The Old Contemptibles

by Robin Neillands

  This arrangement sandwiched the BEF between two French armies, and for the moment General Joffre was happy with this arrangement. If he could not persuade Sir John French to accept his authority and obey his direct orders, he could at least confine the BEF to operations that largely depended on French cooperation, if only to cover its flanks.

  This is not to say that Joffre ceased making demands on his British ally, mainly that BEF units should take over more of the French line, so enabling the French generals to form reserves for further attacks. In itself this was sensible, for to mount a successful attack a commander needs reserves. The troops making the initial assault would usually be too tired, confused and reduced in numbers to exploit any success; fresh troops are needed and must come forward quickly, to hold any salient or exploit any breakthrough.

  This basic fact, and Joffre's demands, reveals a basic Franco-British problem. There is nothing wrong with Joffre's demand; creating strong reserves was necessary for any French success. The problem was that creating and retaining reserves were also essential for any British contribution to that French attack, a contribution Joffre would insist on and French's orders (see the Appendix) urged him to supply. Sir John French could create reserves for his armies and then either support French attacks or launch offensives on his own, or he could take over more of the French line - he could not do both.

  Joffre knew all this but he did not care; this was a British problem and they should solve it to his satisfaction by sending out more troops. He had his own requirements, and in early 1915 these demanded that the BEF take over more of the Ypres front and free the French IX Corps for operations in Artois with the Tenth Army. This move, said Joffre, was 'a necessary condition for an offensive by the Tenth Army'. Further demands for the BEF to take over more of the front would be made throughout 1915.

  At first sight, Joffre's demands again seem reasonable. Apart from a short section north of Dixmunde, south of the North Sea and held by the Belgians, and that 32 kilometres held by the BEF, at the start of 1915 the remainder of the Western Front was held by the French Army. Right to the end of the war the French held more of the front than the British, who never held more than 160 kilometres.

  On the other hand, if the British front was shorter, it was usually far more active in between offensives. Apart from mounting all-out offensives, the British and empire units were always more aggressive in carrying the war to the enemy and keen to dominate that muddy, shell-torn, corpse-littered stretch of ground between the lines known as no man's land, and they did so with a constant round of local attacks and trench raids. The French, on the other hand, generally adopted a rather sensible policy of 'live and let live' with the enemy and left their part of the line quiet unless an attack was being planned or actually executed.

  Such attacks were already being planned in the New Year of 1915. When the year opened the British were contemplating an advance up the Channel coast to seize the ports of Ostend and Zeebrugge. This attack would be supported by naval gunfire from the warships of Admiral Hood's Channel Squadron and aimed at preventing the Germans developing these Belgian ports as submarine bases. The French were not keen on this operation, and in early February the proposal was abandoned.

  General Joffre had other plans, notably for a major offensive designed to pinch off a great bulge in the French line known as the Noyon salient, a relic of the German advance in 1914. This salient peaked at Noyon, just 90 kilometres from Paris, and threatened the vital railway lines between Paris and the northern section of the front. If an attack from the north and south against the base of this salient was successful, it would cut the rail communications feeding the troops at the head of the salient from the east, force their withdrawal and perhaps restore open warfare. In Joffre's plan, this major French assault would be supported by a limited British attack north of the La Bassee canal - an attack that will be fully discussed in the next chapter. This Noyon offensive, according to Joffre, would certainly help the Russians and perhaps end the war.

  There was another reason for pushing ahead with a major offensive in the west. Pressure was building in Britain for a diversion of strength to another theatre, and this pressure was currently shifting in favour of an attack on the Dardanelles, a move supported by the prime minister and the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Both Joffre and French were totally opposed to any diversion of strength away from the Western Front, and a strong offensive was one way to bring the focus of attention back to France. Their demands were partially successful; at the end of January 1915, plans for what became the Gallipoli campaign were being pushed ahead in London and Egypt, but otherwise the current preoccupation was with forthcoming operations on the Western Front.

  The time for a major attack against the Noyon salient seemed propitious. At the end of 1914 the Germans had started to shift divisions to the Eastern Front; eight infantry and six German cavalry divisions had already been taken from the Western Front and twelve new divisions formed in Germany since the outbreak of war had also gone east to confront the Russians. At the end of First Ypres the Germans had 106 divisions on the Western Front; now they had ninety-eight and none of these was fully up to strength. (7) On the other hand the Germans had the benefit of the Western Front trench system which they were steadily developing, but - Joffre thought - given sufficient artillery and some support from the BEF, even that obstacle could be penetrated.

  Three lines of attack on the Noyon salient presented themselves to General Joffre. The first was an attack from Artois to the east, forcing the Germans away from Arras and pushing across the Artois plateau to Douai, eventually cutting the German communications somewhere between Rheims and Arras. Another attack might be mounted from Champagne, this one heading north towards the Ardennes and so cutting the railway lines to the German armies west of Rheims. A final option was to advance from Verdun and Nancy, heading north through the Rhine provinces to cut the German communications across the Rhine to France - and threaten Germany itself. Joffre was evolving a strategic plan, and attempts to implement this strategy were to dominate Franco-British actions for the rest of the year.

  General Joffre was not a man to do things by halves. Faced with the choice of three options he opted for all of them. Attacks in Champagne had been going on for months; in the early spring these would continue and expand while the plans to attack in Artois and from Verdun-Nancy were put in hand. The Artois attack would be delivered in cooperation with a major push in Champagne. When those attacks were fully in train, the third attack would be launched from Verdun-Nancy. If all went well, the Germans would be obliged to retreat from their current positions. Once on the move they might then be pushed back to the Rhine and beyond; if a war of movement could be restored to the Western Front, who knew what might happen?

  Up to a point, Field Marshal French was in full agreement with the French commander on his plans for 1915; like Joffre, he 'strongly deprecated the idea of sending French or British troops to any theatre other than the Western Front'. (8) Until the impossibility of breaking through on the Western Front had been proved, he averred, 'there could be no question of making an attempt elsewhere' - for example at Gallipoli.

  This argument did not entirely sway opinions at the War Office, where the regular 29th Division, which French desperately wanted in France, was now marked for a move to the eastern Mediterranean, actually departing on 15 March. It was replaced by a Territorial Force formation, the 46th (North Midland) Division, which arrived in France at the end of February.

  Field Marshal French was neither pleased nor impressed with this substitution. Since early February he and Sir Douglas Haig had been contemplating offensive operations at Neuve Chapelle in support of the French attack in Artois.

  On 15 February, French asked Haig to draw up plans for an attack on the First Army front at Neuve Chapelle with the low height of Aubers Ridge and beyond as the ultimate objective. On the following day this plan was given further impetus by a request from Joffre, detailing a proposed a
ttack by the French Tenth Army between Arras and Lens with the object of taking the heights of Vimy Ridge. This attack, said Joffre, would be aided if at the same time the BEF would make an attack just to the north, against Aubers Ridge. Together, these assaults would extend the combined Anglo-French attack front to one of some 112 kilometres.

  Before proceeding with this account, it is necessary to refer the reader back to the early part of this chapter in which the state of the BEF in 1915 was described. From this it will be clear that in 1915 Sir John French's force was not equipped for breakthrough offensives and barely equipped for 'bite and hold' attacks, those limited offensives designed only to seize parts of the enemy line.

  This sensible course of action was not one of the available options.

  The French wanted to attack in Artois and Champagne and expected support from the BEF south of the Ypres salient. That commitment was inherent in Franco-British relations, and the notion that the British were unreliable allies was one that Field Marshal French and his superiors were currently most anxious to dispel. Military realities had nothing to do with it; whatever the difficulties, when the French soldiers went forward in the spring of 1915, the BEF would match them stride for stride.

  At this point it would therefore be as well to discuss briefly the two main Allied tactics that the armies employed for the rest of the war, operations usually described as the 'bite and hold' and the 'break­ through'.

  Both of these were designed to cope with the situation created by the existence of the Western Front defences and the end of open warfare. 'Bite and hold' is self-explanatory; after a preliminary bombardment, the Allies would launch an attack that aimed to grab - or bite off- a section of the enemy line. With that much achieved, the artillery would be moved forward and cavalry or infantry reinforcements would come up to hold this newly acquired territory against the inevitable German counter-attack. If this portion could be held, then it could be used as a base for further 'bite and hold' attacks. According to the theory, so the Allied line would advance and the enemy line be gradually eroded.

  There were various snags with 'bite and hold'. The first of these was that - usually - it did not work. The normal result of a 'bite and hold' operation was to create a narrow salient, which the enemy quickly brought under fire and then counter-attacked from three sides. The movement forward of artillery and reinforcements across no man's land was rendered difficult if not impossible by this fire and the shell-torn ground, communications broke down and the attack disintegrated; the usual outcome was a pinching out of the salient with considerable loss to the attacker. There was also the problem created by the inherent design of 'bite and hold' attacks - how many of them would be needed to create a German withdrawal or drive the enemy back to the Rhine?

  Breakthrough attacks were much larger and altogether more ambitious. These were on a wider front, employed more units and aimed at a complete breakthrough of the enemy line on a front too wide to be pinched off. After breaching the line the attacker would bring up the cavalry and move forward to either cut the enemy's communications or roll up his defences from the flank; in either case the outcome should be a major enemy defeat, a full-scale retreat and the restoration of open warfare - or so it was hoped.

  The problem with this form of attack will be revealed in subsequent chapters, but the main snag was the initial one - that of breaking through the enemy defences. It was tacitly assumed - and the generals were absolutely correct in this assumption - that the only way to breach the enemy line was by using an abundance of artillery and a vast quantity of shells. Given such assets, attacks were to prove that the enemy line could indeed be penetrated - but not without problems thereafter.

  The first problem was to balance the extent of the attack front against the availability of artillery. It was accepted that the key to breaching the enemy front was an abundance of artillery, and this must be heavy artillery firing a great quantity of high-explosive shell. In 1915 the problem was twofold; first there was a great shortage of heavy guns and shells, and second, the more the front of the attack was extended, the more the available artillery must be thinned out in order to cover it. The only answer to this conundrum was a super­abundance of artillery and high-explosive shell, but that solution was a long way off in 1915.

  Nor was that all. Even assuming the enemy front could be penetrated, there then arose the problem of exploitation - of expanding the breach and pushing forward from it to complete the breakthrough and roll up the enemy line. The attacking forces could rarely manage this - their energies and much of their manpower would have been exhausted or lost in achieving the breach. What was now required was a rapid commitment of reserves - probably the cavalry - and the forward movement of the guns in order to cover further advances in the exploitation phase of the battle.

  At this point all manner of problems arose, most notably one of communications. No portable battlefield wireless sets were available in 1915; they would not become available until later in the war when wireless sets could be carried in tanks or aircraft, but they were not light enough to be man-portable. The commanders' only means of communicating with the front-line troops was by field telephones and land lines - and then only when the men were in fixed positions. Hence the need for pre-planned attacks, for the commanders had no reliable means of communicating with their troops once those troops moved beyond the front-line trench.

  Other means of communication did exist - visual sightings, runners, flash signals, even carrier pigeons - but all these had limitations. Visual sightings were limited by the sheer scale of the action - the days when an army commander could see the whole battlefield by using his telescope from the back of a horse were long gone - and the battlefield was anyway obscured by smoke and dust. Runners did not live long on a battlefield swept by machine-gun bullets and shellfire, or got lost or delayed.

  Visual signals, using lamps or flares, were also inhibited by dust and smoke and rarely proved effective, and the only recorded use of carrier pigeons comes in an apocryphal story which recounts how, after a number of carrier pigeons had been issued to front-line officers before an attack, one such pigeon was retrieved from the divisional pigeon loft bearing the unhelpful if understandable message 'I am fed up carrying this bloody bird all over France'.

  The problem of reliable battlefield communications is still in existence in the early years of the twenty-first century and has to be fully grasped if the problems facing the Great War commanders are to be understood. It was not just the problem of communicating orders to the troops. There was also the matter of finding out what was going on at the front, during the attack, under that pall of smoke and dust, so that sensible orders, relevant to a changing situation, could be issued and distributed. The basic rule in battle is to reinforce success, but how is that rule to be followed when the commander has no reliable means of finding out which part of his attack is forging ahead and which part is a total disaster?

  Communications apart, the Great War armies faced one insurmountable burden - they had great weight but little mobility. Opportunities for the rapid exploitation of any initial success - and the word 'rapid' is the crucial one - were limited by the fact that the Great War armies relied for their mobility on the feet of the infantry and the hoofs of the cavalry. Load an infantryman with 27 kilograms of kit, plus his rifle and ammunition, and he will not be able to run about for very long - a slow plod over churned-up, muddy ground is the best that can be expected. The cavalry is in little better condition, and both infantry and cavalry, when moving in the open, are vulnerable to enemy fire.

  Then there is the matter of the enemy. However much he may have been surprised by the initial bombardment and attack - and that depended on a wide range of factors - his reaction would usually be prompt and vicious. The troops he has in the line will fight back, reserves will be rushed to the scene and heavy guns brought into play to stem the attack and seal off any salient. Unless the attack is executed with surprise, force and speed of exploitation, it is unlike
ly to succeed.

  Then there arises the matter of training one's own troops. The units at the front in 1915 were composed either of a declining number of regular soldiers, trained for open warfare of the small-scale colonial variety, or Territorial Force volunteers who were barely trained at all. The histories and memoirs of the time are full of complaints about the poor state of training among the arriving troops, and the first requirement for any unit reaching the front was to train its men in the new kind of warfare - trench warfare or siege warfare - in which they were now engaged. This involved grasping trench routines, wiring and digging, patrols in no man's land and trench raids, sniping and trench reliefs, plus all the day-to-day chores of living and surviving in a muddy trench a few hundred yards at best from the enemy line.

  Useful and necessary as these skills were, they were not the skills required for a successful attack. During attacks the need for 'fire and movement' tactics, field craft and basic infantry skills, the vital importance of taking ground, exploiting success while 'ripping up' captured enemy positions, became paramount. These skills and tactics cannot be learned overnight and can only be kept at the desired level by sound training and constant practice. The harsh fact is that the BEF of 1915 was not particularly skilled in either kind of warfare and would need time, training and experience before reaching the necessary state(s) of competence.

  It will therefore be seen that carrying out an attack - be it 'bite and hold' or an all-out attempt at a 'breakthrough' - could never be easy and was especially difficult at this time when neither the kit nor the competence existed. For these shortfalls the generals are usually blamed, but the fault lies with the politicians of the pre-war years, most of whom were members of the current government, who had failed to provide the army with either the geo-political direction or the necessary funds, manpower and industrial backing to play a swift and decisive part in this new and expanding war. The time lost in the pre-war years now had to be made up; to blame the generals for this situation and label them 'donkeys' for the resulting losses is to ignore the underlying factors.