by John Mosier
The notion that the Allies were winning the war of attrition decisively therefore became the key piece of evidence the armies of both nations had to argue their case, was why they were so dead set against these wild expeditions and problematic alliances. All Paris and London had to do was to give them the resources they needed, and the war would soon come to an end—as opposed to Salonika and Greece, which between them tied up nearly 600,000 troops—a force of about the same size as von Hindenburg’s entire command on the eastern front at the time—a fact either passed over in silence by historians or blandly dismissed.
So on the one hand, this was the evidence the army commands used to counter the criticisms of the government, and the civilians—especially in London—had no choice but to believe it.
Two militarily sound conclusions could be drawn from the Allied advantage in the casualty exchange ratio, and those ideas formed the basis of Allied military strategy as it emerged in the December 1915 conferences, where the British and the French commanders planned their next move.
The first was that the Germans were on the ropes. By fall 1915 they simply lacked the manpower to pose much of a threat. In addition to what the GQG claimed were very precise estimates of heavy German losses, there were numerous other factors that supported their conclusions. The three most important are worth explaining in detail, so the reader will understand how solid the evidence appeared to be.
Already, in spring 1915, the German manpower shortage was such that they could no longer support the traditional two-brigade divisions. They had been forced to downsize their divisions, which now only had three regiments of infantry as opposed to four. Whereas at the start of the war they had used divisions and brigades, increasingly they were able only to shift regiments or even battalions.
This was how the experts explained away the observation that it appeared that the Germans had more divisions than before. At first, the Allies had claimed that what was going on was simply sleight of hand: that the German high command was shuttling divisions between the two fronts—that, in fact, one reason their initial offensive had failed was owing to that.
Like many beliefs about the war, this one was untrue, and on two different levels. When the war began, the Germans had 97 divisions on the Western Front, and 26 in the east, for a total of 123 divisions.10 It is true that divisions were shifted to the east, and that the victorious von Hindenburg was presiding over a growing force: by December 1915, there were 46 divisions in the east. But there were now 125 in the west, for a total of 172 divisions.
But this was all explained away by the argument that the divisions were actually much smaller, that the whole thing was smoke and mirrors—a convenient assumption, but since the French high command controlled most of the front, and hence almost all the solid intelligence, no one had access to information sufficient to point out the fallacy.
Increasingly the French were finding positions held by various categories of reservists, a clear indication that their opponents were running low on manpower. Both in the Woëvre and in the Vosges, key positions such as Les Éparges and the Hartmannswillerkopf were held almost entirely by Landwehr. Germany simply lacked the regular troops to hold its defensive positions on the front.
In fact, the only way that the Germans were able to manage this three-front war was by shuttling troops from one threatened area to another. Here is how Joffre justified the failed offensive in Champagne-Artois. First, he linked what was going on in France with what was happening on the Russian front. In May 1915, von Falkenhayn put together a joint Austro-German offensive that sent the Russians reeling, and forced them to retreat all the way back to their prewar frontier. So Champagne-Artois was necessary in order to “afford moral and material aid to our Russian Allies,” since in order to mount that offensive, the Germans had reduced their forces in the west: The Allies now had 1,384 French, 330 Belgian, and 80 British battalions, and the Germans had only 1,113.11
Joffre used the same excuse to justify the September offensives in the same area, noting that in August 1915, “Three more divisions were withdrawn from the French front and moved to Eastern Theatre” (Memoirs, 357).
It would be hard to find a better example of how wildly off the French estimates were. In March 1915, there were 101 German divisions on the Western Front, and 56 in Russia. In May, the month Joffre first referenced, there were 64 divisions in the east; true enough, so there were eight additional divisions in the east, all of them sent there presumably for the May offensive.
So Joffre was correct in arguing that the number of troops in the east had increased owing to the offensive. His error—which was continuous all through the war—was to assume that this increase was achieved only by shuffling and reorganizing. Yes, there were now eight more divisions in the east. But there were now five more divisions in the west, so instead of 101 divisions, the Germans now deployed 106.
True, the movement of German troops during the war was complicated. During this one three-month period in 1915, eight divisions were shifted out of the Western Front, while 20 were deployed in the east. But 21 divisions replaced the 20 that had been withdrawn. Joffre’s intelligence department was simply seeing what it wanted to see, ignoring, or failing to understand, any evidence to the contrary.
Now, probably, had someone like Abel Ferry or General Fayolle had access to all this data, and questioned the generalissimo as to the soundness of his conclusions, his answer would have been (if pressed) that the Germans were simply engaging in a sleight of hand. They had more divisions because the divisions were smaller: Instead of four infantry regiments, they only had three.
In retrospect, the mistake is glaringly obvious: Instead of measuring firepower, Allied intelligence was counting manpower, riflemen instead of machine gunners, just like they were still counting field guns instead of howitzers and mortars. So one mistake reinforced the other.
J. F. C. Fuller, one of the great military theorists of the century, would later note the overwhelming importance of modern firepower on the battlefield, expressing it as an axiom, that “in all wars, and especially in modern wars—in which weapons change rapidly—no army of fifty years before any date selected would stand a ‘dog’s chance’ against an army existing at that date.”12
Although the heavy French artillery of 1915 was not—technically, anyway—fifty years old, as it mostly dates from 1878, the comparison is not all that far off. Allied intelligence persisted in counting apples and claiming they were acorns, in confusing manpower with firepower, and in discounting entirely the efficacy of the technical innovations that marked the German arsenal.13
Finally—and the GQG regarded this proof as conclusive—there had been no major offensive operations on the Western Front at all in 1915. Why? Because the Germans were grossly outnumbered, simply lacked the manpower required. All they could do was hang on. The evidence was overwhelming. The civilians in the government had no choice but to agree, however grudgingly.
So the civilians in Paris simply accepted the figures they were given for casualties on both sides. Indeed, they had no choice, since the GQG controlled the sources of information.
In consequence, by the end of 1915 the idea that the Allies were decisively winning the casualty exchange, that the Germans were running out of men, was firmly embedded in the Allied consciousness, had reached the level of a fundamental assumption not to be challenged.
There were, of course, German casualty figures that were surfacing in the German newspapers (and in the Reichstag), but when they were occasionally mentioned, it was only to be dismissed out of hand: “like to be exaggerated” was the blandly dismissive wording of the Times.14
Indeed, by the end of 1915, anti-German propaganda was such that the most preposterous stories were routinely believed. Indeed, the Allied propaganda was so successful that many of the fabrications have duly entered the historical record and are accepted as fact. There was no limit to the perfidious behavior of
the barbarous Huns, led by their reckless warlord, Kaiser Wilhelm. Lying was the least of their crimes, and certainly no one would believe anything that came out of Berlin, not even the supposedly neutral Americans.15
At the same time, the government in Paris was being given some extremely misleading data about their own losses. On 4 February 1915, Alexandre Millerand, the new minister of war, gave the secret war council a brief report on French losses to date. The army admitted it had recorded 151,900 dead, 217,500 missing, and 368,500 wounded.16
Abel Ferry, who recorded the figures from the report data in his secret diary, accompanies it with a dry comment: “After the war, it will be interesting to verify the accuracy of these figures” (248). And indeed it is, but in 1915 the GQG controlled all the information coming out of the war. The skeptics, few in number, had nothing on which to base their arguments.
At the same time, the army was able to claim that it was getting steadily stronger. It had twice as many machine guns in service as it had at the start of the war: 11,000 as opposed to 5,000.17 The increase in heavy artillery was even more striking. At the start of the war the French had only 300 pieces of heavy artillery, and now (now being January 1916), they had 3,916 (2:597). Modern howitzers were finally beginning to appear, to replace the antiques of 1914, and by midsummer the gunners would have plenty of ammunition, thanks to their American suppliers.
So although Joffre was not nearly so crudely dismissive of the civilians as Sir William Robertson, who at one point told Lloyd George, “It is a waste of time explaining strategy to you; to understand my explanation you would have had to have my experience,” his attitude was basically the same.18
By autumn 1915, with the admission that the expedition to Turkey had failed and must be withdrawn, now that the Greek expedition was mired in bickering and acrimony, the army high command felt that the civilians should get out of the way and let the generals win the war the way they wanted.
And, unlike Sir William Robertson, as well as Sir Douglas Haig, the brand-new commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Joffre had a plan.
THE ALLIED PLAN
So as 1915 came to an end, Joffre unfolded his plan for the coming year. It was based on one simple idea, which he had been patiently developing for over twelve months. Everyone understood the idea of breaking through the German lines, what the French called la percée. The problem, Joffre realized, was that the piercing was never done on a sufficiently broad front. As a result, the Germans could move reinforcements in from both sides and snuff out the advance through counterattacks.
The solution was a coup de belier, or great hammer blow, delivered on such a broad front that it would simultaneously smash through the defensive lines while the scale of the blow would be such that reinforcements would not be able to stanch the hemorrhage.
Joffre was very consistent about that, from his urging Sarrail to expand the Vauquois offensive, to his approval of the Roques plan for the Woëvre. Indeed, the very notion of coordinating the February offensives on both banks speaks to that issue. The attacks ended up badly, but that was because the local commanders were never able to execute them properly, mostly because they lacked the guns and the shells. It was certainly no fault of Joffre and his staff, who were supremely confident of their strategic acumen.
So now Joffre envisioned an offensive on much greater scale, not so much as to the section of the front, but as to the forces employed. In fact, Joffre did not have enough men to manage the thing on his own, but that was hardly a problem. The British already had a million men in France. By early summer there would most likely be half a million more. The trick was getting them to fight.
When the French looked at the front, they saw a million British soldiers holding down about 100 kilometers, and 2.8 million French soldiers holding down nearly 650. Simple math suggested there was a problem. The solution, as far as Joffre was concerned, was to find something for those soldiers to do, and the great joint offensive was the answer.
Since the only way such an offensive could be mounted was in conjunction with the British, everything reduced itself to picking a place where both armies could operate side by side in sufficient strength to break through the German lines.
A moment’s reflection will suggest that this is hardly the way to choose your battlefield, and indeed, the area agreed on, the Somme, had absolutely nothing to recommend it strategically. The area was selected purely because it was the only place where the two armies could mount a joint offensive, side by side, on a broad enough scale. A. J. P. Taylor sums up the whole situation perfectly.
Haig had always a favorite strategical idea: to attack Flanders and then “roll up” the Germans from the north. Joffre did not like this idea. He doubted whether the British would fight hard enough unless he had them under his own hand; and for this a combined offensive was necessary. Joffre therefore pointed to the Somme, the spot where the British and French lines joined. This was a strange choice. There was no great prize to be gained, no vital center to be threatened. The Germans, if pressed, could fall back to their own advantage, with better communications and a shorter line. Joffre did not care. The great thing was to pull the British into heavy fighting.19
The only relevant fact that this observation omits is that Haig’s idea was even more preposterous than Joffre’s. In theory—and we are talking about the French here—a genuine breakthrough on the scale proposed would divide the Germans armies into two portions, allowing the French, who would be on the inside, or right flank of the offensive, to move behind the main German positions from Champagne on over, going all the way laterally across below the Belgian frontier, where the terrain favored mass maneuvers.
So although Joffre’s plan was far too hypothetical, it was not in total defiance of geography. The basic problem with Haig’s “strategical idea” was that it assumed Belgium was a tabletop that the infantry could walk across, once they broke through the German lines. In the real world, a formidable set of rivers ran up through Belgium to the sea, each one of them being wide enough and deep enough to be a serious obstacle. The Meuse was only the most formidable.
The idea was geographic nonsense, but Haig’s conceit was no worse than the whole idea of the “soft underbelly” of Europe that led the Allies to have such high hopes for the impact the Italians would have on the course of the war. Apparently the Alps that formed the border between Italy and Austria were simply a few insignificant ridges that the Italian infantry could walk over in a few days.
However, as 1915 came to a close, Joffre was convinced that he had to do something to get the British to fight, and if the Somme was hardly the answer to the problem of ending the war, it was definitely the answer to the problem that was increasingly nagging at both the government in Paris and the GQG out in Chantilly: how to get the British to bestir themselves from their fraction of the front and used their rapidly growing army to fight the Germans.
Although the British, both then and forever afterward, bristle at the very idea, it must be said that the French felt this imbalance very strongly. When, in June 1916, Arthur Conan Doyle visited the French front, he made the following observation.
Our guide is a Commandant of the Staff, a tall, thin man with hard, gray eyes and a severe face. It is the more severe towards us as I gather that he has been deluded into the belief that about one out of six of our soldiers goes to the trenches.20
On the face of it, the French officer had a fair point, and although generations of British historians have made all sorts of arguments proving—in their minds, anyway—why Haig required an army as large as France’s to hold down a fraction of the front the French were holding, the numbers are really against them.
Indeed, one of the more fascinating things about the war is the extent to which, both then and afterward, it was so completely a war against arithmetic, with mostly but not entirely English historians denying the basic numbers, just as, during the war, the GQG kept insisting
that the German army was shrinking, and would run out of men any minute now.
But at least Joffre and Haig had an excuse: their intelligence (which was mostly French) insisted that they were winning the war of attrition. So all they had to do was speed it up, and so Joffre’s plan of expanding the actual frontage for an offense was both sensible and logical, and was supported by the facts, one of the more important being that since the Germans were so greatly weakened by their losses, time was against them. Joffre was content to wait until the summer, when the British troops would be more numerous and better trained.
In addition, meeting the objections, or needs, of his civilian overlords, the idea was that the great summer offensive in the west would be coordinated with other offensives in Italy, the Balkans, and Russia.
The Allies were dickering with Romania, trying to bribe it to enter the war, and felt they had a good chance of success, so there would be a joint Russian and Romanian offensive that would drive directly into eastern Hungary, possibly even coordinated with a thrust across the southern Carpathians into Transylvania. At the same time, the Allied expeditionary force in Greece, operating in conjunction with the Greek army, would thrust up into the southern part of Hungary, while the Italians would attack (yet again) on their front.
The basic plan was simple—which is a virtue in military matters. Nor did it particularly require some careful coordination, as far as time went. The pressure applied would be like tightening a vise. So long as the offensives occurred within a two– or three-month window, they would have the desired effect. Given all this pressure, whether simultaneous or in a series of repetitive blows, Austria-Hungary would collapse, and Germany would be unable to prop them up.
In fact, ideally, the best sequence would be for the other offensives to precede the one in the west, so the Germans would already be desperate, and would have drained their forces in France to prop up their allies in the east.