Although Germany signed, it soon became clear that the German army had no intention of observing these provisions, either in spirit or in letter. Senior military figures dismissed the convention as hypocrisy, signed by nations that ‘behave as if they were serious about the silly negotiations and agreements’, but in reality had no intention of sticking to them. Aspirations to peace ‘were simply evidence of these nations’ moral and military decay’. 27 Not surprisingly, field-service regulations issued in 1908 clearly stated that ‘preventive’ measures against civilians were justified.
The Schlieffen Plan demanded many more soldiers than were available in 1905. The German army leadership, for the reasons stated above, resisted any significant enlargement, but after new crises in North Africa and the Balkans, in particular after the first Balkan War of 1912, there was a decisive change in attitude. Germany had suffered a further international diplomatic setback in this conflict, which led Kaiser Wilhelm to meet with military leaders in December 1912, where he called for immediate war against France and tsarist Russia. He was strongly supported by the chief of the army’s general staff, Count Helmuth Johann Ludwig von Moltke (commonly referred to as the younger Moltke), who was a particular enthusiast for the Schlieffen Plan. He stated that war had become inevitable, and that the sooner the showdown with the rival European powers could start, the better. This view was supported by the army’s leaders, but opposed by Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, because the navy was as yet not ready for warfare against Britain. Other than ordering an increase of the German army (eventually to 800,000), no concrete decision was taken at this ‘War Council Meeting’. The continental Entente powers responded by also sharply raising the size of their military.
As war clouds were gathering, the majority of Germans had become convinced that the empire was facing a deadly challenge from its rivals. This scenario was fostered no doubt by commentary from the government and much of the media, but the image of revanche-lusting French, Russian Slavonic expansionists, and trade-jealous Britons found an eager audience. The signs were ominous, should things go wrong.
And things did go wrong. The assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 triggered a chain of events. Supported by assurances of German support in case of conflict, the Austro-Hungarian empire on 23 July presented the Kingdom of Serbia with a ten-point ultimatum to cease all activities directed against the Habsburg empire, to outlaw all organisations involved in such activities, and to allow police officials from Vienna to participate in a full investigation into the couple’s murder. The Serbian government accepted nine of the demands, but rejected Point Six, empowering Austro-Hungarian officers to participate in the investigation, as this was an insult that no independent state could tolerate. This led the Habsburg empire to declare war on Serbia on 28 July. Tsarist Russia ordered a partial mobilisation the same day and, after the Austrian bombardment of Belgrade, as a precautionary step but not as a war-declaration, it ordered a full mobilisation on 30 July. Although the German chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, agreed that the tsar’s mobilisation measure did not mean that Russia was intent on waging war, 28 this step was used to rally the German people behind what was claimed to be a defence against aggression from the barbarian east. On 1 August, the German government declared war on tsarist Russia, followed by a declaration of war on France on 3 August. On 4 August, the German army, in accord with the Schlieffen Plan, invaded Belgium. As this was a violation of Belgian neutrality, the British government presented Berlin with an ultimatum to stop the invasion immediately. When this was not forthcoming, the British empire declared war on Germany at midnight on 4 August.
Austria-Hungary’s declaration on 28 July marked the outbreak of war. Germany’s subsequent policies turned what was a localised conflict into a global conflagration.
CHAPTER TWO
The Great War
The German Supreme Army Command (OHL) fought the war from the outset with the utmost brutality, both in regard to the waste of their own human resources and the treatment of the civilian population in the occupied countries. Convinced that the war on the Western Front would take five, or at most six, weeks — ‘You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees’, Kaiser Wilhelm II had promised — the armies proceeded in their task without mercy.
The storming of the Belgian bastion-city of Liege was a grim foretaste of the kind of warfare that lay ahead. The OHL had expected that the occupation of Belgium would not involve serious military action, but their brigades got stuck at the four easternmost forts of the city. The shells they used were too light to penetrate the fortifications, and the Belgians had little difficulty in pouring fire into the German troops, slaughtering row upon row. The dead piled up in ridges a metre high, but the assault continued. Lives were spent like bullets in the knowledge that there were plentiful reserves to make up the losses.
American historian Barbara Tuchman, in her acclaimed August 1914, quotes a Belgian officer’s account of the bloodbath. He watched stunned as the German soldiers marched wave after wave into the machine-guns. The wall of dead and wounded grew so high that the Belgians did not know whether to fire through it or crawl out to clear openings with their hands. Unbelievably, the Pickelhaubens kept coming, sheltering behind the barricade of their own dead and dying to charge up the glacis, only to be mowed down. 1 Tuchman makes the point that the over-lavish waste of human lives by all sides throughout the war began at Liege on the war’s second day. It was a grim portent of the Somme, where hundreds of thousands fell, and of the apocalypse at Verdun. 2
Belgian forts were not taken until ten days after the Germans had moved in a number of huge artillery pieces produced by arms manufacturer Krupp in Essen and the Austrian firm Skoda. Krupp’s 420mm howitzer was the largest siege weapon ever produced: eight metres long, weighing 98 tons, needing a crew of 200 to operate. Equipped with a 42-centimetre calibre barrel, ‘Big Bertha’, as the gun was nicknamed, could fire a shell weighing 800 kilograms over a distance of 15 kilometres. One Krupp 420mm and several Skoda 305mm guns blasted the Belgians into submission within several hours.
The advance into France was marked by a wave of atrocities directed against alleged francs-tireurs that resulted in the massacre of thousands of civilians in both Belgium and France. 3 For Belgium, German occupation meant that for the next four years the country was stripped barer than by a plague of locusts. 4
Appalled by the viciousness of the German attack, the Allies, by the end of August 1914, were convinced that they faced an enemy that had to be beaten, a regime that had to be finished off, and a war that had to be fought to the end. On 4 September, the Russian, French, and British governments signed the Pact of London, which stipulated that they would not conclude a peace separately.
Although contemporaries believed that the German advance had been held up for two weeks by Belgian resistance, in reality the timetable to take Paris was delayed by only four days. Still, this was sufficient for almost 200,000 British soldiers to join the French in their efforts to halt the invasion. The inadequacy of the Supreme Army Command’s planning became obvious, however, when only two weeks after the outbreak of war, two tsarist armies invaded East Prussia. The OHL’s perception that it would take six weeks for the Russian military to reach combat strength was now disproved.
Immediately, retired General Paul von Hindenburg and his assistant, Erich Ludendorff, were dispatched to the east to take command of the Eighth German Army, the only force not involved in the west. The ensuing battles at Allstein (today’s Olszlyn, Poland) and the Masurian Lakes saw the slaughter of tsarist soldiers; 40,000 were left dead or wounded, four times the German casualty list. This decisive victory, however, was to have fatal consequences. The popularity of Hindenburg and Ludendorff rocketed sky-high, further enhancing the prestige of the army. As the political power-base in Germany was soon to shift from the civilian administration to the military, Germany’s fate was eventually to end up in the hands of a military di
e-hard and an ambitious careerist and unscrupulous warmonger.
In the west, the Germans had speedily advanced to the River Marne, where they were halted and pushed back to the River Aisne by the British and French. The Schlieffen Plan had failed. By the end of the year, the Western Front had stabilised into a line stretching from Ypres in Belgium to the south of Alsace, marking the start of four years of trench warfare that would take the lives of four million soldiers. The chief of the general staff, Helmuth Johann Ludwig von Moltke, was blamed for the plan’s failure because of the alterations he had made. As stated above, the plan’s designer, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, had envisaged a decisive strike through the Netherlands and Belgium to encircle Paris. Cut off from the capital and from its source of supplies, the French army would have to surrender, after which Germany could turn its entire military might on tsarist Russia. It was said that Moltke’s alterations weakened the force of the onslaught by confining the attack to Belgium. Furthermore, by withdrawing divisions from the invading armies to protect south-western Germany, and by placing one army on the Russian border, a rapid defeat of the French had been frustrated. The result was trench warfare, with Germany committed to fight in both east and west.
German mythology is one side of the story; the reality of the situation is another. The truth is that the Schlieffen Plan was mistake-ridden and bound to fail from the outset. As had become immediately clear, the assumption that the tsarist war machinery would take weeks if not months to get into action was based on unsound speculation. An invasion of the Netherlands would not only have further outraged neutral countries — in particular, the United States — but would also have demanded additional army units that were not available. In this respect, Moltke had judged the situation correctly, and his decisions were justified. Nevertheless, it was he who was blamed for the failure of the Schlieffen Plan, and he was subsequently removed from the army leadership. A bitter and broken man, he died in June 1916.
It was irrelevant that troops were diverted to the east and south-west. The German plan to paralyse Paris and finish the war in the west was unrealistic. There was a discrepancy between the strategies of the military leaders and the reality of twentieth-century warfare. The military, and not only in Germany, was still thinking in terms of nineteenth-century warfare: quick movements and speedy actions made possible by brisk cavalry charges and the deployment of light artillery and relatively small armies. Their plans failed to take account of transport infrastructure. Over a million troops had to be shifted, and many artillery weapons could not be carried by men or horses, at least not over long distances. Railways were important but geographically limited, and could be destroyed by the retreating enemy.
As the German armies moved deeper into France, men scheduled by the plan to advance over 40 kilometres a day began to tire, and supplying them chiefly by horse-drawn transport became more difficult. The design of motorcars and trucks had not advanced far enough to provide a more flexible and efficient means of transport; nor was there capacity to produce such vehicles in large numbers. Tanks entered the war in its later stages and, indeed, played a key part in the outcome — but on the wrong side, from the German point of view.
Frustration with the failure of the Schlieffen Plan to provide the expected speedy defeat of the French led the German army to look for other means to win the war. Military action resumed after the winter of 1914–15, when the commander-in-chief of the British army, Field Marshal Sir John French, sent this disturbing cable to London:
Following a heavy bombardment the enemy attacked the French Division at about 5pm … Aircraft reported that thick yellow smoke had been seen issuing from the German trenches between Langemarck and Bixschoote … What follows almost defies description. The effect of these poisonous gases was so virulent as to render the whole of the line held by the French Division … practically incapable of any action at all. It was at first impossible for anyone to realise what had actually happened. The smoke and fumes hid everything from sight, and hundreds of men were thrown into a comatose or dying condition … 5
The instigator of poison gas and its use in warfare was Fritz Haber, a German chemical scientist who had garnered an international reputation through his development of synthetic ammonia. Aged 46, he could not be called up for military service at the front and, as a Jew, he would not qualify for a home-front commission. Nevertheless he was a deeply patriotic fatherland supporter, and most keen to play his part in the war effort. He was one of the signatories to the Fulda Manifesto, an imperious statement signed by many intellectuals that denied any German responsibility for the outbreak of war, and which claimed that the country’s military stance prevented the destruction of its entire civilisation. When approached by the chief of the German War Raw Materials Office, Walther Rathenau, to look for possible solutions to break the stalemate at the front, he set keenly to work. Poisonous chlorine gas was the outcome.
The use of poison gas had been forbidden under the Hague Convention of 1907, which stipulated that warring nations ‘agree to abstain from the use of projectiles the objective of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases’. The treaty had been signed by Germany, although, as stated above, the German signature had always been a half-hearted one. There was little subsequent hesitation when it came to subordinating ethical principles to military necessity. On 22 April 1915, the first gas attack was launched. The result was devastating:
Within a few seconds the throats, noses and eyes of the unprotected soldiers in the Allied trenches were smarting agonisingly. Shortly thereafter the men began to cough and vomit blood, their chests heaving as they tried to draw breath, but only managing as they did so to suck more of the deadly poison down into their lungs … By sunset an estimated five thousand Allied troops had died and another ten thousand or so were barely hanging on to life in field medical stations. 6
The panic brought about by this gas attack allowed the Germans to breach Allied defences, but — much to Haber’s disgust — they had not assembled sufficient troops to drive the advantage home. A counterattack by Canadian forces closed the gap again. The dilettantism that surrounded so much of Germany’s military planning soon marked its efforts to change the course of the war by the use of poison gas. The French and British speedily developed their own gas and, as the wind in Western Europe blows mainly from the west, German soldiers copped much more gas than did their counterparts, and they had no hesitation in voicing their anger.
When confronted in later years with questions about the ethics and morality of his wartime conduct, Haber claimed that to be killed by gas was no worse — in some cases, it might be even better — than being blown up and mutilated by explosives, or mowed down by machine guns. He had only done his patriotic duty. He was at odds with his wife, Clara Immerwahr (the first woman to graduate with a Ph.D. in physical chemistry at Breslau University), who committed suicide after the gas attacks of spring 1915. The Allies attempted to try him for war crimes, but he escaped to Switzerland, where he was able to hide until he could safely return to Germany. Much to the disgust of British and French scientists, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of synthetic ammonia in late 1918. During the 1920s he participated in the reconstruction of the nation’s chemical industries, but his luck ran out in 1933 when the Nazis took power. They had no interest in his achievements for the fatherland, and because of his Jewish background he was forced to flee to England. Not surprisingly, given his role in the development of poison gas, the British scientific community gave him a rather hostile reception. He took up a position at the Hebrew University in Palestine, but died unexpectedly in January 1934 while visiting his family in Basel, Switzerland.
Germany’s inability to defeat the Allies on land was paralleled by their lack of success at sea. With the outbreak of war, both Germany and the United Kingdom instituted blockades, but with the superiority of the British fleet the German declaration was an empty gesture. The consequences of the Kaiserreich’s naval inferiority were
clear by the beginning of 1915. The nation had depended heavily upon international trade. Half of its raw materials and about one-third of its food were imported before the war; almost two-thirds of its manufactured goods were sold abroad. The imposition of the British blockade deprived Germany of all but 20 per cent of its export market. Although there was initially strong opposition from the civilian government — the torpedoing of merchant vessels without prior warning was a further violation of the Hague Convention — the ever-deteriorating military situation soon removed all opposition to moving maritime warfare below the surface. The unlimited U-boat warfare that began in February 1915 soon proved another nail in the coffin of the German empire. The damage done to Allied shipping by U-boat warfare was limited, but that done to Germany’s international reputation was huge. 7 In particular, the sinking of the British passenger liner Lusitania on 7 May 1915 led to outrage in neutral countries — above all in the United States, as 120 of the 1,200 dead were U.S. citizens.
Public opinion in the United States had largely supported the Allies after the outbreak of war. Since the abortive attempt by the British empire to bring the disloyal North American colonies back into the camp in 1814, British-American relations had been cordial. In particular, trade between the two states had flourished for a century, and the bulk of the States’ population was of British descent. In addition, most politicians and media commentators believed that the responsibility for the slaughter that had broken out in Europe had to be borne by the Central Powers.
A Perfidious Distortion of History Page 4