World War One: A Short History

by Norman Stone

  There followed one of the most extraordinary episodes of this or any other war. Rain fell on the first day, and carried on for seven days. In August, there were only three rainless days. It fell and fell, twice the average for the month. Heavy shelling made the problem far worse, because the battlefield and the routes towards it turned into quagmires. If wounded men fell off the cart taking them to the rear, they drowned. A field-ambulance sergeant wrote: ‘it requires six men to every stretcher, two of these being constantly employed helping the others out of the holes; the mud is in some cases up to our waists. A couple of journeys… and the strongest men are ready to collapse.’ When even the lightest field artillery had to be moved to escape from German fire, the mud was so thick that moving a single gun just 250 yards took six and a half hours. Wounded men who had crawled into shell-holes for safety found that the rain caused the water in them to rise and rise, so that they could see their own deaths by drowning approaching, fractions of an inch at a time. In this, Gough launched his August attacks, failing miserably again and again.

  Plumer was then given his hand. He insisted on a degree of reinforcement that had been refused to Gough, and proposed only very limited operations – the ‘bite and hold’ principle. Troops should just take their initial objective and have their positions strengthened, rather than attempt to advance any further, beyond the artillery’s capacity and preparation. Plumer was also lucky, in a way that Gough never was: the weather cleared, and the ground began to harden again, though never sufficiently. Three limited battles followed in September – that for the village of Broodseinde being the best known – and they were marked by creeping barrages of great intensity, keeping a curtain of shells just ahead of the attackers, reaching only up to 1,000 yards ahead, with the infantry keeping careful step. German counter-attacks were broken up by such a bombardment, and the troops, not too far from their own positions, could count on reasonable backup. The Germans had no answer to such tactics, and Plumer’s limited operations (like Peátain’s in the same period) were a success. But they did only cover 3,000 yards, with immense effort, and at that rate the war would never be won. Still, Haig started dreaming again, and was somehow convinced that German morale was cracking, that the Germans would soon be surrendering in droves. He ordered Plumer to continue; and then the rain started again. Throughout October and in the first half of November, the troops concentrated on the insignificant village of Passchendaele, and finally clawed their way through the mud to take it – an advance that created a thin salient which everyone knew would have to be evacuated if ever there was a serious counterattack. A senior staff officer at last visited the battlefield, towards the very end. As he approached, he burst into tears, and asked the driver, ‘Did we send the men into that?’ When warned by his own intelligence chief that the Germans were not cracking, Haig added a characteristic note: the man was a Catholic and therefore was perhaps getting information from tainted sources. However, Haig did at least have a faith in ultimate victory, and did not lose heart. The year ended with events that pre-figured the end of the war – Cambrai.

  Here at last the tank experts were allowed their heads. They had said that tanks would be effective if employed together in large numbers, and on hard ground, with proper artillery support. Air support was beginning to matter, as well, because it could force the defenders to keep their heads down, or even just to look elsewhere – the beginnings of the Blitzkrieg techniques that were to win battles in 1918. There were also techniques open to gunners that had not been available before. The most important target of guns was the enemy guns. Earlier, these had to be identified from the air or by their own shots, and artillery used against them would have to be registered, that is, ranging shots fired, which both stopped surprise and identified the hostile gun-position. Now, after aerial reconnaissance (itself much more professional, with proper photography) the enemy gun could be marked on a grid map, and the artillery assault on it therefore prepared in theory without practice shots. In other words, at Cambrai the British gained surprise. The attack went in on 31 October and won an immediate success, with a considerable advance and a large capture of prisoners and guns. In England, the church bells were rung. The advance went far ahead, as usual beyond its supply-lines, and even into open country at last. But the German commander was an able man, who organized a counter-attack on the new principles used in the East – specially trained ‘storm troops’, moving fast, using grenades, and avoiding strongpoints. The German counter-attack could have been held had the British had reserves, but there were none – Passchendaele had seen to that.

  At the same moment in late October, again using the new principles, came what was the most brilliant victory of the entire war, with the possible exception of Brusilov’s – brilliant in the sense that brains and determination overcame material weakness. By summer 1917 astute German gunners had also worked out the principles known to the British, but they applied these principles more thoroughly. Guns could vary in range and direction; or wind and rain might affect the firing. Each one was therefore tested on firing ranges to check for variations, so that due allowance might be made. The bombardment was not designed to smash defences, but mainly to neutralize the command system, the movement of reserves, by a hurricane of shelling and gas. The new methods were tried out at Riga on 1 September, with thirteen divisions assaulting Russian positions on the Dvina, upstream from the city. There was complete surprise; the reserves, generally so fatal for an exhausted attacker, could not come in because a ‘box’ bombardment isolated the defensive area, with a steady curtain of fire to prevent the reserves from coming up. There were new infantry tactics as well. Each army acquired a specially trained assault battalion, carrying light machine-guns and flamethrowers; its task was to move fast ahead, in a loose skirmishing line. The counter-attack at Cambrai had succeeded through these methods, and at Riga they had also shown their value if combined with the new type of bombardment. Commanders who understood such methods were now transferred from the Russian front to others.

  In this case, Italy. Not unlike Russia, she had much that was ancient and much that was modern, but a great part of her people were still in a localized, peasant world – one third of the soldiers were illiterate. Her rulers had pushed the country into war, making her run in the hope that she would learn to walk. They had expected an easy trot to Vienna, and had hardly advanced beyond the customs-posts; subsequent offensives had brought twice as many casualties to the Italians as to the Austrians but had only occasionally brought any kind of gain. There were eleven separate battles on the north-eastern border – the river Isonzo (now, in Slovenia, the Soca) – and, as the Italians learned about guns, and the Austrians became tired, there were successes of a fairly modest kind. However, as with Haig’s doings, these gains came at an enormous cost – one and a half million casualties, as against 600,000 Austrian. In the eleventh battle, where part of the Bainsizza plateau was taken, the Italians lost 170,000 men, 40,000 of them killed.

  For this, the military establishment were inclined to blame the men. Somewhat as in Russia, there was an enormous gap between officer class and men, and the north Italian Cadorna, who ran the strategy (he was the son of the man who bundled the Pope into the Vatican when Italy was united), reckoned that his men would only fight if terrorized. If men did not get out of their trenches to attack, their own guns must fire on them. After the war, monuments to the Unknown Soldier went up in Paris and London – men who had been blown to pieces of bone and could no longer be identified, with widows of such men chosen at random for an opening ceremony. The Italians had such a monument, but the area where the Second Army fought was excluded from the search for unidentified remains, because any soldier there might have been killed by his own generals. One such officer, who became head of the Fascist militia (and was probably murdered in revenge, thrown from a train, in 1931) used to take his stand in the front trenches, with his revolver, shooting down his own men if they hesitated. Cadorna even adopted the Roman practice of decimati
on, shooting every tenth man at random in a regiment that had done badly. There were some cases of extraordinary cruelty – for instance, a father of seven shot for being the last to go on parade because he had overslept, this in a brigade that had been cut off in no man’s land, had tried to surrender, had been rescued, after an otherwise commendable record, and was now supposed to be punished. When, in August 1917, the Pope launched his peace appeal, at a time when the entire intervention of Italy could easily be judged to have been a dreadful blunder, Cadorna banned the Italian press at the front.

  He was about to receive retribution. The Bainsizza affair had scared the Germans: what if Austria dropped out? With the end of the war in the east, troops were freed for other purposes, and a new German army was set up, the Fourteenth, under the competent Otto von Below, who knew about the Riga methods. His force contained two future field marshals, Rommel and Schörner, both of whom distinguished themselves, this time as junior officers capturing mountains. Seven German and five good Austrian divisions mustered on the upper Isonzo, in very mountainous territory, after a display of virtuosity with transport of which, in this war, the Germans and French alone were capable (the very delivery of milk to Vienna schools had to be suspended). Over railways of limited capacity, and then over narrow mountain roads, a thousand guns with a thousand rounds each were delivered, and with Porsche’s traction machines and four-wheel drives, or ingenious manoeuvring of monstrous instruments of war through mine-shafts, the Central Powers established formidable local superiority without the Italians’ taking it at all seriously, though deserters warned them.

  The record of the interrogation of the deserters was found on the floor of Italian headquarters in Udine a few days later; by then, catastrophe had occurred. Relative success on the Bainsizza plateau, in the middle of the Isonzo front, had pushed part of the Italian army uncomfortably forward; there was an Austrian bridgehead at Tolmein (Tolmino), and the enormous Italian army corps in the area occupied a position divided by the river; its commander – curiously enough the General Badoglio who later had a prominent role first for and then against Italian Fascism – clearly did not know whether to put the weight on the eastern, attacking bank or the western, defending one. In any event, chased by a German bombardment, he ended up in a cave, not able to direct either part. To his north was an army corps centred on an Isonzo village called Flitsch (Plezzo, now Bovec). Entirely unexpected, five of the best Austrian divisions were going to come down a mountain at that corps. Down-river was another little place, Caporetto,3 marking the join of the two main Italian units. Neither was ready. Cadorna himself had had some notion that he ought probably to go over to the defensive. However, Capello, commander of the main Isonzo army – the Second – had other ideas, and for a month, delayed preparations: if the Central Powers attacked, he would counter-attack, he said, and held his troops forward. Cadorna was scared of Capello – a volcanic little Neapolitan Freemason, of none too grand social origins. He tolerated the disobedience, and when the Central Powers struck, Italian artillery was being hauled into defensive positions at last, wending a wearisome way through the middle of retreating troops.

  On 24 October at 2 a.m. the guns opened up. The German expert, a Brigadier von Berendt, understood how to organize the mixture of gas – which killed the mules transporting guns – and high explosive. Since there was air superiority, the Germans knew where the Italian batteries were, and silenced most of them. The bombardment waxed and waned – a pause, around 4.30, for an hour, to gull the enemy into taking some fresh air, then more intensive fire, then, in the last fifteen minutes, ‘drum-fire’, including the dropping of shell by trench-mortars on the front positions, which were utterly wrecked. At 8 a.m. the attackers moved. On the Flitsch side, the Austrians came down a mountain and the Italian defenders had no gas masks. The Austrians then went ahead through a valley to the plains not far beyond. The general in charge of the Italian corps (he had only four divisions to cover twenty miles of complicated front) ordered a retreat, and also a counter-attack. One of his divisional generals, wondering what was happening, drove into the village of Caporetto to use a working telephone. He was captured, because the other element of the Central Powers’ attack had broken through Badoglio’s confused positions and swung north-west, along the river, to Caporetto. The division then disintegrated, as did the northern corps altogether.

  At Tolmein, there was an extraordinary feat of arms. German mountain troops had to seize some commanding heights, which meant a climb, after the bombardment, of 900 metres. Rommel, then just a captain, with 200 men of the Württemberg Mountain Battalion showed the German army at its best. He did not try a direct attack on the ridge of the Kolovrat, the massive mountain on the western side of the river. Instead, he sent a group of eight men under a corporal to see if there was a way through the defences. There was. Italian sentries were sheltering from the rain, and were captured. There was a gap beyond in the wire. Another dug-out was taken, and Rommel’s men crept up to the ridge. Then they moved along it – the Italians so surprised that one battery of heavy guns was captured from behind, while the officers were at lunch and the men were playing cards. Then Rommel moved on the southern side of the ridge, inviting surrender. One after another, he took the better part of five Italian regiments. In spirit, it was the same performance as he was to put up in the summer of 1942, when he wrapped cardboard tank-like structures round Volkswagen cars, drove to the great British base at Tobruk, bombarded it into surrendering, and took such quantities of petrol from it that he was able to drive on, almost to Cairo. In the Caporetto battle, another officer of his regiment also captured a mountain and was awarded the highest possible decoration. Rommel’s commanding officer asked for Rommel to be given the medal too, and was told that that decoration could not possibly be given twice to the same unit at the same moment. Rommel captured another mountain and the rule had to be broken.

  On 25 October the Italian position had collapsed and the generals started looking for excuses. Capello played the sickness game: full of energy one moment at the best hotel in Verona, stricken at Padua hospital the next. Badoglio hastened to pin the blame on him, and hid. Only the Duke of Aosta, commanding the Third Army to the south, kept his head and retreated in reasonable order. Cadorna himself, on the 27th, composed the most remarkable document sent by any general in this war, claiming that the Second Army had simply not fought at all and that ‘the Reds’ were infiltrating the country. The government suppressed the telegram, but not before it had been sent abroad. When the British and French were asked for direct help, they made the dismissal of Cadorna a precondition, a demand most reluctantly conceded by the Italian establishment; in that army, as in the Russian, duds were adhesive, and were even able to influence official histories (the true story did not emerge until 1967).

  Guns were captured wholesale as they were manoeuvred around narrow passes; soldiers, in droves, surrendered out of utter bewilderment when they found Austrians and Germans coming along paths in the rear, where they had never been expected at all; Cadorna muddled things further, when he mismanaged retreat. There were four bridges over the river Tagliamento, which marked the opening of the great Friulian plain, some twenty miles from the Isonzo front line, along roads flanked by huge mountains. Two of these bridges were assigned to the Third Army, which withdrew over the river in reasonable order. Parts of the Second Army had to struggle north-west, coinciding with refugees, and found one of the bridges captured; over the other there was a disorganized mass evacuation, with, on the other side of the river, pot-bellied little colonels shooting any man apparently straggling. The episode was described in one of the famous books about this part of the war, Ernest Hemingway’s Goodbye to Arms.4 In the event, there were 300,000 prisoners and 300,000 sbandati – men who had lost their units – and half of the entire artillery of the Italian army was captured. An attempt was made to stand on the Tagliamento, but the attackers’ artillery, thanks to Porsche, was being manoeuvred quite fast; the retreat went on to the r
iver Piave and, on the western side, the massif of Monte Grappa. British and French troops arrived. So did malaria, from the marshes of the area. The front was now much shorter – seventy miles, as against 180 – and the Central Powers’ forces were by now a very long way from railheads, themselves inadequate. In Italy, national resistance at last became popular. The sensible Diaz succeeded Cadorna, and the Italian High Command stopped treating their soldiery as cattle; the Austrians and Germans could not break the Piave and Grappa positions. On 2 December the Caporetto offensive was officially halted, and Otto von Below was sent to the western front, where the offensive of all offensives was about to begin. The German leadership had not quite managed to knock out Italy. But they were now given an enormous advantage: Russia collapsed.