by Nick Lloyd
Zero Hour: Time at which an attack would commence
References
Introduction
1 ‘Letters to the Editor’, The Spectator, 3 January 1958.
2 B. H. Liddell Hart, The Real War, 1914–1918 (London: Faber & Faber, 1930), p. 367.
3 Ibid., p. 361. The Walcheren Expedition of 1809 was one of the most misconceived military operations of the nineteenth century. A force of 40,000 British troops was assembled at Walcheren, a swampy island at the mouth of the River Scheldt, intending to push on to Antwerp and provide support to Austrian forces fighting against Napoleon Bonaparte. Unfortunately, an armistice between France and Austria was signed shortly before the expedition set sail, and once there the invasion force quickly bogged down. The island was evacuated before the end of the year after the loss of over 4,000 soldiers and thousands more who suffered from so-called ‘Walcheren Fever’.
4 Dan Todman sees it as ‘almost certainly apocryphal’, while Frank Davies and Graham Maddocks call it ‘largely a myth’. See D. Todman, The Great War. Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon and London, 2005), p. 81, and F. Davies and G. Maddocks, Bloody Red Tabs. General Officer Casualties of the Great War 1914–1918 (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 1995), p. 18.
5 D. Cooper, Haig. The Second Volume (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), pp. 159–60.
6 LHCMA: Liddell Hart Papers, LH 11/1927/17, ‘Talk with General Edmonds–7/10/27’.
7 See R. D. Heinl, Jr, Dictionary of Military and Naval Quotations (Annapolis: United States Naval Institute, 1966), p. 360; M. Dewar, An Anthology of Military Quotations (London: Robert Hale, 1990), p. 247; N. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976), p. 374; R. Pois and P. Langer, Command Failure in War. Psychology and Leadership (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp. 143–4; Lord Wedderburn, ‘Laski’s Law behind the Law’, in R. Rawlings (ed.), Law, Society, and Economy. Centenary Essays for the London School of Economics and Political Science 1895–1995 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 33; and S. Blackburn, Mirror, Mirror. The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 104.
8 P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; first publ. 1975), p. 84.
9 D. Todman, ‘Third Ypres: Fact and Fiction’, in P. Dennis and J. Grey (eds.), 1917. Tactics, Training and Technology: The 2007 Chief of Army Military History Conference (Canberra: Australian History Military Publications, 2007), p. 202.
10 A. J. P. Taylor, The First World War. An Illustrated History (London: Penguin Books, 1966; first publ. 1963), p. 194.
11 ‘An Officer’s Letter’, The Times, 31 July 1917. It reported that Sassoon was ‘suffering from nervous breakdown’.
12 ‘Memorial Tablet’, in S. Sassoon, Selected Poems (London: William Heinemann, 1940; first publ. 1925), p. 58.
13 D. Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George (2 vols., London: Odhams Press, 1933–6), II, ch. 63.
14 Cooper, Haig, ch. 20.
15 See A. Green, Writing the Great War. Sir James Edmonds and the Official Histories, 1915–1948 (London: Frank Cass, 2003), ch. 8.
16 Sir J. Edmonds, Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: HMSO, 1948), II, pp. 366–87.
17 F. Lloyd George, ‘Passchendaele’, The Times, 15 March 1949.
18 Lord Trenchard, ‘Lord Haig’s Decisions’, The Times, 29 January 1949.
19 J. H. Davidson, ‘Lord Haig’s Decisions’, The Times, 16 February 1949.
20 B. H. Liddell Hart, ‘The Basic Truths of Passchendaele’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institution, Vol. CIV, No. 616 (November 1959), pp. 435–6.
21 For differing views on the value of Edmonds’s work on Third Ypres see Green, Writing the Great War, p. 194; D. French, ‘“Official But Not History”? Sir James Edmonds and the Official History of the Great War’, The RUSI Journal, Vol. 131, No. 1 (1986), pp. 58–63; and T. Travers, The Killing Ground. The British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare 1900–1918 (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2003; first publ. 1987), ch. 8.
22 J. A. Terraine, ‘Passchendaele and Amiens I’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institution, Vol. CIV, No. 614 (May 1959), p. 173.
23 J. Terraine, Douglas Haig. The Educated Soldier (London: Cassell & Co., 2000; first publ. 1963), p. 373. See also J. A. Terraine, ‘Passchendaele and Amiens II’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institution, Vol. CIV, No. 615 (August 1959), pp. 331–40. See also Terraine’s collection of documents on Third Ypres: The Road to Passchendaele. The Flanders Offensive of 1917: A Study in Inevitability (London: Leo Cooper, 1977).
24 Terraine and Liddell Hart both worked on the BBC series The Great War (1964), but Liddell Hart (who had been appointed Consultant Historian) asked for his name to be removed from the credits for programmes 13 and 17 (dealing with the Somme and Passchendaele) after suggesting amendments, which were ignored. B. H. Liddell Hart, ‘The Great War’, The Times, 19 September 1964, and Todman, The Great War, pp. 111–13.
25 L. Wolff, In Flanders Fields (London: Longmans, 1960), p. xxiv.
26 See ‘Author’s Foreword’ in L. Macdonald, They Called It Passchendaele. The Story of the Third Battle of Ypres and of the Men Who Fought in It (London: Penguin Books, 1993; first publ. 1978), p. xiii.
27 R. Prior and T. Wilson, Passchendaele: The Untold Story (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002; first publ. 1996), pp. xviii, 200.
28 Ibid., p. xix. In the third edition of their book, which was published in 2016, Prior and Wilson survey the current literature on the battle and claim that nothing published since 1996 has substantially challenged their findings.
29 For the Australian and New Zealand experiences of Third Ypres see A. Ekins, ‘The Australians at Passchendaele’, and C. Pugsley, ‘The New Zealand Division at Passchendaele’, in P. Liddle (ed.), Passchendaele in Perspective. The Third Battle of Ypres (London: Leo Cooper, 1997), pp. 227–54, 272–91; G. Harper, Massacre at Passchendaele. The New Zealand Story (Brighton: FireStep Books, 2011; first publ. 2000); and A. Macdonald, Passchendaele. The Anatomy of a Tragedy (Auckland: HarperCollins, 2013). Canada’s participation has attracted a number of excellent studies, including, for example, D. Oliver, ‘The Canadians at Passchendaele’, in Liddle (ed.), Passchendaele in Perspective, pp. 255–71; T. Cook, Shock Troops. Canadians Fighting the Great War 1917–1918 (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2008); and D. G. Dancocks, Legacy of Valour. The Canadians at Passchendaele (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1986).
30 The literature on the German experience of Passchendaele (in English) is extremely limited. See A. Lucas and J. Schmieschek, Fighting the Kaiser’s War. The Saxons in Flanders 1914/1918 (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2015); R. McLeod and C. Fox, ‘The Battles in Flanders during the Summer and Autumn of 1917 from General von Kuhl’s Der Weltkrieg 1914–18’, British Army Review, No. 116 (August 1997), pp. 78–88; G. Werth, ‘Flanders 1917 and the German Soldier’, in Liddle (ed.), Passchendaele in Perspective, pp. 324–32; G. C. Wynne, If Germany Attacks. The Battle in Depth in the West (Westport: Greenwood, 1976; first publ. 1940), ch. 12; and ‘“The Other Side of the Hill”. The Fight for Inverness Copse: 22nd–24th of August 1917’, Army Quarterly, Vol. XXIX, No. 2 (January 1935), pp. 297–303. The most useful account is undoubtedly J. Sheldon, The German Army at Passchendaele (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2007), which explores the battle through little-known German regimental histories.
Prologue: The Nivelle Offensive
1 Nivelle, cited in R. A. Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory. French Strategy and Operations in the Great War (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 324.
2 Ibid., pp. 325–6.
3 Ministère de la Guerre, Les Armées Françaises dans La Grande Guerre, Tome V, Vol. 2 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1937), p. 191.
4 General Karl von Einem (GOC Third Army), cited in M. Nebelin, Ludendorff. Diktator im Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: Siedler Verlag, 2010), p. 237. Several other senior officers also expr
essed discomfort at the ‘scorched earth’ policy, including Crown Prince Rupprecht, who reluctantly went along with it.
5 H. Hagenlücke, ‘The German High Command’, in P. Liddle (ed.), Passchendaele in Perspective. The Third Battle of Ypres (London: Leo Cooper, 1997), p. 48.
6 C. Falls, Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: Macmillan & Co., 1940), I, p. 488.
7 J. de Pierrefeu, L’Offensive du 16 Avril. La Vérité sur l’affaire Nivelle (Paris: Renaissance du Livre, 1919), pp. 90–91.
8 Ibid., L’Offensive du 16 Avril, p. 92.
9 Ibid., L’Offensive du 16 Avril, p. 93.
10 E. L. Spears, Prelude to Victory (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), pp. 506–7, 510–11. Original emphasis.
11 C. Barnett, The Swordbearers. Supreme Command in the First World War (London: Cassell & Co., 2000; first publ. 1963), p. 193.
12 J. de Pierrefeu, French Headquarters 1915–1918, trans. Major C. J. C. Street (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1924), p. 152.
13 Falls, Military Operations: 1917, I, pp. 498–9.
14 Ministère de la Guerre, Les Armées Françaises, Tome V, Vol. 2, p. 188.
15 Of those divisions that mutinied, forty-six were ‘very much affected’ and of these thirteen were seriously affected. Ibid., pp. 193–4.
16 Pierrefeu, French Headquarters, pp. 179–80.
1. Manoeuvres of War
1 E. L. Spears, Prelude to Victory (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), p. 277.
2 ‘Man of the Moment’, The Times, 8 December 1916.
3 ‘Mr Ll. George in Office’, The Times, 8 December 1916.
4 Lord Hankey, The Supreme Command 1914–1918 (2 vols., London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961), II, p. 575.
5 Lloyd George’s War Cabinet consisted of Andrew Bonar Law (Chancellor of the Exchequer), Lord Curzon (Lord President of the Council), Lord Milner (Minister Without Portfolio) and Arthur Henderson (Minister Without Portfolio). Henderson resigned from the War Cabinet on 11 August 1917. He was replaced by George Barnes (Minister of Pensions).
6 French casualty figures taken from R. A. Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory. French Strategy and Operations in the Great War (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 309.
7 C. Duffy, Through German Eyes. The British and the Somme 1916 (London: Orion, 2007; first publ. 2006), p. 324.
8 See for example Lloyd George’s speech of 3 November 1916 in which he delivered a typically blunt assessment. ‘We are not getting on with the war… At no point had the Allies achieved a definite clear success.’ Lloyd George, cited in D. R. Woodward, Lloyd George and the Generals (London: Associated University Presses, 1983), p. 118.
9 G. A. Leask, Sir William Robertson. The Life Story of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (London: Cassell & Co., 1917), p. 141.
10 TNA: CAB 24/1/G33, Sir W. Robertson, ‘Memorandum on the Conduct of the War’, 8 November 1915.
11 D. Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George (2 vols., London: Odhams Press, 1933–6), I, pp. 466–9.
12 Woodward, Lloyd George and the Generals, pp. 133–4.
13 Hankey, The Supreme Command, II, p. 614, and J. Grigg, Lloyd George. War Leader 1916–1918 (London: Penguin Books, 2003; first publ. 2002), pp. 35–8.
14 Appendix 18, ‘Proposed Organization of Unified Command on the Western Front’, 26 February 1917, in Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917: Appendices (London: Macmillan & Co., 1940), pp. 62–3.
15 Sir W. Robertson, Soldiers and Statesmen 1914–1918 (2 vols., London: Cassell & Co., 1926), II, p. 206.
16 Appendix 19, ‘Agreement Signed at Anglo-French Conference Held at Calais’, 26/27 February 1917, in Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917: Appendices, pp. 64–5.
17 F. Stevenson, Lloyd George. A Diary, ed. A. J. P. Taylor (London: Hutchinson, 1971), p. 157.
18 D. Lieven, Nicholas II. Emperor of All the Russias (London: Pimlico, 1994; first publ. 1993), pp. 231–4.
19 D. French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 40–41.
20 TNA: CAB 24/11/GT597, J. C. Smuts, ‘The General Strategic and Military Situation and Particularly That on the Western Front’, 29 April 1917. Lloyd George’s notes on the conference can be found in War Memoirs, I, pp. 909–27.
21 TNA: CAB 24/11/GT599, Sir W. Robertson, ‘Operations on West Front’, 30 April 1917.
22 TNA: CAB 23/13, ‘War Cabinet 128 a’, 1 May 1917.
23 TNA: CAB 24/12/GT657, ‘Anglo-French Conference, May 4, and 5, 1917’ and ‘Statement by General Sir William Robertson’.
24 French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, pp. 52–3.
25 Haig diary, 4 May 1917, in G. Sheffield and J. Bourne (eds.), Douglas Haig. War Diaries and Letters 1914–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005), p. 292.
26 P. von Hindenburg, Out of My Life, trans. F. A. Holt (London: Cassell & Co., 1920), pp. 204–5. Emphasis added.
27 W. Görlitz (ed.), The Kaiser and His Court. The Diaries, Note Books and Letters of Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller, Chief of the Naval Cabinet, 1914–1918 (London: Macdonald & Co., 1961; first publ. 1959), p. 222.
28 Crown Prince Wilhelm, The Memoirs of the Crown Prince of Germany (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1922), pp. 154, 157.
29 On 24 March 1917, Karl’s brother-in-law, Prince Sixtus of Bourbon–Parma, agreed to take a letter to President Poincaré. Prince Sixtus was serving in the Belgian Army and acted as an intermediary between the two powers. Karl promised to support France’s claims in Alsace–Lorraine, as well as the liberation of Belgium and Serbia, in exchange for a separate and lasting peace with the Allies. The ‘Sixtus Affair’ was doomed to failure, however, given the impossibility of reconciling Italy’s territorial demands with those requested by Emperor Karl. See A. Watson, Ring of Steel. Germany and Austria–Hungary at War, 1914–1918 (London: Allen Lane, 2014), pp. 466–7.
30 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918, XII. Die Kriegführung im Frühjahr 1917 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1939), p. 39.
31 Duffy, Through German Eyes, p. 324.
32 R. Foley, ‘Learning War’s Lessons: The German Army on the Somme, 1916’, Journal of Military History, Vol. 75, No. 2 (April 2011), p. 500.
33 Hindenburg, Out of My Life, pp. 245, 246. For the ‘Hindenburg Programme’ see Watson, Ring of Steel, pp. 378–84.
34 Görlitz (ed.), The Kaiser and His Court, p. 232.
35 H. Newbolt, History of the Great War. Naval Operations (5 vols., London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1928), IV, p. 270. Original emphasis.
36 J. B. Scott (ed.), Official Statements of War Aims and Peace Proposals. December 1916 to November 1918 (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1921), pp. 1–3.
37 Ibid., p. 7.
38 Ibid., pp. 26–8.
39 Newbolt, Naval Operations, IV, p. 370. Original emphasis.
40 Görlitz (ed.), The Kaiser and His Court, p. 264.
41 D. Steffen, ‘The Holtzendorff Memorandum of 22 December 1916 and Germany’s Declaration of Unrestricted U-Boat Warfare’, Journal of Military History, Vol. 68, No. 1 (January 2004), p. 219.
42 Watson, Ring of Steel, pp. 420–21.
43 TNA: CAB 24/20/GT1496, ‘War Cabinet. The Submarine Situation’, 24 July 1917.
44 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918, XIII. Die Kriegführung im Sommer und Herbst 1917. Die Ereignisse außerhalb der Westfront bis November 1918 (Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1942), p. 22.
45 Hindenburg, Out of My Life, p. 265.
46 E. Ludendorff, Ludendorff’s Own Story. August 1914–November 1918 (2 vols., New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1919), II, p. 23.
47 How infantry strengths could decrease while the size of the army actually increased was due to the rapid expansion in the artillery, and the growing demand from supporting and technical units. During this period OHL also created fifty-three new divisions.
48 Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg, XIII, p. 26.
&nbs
p; 49 Ibid., p. 27.
50 Grundsätze für die Führung in der Abwehrschlacht im Stellungskriege vom 1 Dezember 1916 (Berlin: Reichsdruckerei, 1916). It was reprinted in March 1917, before an updated version was published on 1 September 1917.
51 Ibid., pp. 9–10.
52 TNA: WO 157/22, ‘German Instructions for a Counter-Attack Organized in Depth’ in GHQ Summary of Information, 29 July 1917.
2. Haig and the ‘Northern Operation’
1 Haig to Robertson, 13 August 1917, in D. R. Woodward (ed.), The Military Correspondence of Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, December 1915–February 1918 (London: Bodley Head for the Army Records Society, 1989), p. 215.
2 G. Powell, Plumer. The Soldiers’ General (London: Leo Cooper, 1990), p. 228.
3 Sir J. Edmonds, Military Operations: France & Belgium 1917 (3 vols., London: HMSO, 1948), II, p. 8.
4 See Appendix I, ‘Project for Combined Naval and Military Operations on the Belgian Coast with a View to Preventing the Enemy Using Ostend as a Submarine Base’, 12 November 1916, in Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 396–8.
5 F. Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1967; first publ. 1961), p. 104.
6 P. Barton, Passchendaele. Unseen Panoramas of the Third Battle of Ypres (London: Constable & Robinson, 2007), p. 17.
7 IWM: Documents 12332, ‘The Journal of John Nettleton of the Rifle Brigade 1914–1919’, p. 86.
8 Edmonds, Military Operations: 1917, II, pp. 125–6.
9 For Haig and his experiences at Ypres see J. Hussey, ‘A Hard Day at First Ypres: The Allied Generals and Their Problems, 31 October 1914’, British Army Review, No. 107 (August 1994), pp. 75–89; I. F. W. Beckett, Ypres: The First Battle, 1914 (Harlow: Longman, 2004); D. J. De Groot, Douglas Haig, 1861–1928 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), pp. 165–8; and N. Gardner, Trial by Fire. Command and the British Expeditionary Force in 1914 (Westport: Praeger, 2003), pp. 219–20. On the afternoon of 31 October 1914, with the BEF coming under sustained attack, Haig rode forward along the Menin Road to rally his troops. While some historians have cast doubt on the wisdom of doing this, what is clear is the lasting legacy that First Ypres had on Haig–a sense of the fragility of the British line and how near it came to collapse.