Engines of War

by Christian Wolmar

  The windy little Meusien railway, though, proved an essential adjunct to the road. The line had struggled to keep the front supplied even before the battle, and once it began an appeal was made around the country for metre-gauge locomotives and wagons. Fortunately, there were many other railways built to that gauge in France and sufficient stock was found to run about one train an hour, which meant the Meusien carried about a quarter of the total supplies for the front in the early stages of the battle. As more rolling stock arrived, and improvements to the line were made, the railway’s capacity increased to one train every forty minutes, providing much relief to La Route. Such was the importance of the supply routes that at the numerous level crossings between the railway line and the road Pétain stationed cavalry troops to regulate the traffic and reduce the risk of accidents.

  Appreciating that La Route would always struggle to cope, as soon as the battle of Verdun began, in February 1916, Pétain had ordered the construction of the Nettancourt-Dugny line, a forty-five-mile-long standard-gauge railway line parallel to the road, and, remarkably, this was completed in June, just four months after work had started. The new railway was an enormous boon for the line of communication and largely took over the carriage of supplies, especially the heavy artillery shells, relegating La Route to the transport of light trucks and motor cars. A. J. P. Taylor’s assertion that it was the lorries which made all the difference (‘Without the automobile engine, Verdun could not have been saved’41) underestimates the role of the Meusien and of the parallel line built so successfully in haste. Moreover, he ignored the role of the light railways, which were essential for carrying supplies for the last few miles to the front, which was served by a six-track 60cm railway. Indeed, the commemorative monument to La Voie Sacrée recognizes the role of the railways by depicting a steam locomotive as well as three trucks.

  Neither the intense trucking on the road, nor the opening of the Nettancourt-Dugny railway line, had been anticipated by the German military planners. The ultimate result of Verdun was a ghastly score draw, resulting in the staggering loss of a total of more than 300,000 lives.42 The French held on to Verdun but at tremendous cost, while the Germans almost succeeded in their aim of breaking French morale but also suffered enormous casualties.

  The Germans had thought their better logistics would be decisive at Verdun but underestimated the adaptability of the French. Pétain saved Verdun by understanding the importance of his line of communication and ensuring it could cope with keeping the front supplied. In the event, not only did the French supply route stand the test but Pétain was so confident of its robustness that he rotated his troops every fifteen days in order to keep them fresh, which placed enormous additional burdens on both road and rail. This policy resulted in more than 2 million troops being taken to and from the front during the course of the ten months of the battle. Of course, many of those returning were wounded and both railway lines proved particularly useful for transporting them away from the front as they offered a far more comfortable ride than the bumpy road. These troops heading for a brief respite on leave, dubbed permissionaires, were not, incidentally, the easiest passengers for the railways to carry. Pétain had created a special Guide du permissionaire to regulate their behaviour and they were supposed to travel exclusively on special trains. In their rush to get home, however, they jumped onto any available service, sometimes ejecting any hapless civilians who happened to be travelling in the same direction, and their rowdy behaviour became an issue of great concern to the authorities. Groups of soldiers, claiming to be lost, would use their railway passes to travel around the system for days, as had happened in the Franco-Prussian War. In an effort to keep the soldiers separate from the general public, special exchange stations, furnished with canteens and even cinemas, were established, but the problem persisted throughout the war.

  Verdun showed yet again that the particular state of transport technology in the First World War undoubtedly favoured defenders rather than attackers. The Somme offensive would provide another hard-won lesson, that in the muddy conditions of the Western Front light railways were necessary to consolidate an attack as well as to support an entrenched position. The Somme offensive was led by the British and, like all others, was supposed to be the decisive breakthrough, but it started badly. The attack began earlier than planned, at the instigation of the French, who were anxious to create a diversion from Verdun in order to maintain morale among the Allied troops. Partly because bringing forward the launch of the attack left much of the German artillery intact, and also because the same suicidal ‘going over the top’ tactics as in previous campaigns were used, 1 July 1916, the first day of the battle, became the bloodiest ever in British military history with 57,470 killed and wounded. When, within weeks, the Somme attack foundered, matters came to a head. According to the official report published after the war, it only took a simple logistical calculation to understand why it failed: ‘without some means of rapidly establishing communications across the shell-pitted area, no breakthrough was possible. The experience of the Somme showed that during an offensive on a twelve-mile front the loads to be distributed daily beyond railheads amounted to over 20,000 tons. To deal with such quantities, corduroy roads43 and a few isolated lines here and there were totally inadequate.’44 The authorities had thought that standard-gauge railways could be brought nearer the front but this proved impossible because they took too long to build and repair, and were vulnerable to attack.

  The official report on logistics published after the war was unequivocal about the experience of the Somme and explained why field railways were better than other methods of transport: ‘Experience showed that neither standard-gauge railways nor metalled roads could be extended across the shell-pitted area quickly enough to keep pace with the advance. A very costly offensive might gain a mile or two but the time required to reconstruct communications across the ground won gave the enemy time to recover and to reorganize his defences so that the whole process of preparing for and launching another costly attack had to be gone through again.’45

  In other words, after two years of war and numerous attempted ‘offensives’ and ‘breakthroughs’, the military authorities realized that they had failed to think through the logistical requirements of the army once the initial advance had been made. Hundreds of thousands of men had died in battles which never had a hope of success because the logistics had not been properly considered. Of course, improving the line of communication served by the railways would not have been enough to win the war, but a failure to recognize the importance of such preparation ensured that any breakthrough would be transitory

  The Somme offensive lasted until mid-November but in effect petered out after a few weeks, by which time it had failed in its basic aims since no permanent breach of the German lines had been achieved. By early August, when it became clear that the attack had resulted in no significant advance, a circular from the Quartermaster General announced a reversal of policy, stressing the need for armies to find substitutes for motor transport and requiring light railways to be used throughout the front line for the carriage of ammunition, engineering stores and general supplies. Consequently, the Ministry of Munitions placed a massive order for sufficient equipment to build and operate 600 miles of track, including 120 ‘tractors’ (petrol or petrol-electric engines) and steam locomotives, only to find that the capacity of British manufacturers had largely already been taken up by the French. After pressure from the Army, supplies were rerouted to the British and a large construction programme was initiated, resulting in the completion of over 200 miles of 60cm railways by the end of the year with the ultimate aim of creating a network of 1,000 miles.

  If light railways were the key on the front line, further back the smooth operation of the standard-gauge railways remained essential and during 1916 the French system was beginning to break down. As previously mentioned, the French were operating more traffic than in peacetime, with fewer personnel and a rolling stock of worn locomoti
ves and ramshackle wagons; from the autumn of 1915, the system began to deteriorate, as increasing demands were placed on the network. Both men and material suffered delays because of the shortage of wagons, and the ports were becoming bottlenecks, with ships spending up to seventeen days in the French docks because cargo could not be unloaded and removed quickly enough. Throughout 1916, the French were frantically requesting extra rolling stock from the British in order to cope with the ever-increasing demands on the railways. Until then, the British had relied on local locomotives and wagons, but in May 1916 the French suggested that the British provide all the wagons, a total of 22,500, required for the movement of British troops and supplies. This caused consternation in the War Office because the British could not possibly supply so much equipment at such short notice, and the initial response was the standard British one of creating a sub-committee to examine the matter. In fact, British equipment had been used on the French railways since the autumn of 1914, when the South Eastern & Chatham Railway sent over ten locomotives, along with the men to operate them, for the unloading of ships in Boulogne. Construction workers and maintenance engineers had been also despatched to help with the repair and upkeep of the lines serving the British Expeditionary Force. This arrangement was regularized the following year with the creation of the British Army’s Railway Operating Division, which from late 1915 began to take over the operation and maintenance of lines used by the British troops, who were, for the most part, entrusted with the northern sections of the Western Front. This new division also started building branch lines to provide extra routes to the front with the agreement of the French authorities.

  After some hesitation, the War Office acceded to the French request for stock, promising to take over progressively the running and provisioning of more lines, and a flow of British wagons and locomotives began arriving in France from the other side of the Channel. The Railway Operating Division assumed control of its first line, a section of the intensively used Hazebrouck-Ypres route, in the summer of 1916, but it was not until the end of that year that real impetus was given to British efforts to strengthen the capacity of the railways in France. Sir Eric Geddes, the former deputy manager of the North Eastern Railway who later became Britain’s first Minister of Transport, was appointed to undertake a rapid study of the transport situation in France. On his arrival in France, Geddes noted: ‘the troops were fagged out because of lack of transport. The railheads were ten to fifteen miles back. The roads were blocked and the ammunition and guns were piling up in England.’46 There was no central control of the transport operation: ‘The transport network was so heavily sectionalised that responsible officers had a narrow focus on problems which enabled them to make slight adjustments but not to tackle the larger problems.’47

  Geddes’s findings were devastating. In his report, sent to the new Prime Minister, David Lloyd George,48 at the end of November 1916, he confirmed that the railway system in France was at breaking point. More than two years of intensive use, a depleted workforce and insufficient maintenance had taken their toll. The forty-five British locomotives working there were plainly insufficient and Geddes argued that 300 locomotives and 10,000 wagons should be despatched as soon as possible if the line of communication for the British Army were not to collapse. He also said the British needed to supply the material to build 1,000 miles of line for both new sections and extra tracks on busy routes.

  The Geddes report had an immediate impact. It was clear that there was no time to build new locomotives, and therefore the British railway companies, which in any case were under government control, would need to provide them. Spare locomotives and equipment for the permanent way were garnered from railways across the country and sent to France. While the rail companies responded well to these demands for spare equipment, its shipment across the Channel was hampered by Germany’s new aggressive naval policy of using U-boats to sink any Allied ship on sight. Not only were some of the consignments sunk, but others suffered prolonged delays because of the presence of the German submarines. There were problems of compatibility, too. The first wagons sent over to France had grease axle boxes, rather than the oil-based ones universally used in France. Since the French had no use for grease, none was available, and the wagons soon seized up, leaving them in sidings until a supply of grease could be sent over from Britain.

  Geddes, however, did more than just demand extra supplies of railway material from Britain. He reorganized the whole logistical operation, bringing together all the disparate parts under one directorate, which he headed as Director-General of Transportation. That had been a long time coming. Back in 1914, Lord Kitchener had asked Sir Percy Girouard, the builder of the Sudan railway, to produce a report on the railway situation in France, which had made precisely the same recommendation but had not been acted upon because of the usual squabbles over territory between the different sections of the military. Girouard had also wanted an officer to be appointed to take general charge of railway work on the Continent, and Geddes now took on that role, two years after the original recommendation. He set up a central office in France with more than a hundred officers and 600 clerks, all of whom were given military rank in order to confirm their status, and he created separate sections to cover docks, railways, roads and light railways. These offices, which were only three miles from HQ, even acquired the name ‘Geddesburg’ as an ironic recognition of their importance. It was on his initiative that the major programme for light railways was developed and he also beefed up the Railway Operating Division by drafting in railwaymen from other divisions. Its manpower rose to 76,000, incorporating thirteen companies (with around 250 men each) of civilian platelayers from the home railways who were engaged on three-month contracts at a high rate of pay and worked under the orders of civilian engineers, to build sections of both main-line and light railway. The Army disliked the use of civilians, however, because they were not subject to military discipline and these volunteers were soon dispensed with, as the official report recalls in a typically understated way: ‘As in the Crimea in 1855 and the Sudan in 1885, the experiment of employing civilians in an overseas theatre of war did not prove altogether satisfactory and further offers of assistance of this kind were declined.’49 Over the course of the war, the British built around 800 miles of railway, and the French around four times that length, more than 3,500 miles.

  Geddes was also instrumental in persuading the military authorities of the urgency of the transportation system by making simple logistical calculations which should have been worked out at the outset of the war. He showed, for example, that a corps of 50,000 men on a four-mile front would get through a maximum of 2,300 tons of ammunition, and using such simple arithmetic worked out that the shortfall in the transportation supply route could be as much as 50 per cent. It was not only railways that needed to be improved. The ports of Dover and Folkestone had long been under strain, and Geddes recommended the massive expansion of the so-called ‘mystery port’ at Richborough in Kent, which had been created uniquely for military purposes, and eventually became a massive – and largely secret – installation with sixty-five miles of railway line and sidings. To improve the flow of material through the port, a cross-Channel ferry service to Calais and Dunkirk was created to handle large pieces of equipment such as heavy guns and even tanks. It was the first to use the roll-on, roll-off (ro-ro) system, enabling trains to board and disembark the ships directly. Until then locomotives and wagons had to be loaded and unloaded one by one with a quayside or ship-mounted crane. Three ferries were specially built, each able to carry ten of the large Railway Operating Division standard locomotives or fifty-four wagons, and even though they had stern entry only (unlike today’s ro-ro ferries, which have ramps and seaworthy doors at both stem and stern), the turnaround efficiency was greatly increased.

  Following the Geddes initiative, British rail supplies and workers poured into France and the Railway Operating Division gradually took over lines previously run by the French. By the end of 1
916, it controlled a hundred miles and at the end of the war more than 800 miles of standard-gauge line and 1,000 miles of light railway, and it had also built a further 800 miles of track during the conflict. This arrangement required the establishment of a clear division of responsibility between the British and French. The British were responsible for carrying troops and material from the ports to the gare régulatrice, where the French took over. In many cases, railwaymen from Britain were used to drive these locomotives and found themselves working alongside their French counterparts. Indeed, since locomotives were pooled, many French civilian trains were hauled by British locomotives driven by ‘les Rosbifs’. As many of the locomotives supplied to the French railways were old and the demand for extra ones became insatiable, it soon became clear that the British would have to recommence the production of new locomotives, which had stopped at the outbreak of war. By the winter of 1916-17, the number of trains on the French network had increased by 50 per cent from peacetime levels, but many of its stock of 14,000 locomotives were laid up owing to the lack of spare parts or manpower to fix them. An additional constraint on the network was the multiplicity of different types of locomotives as the French, unlike the Germans and Russians, did not have a standard freight locomotive that could be moved easily around the system. Consequently, when the British started producing new engines for use in France, a standard type based on a Great Central freight design was chosen and more than 300 of these were eventually supplied. As demand increased further, another 500 locomotives were brought over from America.