Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  Figure 4. Battle casualties sustained by German First and Second Armies on the Somme, ten-day periods from June to November 1916

  Source: Heeres-Sanitätsinspektion des Reichskriegsministeriums (ed.), Sanitätsbericht über das Deutsche Heer (Deutsches Feld- und Besatzungsheer) im Weltkriege 1914/1918 (Deutscher Kriegssanitätsbericht 1914/18). Die Krankenbewegung bei dem deutschen Feld- und Besatzungsheer im Weltkriege 1914/1918 (3 vols., Berlin, 1934), iii, pp. 52–3.

  The Entente thus certainly inflicted grievous losses on the 103 German divisions that fought in the battle, but it failed to deal a death blow to the German army. This continued to rise in strength: in June 1917 at its peak, it had three-quarters of a million men more than a year earlier, at the start of the Franco-British attack.142 The impression that the Entente failed in what was supposed to be its year of attrition in 1916 is borne out by casualty statistics. Despite the vast numerical and material superiority of its enemies, and the fact that at least notionally they were following a deliberate attritional strategy, the German army’s 1,393,000 killed, wounded, missing and prisoners (336,000 of them dead) in 1916 were 311,000 fewer than its casualties in 1915.143 Even if reframed in retrospect as an attritional battle, the Somme battle was clearly badly managed. The first ten days of July 1916, justly remembered as a catastrophe for the British, were also the period of greatest loss to the Germans (see Fig. 4). Never again in the course of the battle did the attackers inflict such casualties on their enemy. If placed in proportion to overall strength, only once, at the opening of September, were casualty rates heavier. Fierce British and French attacks launched on 3 and 4 September eliminated 13 per cent of the First and Second Army’s strength, in contrast to around 10 per cent in the first ten days of July or between 6 and 8 per cent in a normal week and a half of disjointed small-scale attacks on the Somme.144

  The Somme battle’s most damaging impact on the German army was in fact not material but psychological. An early sign that this battle was different from previous clashes, more intense and awful, was the sudden tripling of psychiatric casualties among troops stationed opposite the British in July 1916 (see Fig. 3). The combat may have been less bloody than more mobile fighting but it was far more stressful. As Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, a thoughtful soldier who from 28 August led the Army Group overseeing the Somme battle, discovered, ‘the effect of overwhelming enemy artillery fire, existing in the shell holes, not enough rations, the stench of corpses, and all the other difficulties of a lengthy battle quickly consume the nerves of leaders and men’.145 The unpredictability of death by shellfire and the helplessness felt by soldiers under the battle’s extraordinarily heavy bombardments were deeply disturbing. Some lost their religion: belief in the guiding hand of a loving God could be simply too difficult in this suffering and chaos. Field chaplains reported that attendance at services had dropped.146 By the autumn, the strain had begun to damage some units’ combat performance. General Gallwitz recorded in mid-September that more men were reporting sick, and desertion and self-inflicted wounding were on the increase.147 Rumours circulated of Rhinelanders, men whom the army worried about due to their proletarian background and often strong Socialist sympathies, fragging their officers.148 More substantively, the ratio of captured and missing to killed increased as the Somme dragged on, an indication that troops were becoming more inclined to surrender. By October on the Somme and also at Verdun where the French recaptured the fortresses of Douaumont and Vaux, panicked German units were reported to have fled wholesale or capitulated.149

  The Entente missed an opportunity on the Somme in 1916. An initial break-in all along a 40-kilometre front was not only in the bounds of possibility but, even if shallow, would have been extremely difficult to seal for an army already heavily committed at Verdun and forced to shore up its ally on the other side of Europe. The subsequent British failure to concentrate force and, with only a few exceptions, plan large, systematic assaults, wasted an unprecedented material superiority and permitted the Germans to transfer strength elsewhere. The offensive’s success as an attritional battle has been vastly overstated. Although it became famous as a Materialschlacht – a battle of material – its main impact was psychological. The horrendous combat conditions and the obviously great material inferiority of their own side shook German troops. Gallwitz maintained that the majority of soldiers continued to recognize the ‘necessity of holding out’.150 The duty to defend hearth and home remained strong: ‘In der Heimat, In der Heimat’ – ‘At home, at home, / We’ll see each other again’ – was sung by men coming out of combat on the Somme.151 Nonetheless, not just the generals but their soldiers too now knew how powerful their enemies were and how close they had come to being overwhelmed. For the first time, there was doubt about whether Germany would win this war.

  OUTCOMES

  All fronts were calm by December 1916. The Entente had little to show for all its planning and exertions. The British on the Somme had finally taken Beaumont Hamel, an objective laid down for the offensive’s first day, in November. The French had recaptured most of the land lost in the first half of the year at Verdun. The Italians had achieved somewhat more, taking the prestige objectives of Gorizia and Monte San Michele in their August offensive. However, they had then exhausted their troops in three poorly prepared and executed battles of the Isonzo (the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth). Brusilov’s offensive had, after a period of attritional warfare, ground to a halt in November. Much more significant than these ‘bloody victories’ was the Central Powers’ occupation of most of Romania after a rapid campaign that ended with the capture of Bucharest at the start of December.152

  Nonetheless, belying the modest changes to Europe’s map, the fighting of 1916 had a profound effect on both Central Powers. Austria-Hungary’s year had been especially disastrous. The Brusilov offensive not only cost the Habsburg army nearly 500,000 casualties but also had a much wider impact on the Empire. The territory overrun by the Russians was valuable. The loss of Czernowitz was a major blow to prestige and the surrender of the Jakobeny mine in Bukovina, the Empire’s main source of manganese, had serious implications for its war effort. Although Bosnian mines could partially compensate, the loss forced Austria-Hungary to lower the percentage of manganese in its steel.153 Even more significant, in appealing for help to fight off Russian attack, Habsburg leaders suborned their empire to Germany, relinquishing military and much foreign policy independence. On 6 September a ‘United Supreme Command’ in the east was organized under Wilhelm II, after at the end of July most of the Eastern Front had already been placed under German command. German power was cemented by changes further down the Habsburg military hierarchy. Key Habsburg command positions were taken by German generals, and German officers were even inserted as battalion or company commanders into Habsburg units, while their opposite numbers were transferred to German formations to learn the art of war. The Central Powers’ alliance was tightened through these measures, but with Austria-Hungary now bound in explicitly as the junior partner.154

  In Germany, the crises of 1916 precipitated a change of army command. Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, the hero of Tannenberg, was appointed on 29 August 1916 to Chief of the General Staff, with Erich Ludendorff as his First Quartermaster General. Falkenhayn’s star had waned with the failure of his Verdun strategy, his relations with the Chancellor were bad, and the Kaiser lost confidence in him once Romania declared war. The new army commanders, the Third OHL, worked from the basis, as Ludendorff later put it, that ‘men, war material and moral resolution were matters of life and death to the Army’.155 Steps were immediately taken to conserve manpower. A methodical system of fortnightly rotation was introduced on the Somme to spare troops. The orders not to relinquish territory were condemned as needlessly wasteful of men’s lives and rescinded. A flexible ‘elastic’ defence was instead ordered.156 Later, more radical measures were introduced. At the end of the Somme battle, Hindenburg and Ludendorff settled on a strategic withdrawal. In the rear of the bat
tlefield 65,000 labourers, many of them unwilling French and Belgian civilians or prisoners of war, were set to work constructing the immensely strong Siegfried Line. The German front was strengthened and shortened by 50 kilometres, releasing ten divisions. Drawing inspiration from the destruction they had seen during the Russian Great Retreat of 1915 but adding German system and planning, the new commanders ordered a methodical devastation, codenamed Operation Alberich, of the land relinquished. When four German armies withdrew 20–40 kilometres to their new positions in conditions of highest secrecy in mid-March 1917, they left behind 1,500 square kilometres of depopulated wasteland.157

  The Third OHL brought a new radicalism and ruthlessness to how Germany waged war. Society was to be remobilized for the army. Hindenburg and Ludendorff recognized the urgent need for new weapons and war machines from the home front; the Somme had demonstrated just how far the Reich lagged behind. Yet the prime lesson that the new German High Command drew from the fighting was that although materiel was important, human factors, the skill and motivation of soldiers, trumped it. ‘In this war,’ observed one army analysis of the Somme battle, ‘which technology and numbers appear to dominate, the strength of will of the individual personality is in fact decisive.’158 Small groups of soldiers, protected only by shell holes and their own wits in the later stages of the campaign, had successfully fought to a standstill the British and French armies. The Somme provided both wide experience of a new type of fighting, previously associated with the elite storm troops, and the spur to institutionalize its methods across the army. Under Hindenburg and Ludendorff, the German military embraced ‘elastic defence’, reformed its command structure, delegated authority downward and replaced the 200-strong company with eight-man squads as its basic tactical unit. In training, teamwork, initiative and independence were its watchwords: ‘soldiers in the ranks with nerves as hard as steel’ were, manuals explained, now ‘the main bearer of the fight’. Here lay the paradox of the Somme: the German army bled heavily and was deeply shaken in the battle. The force that emerged was more brittle, as a jump in indiscipline and desertions revealed the following year. Yet through the ordeal, it adapted and underwent tactical revolution. The Entente in 1917 would find it a more flexible, skilled and dangerous opponent.159

  8

  Deprivation

  SUFFERING AND SHORTAGE

  For central European civilians, no less than for their soldiers, the year 1916 was grim. Home and front were intimately connected and the impact of the bloody struggles in east and west inevitably reverberated well beyond the battlefield. With seven million German and almost five million Austro-Hungarian men in garrisons or at the front, nearly every family had somebody to fret about. As casualties mounted – the total military dead of Germany and Austria-Hungary since the start of the war each exceeded one million during the course of 1916 – so too did the mourners in the homeland.1 Moreover, these societies were not only desperately sad, anxious and stressed, but they were also becoming ever more exhausted and impoverished. The channelling of resources to the military, the ever tightening Entente blockade, soil exhaustion and bureaucratic bungling brought terrible hardship. Above all, the home front’s year was defined by food shortage.

  People living in German and Austro-Hungarian towns, and above all in the major metropolises, faced a miserable struggle to find food from the war’s middle years. Anna Kohnstern’s letters to her soldier-son Albert offer a window into the troubles that she and other citizens of Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city, endured. In March 1916 she told him how queues of 600 or 800 people formed outside shops whenever consignments of butter were delivered. Her April letters made clear that the home front was becoming a consumer battlefield: in a scramble to buy meat, she recounted, two women had been killed and sixteen hospitalized. Both butter and meat had been scarce and expensive for much of the previous year. What made 1916 worse was that grain from the last harvest had been consumed already before the year began and potatoes started to run out in the spring. The family lost weight; Anna especially, as she continually skimmed off part of her inadequate ration so as to send extra food to her son in the field. The summer brought Hamburg’s first major hunger riots, in which thousands of working-class women and youths shouted for bread, looted bakeries and fought police. When a cold, wet autumn created the conditions for a fungus to destroy half of the annual potato crop, a terribly difficult winter, the worst in nutritional terms that Germany experienced during the war, was unavoidable. As Anna told Albert despairingly in November, ‘shopping for food is becoming ever worse. One is underway the entire day and still gets nothing.’ She and her five daughters closed off most of their lodgings and huddled in one room in order to save on heating fuel, which was also scarce and expensive. Like other families across central Europe, the Kohnsterns subsisted that winter on turnips, cattle fodder which the state had forced farmers to surrender. Anna’s letters became openly desperate. ‘It isn’t going to be possible to get through winter,’ she wrote on the first day of December, with the worst of the ordeal still before her. ‘It is highest time that the war was ended.’2

  Millions in towns and cities across Germany and Austria-Hungary shared the Kohnsterns’ plight. The search for scarce essentials such as soap, fuel, clothing and, above all, food increasingly dominated civilians’ lives. The Berliner Tageblatt reported as early as May 1916 on how cityscapes had altered as shopping, once so simple, had now become a cut-throat competition with one’s neighbours:

  Whoever in these cool spring nights is willing to take a walk through the streets of the city will, already before midnight, see figures loaded up with all sorts of household equipment creeping here and there in front of the market halls, at times also in front of the various warehouses and grocery stores. At first there are only a few but with the chime of midnight the groups swell to crowds. Women form the majority. At first, they huddle on the steps of the surrounding shops and on iron park railings. Soon however one of them comes and puts down a straw sack next to the entrance, on which she makes herself comfortable. That is the signal for a general movement. Behind the lucky owner of the straw sack, a second woman sets up a deckchair. Close next to her a less demanding lady takes up position on a simple wickerwork chair, which she has brought – God knows how far – from her apartment . . . Between and behind the lucky ones line up in ever extending rows with five to eight people next to each other women, in modest numbers also men, and indeed even children. Through the rows spreads a lively chatter.

  In time, the conversations cease. The woman with the straw sack lies down for a short nap. The woman with the deckchair follows her example. The others stand there apathetically, some sleep standing and the moonlight makes their pale faces appear even sallower. Police appear and walk up and down morosely.

  The morning dawns. New crowds arrive . . . At last the selling begins. And the result: to each a pitiful half or, if one has especial luck, a whole pound of meat, lard or butter for half of the buyers, while the others must leave with nothing.3

  Berliners were not alone in dancing the ‘Polonaise’ – the wartime slang for queuing because one stood in line and shivered. The same dance of deprivation played out day and night in cities across central Europe. The Viennese suffered more than most. In the spring of 1917, a quarter of a million people, approximately 12 per cent of the city’s population, daily stood in one of almost 800 queues around the city. More than one-fifth of these shoppers departed empty-handed, their strength wasted. In some working-class districts, lines formed outside bakeries already shortly after 10 p.m. Anyone who arrived after 3 a.m. was unlikely to get to the front before the flour on sale was exhausted.4

  The successful shopper needed not only to know where the next irregular food delivery would arrive and come early enough to reach the front of the queue before the limited supplies gave out. She (for those queuing were largely female, as so many men were in either the army or war industry and therefore had access to separate food provision) also ha
d to be able to afford the goods. Although official controls kept down the price of some staple products, this nonetheless proved a challenge due to rapid inflation. Food prices in Germany’s cities were already one and a half times their peacetime level at the end of 1915. The new shortages prompted a sudden spurt of further inflation, bringing prices in the spring of 1916 to double the pre-war level, where they remained for the rest of the year. In Austria, which lacked the financial means to sustain a great war, inflation spiralled: the cost of living was two and a half times its pre-war level already by the end of 1915, and it was over six times greater by December 1916.5 Earnings increased too, but failed to keep up with the rapidly rising costs. In Germany, the real wages of most male and female manual workers were worth 75 per cent of their peacetime value by March, and only around 60 per cent by September 1916. Even in war industries like munitions, metal-production, chemicals and electrics, where pay was much better than the average, workers’ real wages fell by 8 per cent for women and over 20 per cent for men.6 Workers in Austria fared worse, not only due to higher price inflation but also because they were subject to more compulsion than the proletariat in wartime Germany. Austrian factories producing for the army operated under the ‘War Performance Law’ (Kriegsleistungsgesetz) of 1912, which suspended employees’ rights to resign or collectively protest. So in the metals industry, which in the Reich offered some of the highest and most durable wages, all but the most skilled Austrian workers saw their real earnings drop below half of the pre-war levels already by March 1916. In Bohemia, the Empire’s core industrial region, workers’ real wages would by 1918 be just 35 per cent of their pre-war value.7

  White-collar workers were in even greater trouble. German salaries had been cut during the war’s first eighteen months. Subsequently, office workers accrued rises and more allowances, yet at the end of 1917 their nominal earnings were only 18 per cent higher than at the outbreak of hostilities, whereas manual workers in factories not producing for the war had been given rises of 40 per cent, and many of those in war industries had increased their takings by 100 per cent. Civil servants were no more protected than desk-bound administrators in private businesses; by 1917 their salaries had lost around half of their value. Many white-collar employees now earned less than munitions workers, a change experienced as a deep humiliation.8 In Austria too, bureaucrats watched their salaries inflated away. Their discontent was especially threatening, for the administration was the loyal, nationally indifferent ‘glue’ that held together the Habsburg Empire.9 The bourgeoisie reliant on a fixed income such as a pension, or who lived off savings, also suffered severe hardship both in Vienna and in the Empire’s peripheries. Aleksandra Czechówna, by no means one of Cracow’s worst-off citizens, rued in September 1916 what she called ‘expensive money’ and regretted having ‘to do without many things to which one was accustomed’ and even ‘now and then to starve’.10