A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  Background: An Infinite Appetite for Shells

  AN INFINITE APPETITE FOR SHELLS

  THE GREAT WAR IS REMEMBERED AS THE WAR OF THE machine gun. Its defining image is of doomed foot soldiers, bayonets fixed, climbing doggedly out of their trenches and being mowed down like so many stalks of corn by gun crews dispensing instant death at the industrially admirable rate of ten rounds per second. And of course that image is no mere phantasm. It happened again and again from the summer of 1914 until the autumn of 1918. The machine gun was one of the war’s essential elements, a prime reason why so many offensives failed so miserably, a puzzle that the generals had to solve before they could begin to succeed.

  But in fact it was artillery that dominated the battlefields. World War I was the first major war, and it would also be the last, in which more men were killed by artillery than by small arms or aerial bombardment or any other method of destruction. Until late in the war artillery was the only weapon that, when used to maximum advantage, could neutralize the machine gun. It was the one weapon without which infantry, both when attacking and when defending, had almost no chance. Armies could and did misunderstand and misuse the machine gun and survive. There was less room for error where the big guns were concerned. Huge numbers of such guns proved to be indispensable from the start, as did astronomical numbers of shells. Where this need was not met, empires tottered.

  The Boer, Russo-Japanese, and Baltic Wars had all given warning of what would happen if the armies of the great powers of Europe met in battle armed with thousands of the latest rifled, breech-loading, rapid-firing cannon. No one came close to imagining, however, how great the hunger for shells was going to be when such a war came. In the years leading up to 1914 all the powers had spent heavily on artillery (in addition to its heavy artillery, Germany began the war with more than five thousand smaller field guns and twelve hundred field howitzers), and all entered the conflict with what they thought were immense quantities of ammunition. All were stunned by the speed with which their supplies were exhausted. When 1915 arrived with both fronts deadlocked, all the belligerents found themselves desperately short not just of shells but of production capacity. No amount ever seemed to be enough.

  The French, who thought they had a three-month supply on hand at the end of July 1914, were rationing the number of shells given to each battery within six weeks; the Battle of the Marne nearly cleaned them out. The British, believing that they were going to war with a six-month supply, were running short before the end of October. The Russians, proud of having stockpiled a thousand rounds for every gun in their army, were likewise soon baffled by a conflict in which a single artillery piece might be called upon to fire a thousand times every couple of days.

  When Grand Duke Nicholas told the Petrograd government that he needed two and a half, then three and a half million shells per month, these were numbers that Russian industry could not begin to provide. And so the Russians began placing huge orders overseas, first with British suppliers (who cheerfully accepted them and the advance payments that came with them in spite of being unable to meet their own army’s needs), then with the United States. Being essentially bankrupt by early 1915, Russia was able to pay only by drawing on a line of credit of £25 million per month grudgingly extended by a British government fearful of collapse in the east. The systemic corruption and profiteering of the Russian procurement system assured that much of the money simply disappeared. Much of what was ordered was never delivered, and much of what was delivered piled up uselessly at Russia’s only functioning (and woefully inadequate) ports of entry, Vladivostok at the eastern end of Siberia and Archangel in the Arctic.

  Though the shortage was severe for all the belligerents, its nature varied from country to country. Austria was plagued by the need to produce ammunition for a ridiculously large number of different kinds of guns, many of them antiques long since discarded by armies that had done a better job of modernizing and standardizing. But even the most modern armies encountered problems not only of quantity but of shell type. All of them, before the war, had given priority to the production and accumulation of shrapnel, an antipersonnel projectile that, upon exploding in midair, showers lethal lead pellets over a wide area. The early months of the war showed that, though shrapnel was effective in cutting away barbed wire, it was useless for destroying fortifications and killing the men inside. Only high explosives such as dynamite and nitroglycerin did the job. The consumption of high-explosive shells—much more complicated and costly than shrapnel—increased exponentially.

  A British munitions plant, pouring out shells for the armies of the Entente

  France and Germany adapted best. In Paris an able and energetic young socialist politician named Albert Thomas was named undersecretary for armaments in the ministry of war and hurried to make changes. He got three hundred and fifty thousand skilled industrial workers—eventually half a million—released from military service and assigned to munitions factories and coal mines. He brought tens of thousands of women onto the payrolls of private and government plants. He thereby started a gender revolution that would change European society; by the end of the war women would fill more than a third of all industrial jobs in Britain and France, and more than half of such jobs in Germany. Prisoners of war were put to work as well, and refugees. With remarkable speed France was soon coming close to meeting the needs of its army.

  Germany’s situation was especially perilous in the first year of the war. Moltke, uniquely among Europe’s prewar military planners, had insisted on the development of industrial facilities capable of achieving and sustaining high rates of munitions production. These facilities provided a basis for rapid expansion, but they were not nearly enough. The Germans had used more ammunition in the Battle of the Marne than in the Franco-Prussian War; First Ypres and the war in the east further drained supplies; and the naval blockade put in place by Britain cut Germany off from sources of essential commodities.

  To attack the problem Falkenhayn, in his capacity as minister of war, recruited a dynamic young Jewish industrialist named Walter Rathenau. Rathenau got almost miraculous results out of Germany’s chemical and engineering industries. Soon camphor, essential in the production of gunpowder, was being extracted from turpentine rather than imported from Japan. Nitrogen was being drawn from the atmosphere rather than from the guano deposits of Chile, and wood products were replacing American cotton and also providing the acetone needed for making nitroglycerin. In Germany as in France, skilled workers were exempted from military duty and women went into the factories. By the summer of 1915 Germany was manufacturing upward of four million shells per month. That was sufficient, though barely.

  Historians who have examined the question argue persuasively that the shell crises of 1914 and 1915 need not have been as serious as they were and in fact were sometimes not as serious as the generals claimed. In many battles, especially when bad weather turned roads to muck, the problem was not so much a lack of ammunition as an inability to get the necessary tons of it to the waiting guns. In Serbia in 1914 horse-drawn Austrian wagons laden with shells were able to move only twelve miles in four days of hard labor. Gunners were often profligate, opening fire, for example, upon seeing just one or two distant soldiers. The Russians made especially bad use of their supplies, stockpiling mountains of shells in fortresses that usually had little military value and eventually fell to the Germans.

  Generals on both sides became adept at blaming a shortage of shells for their failure to produce the results they had promised. In Russia, Minister of War Sukhomlinov was so convinced that his rivals were using such complaints to undercut him politically that he withheld urgently needed ammunition. At the end of First Ypres, Sir Douglas Haig complained to a journalist that his troops could simply have walked through the German lines unopposed “as soon as we were supplied with ample artillery ammunition of high explosives.”

  Haig’s failures in later offensives, when his supplies of ammunition were practically infinite,
make this complaint dubious at best. But it was not the last such complaint to be made—and made publicly—by a senior commander of the BEF. The result, before 1915 was half finished, would be a crisis that brought down Asquith’s Liberal government and led to a radical redistribution of power among Britain’s political leaders.

  Chapter 17

  The Ground Shifts

  “Success will come in the final analysis to the side which has the last man.”

  —HENRI-PHILIPPE PÉTAIN

  By the end of April the Germans had scraped together enough troops to form yet another new eastern army, the Eleventh. They accomplished this through a general reorganization in which the number of battalions per division was reduced from twelve to nine, compensating for the reduction in manpower by giving every division more machine guns. Command of the Eleventh was given to August von Mackensen, a ferocious-looking general who had figured importantly in the Tannenberg victory and offered Falkenhayn the advantage of being no friend of Hindenburg and Ludendorff.

  The question facing Falkenhayn would have seemed familiar in London: how should the new army be used? Giving it to Hindenburg was out of the question. Transferring it to the Western Front was impossible because contrary to the wishes of Kaiser Wilhelm, who though declining in influence remained hereditary All-High Warlord with the power to set strategy. The fact that not a single offensive on the Western Front had achieved its intended results reinforced the kaiser’s belief that victory could be achieved only in the east.

  Falkenhayn had to do something, he was going to have to do it in the east, and he strongly preferred that it not happen in the northern sectors where Hindenburg was in command. A simple process of elimination pointed him toward the southeast—toward the Austrians and their endless problems. And though he still had powerful political enemies, Falkenhayn also had a new ally: Crown Prince Wilhelm, the kaiser’s heir. This far-from-incapable young officer, now developing into a seasoned army commander, suggested how Falkenhayn might satisfy the skeptics and at the same time prepare the way for the Western Front offensive that he wanted. The prince’s idea was simple and sensible. Germany’s prime objective should be not to defeat the Russians conclusively—an unrealistic goal, in light of the enemy’s manpower and the vast distances of the eastern theater—but to damage them so badly that in 1916 the Germans would be free to turn their attention to the west.

  Falkenhayn was thus disposed to pay heed when Conrad reported from Vienna that he saw an opportunity to break through the momentarily static Russian line between the Galician towns of Gorlice and Tarnow, and thereby preempt the inevitable resumption of Russia’s Carpathian offensive. Conrad, however, remained desperately short of troops and shells, and so he added that he would be incapable of executing his plan without the assistance of at least four German divisions. Falkenhayn’s answer was surprising from a man who had so long been incapable of enthusiasm where the east was concerned. He told Conrad that he was sending not just the four requested divisions but twice that many: all four of the corps that made up Mackensen’s new army. Conrad, formally in charge of the campaign, was required to promise that he would do nothing without the approval of Falkenhayn or, in Falkenhayn’s absence, of Mackensen. Mackensen, along with the Army of the South that was already operating with Conrad under the command of General von Linsingen, would be reporting not to the two giants of the north but to Falkenhayn himself.

  Over a ten-day period Mackensen’s army was moved into place, surreptitiously so as not to alert the Russians, behind a thirty-mile expanse of front facing Gorlice and Tarnow. Falkenhayn himself went east to oversee the deployment, while Hindenburg and Ludendorff remained on the sidelines. Pointedly declining to give them any direct role in the impending offensive, Falkenhayn asked them to undertake a diversionary action to draw as many Russians as possible away from Galicia. Ludendorff, interested not in diversions but in conquest, took Falkenhayn’s request as justification for sending a large cavalry force into Russian-controlled territory on the far northern Baltic coast, a remote and desolate region called Courland that the war had not yet reached. At first this probe did not produce the result that Falkenhayn, at least, was hoping for: the Russians didn’t regard it as important enough to require a strong response.

  The southern offensive, with Conrad and his troops in a distinctly subordinate role, began on May 2 with a brief but fantastically intense artillery barrage and almost immediately turned into a success unlike anything seen in the west. In four hours fifteen hundred German and Austrian gun crews dropped seven hundred thousand rounds of high explosives, shrapnel, and poison gas onto a twenty-eight-mile front occupied by the Russian Third Army, which had not troubled to construct strong defenses and was short not only of artillery but even of rifles. Worse, the Russians’ five and a half divisions—sixty thousand men—had been worn down by the winter fighting in the Carpathians and had been left in an isolated position that no other Russian force would be able to reach quickly. When the bombardment ended and Mackensen’s ten divisions and Conrad’s eight moved forward, the Third Army collapsed. The attackers pushed it back beyond Gorlice in less than twenty-four hours. They advanced eight miles in forty-eight hours, Tarnow fell on the fifth day, and within a week a hundred and forty thousand Russians and two hundred guns had been captured. Two other Russian armies came forward to rescue the Third, but their movements were poorly coordinated and accomplished little beyond feeding more bodies to the German gunners. General Radko Dimitriev, commander of the Third Army, was begging for approval to begin—so far as his troops were still capable of such a thing—a retreat across Galicia to the River San. This would have required abandoning the great prize of Przemysl. Grand Duke Nicholas, unable to accept the surrender of everything he had won, refused. He ordered Dimitriev to do what the German artillery made an impossibility: to stand his ground.

  With winter finished, the war was heating up everywhere. A week after the start of the Gorlice-Tarnow offensive, Joffre and French launched in the Artois region directly south of Ypres (where the fighting had never entirely died down) a massive attack that both men expected to produce great results—that Joffre said could “finish the war in three months.” The thinning of the German line had gone too far to remain secret. Knowledge of it helped make Joffre and French as confident as ever that the eternally hoped-for great breakthrough was at hand.

  The bloody mess called the Second Battle of Artois began on May 9. After only forty-six minutes of shelling (the brevity of this bombardment was made necessary by a scarcity of high-explosive shells), three corps of Haig’s recently formed British First Army hit two sectors of line defended by only two German regiments. The Germans had constructed parallel lines of defense, including dugouts reinforced with timbers that, when topped with layers of dirt-filled sandbags, could not be penetrated even by high explosives. Only eight percent of the British shells had contained high explosives, and their shrapnel hadn’t been sufficient even to cut away the barbed wire in front of the trenches.

  The defenders emerged from the barrage almost untouched, their machine guns so positioned as to be able to direct a heavy fire into the flanks of the two formations of British attackers. The target of the offensive was Aubers Ridge, which rose up abruptly behind the Germans’ first line. Once there, the attackers were to move southeast along a line of ridges until they linked up with French troops who, according to the plan, would by then be on the march toward the town of Lens. Beyond Lens lay a flatland called the Douai plain, the wrecked Belgian fortress of Namur, and (so Joffre hoped) victory.

  On that first day British casualties totaled 11,600, more than four hundred and fifty officers included, with so little result that the offensive was brought to a halt. The stop was temporary; three more divisions were thrown at the Germans May 16 through 18, suffering seventeen thousand additional casualties while gaining no ground.

  The French had much greater initial success, in part because their attack was preceded by six days of bombardment during w
hich twelve hundred guns poured seven hundred thousand shells onto the Bavarians of Crown Prince Rupprecht’s Sixth Army. In the four hours before the infantry’s advance, the gunners fired enough rounds to put eighteen high-explosive shells on every yard of front; most of their guns were 75mm field pieces with low trajectories ill suited to the shelling of trenches, but the cumulative effect was devastating. Though both flanks of the attack force were butchered by machine-gun fire, the center quickly penetrated three miles into enemy territory. For three days the center continued its advance, taking possession of three German lines.

  Then heavy rain began to fall, turning the ground to a gluey mud that made further progress impossible. In the end the early success of this assault led to losses so severe that it would have been better for the French if they had been checked at the beginning as completely as the British. The attackers made no breakthrough, finally, just an impressive but temporary bending-back of the German line. Ultimately they found themselves blocked by a last-ditch line of machine-gun nests that alone stood between them and the German artillery. As usual, the fight went on long after any chance of success had evaporated, with repeated French and British attacks neutralized by German counterattacks, casualties piling up, and nothing of importance accomplished. When the battle came to its end on June 18, the French had lost more more than a hundred thousand men, the Germans just under fifty thousand.

  Joffre remained undaunted. He was already making plans not only to restart the Artois offensive in the fall but to combine it with a simultaneous, even bigger attack in Champagne, thereby swamping the ability of the Germans to respond. If only in numerical terms, Joffre’s optimism had a rational basis: by early summer the British and French outnumbered the Germans on the Western Front by fully half a million men. Sir John French was as confident of success as Joffre and as eager for more offensives.