Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military)

by Gordon Corrigan

  Radio in 1914 was rudimentary. The Royal Flying Corps did have a spark transmitter in some aircraft, and at corps level there was some radio equipment. No radio was yet small enough and robust enough to be used by the troops in the trenches, and communication was by runner, telephone, semaphore flags, heliograph and even by pigeon and trained dogs. The most common method was by telephone. Lines were laid from forward companies back to battalion headquarters in the support or reserve trenches, and then back to brigade headquarters. Two sets of line were always laid in case enemy shelling cut one, and where possible the line was dug in and protected.

  Most work was done at night. The carrying-up of rations, ammunition and water and the digging of major new trench lines or communication trenches was much safer under the cover of darkness. Signallers would check their telephone wires, and parties would go out to ensure that the obstacle belt in front of the firing line had not been damaged by shelling or cut by unseen German patrols.

  Throughout the war the largest arm of the service was the infantry, with fifty-four per cent of the total strength of the BEF in 1914, reducing to just over thirty-three per cent in 1918 as other methods, such as tanks and the Machine Gun Corps, were used to help inflict death and destruction. Not surprisingly the infantry had the highest casualty rate of any arm, eighty-three per cent of the total on the Western Front, while the safest combat arm to be in was the cavalry: with an average of just over three per cent of the army’s manpower, they sustained less than one per cent of its casualties. The casualties in the Machine Gun Corps were very heavy. Although it was only formed in late 1915, it had about twice the number of casualties of the Royal Engineers, despite having only one-quarter of the number of men.

  Each soldier in the BEF, with the exception of medical personnel and chaplains, was armed with a rifle, the .303 calibre Lee-Enfield, probably the best military rifle ever made anywhere, which remained in service in the British regular army with only slight modification until 1960. This rifle, like all rifles, had to be ‘zeroed’ to the user. Every man holds his rifle in a slightly different way, and every rifle has slight variations in the alignment of its various components. A rifle was a personal issue, which the man was supposed to retain throughout his service, and he had to fire it on a range until, by adjustment of the foresight and backsight, the rifle put the shots where the man aimed. Even the best shot in the army could not be sure of hitting a target with the first few rounds if the rifle was not zeroed to him personally. Much nonsense is talked about the British infantry and its shooting. It is true that the British army spent more time perfecting rifle shooting than any other in Europe – a sensible precaution when it was always smaller than anyone else’s, and when, as a long-term volunteer organisation, it could afford the time to develop this important skill. The regular army had a high standard of shooting in 1914, but the so-called ‘mad minute’, where each man fired fifteen rounds, was very far from accurate and was nothing more than the bringing-down of a lot of lead in a wide area. It probably did confuse the young German reservists into thinking that the British had more machine guns than they actually did, but it would not have fooled them for long, or a regular NCO at all. The usual rapid rate of fire was eight to twelve shots per minute, supposedly aimed, but this could not be sustained for long with a bolt-action rifle: the bolt had to be worked after each shot to eject the spent round and load the next, the sights lined up, the breathing adjusted and the trigger squeezed. Men were trained to fire aimed shots at up to 600 yards’ range, and longer in volley fire, but the normal battle shooting range was between 100 and 300 yards. When the rifle was not in use the sights were set to 300 yards. At the beginning of the war the overall standard of shooting was good in the regular army, less good in Territorial Force battalions and only moderate among the New Army men. As time went on the first declined and the latter two improved; by 1918, when much less reliance was placed on individual prowess with the rifle, the general standard was much the same throughout the infantry, the majority qualifying as first- or second-class shots, with a few marksmen and a handful of incorrigible third-class men.

  Each man normally took 150 rounds of rifle ammunition with him when he went into the trenches, and more was available in the front line. It would be very unusual indeed for a man to fire off this amount of ammunition, even when engaged in a major offensive or defending against a large-scale attack; but the British had learned the lessons of having insufficient ammunition the hard way, and it was now very rare for a man to run out. It is not possible to quantify the exact rate of ammunition expenditure to kills achieved. At Neuve-Chapelle in March 1915 the British and Indian soldiers fired a total of three million rounds of small-arms ammunition. The total of German killed and wounded is estimated at 16,000, giving a hit rate of one for every 187 rounds fired. This, however, takes no account of casualties caused by bomb guns (trench mortars), machine guns and shelling, or of men hit several times. It is more likely that around 400 rounds of rifle ammunition were fired for every hit, but even this is not the whole picture. Rifle fire is not always aimed at a specific target. Men will be ordered to fire on an area to prevent the enemy using it, or on a line of trenches to keep the enemy heads down, and a strict linkage of rounds fired to enemy casualties is meaningless.

  It is a common misconception that it was the machine gun that killed most British soldiers in France and Flanders, but the real killer was artillery. An analysis undertaken by the RAMC showed that just over two per cent of all wounds were caused by grenades, almost thirty-nine per cent by bullets, either rifle or machine-gun, and just over fifty-eight per cent by shells from artillery or trench mortars. The remainder, some 0.32 per cent of the total, were due to other causes, including bayonets.3

  In the British army the Royal Artillery was divided into three branches: the Royal Horse Artillery, the Royal Field Artillery and the Royal Garrison Artillery. The horse artillery supported the cavalry and the field artillery the infantry. The Royal Garrison Artillery originally manned static guns in fortifications, but by 1914 their main purpose overseas was to man heavy guns, used mainly for bombarding enemy artillery positions (this was known as counter-battery fire). The garrison artillery was also responsible for manning anti-aircraft guns (from September 1914). Curiously, perhaps, mountain artillery also belonged to the Royal Garrison Artillery. This sub-branch consisted of artillery units intended to support the infantry in inhospitable terrain where there were no roads. Their light guns could be dismantled and carried on mules, the criterion being that the guns had to be able to go where a man could go without using his hands to crawl or scramble. There were only three mountain-artillery batteries employed on the Western Front, but others, of both the British and Indian armies, fought in Egypt (two batteries), Gallipoli (four), East Africa (five), Mesopotamia (twelve) and Palestine (fourteen).

  Artillery pieces can be broadly classified as field guns, heavy guns and howitzers. The difference between a gun and a howitzer is that the former fires on a relatively flat trajectory, whereas the latter can ‘lob’: that is, fire a shell at a high angle into the air so that it falls behind an obstacle, beyond a range of hills or into a trench.4 With artillery of the Great War period, the penalty for this ability to lob was a shorter range than a gun of the same calibre.5

  It is a common cry of those who belong to the ‘butchers and bunglers’ school of Great War scholarship (if their activities can be dignified with the term ‘scholarship’) that the British army always prepared to fight the last war. This is one of the more enduring accusations of those who consider that British generalship was concentrated in the hands of stupid, hidebound traditionalists. Of course British generals – and indeed all generals – prepared to fight the last war. As a crystal ball to foresee the future is not available, it is only by examining the lessons of previous campaigns that any sort of war-fighting doctrine can evolve. General staffs which were unprepared to face problems that had appeared before would be failing in their duty and deserving of censure.
Men who examined what had happened in the past and were prepared to meet it can only be praised. In liberal democracies at least, there is little funding for speculative development, and an army that spent too much time and money planning for a future which might not come to pass would be foolish indeed. That said, professional soldiers in all armies took note of current experience and where possible incorporated its fruits, and this was particularly true in regard to artillery.

  Consideration as to how a future European war might develop was based on the events of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, the South African War of 1899–1902 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. All these wars consisted of manoeuvring by armies, interspersed with short set-piece battles, and a few siege operations. The infantry, who would do most of the fighting, needed an artillery gun that could move quickly to their support and fire at enemy infantry and cavalry in the open at the maximum range at which the methods of fire control then available could guarantee hitting a target.

  During the first decade of the century most armies re-equipped their artillery with what were known as ‘quick-firing’ guns. During the last great pan-European conflagration, the Napoleonic Wars, artillery guns had been muzzle-loading and ammunition divided into the ball or shell (what was actually fired at the enemy) and the propellant (the charge that drove the shell from the gun). Guns had been sighted by eye and the recoil of firing drove the gun backwards, from where it had to be hauled back into its firing position and re-aimed before another round could be loaded and fired. Technical development since then had concentrated on increasing rate of fire, accuracy and range. This was achieved through four major innovations: ammunition incorporating a cartridge case, which would increase the rate of firing as well as sealing the breech; a breech mechanism that was easy and quick to operate, thereby increasing the rate of fire; the incorporation of a recoil mechanism inherent to the gun carriage, allowing the gun to remain in position when firing and reducing the time needed to set the sights between firings; and rifled barrels to improve range and accuracy. In most cases the ammunition came in one piece: that is, the shell and the cartridge case containing the propellant were fixed together, rather than separate as they had been formerly; although in some howitzers, where the propellant had to be varied according to the range required, ammunition came separated.

  The French were the first to mass-produce a gun that combined all these attributes: the 75-mm model 1897, so called for the year it first came into service. The 75 was breech-loading; its ammunition came with the shell at the end of a brass case in which was the propellant, so it could be loaded in one movement. On firing, the brass case expanded to make a gas-tight seal at the breech. A recoil mechanism absorbed the shock of firing by allowing the barrel to move back, ejecting the spent case as it did so, before returning to the loading-and-firing position. As the gun remained static throughout, a shield could be incorporated to protect the crew from small-arms fire. There was a simple pole trail and the gun could be drawn by six horses. By 1914 the 75 was an artillery legend, but actually almost obsolete. It suited the French doctrine of continuous attack, however, and the French army had a great many of them. Though the British, German and Austrian equivalents were superior in range and weight of shell, there are times when a great many bows and arrows are better than one rifle, and there is a natural reluctance in all armies to admit that what you are equipping your soldiers with may not the best available. And thus the 75, with numerous modifications, remained in service with the French (and American) armies until the early 1940s.

  The standard British field gun was the eighteen-pounder, introduced in 1904 and combining the best features of artillery development by other countries and by the Royal Navy. It too was a rifled breech-loader with recoil mechanism and protective shield. It was robust, once the recoil mechanism had been adapted for the very high rate of fire experienced on the Western Front, and accurate. The gun had a dial sight to allow unseen targets to be engaged by laying the gun from a known compass bearing. In 1914 each British division had three brigades (regiments in modern parlance) of eighteen-pounders, each brigade having three batteries of six guns each, or a divisional total of fifty-four guns. By 1915 the requirement to equip the New Armies and the Territorial Force had forced a reduction to forty-eight guns per division, and in 1916 a further reduction to thirty-six allowed the formation of Army Field Artillery Brigades, a centralisation of assets which could then be deployed where the army commander thought they were most needed.

  On the outbreak of war artillery training was based on what had gone before, and this had generally been situations where guns could see the target they were firing at. Fire control consisted of the battery commander standing to the upwind flank of his battery with a telescope, watching the fall of shot and correcting the fire until it hit the target. It was thus unnecessary for the guns to be able to fire further than a man with a telescope could see, and the maximum range of the French 75 was 7,500 yards, and of the British eighteen-pounder 6,500, increasing to 9,300 in 1917.6 In the early stages of the war it was not uncommon for field (and horse) artillery units to bring their guns right up to the infantry forward positions. Partly this was due to the difficulties of communication, but there was also a feeling in the Royal Artillery that guns at the front helped boost infantry morale, as indeed they did. At the end of the movement phase of the war it became obvious that artillery would no longer fire at a target that the gunners could see, and methods of fire control from a distance began to be developed. Guns were placed to the rear and behind cover, usually a ridge line, but often dug in as well, and an observer – the Artillery Observation Officer – was stationed where he could see the target.

  In defence guns would be unhitched from their transport – horses – and lined up at a location identified on the map, with all gun barrels pointing in the same direction, specified by a compass bearing. In its simplest form an opportunity shoot might be conducted by the Observation Officer giving the map reference of the target to the gun line by telephone. At the gun line the battery commander, or later the Gun Position Officer, would work out the range to the target and the direction left or right of the known bearing, and the gunners would traverse the guns to point at the target. The elevation would be given, worked out from range tables that gave the number of degrees of elevation required for a given range, and one or two guns would fire one round. Contrary to popular belief, an artillery piece is not a pinpoint weapon but an area one, and the Observation Officer would tell the gun to go right or left, drop or add, until the shells were landing where they were wanted. The officer on the gun line had to know the compass bearing between the guns and the target in order to work out what the observer’s ‘left one hundred’ meant for the guns, and the alteration of elevation and traverse for the guns was applied accordingly. When the firing gun dropped a shell within twenty-five yards of the target, the observer would report ‘on target’ and the whole battery would fire. Firing off the map was not the best method of bringing artillery fire onto a target, as maps, at least in the early part of the war, were inaccurate. The preferred method was for the row of guns to be positioned at right angles to what was known as the ‘zero line’, a compass bearing from the centre of the gun line to the target, or to the centre of a designated area. The artillery observer would then work out the range and angle from his position to the target, and from his position to the guns, using a rangefinder. Once these measurements were known, simple trigonometry, incorporated in range tables, allowed the officer on the gun line to work out the range and bearing to the target. Usually two guns would fire at first, one with its range set at 300 yards farther than the second, which fired five seconds later. The aim was to achieve a bracket, that is with one gun dropping its shell ahead of the target, and the other behind it. The observer corrected the fire, by voice or more often by telephone, until the rounds were falling where they should, and the whole battery could then fire onto the target.

  The system depended totally on the abi
lity of the observer to communicate with the gun lines, and while the telephone, with lines duplicated and dug in, worked well when the BEF was static in trenches, it was unreliable in the attack, when gunners had to lay a line to the observer who was moving forward with the infantry. All methods were tried, and used, but it would not be until well after this war that a portable radio would allow instantaneous reaction to an infantry request for fire on an opportunity target. Fire plans to support infantry on the move in the Great War were timed, rather than ‘on call’. In the course of the conflict fire control became ever more sophisticated, as did the method of aiming the gun. As ranges increased so the flight of the shell was influenced by such factors as wind direction, humidity and atmospheric pressure, and range tables were amended to take account of these.

  The lesson of previous wars had been that most field artillery ammunition should be designed to take on infantry, cavalry and other guns in the open, and so British field artillery entered the war with a preponderance of shrapnel shells.7 The shrapnel shell for the eighteen-pounder had a steel casing filled with 375 lead balls, each about the size of a marble and weighing just under half an ounce, and a bursting charge. On reaching the target the shell exploded in mid-air, scattering the area in front or around it with a hail of lead, rather like a very large shotgun blast. It was widely believed that the fuse, time or percussion, was made under licence from Messrs Krupp of Essen, and that it was not until the arrival of the less than gentlemanly Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions in 1915 that the British government stopped paying royalties for the use of this German invention. As with many good stories there is no evidence whatever for this, and in any case the British had developed a fuse of their own.