The Eastern Front 1914-1917

by Norman Stone

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Shell-Shortage, 1915

  The disaster in Galicia provoked an immediate outcry within Russia. The army was said to have been defeated because of a crippling shell-shortage, complemented by a severe shortage of rifles. It was, as Bernard Pares,* faithfully echoing respectable opinion in Russia, called it: ‘a war of men against metal’, in which even the stoutest soldiers and the ablest strategists would have been at a loss—an opinion naturally shared by Stavka. At first, shell-crisis involved Stavka, war ministry and Artillery Department. But the manufacture of war-material, and conversion of the country to a war-economy, came to involve the State’s relationship with private businessmen and the working-classes, and hence opened up a whole seam of economic and political questions that touched on the essence of Tsarist Russia. Some writers have suggested that the shell-shortage proved Russia to be ‘incapable, at her then stage of industrial development, of matching the needs of modern war’.1 Hence the whole question becomes a touchstone for Russian economic development before 1917, although before a direct relationship between shell-shortage and structural faults of the economy can be established, many short-term factors have to be given their due weight.

  There was little dispute, at least by spring 1915, as to the facts of shell-shortage. Rennenkampf and Ivanov had already complained in September 1914, and there had been an appeal from the Grand Duke to the Tsar. Usually, such alarms were dismissed by the war ministry and the Artillery Department as hysterical, but their frequency grew. In September 1914, Stavka said it would need 1,500,000 rounds per month—about three times, what had been thought necessary before the war—and in later months this figure climbed to 2,500,000 and then 3,500,000, which remained the ‘norm’, with some fluctuation, for the rest of the war. By spring 1915, tales from the front revealed that German artillery superiority was crushing. When Mackensen broke through in May 1915, his XI Army alone had a million shells, not counting those of his allies; III Army, at the point of break-through, had less than 100,000 and received not much more than that in the next month, since on 13th May the entire south-western front had barely over 100,000 in reserve. Between January and April 1915, the whole army received two million shells only, and, with the German ‘pincer-movement’ of summer 1915, Russian troops were either captured wholesale or driven back in panic. Shell-shortage could not have been more clearly documented than by the Russian abandonment of Poland that summer.2

  The first reason for shell-shortage, and the parallel shortage of rifles, was relatively simple. No-one had foreseen that this would be a long war, and no preparations were made for armaments-production ‘in depth’. The supposition that war would be short owed little to purely military calculations, for men were aware that states could field huge armies with vast armament, and the defeating of such would be a long business. The calculation that war would be short owed much more to prevailing ideas of economics—the advanced nations of the west could not possibly allow disruption of trade for more than a few months, or their economies would collapse. Financial calculations were much the same. After a few months, the states’ credit would be exhausted—indeed, the Hungarian finance minister said, as war broke out, that it could not last longer than three weeks. The preamble to Russia’s ‘Great Programme’ read: ‘the present political and economic circumstances of Russia’s main neighbours rule out the possibility of a long war.3 Some writers had even argued that, since Russia was less dependent on international trade, she could afford a long war; a strategy of attrition was recommended, even by the perceptive Bloch. The discovery that states could go on fighting the war with bits of paper took almost everyone by surprise.

  .The immediate consequence of this belief in a short war was that states concentrated on building up their stocks of armament, rather than their factories to produce armament. They used their money to buy shell from existing manufacturers, rather than to develop factories that would, in wartime, produce shell but that would, in peacetime, lie idle. This policy saved every state money, at a time when defence swallowed more and more resources in budgets. In Russia, a factory to produce 20,000 fuzes a day would cost forty-one million roubles, but with the same money the state could add two million shells to its existing reserve of seven million.4 This problem was less in other countries, because the defence-factories, even in peacetime, would be far from idle: they could count on a considerable export-market. In Russia, excess-capacity would just rust. An informed guess was made, on the basis of 1904–5, that a thousand rounds per field-gun would suit European war, and a reserve of seven million shells of various types was laid in. Even this—which in 1916 would not have kept a single gun going for ten days of offensive action—was not to be mobilised at once, but over 480 days. Shell kept the better, the more its parts were separated. One-third of the shell was kept in complete readiness, one-third in part-readiness, and the rest split up into its parts. Assembly of shell, in ‘parks’ of 30,000 rounds served by ninety men, would take time, especially in the long winter nights, and until 1912 men supposed that the shell could be got ready in leisurely style. Again, the three State factories for shell were told to produce half a million rounds per month if war broke out. With rifles, it was a similar case. Enough rifles were laid in for the 4,500,000 men to be called up in wartime. Ponderous logic dictated that the army should make money by selling off its surplus stock, and 450,000 rifles of an older model were sold off to officers for use in hunting. Similar logic dictated that skilled labour should be released, and the machinery not used. The State factory in Tula produced, in the first months of 1914, between one and five rifles per month and its manager converted some of his machinery to make gun-sights and pistols, in order to have something to do. Not more than 50,000 rifles could be produced in a month. Once the old stocks ran out, replacement-rates were therefore absurdly low in both rifle and shell—the more so as even the agreed production for wartime could not be carried out at once. By July 1915, over four million men had been called up above the initial set,5 and by then, Stavka’s minimum demand for shell was five times greater than the production ‘norms’ of 1914.

  Shell would have to be produced from somewhere, and the responsibility for this lay, initially, with the war ministry’s artillery-department. But a considerable delay in production, from Russian resources, was caused by the department’s feeling that the shell-shortage was not a real crisis at all, despite appearances. The department were of course wrong; but they were wrong for the right reasons. In their panic, Stavka had exaggerated both the inevitable effects of inferiority in shell, and the quantities available to the Germans; and they also mis-handled the shell that came their way. Battles were not lost uniquely because of shell-shortage, or even mainly because of it.

  The over-rating of artillery was of course understandable. The First World War produced a unique disparity between weight and mobility: huge armies, with twentieth-century supply, but moving with less speed than eighteenth-century infantrymen. Manoeuvre was ruled out; and men concluded that the only way to defeat the enemy was to find him where he was concentrated, and rain shell on him—in the French phrase, ‘artillery conquers, infantry occupies’. If this too failed, then the answer must surely be: more shell, and of course heavier shell. There were many drawbacks to this method, as the offensives of 1915–17 showed, but commanders did not see much alternative to the great bombardments with which they initiated their actions. There was an alternative, which boiled down to better training of the infantry, and harmonisation of infantry with artillery. But it took generals a long time to recognise that the new soldiers could be intensively trained, and it took artillery an even longer time to regard infantry as an equal, partnership of which was essential to the winning of a battle. At bottom, it was the same attitude that prevented civilian recruits of 1914–18 from ever achieving really considerable promotion in the wartime armies of Europe. The generals behaved as if they had a monopoly of wisdom, and demanded vast quantities of shell as a consequence of tactical bankr
uptcy.

  .Certainly, shell was exaggerated as a feature of Russian defeats in the spring and summer of 1915. The Germans’ artillery-superiority on the eastern front was no greater, and indeed was usually smaller, than the western Powers’ artillery-superiority in France, which got them nowhere. German shell-production in the summer of 1915 did not exceed four million rounds per month, three-quarters of which normally went to the west; Russian production rose from 450,000 in the first months of 1915 to nearly 900,000 in July and over a million in September. Of course the Germans could concentrate shell-stocks for an offensive, and achieve local superiority at the point of break-through; but this was not a long-term factor, and a truly crushing weight of shell appears to have been established only three times: Mackensen’s break-through at Gorlice early in May, Gallwitz’s break-through on the Narev in mid-July, and Mackensen’s break-through at Cholm and Lublin in late July. Even then Russian accounts over-rated the Germans’ quantities of shell—the careful Korolkov, for instance, remarks that Gallwitz’s army had three million rounds to use on the Narev, whereas the army did not use even a million in the course of the whole eight weeks’ campaign between the Narev and the fall of Vilna on 18th September.6

  In any case, it was quite possible to counter the attackers’ artillery-superiority by tactical devices, as the Germans did in France. Guns were seldom very accurate, and for much of 1915 usually had the wrong kind of shell for the work asked of them—shrapnel rather than high-explosive. Dummy-trenches, dug-outs with earth ceilings ten metres thick, support-lines, flexible handling of reserves counted for a great deal in the west. In the east, they were more difficult to set up—man-power was thinner on the ground, building-materials more difficult to come by, roads and railways either too few or too over-loaded to permit rapid shuttling of reserves. But at bottom it was lack of will not lack of means that dictated the Russian army’s poor response to the challenge of German bombardment. Stavka fell into the habit of blaming all of its misfortunes on lack of shell, and seems to have neglected ways by which the German superiority could have been countered, while at the same time many interested but ignorant parties in Russia automatically sympathised with Stavka’s view.

  A further criticism of the artillerists’ was also true, that Stavka mis-handled its shell, though the fault was often the artillerists’ as much as Stavka’s. Stavka itself had no artillery section until the spring of 1916, when Upart was set up, and accounting for shell was one of the many responsibilities of Kondzerovski, the adjutant-general, whose prime function was none the less to take care of senior promotions. When the artillerists asked Stavka for details of shell-consumption, Stavka had none to give; and contradictory tales came from the front and army headquarters. In September Ivanov said he had used up 1,000 rounds per gun, but inspection of his armies by the artillerist Khanzhin showed that all of his armies, except IX, had quite enough shell for the campaign of late September-mid-October on the Vistula. The artillerists could show that they had sent nearly five million rounds to the front by the end of 1914; Stavka could account for only a third of them, and the artillerists concluded that there must be three million rounds left.7 They suspected, in any case, that the infantry were both grossly wasteful with shell, and that artillery was already, as a result of Sukhomlinov’s misdoings, too much dominated by infantry. Artillery experts in the infantry units were not given power to command their guns, but were supposed only to make sure they were in good shape. Not until late in 1915 did artillery brigadiers’ establishment contain even two telephones.8 In some units, individual batteries were commanded by battalion commanders, with the inevitable consequence that the batteries were told to do what the artillerists imagined to be infantry work—the breaking-up of an enemy patrol, for instance. If shell-shortage existed, then it was the infantry’s fault; infantry would learn sense, and give the work back to artillerists. At bottom, the shell-crisis reflected the bad relations of infantry and artillery, as much as it caused them.

  But the artillerists themselves were far from free of blame. Their crazy insistence on the value of fortresses led to a stock-piling of guns and shell in artillery-museums such as Novogeorgievsk and Kovno, where the Germans captured 3,000 guns and almost two million shells. The commanders of these places seem also to have concealed their stocks of shell, for fear Stavka would remove them, and the first time Stavka learnt the size of the stocks was sometimes from German communiqués. Of course, some fortresses did quite good work, if the defence were well-planned, as was the case of Osowiec in spring and summer 1915, and Ivangorod in 1914–15. But both were really luxuries—using a thousand rounds per gun, in the case of Osowiec, in a complicated artillery-duel that showed the technical qualities of Russian artillerymen 9 at their best, but that did nothing to help the exposed infantrymen to north and south. The artillerists’ attitude to reserve-divisions in particular was shameful. They resented having to waste their precious shell to preserve the existence of these allegedly useless troops. Moreover, if it was true that infantrymen sometimes made gunners spend too much shell, the fault often lay with the over-large batteries that artillerists had insisted upon, for their eight-gun batteries, retained until 1915, wasted shell that six-gun German batteries did not have to waste.*

  An initial delay in ordering shell came therefore from the Artillery Departments’ private calculation that shell-shortage was unreal, and was quite possibly a manoeuvre mounted by personal enemies in Stavka against the war ministry of Sukhomlinov. Responsibility for ordering shell lay with the War Council, an institution composed of, even for Russian circumstances, extraordinarily aged generals, set up to administer the war chest, and chaired by the War minister. It was supposed to examine every order made. In time, with millions of roubles’ worth of orders, the Council could not contend with the flow, and the system had to be stream-lined. But throughout 1914, the members of this Council, all of them acutely aware of the sneers of civilian ministers at slipshod military accounting, were determined to do their bit to save the country’s money; they remained little corks of pedantry, bobbing in the war-economic storm. A request for two million shells was turned down in September; 800,000 were substituted, even then only on the grounds that the noise they made would be good for troops’ morale. In this period, not even the five million rounds that Russia, with her existing capacity, could turn out in a year, had been ordered. With rifles, it was much the same. Meanwhile, a complicated game of buck-passing developed between General Headquarters and Ministry until the shell-reserve per gun fell, by June 1915, to less than two hundred rounds per month, and until the rifle-stock declined to the point where, in July 1915, five men were being trained with two rifles.

  Certainly, by the end of 1914, the Artillery Department had woken up to the fact that this would be a long war; generally, too, there was now appreciation that shell would be needed in great quantity. But the experts did not consider extending shell-production inside the country, for the simple reason that they could not imagine Russian businessmen to be capable of producing shell. The Department had faith only in a narrow circle of seventeen Russian industrialists, and it had not much faith in those. In any case, Russian industrialists were already complaining of wartime difficulties: the cessation of trade with Germany deprived them of a vital source of machinery and skills, and conscription of skilled labour within Russia, together with the transport-disruption of wartime, had made life difficult for them. It was characteristic of this period that the Council of Ministers should pass an order for thirty large locomotives to America, since the Putilov factory demanded 1,500,000 roubles per locomotive, and would deliver only late in 1916, whereas the Americans would send them in four and a half months, and would charge 500,000 roubles per locomotive less than Putilov.10 The Artillery Department could not imagine that Russian industry would be capable of manufacturing war-goods, and therefore had recourse to foreign suppliers, who were supposed to be cheaper and more efficient, and who had also been supplying Russia for many years past.

&n
bsp; Not much could be got from France, although Schneider-Creusot did produce for Russia throughout the war, because French industry was almost completely taken up with supplying the French army. Not much—though still a surprising amount—could come from Germany, hitherto a large-scale supplier. It was on England, and then on the United States, that the Russian war ministry counted. Orders both for rifle and shell were passed in great quantity—by the beginning of 1915, fourteen million rounds of shell had been ordered from various British and American firms, together with shell-parts for still more rounds. Large orders for rifles had also been placed, in the United States for the most part, and by November 1914 the English firm of Vickers had received forty-one million roubles’ advance-payment. Russian reliance on these foreign firms is shown in the following table, applying to December 1914:

  Shell (1,000 rounds) expected by the Department for use at the front:11

  by 1st May 1915

  Russian production:

  Vickers:

  United States:

  3” shrapnel:

  820

  490

  275

  3” high-explosive: by 1st September 1915

  146

  100

  75

  3” shrapnel:

  950

  400