Engines of War

by Christian Wolmar

  By the middle of 1917, when another major offensive was being prepared, this time in Flanders, the central role that light railways could play had been recognized and for the first time they were included as part of the central planning. The attack centred on the village of Passchendaele near Ypres, with the aim of enabling the British to reach the Belgian North Sea ports from where it was thought, wrongly, that the Germans were launching U-boat attacks on British shipping. A recent French offensive, further south and aimed at German positions on the Aisne, had failed badly, creating a mutinous air in the Army, and the Passchendaele attack (also known as the Third Battle of Ypres) was felt necessary to restore morale among the Allies. The offensive started in early June with the successful blowing up of a German-held strongpoint, the Messines Ridge above Ypres, but then there was a fatal delay until the end of July before the full attack was launched. Passchendaele has become the symbol of the worst conditions endured by the soldiers in the First World War as the Flanders fields, mostly reclaimed marshlands, were already prone to flooding, and the terrible weather of that summer turned the whole area into a quagmire. Soldiers, weighed down by their 45lb packs, had to pick their way carefully through the mud on duckboards, knowing that a slip could lead to death by drowning. In these conditions, the 60cm railways proved invaluable. Everywhere that the troops made gains, a light railway would soon be constructed to support them. For example, according to W. J. K. Davies, the historian of the light railways in the war, ‘it took only sixty hours after Passchendaele had been occupied for a light railway to be operating right into the village, bringing up stores and taking back wounded.’50 While the plight of the forward units in the difficult conditions was dire, their difficulties were greatly alleviated by the ability of the railways to deliver supplies right to the front, since road transport could not reach most of their positions.

  It was not the logistical shortcomings which resulted in the offensive failing, yet again, to achieve a significant breakthrough. The Germans had been given weeks to prepare for the expected assault following the blowing up of their positions on the Messines Ridge, and they had reinforced their lines further back by building a series of pillboxes, the marshy land being unsuitable for deep trenches. The Allied attack foundered in the muddy morass created by a particularly wet summer and by early November, when the attack was called off, the British had reached only the one-time village of Passchendaele, now completely wrecked, an advance of seven miles achieved at a cost of 300,000 lives.

  Until then the network of light railways had remained largely isolated from one another as each one ran between railheads and individual supply dumps near the front line. The lack of links between the light rail systems of the 1st and 3rd armies during the Passchendaele attack had meant weapons and other material had to be transferred between the two by a roundabout route on the standard-gauge railways, an utterly inefficient manoeuvre. Consequently, towards the end of 1917, the military authorities decided to create a long north-south line connecting these disparate systems about four miles behind the lines. The idea was that this would allow the rapid transfer of material, especially light artillery, between different sections of the front to help resist the expected German offensive. A further plan to create a parallel line, eight miles behind the trenches, had not been completed by the time the attack came in March 1918. Another idea which never got off the ground, and which demonstrated how the military authorities occasionally took leave of their senses, was that of building 200 miles of electrified 60cm railway powered by overhead cables, which would not only have been dangerous, since the wires would have been at head height, but also have been unsuitable for operations anywhere near enemy lines since they would have been easily visible.

  At their peak, in March 1918, there were more than 1,000 miles of these light railways and 150 miles of tramway on the Allied section of the front, matched by a network that was probably even larger on the German side. The Germans had an enormous pool of 60cm gauge locomotives, having built more than 2,500 steam engines alone, many of which were deployed on the Eastern Front, notably in Poland. On the Allied side, not only was there a connecting line running north-south, but there was a network of marshalling yards as well as countless stations where material could be transferred from standard gauge to light railways. Quite often, too, there were intermediary yards where the larger trains, hauled by steam engines, were broken down into smaller ones pulled by petrol engines, which could operate closer to enemy lines. The vast majority of the deliveries to depots near the front were carried out at night, with trains often being prepared in the marshalling yards during the day and waiting for the cover of darkness to proceed.

  It was not only the existing French network that required extra stock. Further strain was put on the railway system at the beginning of 1917 when the Allies devised a 1,500-mile trans-European railway service linking Cherbourg with Taranto in southern Italy, by a roundabout route that took in Tours in western France and the Mont Cenis tunnel, in order to support the Allied forces in the eastern theatres of the war and for use by French and British troops sent there. This service required more than a hundred locomotives to provide six trains per day to supply the theatres of Macedonia, Palestine and Mesopotamia, and was designed to replace the vast amount of shipping on this route, which was in constant danger of attack. The service, however, was interrupted by the Italian defeat at Caporetto in October 1917 and the German offensive on Amiens the following year, and never reached its full potential, mustering at best two to three trains daily.

  There were other demands stretching the resources of the French railway system. The most significant was the transport of the American troops who started arriving during the summer of 1917. The French Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railway had already performed well in carrying more than 100,000 Indian, Gurkha and Anzac troops up to the front from the Mediterranean port of Marseille, but now a far bigger operation was required when the troops started arriving from the United States, which had joined the war after Germany started sinking its ships. The Channel ports could not take the strain as the numbers arriving grew rapidly in 1918 and American soldiers had to be landed at the Atlantic ports on the west coast, mostly Bordeaux and Saint-Nazaire, requiring trains to transport them across France to the front. By the end of the war, 2 million Americans were serving in France, and major improvements had to be carried out on these new military routes, which had not been designed to carry such vast numbers. The Americans brought a lot of equipment with them, including a huge number of ‘Pershing’ locomotives, and operations on these lines were carried out in great measure by the 50,000-strong US Transportation Corps, most of whom were former railwaymen, but nevertheless their arrival placed further strain on an already overloaded rail network. The level of service was not helped by tensions between the American and French railway workers, which occasionally flared up into full-scale fights.

  The Americans, like the British, had initially promised to provide all the necessary transportation for their men but at best they only managed around four fifths. The British, too, remained reliant on French labour and equipment. Despite the promised influx of British men and material to the French railways, according to the official report on transportation, ‘it was not until the final few months of the war in 1918 that the British were actually providing all of the locomotives, wagons, personnel, repairs and works which they required’.51

  None of these difficulties should mask the basic fact that the Western Front was a miracle of logistics. The way that both sides could keep huge numbers of soldiers and enormous amounts of equipment in place, feed and rotate troops, supply ammunition and fuel, and keep everyone reasonably healthy was only possible because of the transport infrastructure in which the railways played the key role. Viewed in a negative light, perhaps this was unfortunate since without the efficiency of the railways, the war might have finished much earlier.

  It was only in the last few months of the war that the conflict took on a different complex
ion. As we shall see in the next chapter, after three and a half years of stalemate in the final stages it became a war of movement once again. It was only to last eight months but briefly forced the railways into a different role. Meanwhile, however, another type of war had been taking place on the Eastern Front between Russia and Germany, a conflict that was ultimately decided by letting one man through the lines on a train.

  The port at Balaklava: the starting point of the first military railway built during the Crimean War in 1855.

  Secessionists ambush a train in Virginia during the American Civil War, but then find themselves pursued by the travelling Unionist soldiers.

  Ripping up lines was a major tactic used by both sides in the American Civil War. Here Unionist soldiers destroy tracks in Georgia in the closing stages of the war.

  Unionist engineers repair the key Orange and Alexandra railroad after it was destroyed by Confederates in 1863. The locomotive is named Haupt after the brilliant railroad engineer Herman Haupt, who can be see here (bearded and hatted, right) observing the reconstruction of the line.

  In this 1864 cartoon, a train crash is used as a metaphor for the havoc perceived to have been wreaked by Lincoln’s support for abolitionism.

  Prussian cavalry leave Düsseldorf by train at the beginning of the short Austro-Prussian War in 1866.

  Boats for building pontoon bridges are loaded onto wagons by the French in August 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War.

  The siege of Paris, 1870: one of the first uses of an armoured train in warfare.

  A railway embankment is attacked by the Prussians during the battle of Amiens in 1870.

  A wrecked railway bridge at Pontoise in 1871 during the Franco-Prussian War. River crossings like this were particularly vulnerable to sabotage.

  The Turks load artillery in preparation for resisting the Russian attack during the brief Russo-Turkish War in 1877.

  Boers attack a British train in the Transvaal in October 1899.

  The British made extensive use of armoured trains in the Boer War, such as here at Gras-Pan in December 1899.

  A British unit uses a primitive armoured train for reconnaissance in the Boer War. These trains soon became more sophisticated.

  Left: A Japanese cartoon print of the destruction of a Russian train.

  Above: A Japanese attack on a Russian ambulance train during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5.

  Tracks were laid across Lake Baikal to transport supplies as that section of the Trans-Siberian Railway had not yet been built. However, the ice was not thick enough to support the weight of locomotives and so horses were used to pull the carriages.

  Improvisation was the keynote for the narrow gauge railways that were an essential component of the line of communication on the Western Front of the First World War.

  A lonely vigil: Indian troops guard the Basra Railway in southern Mesopotamia.

  Algerian troops depart for the front in converted freight wagons at Champigny-sur-Marne station during the First World War.

  In the First World War, propaganda posters playing on patriotic fervour were used to try to improve the performance of the US railroads, which were a vital component of the war effort.

  As part of the British attempt to keep up morale, King George V visited a forestry company on a light railway in the final stages of the war in August 1918.

  A US marine bridge in the First World War is destroyed by a German attack and a Red Cross train left half-submerged.

  German engineers transport a locomotive on a raft across the Vistula near Warsaw during the First World War, showing the lengths to which the army went to maintain an effective railway system wherever it went.

  The armoured train, Zaamurets, later renamed Orlik, was used during the First World War and captured several times during the Russian Civil War and again in subsequent conflicts.

  Even a crude light railway such as the horse-drawn stretcher (top) was better than the cart and horses still used to transport many wounded in the First World War. Ambulance trains (middle) later became the norm, often being prepared before a battle to avoid scenes such as these (bottom), which were commonplace in the early stages of the conflict.

  The Russian Civil War saw intensive use of armoured trains on both sides. Here Czech soldiers are seen in a camouflaged train in 1918.

  A scene from Doctor Zhivago featuring Strelnikov (Tom Courtenay), the hard-line Bolshevik, who is running military operations from an armoured train during the civil war between the Bolsheviks and the Whites.

  In both world wars, over-optimistic soldiers on all sides would daub their trains with slogans suggesting the next stop was the enemy capital.

  The armoured train on the tiny Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, given the task of guarding the British coast against invaders, was one the most bizarre rail vehicles of the Second World War.

  Surprisingly, the Luftwaffe rarely targeted railways during the Blitz but stations such as St Pancras, seen here in May 1941, did suffer damage from indiscriminate bombing.

  Changing gauge was an onerous and slow task which greatly hampered the German advance into the Soviet Union.

  The French resistance target the railway network to help the Allied invasion of June 1944.

  The US railroads had to be temporarily nationalized in 1917 because they could not co-ordinate their efforts and, though they worked together better in the Second World War, they eventually met the same humiliating fate.

  ‘Railway Transport and the Red Army Are Brothers!’ Russian railway workers were brought under military discipline in the Second World War.

  The first train arrives to relieve the siege of Leningrad in early 1943 complete with a propaganda photograph of Stalin on the front.

  Soviet sentries had to guard freight trains against their own soldiers as well as those of the enemy.

  Hitler, who was sceptical about the value of the railways compared with roads, inspects a wrecked Polish armoured train during the invasion of Poland in 1940.

  The mass transport of so many Jews to the extermination camps and concentration camps would not have been possible without the grim efficiency of the rail network.

  One of the first acts of the invading forces in Normandy in June 1944 was to re-establish a railway system. Some lines, like this one, were built right onto the edge of the beach, from where they could take supplies directly from the ships.

  Jeeps were adapted for rail use when Allied forces regained control of Burma from the Japanese in 1945.

  The rafale, an escorted armoured convoy ran by the French in Vietnam, allowed regular journeys between Saigon and Nha Trang despite the threat of the Chinese-supported Viet Minh. Conditions were cramped for the local people travelling, as they are here in 1952, in fourth class.

  A team of UN-led commandos prepare to sabotage the railway behind Communist lines in the Korean War in 1950.

  The North Korean railways were a key target for American forces during the Korean War but despite concerted attacks they continued to function as a vital supply route throughout the conflict. Even though the station below has clearly been destroyed, the line remains in operation.

  EIGHT

  EASTERN CONTRASTS

  On the Eastern Front and in other theatres which were brought into action in the later stages of the war, a very different type of conflict took place. The Schlieffen Plan had been devised in an effort to avoid the risk of fighting simultaneously on two fronts, but the failure of diplomacy and the rush into war guaranteed that Germany was plunged into this unwanted scenario. Unlike on the Western Front, where a stalemate emerged within weeks of the outbreak of war, in the East it was the absence of railways which resulted in a more mobile war. According to A. J. P. Taylor, ‘an attacking force could advance fifty miles or so if carefully reinforced. Then the impetus of advance gave out, through lack of railways. The defenders, falling back on their supplies, consolidated their position: the line formed anew.’1

  The Russians rushed into the war, s
omewhat unprepared, on 17 August 1914 in order to support their Western allies. Despite German expectations, the Russian forces mobilized reasonably quickly, though not in sufficient numbers to give them a decisive advantage. Their mobilization plans included the requirement that freight trains should cease to run while the troops were deployed but, in the event, according to Westwood, ‘the Russian railways did so well that they found capacity to restore their freight trains to service, rather sheepishly reloading the freight that had been jettisoned at wayside stations a couple of weeks earlier’.2 This episode is typical of the Russian performance in the whole war, which was patchy, with surprisingly efficient episodes interspersed with others that had all the hallmarks of the inefficient and corrupt tsarist regime and its total disregard for the fate of the foot soldiers. While Russian industrialization had not really taken off by 1914, ensuring its army was short of equipment, the sheer numbers the military could muster, together with the scale of the country, guaranteed that Russia was able to put up stern resistance to the Central Powers, especially as it mostly faced the weaker of the two, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, across the battlefield in the initial stages. Moreover, Russia was industrializing fast, which meant that by the middle of the war it was better able to supply its troops with sufficient guns and ammunition. Russian logistics were hampered, though, by the kind of muddle which had characterized the French handling of the Franco-Prussian War. The railways were split, as in France, between those near the front, which were under military control, and the lines in the interior, which remained the responsibility of the ministry of transport. The usual mistakes were made with railway and military authorities squabbling over what trains should have priority, and officers refusing to co-operate by holding on to wagons, once they had been unloaded, for use as warehouses, offices or even living quarters.