anglo-French front (see Table 6).

  The material superiority available to the Entente should have been overwhelming. That it was not is often attributed to two causes, beyond the flawed plan. The first was the German defences. General Fritz von Below’s Second Army had spent twenty-one months fortifying the area on either side of the Somme River. By the end of June 1916, it had two defensive positions plus a third that had only been sketched out, but not actually built. The first line was formidable. Before it were two belts of barbed wire, each between 4.5 and 9 metres wide. Defended villages, Beaumont Hamel, Thiepval, Ovillers, La Boiselle and Fricourt, all with solid stone houses, had been built into the fortifications and wired. In the trenches, the chalky soil of the region had permitted the excavation of shelters to a depth of 12 metres. These were often connected, with multiple exits, in order to prevent soldiers from becoming trapped. They were equipped with beds, stoves and kitchens. Stocks of boots, socks, shirts and rations were kept in some large shelters for the garrisons. Some had rails fitted to their staircases, up which a heavy machine gun could be hauled in an emergency.100 The second line, which ran 2–3.5 kilometres behind the first, was weaker, had fewer dugouts, but still featured intimidating strongpoints capable of all-round defence.101

  Table 6. The strength of opposing forces on the Somme, 1 July 1916

  Source: H. H. Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914–1918 (London, 1997), p. 199.

  These positions were well built but not impregnable. Mistakes had been made. Most seriously, when the front had been chosen in 1914, tactical thinking had not yet recognized the value of reverse slopes. The Germans’ front line was positioned in full view of the enemy on forward slopes, giving an excellent field of fire over no-man’s-land but making these trenches easy to shell accurately. Rawlinson had been heartened when he had first visited the sector in February 1916. It was, he had commented, ‘capital country in which to undertake an offensive . . . for the observation is excellent and with plenty of guns and ammunition we ought to be able to avoid the heavy losses which the infantry have always suffered on previous occasions’.102 However, the Germans’ second line lay hidden from view behind the hills, which reinforced the argument for a step-by-step assault. On the south of the attack front, the French General Marie-Émile Fayolle leading the Republic’s Sixth Army in support of the British, adopted just such a systematic approach. The first line was his primary objective, but preparations were made to bring the artillery forward rapidly to completed emplacements for a speedy assault on the second line while defenders were still disorientated. The British, although less well supported by heavy guns than their allies further south, were prompted by Haig, in turn under pressure from Joffre to try for a deep penetration, to overreach themselves. Had the planning been more realistic and the advance limited but systematic as in the south, the German front defences should have imposed no insuperable obstacle.103

  The second factor often cited to explain the disappointing results of the Entente’s initial assault was the British Expeditionary Force’s inexperience. To a far greater degree than either the French or German armies, this was a scratch-built wartime army, for Britain had no peacetime conscription. In just two years the British military had expanded from a 247,432-strong professional force backed by 245,779 part-time Territorials to a mass army of 1.25 million soldiers.104 Although the army’s senior ranks are generally now remembered with least sympathy, these large numbers confronted them with a daunting prospect. In 1916 the five British armies on the Western Front, each fielding hundreds of thousands of soldiers, were led by men who in 1914 had directed divisions of 20,000. Corps commanders with 40,000 men had headed brigades of just 4,000. Learning how to manage such large numbers of men while simultaneously coming to grips with the unexpected and difficult conditions of modern static war was an immense challenge. The fact that all corps commanders supported Rawlinson’s initial plan for limited objectives testifies to a realistic awareness of their limitations. Yet this did not equate with a lack of imagination or ambition. Considerable innovation was ongoing at all levels of the army’s command. The care with which British battalion commanders selected their tactics for the attack on the Somme on 1 July 1916, and the diversity of methods chosen, offer a good illustration. Stories of overladen men walking slowly towards German trenches, only to be mowed down by machine-gun fire, are largely the stuff of legend. Fifty-three of eighty battalions in the first assault crept into no-man’s-land in order to rush enemy positions, and another ten stormed forward from their own parapet. Among the twelve battalions that marched slowly, several did so because they were following creeping barrages intended to keep defenders’ heads down, and they proved highly successful.105

  The focus of most accounts of the Somme has always been on the British infantry. The fact that the men were nearly all wartime volunteers, the sentimental association of their units’ names with the English shires or Scottish Highlands, and the charming naivety of the titles of ‘Pals Battalions’ like The Post Office Rifles, North Eastern Railway Pioneers or Grimsby Chums, have inspired accounts filled with pathos. Landmark works have long portrayed them as ‘uniformed innocents’ entering battle against a well-entrenched, battle-hardened opponent.106 Yet this is hyperbole dressed up as fact. The Britons who attacked that summer on the Somme were, as one of them later reminisced, ‘very different from the greenhorns who had landed in France a year earlier’.107 The men had already completed more than nine months of home training and then had spent at least six months, and more often nine or twelve, hardening and learning field craft on the Western Front. Their units had conducted raids and taken casualties. By May 1916 their opponents were observing with surprise how adept the British infantry, mortars, machine guns, artillery and aerial reconnaissance had become at combined operations.108 In fact, if anybody on the Somme battlefield is overdue to be treated with a little pathos it is not the attackers, with their threefold artillery superiority, total control of the air and copious reserves of manpower, but rather the German defenders opposite. The men who met the British attack on 1 July were mostly from the south of the country, and as likely to curse in sing-song accents ‘the damned Prussians’ as ‘Tommy’ or the ‘Franzmann’. By no stretch of the imagination can they be described as professional. Many were wartime-trained soldiers like their opponents, and their units were mostly reserve regiments, which from mobilization at the outbreak of war had only ever had a smattering of career officers. They were the sorts of soldiers who defined the German army of the middle war years, grumbling about the rations, praying to God to protect them just that little bit longer, and yearning for Maria, Ursel or Greta. It was their bad fortune to be in the path of a juggernaut determined, as they saw it, to carry the devastation around them into their homeland.109

  Signs of a brewing military storm had been mounting on the Somme front for months. From April, the Württembergers of 26 Reserve Division in the north of the sector had heard at night snatches of the rumble of traffic and supplies being unloaded behind British lines. Enemy aerial activity had suspiciously increased. In the middle of June the aeroplanes became even busier, constantly circling overhead, and the Württembergers’ patrols stumbled across so-called Russian saps, like the ones Brusilov’s soldiers had dug, stretching from British lines 90 metres into no-man’s-land. The first day of the Somme battle, 24 June 1916, was heralded at 5 a.m. by shellfire peppering along the line. In the following hours, 3,000 heavy and field guns and more than 1,400 mortars began to bombard the whole 40-kilometre attack front. Among the intended victims of this attack, there was at first some wishful thinking. Lieutenant Adolf Spemann, for example, the adjutant of the II Section, Württemberg Reserve Field Artillery
27, stationed north of the village of Ovillers, initially hoped that it was no more than a demonstration. The shelling was continuous but appeared uncoordinated. However, once it increased in intensity that afternoon, with 900 shells dropping over his sector in a single hour, he accepted ‘that in fact it will be something big’.110

  No one on the German side of the lines quite foresaw just how ‘big’. The Entente had planned a bombardment of six days, but poor weather on 26 and 27 June meant that it was extended to a full week, in which 2.5 million shells were fired into the defenders’ positions. Gas was also released at irregular intervals, day and night. The bombardment was most intense and effective in the French Sixth Army’s sector south of the Somme River. In the British Fourth Army’s area of attack, especially in the north, its results were generally more disappointing. There were a number of reasons for the difference. First, the three French corps were simply better supported. They had nearly 100 more heavy guns than the five British corps on their right. Second, their ammunition worked much better. German experts praised French shells’ sensitive fuses, which triggered the explosive before the projectile could bury itself too deep in the ground and muffle the blast. By contrast, three-quarters of the shells fired by British artillery were of shoddy North American manufacture. According to German observations made just before the battle, three-fifths of British medium calibre and nearly all shrapnel shells did not explode. This high proportion of duds exacerbated the problem, built into the offensive’s planning, that insufficient guns and ammunition were available to cover all targets in Haig’s extended area of attack. The British could devote only 180 guns for crucial counter-battery work. Their 188,500 heavy shells, the only projectiles capable of caving in deep German shelters, were too few. Moreover, around two-thirds of available munitions were not fired at the enemy trenches at all but were needed to clear the thick wire belts in front of them.111