America At War - Concise Histories Of U.S. Military Conflicts From Lexington To Afghanistan

by Terence T. Finn

  France too had prepared for war. It had constructed a series of powerful forts along its border with Germany. Any attack there by the kaiser’s troops would run into interlocking fields of fire intended to halt the German advance. But General Joseph Joffre, chief of the French army, wanted to do more than simply hold back the Germans. He wanted his forces to attack. His plan, labeled War Plan XVII, envisioned an offensive into Germany, the goal of which was to retake Alsace and Lorraine.

  Aware of the forts and of France’s desire to recover Alsace and Lorraine, Schlieffen had developed an extremely bold plan. The German army would strike not across the border with France. Rather, it would attack from the northwest, through Belgium. The army’s right wing, its most powerful element, would swing wide, crushing both Belgian and French forces, then sweep south to the west of Paris, coming around the city to hit from the rear those French forces that were facing the rest of the German attack.

  Though aware that marching through Belgium might bring Great Britain into the war, Germany’s generals were not concerned. The British army was small and not likely to arrive in time. And if it did, it easily could be pushed aside. As to Belgium, its army too was small. The forts on which it relied for defense simply were to be blown to pieces by specially designed heavy guns. Could Moltke and the eight separate field armies he had at his disposal execute von Schlieffen’s plan?

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  On August 4, 1914, German forces crossed into Belgium, heading for France. Two armies were kept home to protect Alsace and Lorraine. Another, the Eighth, was positioned to the east, guarding the nation’s border with Russia. Thus Moltke dispatched five separate German armies to hit the French. Two of them, the First and the Second, constituted the strong right wing of the strike force. Commanded respectively by Generals Alexander von Kluck and Karl von Bulow, they together numbered well over half a million men. It was an impressive force. The kaiser and his army commander in chief believed it was unstoppable.

  It was true that Belgium’s army was small, but when King Albert ordered it to oppose the Germans, it did so, and it did so bravely, delaying the German advance.. The results, however, were as the kaiser’s generals had predicted. The forts Belgium had built were destroyed, and those Belgian soldiers not killed or wounded retreated, joining up with the French Fifth Army, which itself was defeated in battle.

  Nevertheless, the French commander in chief, true to his desire for offensive action and consistent with War Plan XVII, had sent two armies into Alsace and Lorraine. Attacking along a seventy-five-mile front, the soldiers ran into the two armies Moltke had deployed there. At first the French did well. But by late August they had given way in the face of strong German counterattacks.

  By this time, the British too had suffered losses. Once Belgium’s neutrality had been violated by the Germans, the government in London had sent most of the British army to France. What was called the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) began arriving on August 14. It went into action almost immediately. At Mons and Le Cateau, the soldiers of King George V fought hard, inflicted casualties on the Germans, but fell back. At Le Cateau, a small village southeast of Cambrai, the BEF had eight thousand men killed or wounded. Not since Waterloo in 1815 had Britain’s army seen such combat.

  So far the Germans had done quite well. They had pushed aside the Belgians, defeated the French, and caused the British to retreat. Closing in on Paris, they reached the Marne River on September 3. That same day the French government abandoned the capital, setting up shop in Bordeaux, far to the south. Soon, German troops crossed the Marne. Some of their heavy guns began shelling Paris. Victory for the kaiser and his generals seemed close at hand.

  However, Joseph Joffre did not panic. Calmly, as the Germans advanced, he redeployed his troops (as each day he calmly enjoyed a lengthy lunch, then a nice nap). He also took note of a gap that had opened between the German First and Second Armies. The former, Kluck’s command, had not circled west of Paris. Intent on destroying French forces before him, it had swayed from Schlieffen’s original plan. Paris was on its right flank. To its left, but not close by, was Bulow’s Second Army.

  All along a two-hundred-mile front, the battle raged. Defending the French capital, to Kluck’s right, was the French Sixth Army. Among its soldiers were the garrison of Paris. Their commander, General Joseph Gallieni, had requisitioned six hundred Renault taxicabs to transport these troops, five men at a time, to the army. He soon would become known as “the savior of Paris.” His vehicles, the taxies, would pass into legend.

  Farther to the east, very much in the fight, Joffre had placed the newly created Ninth Army. Its commander, Ferdinand Foch, had performed well in the defense of Nancy, a major city in northeastern France. In 1918, Foch would play a key role in the Allies’ final victory. He was a capable commander with an aggressive approach to warfare. In the Battle of the Marne, he drafted a signal that, like the Parisian taxis, would become legendary: “My center is giving way, my right is in retreat, situation excellent. I attack.”

  The kaiser’s troops fought hard. But they had marched a long way since crossing into Belgium. They were tired and no longer at full strength, having suffered numerous casualties. More important, by early September, they were short of supplies. Logistics—that critical component of both ancient and modern warfare—were to be their undoing. The German army simply could not keep its divisions fighting in France adequately supplied. German units were short of practically everything, particularly food. So the kaiser’s generals were forced to concede defeat. On September 9, the fortieth day, Bulow ordered his Second Army to withdraw. This meant the other German armies had to do the same. The Battle of the Marne was over.

  Joffre had won. “The Miracle of the Marne” had saved France. Church bells rang and the nation celebrated. The cost had been high. In the month of September in the year 1914, the French Army had sustained more than 200,000 casualties. October would see that number increase by 80,000. By the end of the year, after but five months of war, 306,000 French soldiers were dead. Twice that many were wounded.

  For Germany, the Marne represented its best chance to win the First World War. Unlike in the successful campaign against France in 1870–1871, the kaiser’s armies in 1914 did not crush their opponents or cause a government to topple. Despite successes on individual battlefields, the German efforts in Belgium and France fell short. Yet, though tired and short of supplies, by no means were the German armies a spent force. They retired in good order, retreating to high ground at the Aisne River. There, in addition to emplacing machine guns and siting artillery batteries, they began to dig. So did the French who pursued them. Soon, the trenches that would so characterize the Great War laced the landscape. As winter set in, they would run a distance of 475 miles without a break, extending from the Swiss border to the North Sea.

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  As a result of the German army’s failure at the Marne, Helmuth von Moltke lost his job. His replacement as commander in chief was General Erich von Falkenhayn. By October, given the line of well-defended trenches, the only place where an army might outflank its opponent was to the northwest. The campaign here is often referred to as “the race to the sea.” Falkenhayn focused on a small spot in Belgium still held by the French and British. If he could have success there, he would gain control of those ports nearest to England, thus making operations extremely difficult for the BEF, possibly compelling Great Britain to leave the war. Were that to happen, he would be able to concentrate his armies in the west solely on the French. Despite the outcome at the Marne, Falkenhayn saw in this approach an avenue to victory.

  The fighting that resulted lasted for more than five weeks. Falkenhayn’s soldiers fought Belgian, French, and British troops. Collectively, the engagements are recorded as First Ypres, after the medieval town in Belgium around which much of the fighting took place. This first clash was costly to all involved. Together, more than two hundred thousand men were either killed or wounded. In the end, the Germans failed to advance
as Falkenhayn had hoped.

  For the British, First Ypres would be a memorable battle. Not because they won, which they did, though with heavy casualties, but because it marked the passing of the small, professional army Great Britain had established to fight its battles on land. By the end of 1914, most of the one hundred thousand men comprising that army were gone. They were either dead or wounded. From 1915 on, the British army would have to rely on volunteers and conscripts, young men with little training whose military skills would take time to develop.

  If First Ypres left a mark on the British—and it did—it left a mark as well on the Germans. In pushing forward on the attack, Falkenhayn’s forces included a large number of university students who, eagerly, had volunteered for the army. Hastily, they were given uniforms and rifles and, with little preparation, were rushed into battle. The results were catastrophic. Approximately twenty-five thousand were killed. In Germany, their deaths became known as Kindermord, the Massacre of the Innocents. John Keegan, a highly regarded military historian, notes in his fine book on World War I that the insignia of every German university is displayed at the cemetery where the twenty-five thousand are buried in a mass grave.

  Holding off the Germans at First Ypres meant that the British and French retained control of a small slice of Belgium. The rest of that country was occupied by the kaiser’s forces. These troops, with the approval of senior army commanders, acted with extreme cruelty toward Belgian civilians. They simply took many of them away and shot them. Additionally, they looted and wantonly burned buildings. This barbaric behavior included the destruction of the ancient university town of Louvain with its unique library that housed irreplaceable medieval and Renaissance works of art. What became known as “the Rape of Belgium” appalled thoughtful people throughout the world. It served to inflame British public opinion, which helped sustain Britain’s commitment to battle. It also contributed to a belief in the United States that Germany did not deserve to win the war.

  Both Moltke and Falkenhayn had concentrated Germany’s forces in the west, hoping to defeat France before Russia was capable of waging war. But the tsar mobilized his troops more quickly than expected. Two Russian armies soon attacked, crossing into East Prussia in mid-August. Defending Germany was a single army, the Eighth. Its commander was a retired soldier brought back to active duty, Count Paul von Hindenburg. His chief of staff was General Erich Ludendorff. Together they made a formidable team. In late August 1914, they crushed the Russians at Tannenberg. One of the Russian armies was completely destroyed. Mortified by the totality of his defeat, its commander wandered off into the woods and shot himself. Casualties were high, but the most notable statistic is the number of Russians captured. At Tannenberg, the German Eighth Army took ninety thousand prisoners! The battle was one of the great engagements of the First World War. Germany’s victory was complete. Hindenburg became a national hero. Later on, when Falkenhayn was dismissed, the kaiser appointed Hindenburg as the army’s commander in chief. Ludendorff became chief military planner. As the war progressed, Hindenburg became more of a figurehead, while Ludendorff decided where and when German troops would fight.

  For the next three years, 1915–1917, the Germans and the Russians would do battle. Most of the time the Germans won. In 1915 the kaiser’s generals scored a huge victory near the towns of Tarnow and Gorlice in what is now Poland (at that time there were Poles, but no independent nation of Poland, the territory being part of the tsar’s empire). What is remarkable today is the scale of the battles. Thousands upon thousands of men fought and died. In the campaign of Tarnow-Gorlice, the Russian army suffered nearly one million casualties. In pushing the Russians out of Poland, the Germans took 750,000 prisoners. In 1916, in a rare Russian victory over both German and Austrian troops, General Alexei Brusilov’s offensive inflicted 600,000 casualties on the enemy. In the Caucasus, where the Ottoman and Russian Empires collided, the Turks lost more than 60,000 men in an unsuccessful attack on the Russians.

  Despite occasional successes, the war did not go well for Russia. Military defeat in the field and political unrest at home led to revolution. On March 15, 1917, the tsar abdicated (and later was executed). The liberal socialist Alexander Kerensky and his government were also toppled (although he was not killed). Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks took control and at once secured an armistice with Germany. The kaiser and his generals were in no mood for leniency. At Brest-Litovsk they laid down harsh terms. The Russians had no choice but to accept. Huge amounts of once-Russian territory were transferred to German control, including what is now Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Finland. One-third of Russia’s agricultural land was lost. Nine percent of its coal reserves were gone. The result of failure in battle, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk humiliated Russia. Far more than territory had been sacrificed. By the end of 1917, nearly five million Russian soldiers had been wounded; 1,800,000 were dead.

  As the Russians were crushed by the Germans, so too were the Romanians. In 1916, emboldened by General Brusilov’s initial successes and hoping to gain additional territory once Germany was defeated, Romania went to war. Siding with Great Britain, France, and Russia (the Triple Entente), Romanian forces attacked west, advancing fifty miles into Transylvania, then an area belonging to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, but in which a large number of Romanians resided. Germany’s response was prompt and forceful. One German army, which included troops from Bulgaria and Austria, crossed into Romania from the south along the coast. Another attacked from the north. Together they disposed of Romania’s army as well as Russian regiments sent to help. Victorious German infantry entered Bucharest, the capital of Romania, on December 6, 1916. An armistice soon followed, then a treaty of peace. As with Brest-Litovsk, the terms were harsh. Romania possessed four assets: oil, grain, railroads, and part of the Danube. The Germans took control of all four. Romania in effect became a vassal state. However, it would have the last laugh. At Versailles in 1919, in the treaties that formally concluded the First World War, Romania, having chosen the winning side, was rewarded with Transylvania. Even today the region constitutes the northern portion of the country.

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  Throughout World War I Germany’s principal allies were the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and the empire of the Ottomans. The latter was quite large, covering what is today Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and parts of Saudi Arabia (Egypt and Kuwait were British protectorates). Because the empire was in decline, its army needed assistance. This the Germans provided. Indeed, during the last years of the war, the commander of most Turkish forces in Palestine was Erich von Falkenhayn. Among troops at his disposal were eighteen thousand German and Austrian soldiers. In 1916 General Falkenhayn had led one of the German armies in Romania. By 1917 he was in the Middle East. There he had less success. Earlier, British troops had repulsed a Turkish assault on the Suez Canal and retaken Baghdad, the city having surrendered in April 1916. In 1917, Falkenhayn’s task was to hold on to Palestine. But in a series of engagements with the British, he was unable to do so. Edmund Allenby, the British commander, defeated the Turks and his German counterpart and on December 11, 1917, entered Jerusalem in triumph.

  Of considerable assistance to Allenby were a large number of Arab warriors who had little love for their Turkish rulers. A British intelligence officer, T. E. Lawrence, helped convince them to aid Allenby. They did so in part due to British promises of independence once the war ended. Of course, the British had no intention of honoring these promises, as the Arabs discovered at Versailles.

  Like the army of the Ottomans, the army of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire required German assistance. The Hapsburg army was large and certainly not lacking in courage. But in early battles with the Russians along their common border, the army was worn down. By the end of 1914, just months into the war, it had incurred 1,200,000 casualties. Twelve weeks into 1915 saw that number increase by 800,000. Many of these soldiers constituted the core capability of the army and could not be replaced. As the war c
ontinued, their absence was felt. The empire’s army, while still large, was not effective. It needed help. This came from Germany in the form of men and supplies. In fact, German generals essentially took over command of their ally’s army. More than one German commander said that the kaiser’s army, to use the phrase highlighted by noted historian Hew Strachan, was “shackled to a corpse.”

  If there was one nation on which the Austrian-Hungarian Empire wished to wreak havoc, it was Serbia. Since June 1914, revenge for the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was never far from the minds of the Hapsburg leaders. Very early in the war, the Austrian-Hungarians attacked. Remarkably, the Serbs held them off. Despite the setbacks and 227,000 casualties, the Austrians had no intention of quitting. They turned to the Germans and to the Bulgarians, and in the fall of 1915, troops from all three countries invaded Serbia. They were under the command of one of Germany’s better generals, August von Mackensen. He had won the great victory at Tarnow-Gorlice and in 1916 would lead one of the German armies into Romania. His efforts in 1915 soon had the Serbs in full retreat. The defenders fought hard, suffering ninety-four thousand casualties. But their opponent was too strong and Serbia’s army and government had to flee. Their epic march across Montenegro and Kosovo to the Adriatic Sea, where Allied ships took them off, is today part of Serbian legend.