Engines of War
Page 25
The war was launched when two Russian armies pushed, with little clear intent, into East Prussia. After some hesitation, and an initial retreat which led to the replacement of their commander, the Germans responded with a counter-attack at the decisive battle of Tannenberg in the last week of August 1914, which routed the Russians. Thanks to the network of railways behind their lines, and their ability to exploit them to the full, the Germans were able to regroup after their initial setbacks, while the Russians were greatly hampered, again, by the change of gauge at the frontier, which resulted in troops having to disembark and either march to the front or wait for one of the few standard-gauge trains captured from the Germans. Therefore the Russians were not able to profit from the huge numerical supremacy of their army, since the arrival of troops beyond the railhead in Russia was delayed by the lack of rail transport. In contrast, the Germans were able to nimbly move troops around by rail to focus their attack on the Russians’ weak points. The crucial manoeuvre undertaken by the Germans was, after a couple of smaller battles, to re-engage their troops so quickly by rail that a single German army was able to hold off the rather disjointed attacks of two Russian ones. The Russians’ misuse of another technology, the telegraph, along which they sent uncoded messages that were easily intercepted by the Germans, did not help their cause either, as their marching plans were, quite literally, telegraphed in advance to the enemy.
Further south in Galicia, the Russians and Austrians were engaged in what A. J. P. Taylor called ‘confused conflict’: ‘The railway network of western Europe virtually gave out here’ and ‘there were great empty spaces where armies, ill-equipped by Western standards, wandered in search of each other’.3 The Russians eventually emerged victorious thanks to their superior numbers, reaching the Carpathians, where they came up against the Germans who, stiffening the resistance of the weak Austro-Hungarians, halted their advance. Although the Russians’ attack on the Eastern Front was checked, their very presence forced the Germans to use up vast resources which otherwise they would have been able to deploy to good effect against the British and French. Although the Schlieffen Plan had, in a way, been unnecessary because the Germans showed they were able to wage war on two fronts, the theory behind it was correct: fighting on both simultaneously weakened the Germans’ ability to make a decisive breakthrough on either side.
These early battles confirmed that the Eastern Front would be a different type of war to the stalemate that had quickly been established in the west. Overall, there was a far less developed network of railways as the armies moved east and there were even fewer lines to accommodate them. It was a vast theatre that stretched east-west from the Baltic through to Moscow, a distance of around 750 miles, and down to the Black Sea a thousand miles away. The battles raged through this huge area, rarely settling down to any fixed front and dependent on lines of communication that were much less established than on the Western Front.
In 1915, the Germans focussed much of their effort on the Eastern Front, seeking to push the Russians back over their frontier. The superior railways on the western side of this vast region gave the Germans an inherent advantage, but they were overstretched by having to fight on two fronts and still lacked manpower and weaponry despite the extra resources provided by HQ in an effort to bring about a decisive breakthrough. A series of successful battles during the year cleared the Russians out of what is now Poland, but then the front settled down, running from Riga near the Baltic coast down to Ternopil in Ukraine, and would not change substantially until the collapse of the Russian resistance in 1917. After their substantial losses of 1915, the following year the Russians launched what is widely accepted as the most effective and skilled offensive of the whole war by any of the combatants, the campaign against the Austro-Hungarians by General Alexei Brusilov in present-day Ukraine. The attack was made in response to French requests to relieve pressure on Verdun by forcing German troops to move to the Eastern Front and it is a testimony to the brilliance of the offensive that it was named after the general who led it.
Brusilov realized that although his railway supply lines were far inferior to those of his enemy, his troops were able, through the use of stormtrooper tactics, to break through the Austro-Hungarian lines at several points. Rather than the conventional tactics of long inaccurate bombardments, which always resulted in a muddy morass that made progress difficult for the invading infantry, followed by massive troop movements, which invariably were spotted by the enemy, he launched a short barrage on 4 June 1916 and followed that up with attacks by small groups of soldiers on enemy positions. While Brusilov deliberately did not mobilize his troops in the conventional way, avoiding massive concentrations that posed an easy target for the enemy, the sheer numbers on both sides ensured it was one of the bloodiest battles in history.
Brusilov used the inadequacy of his rail support to his advantage by being more flexible and mobile, in which he was helped by the fact that the Army was now better equipped after munitions production had been stepped up. According to Brusilov’s memoirs, ‘knowing the limitation of our rail transport… I knew that while we were entraining and transporting one Army Corps, the Germans would manage to transport three or four’.4 Ultimately that lack of transport cost Russia the advantage gained by Brusilov and his attack petered out at the end of September after the Germans brought in reinforcements in sufficient numbers to counter it. The offensive, which cost nearly 3 million killed, wounded or captured5 on all sides, had been, according to A. J. P. Taylor, fatally undermined by the fact that ‘since most Russian railways ran east to west, not north to south, the reserves could not be moved in time’.6
Brusilov’s skills and the stronger than expected resistance by the Russians made it harder for the Central Powers to push back the Russians through eastern Europe. With the Russians fighting rather better than the Germans had expected and the Austro-Hungarians proving mostly ineffective and weakened by mass desertions of their Slav troops, the conflict on the Eastern Front lasted far longer than predicted. There were never enough troops to create a Western Front-type scenario of continuous trench lines, but instead key strongpoints, especially railway junctions, became the focus of battles. In the main, in the east battles were fought along the axis of the few main railway lines that remained generally intact, while in the west, once the Germans had reached beyond the range of their artillery, they had to fight across a railway-less terrain made impassable by previous battles. As the Germans were to discover even more forcefully in the Second World War invasion of Russia, once they crossed the border, they would be greatly hampered by the change of gauge, and the further they advanced into Russia the wider the front became and the thinner the logistical infrastructure behind them.
While the Russians struggled to supply their lines, the Central Powers’ front, on the other hand, enjoyed the support of numerous standard-gauge lines, including several that had been built by the Austrians after the Russian attacks of 1914 in Galicia which had cut off their supply lines. One notable line, for example, was the twenty-one-mile Benzino Electric Railway between Tiha Bargaului and Dornisoara in northern Romania, a windy and slow railway which ran along the side of a mountain pass and proved crucial in keeping a section of the front supplied. There was also a series of Feldbahnen built in great haste behind the lines to serve the trenches once the front settled down. These were huge networks, at times stretching several hundreds of miles and used, as on the Western Front, to deliver supplies and troops the last few miles between the railhead and the trenches, and also to connect the various sections of the front with long lines running broadly north – south. The lack of conventional railways in central Europe meant that the light railways were even more important than on the Western Front and tended to run over longer distances. As just one example, the Germans opened their first 60cm railway in Bulgaria in 1915 and by the end of the war there were no fewer than 200 miles of such lines, some of which remained in use long after the war and in one case until 1969.
&nb
sp; Elsewhere, Italy, which joined the war late in May 1915, launched a series of attacks on the Austrians in the hope of gaining territory that the Italians had long claimed as theirs. The resulting battles between the Austrians and Italians largely took place in the mountains separating the two countries and consequently the Austrians built several long and heavily engineered narrow-gauge lines, together with many lighter lines and cableways, to supply their armies in the South Tyrol.
Indeed, virtually everywhere there was a front, railway lines, ranging from standard to 60cm gauge, would quickly be laid down to serve them. However, while railways may have been necessary to win a battle, they were not a panacea, and by no means guaranteed the right result. One of the railway failures of the war was the attempt by the Russians to defend St Petersburg with a series of fortresses in the Baltic linked by a network of 75cm lines. This system had been constructed on the order of the Tsar during the immediate run-up to the war because Russia’s military leaders, alarmed by memories of the heavy naval defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, suddenly became aware that their capital might be vulnerable to an attack from the sea. Two networks of lines extending over 150 miles, based around Tallinn (now the capital of Estonia) were built to provide the batteries with both men and ammunition. In the event the system proved useless. The Germans did not invade by sea, but by land, and many of the guns served by the railway never fired a shot in anger. The Germans proceeded to take over the batteries and even built a few new positions, which required extending the railway network, so that by the end of the war the system consisted of more than 200 miles of track. However, it again proved militarily useless as the Russians never attacked those positions and the lines were simply abandoned to the Estonians when the Germans departed after the end of the war.
Taking over the enemy’s railway lines was a common characteristic of the battles on the Eastern Front and the Germans gained control and made good use of vast swathes of railway in the areas that they occupied in central Europe. After their gains of 1915, the well-organized German railway troops became adept not only at repairing the damage that the Russians inflicted on the tracks as they retreated, which was often carried out ineffectively, but also at regauging long sections of the 5ft line used by the Russians to the standard 4ft 8½in. By May 1916, the Germans had converted almost 5,000 miles of track in what is now Poland, Belarus and Lithuania with relative ease, since it was a matter of narrowing by just 3½in rather than widening, though the work still delayed progress, especially as it was virtually impossible to carry out in freezing conditions because of the difficulty of lifting iced-up rails.
For their part, the Russians were hampered throughout the conflict with Germany by their inability to manage their railways efficiently. It took until January 1917 for the Russians to bring the administration of the railways under the control of the Ministry of Transport, and by then it was too late. According to John Westwood, ‘transport failure, partly due to the shortage of empty cars, led to food shortages in the cities and so to internal unrest’. Indeed, the Russian Revolution was triggered off by a bread shortage in Petrograd (St Petersburg)7 which was a result of the mismanagement of the transport system. The collapse was stimulated partly by the arrival of Lenin from his exile in Switzerland in April 1917, in a special train which the Germans allowed through the front because they were keen to sow chaos and disorder in Russia. The train, on which smoking was not allowed, much to the discomfort of Lenin and his retinue of thirty fellow travellers, took him to Petrograd, where, immediately on his arrival, he gave a speech that sparked off the Bolshevik Revolution. Once the Bolsheviks took over the government in October 1917,8 they quickly sued for peace, allowing several independent states such as Ukraine, the Baltics and Poland to emerge in central and eastern Europe. The Communists were keen to pull out of the conflict because they were too busy fighting their own civil war, another conflict in which the Trans-Siberian Railway would play a major role, as did armoured trains.
Armoured trains played a very limited role in the world war. Despite the success they had enjoyed in the Boer War and their use in the defence of Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese War, none of the major combatants had envisaged a role for armoured trains in the detailed war plans they had made in the run-up to 1914. In the west, they were barely used. In Britain, in 1914, the War Office commissioned a couple of trains, which were hastily built and kept permanently in steam, on the Norfolk coast and north of Edinburgh respectively, ready to repel the invasion which never came. How two armoured trains would make a significant difference to an all-out attack from the sea by the Germans was a puzzle which only the War Office tacticians would be able to unravel. The Belgians, too, had a couple of armoured trains that briefly saw action during the British assault on Antwerp in late September, but once the front settled down, armoured trains were not considered by the military leaders of any of the combatants fighting on the Western Front to have any value.
In the east, however, there was more interest in them from the military authorities on both sides. In 1912, the Russians had launched a programme of building armoured trains, similar to those used by the British in the Boer War, and four of them were sent to Poland in the early stages of the fighting, where they enjoyed considerable success. One of them played a decisive role in repelling a German infantry attack near Lvov, allowing the Koluszki station to be captured. Following several other successful deployments, the Austro-Hungarian Army had also built up a stock of armoured trains by 1916 and ten of these trains ‘served with distinction on the Russian, Romanian and Italian fronts’.9 The Russians, too, greatly expanded their fleet, which reached a total of fifteen, including the most famous, Zaamurets, and these saw considerable action until the end of the conflict with the Germans.
The Russian war effort began to be undermined when the Tsar was overthrown by the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky following the revolution of February 1917. Kerensky, a social democrat, could not, however, resist the Red tide and he was, in turn, overthrown by the Communists in October 1917 after Lenin’s triumphant return in his special train to Petrograd. The Communists established control over much of the west of the country in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution thanks to the use of the railways. Select bands of armed revolutionaries spread out on the railways from their headquarters in Petrograd to make contact with the 900 soviets – revolutionary groups of local citizens – that had sprung up in towns and cities around the country to put down anti-Communist forces opposed to the October revolution. John Keegan, in his classic work on the war, argues that ‘the Russian railways, during this brief but brilliant revolutionary period, worked for Lenin as the railways had not for Moltke in 1914. Decisive force had been delivered to key points in the nick of time, and a succession of local successes had been achieved that, in sum, brought revolutionary triumph.’10 The Bolsheviks, however, failed to press through their advantage as their peace agreement signed at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 collapsed, which stimulated counter-revolution by White Russians in Ukraine and in the east, which remained an area in turmoil for several years. It was in the latter that armoured trains really came into their own, being deployed more extensively and to better effect than in any other conflict.
This was partly a result of the nature of this war and of a terrain, which lent itself to their use. Whereas the battles on the Western Front were fought in densely populated areas where massed armies faced each other, and even on the Eastern Front armies eventually became entrenched, the Civil War took place mostly in the lightly populated areas of Russia east of Moscow. With air power still limited and few roads or cars, mobile tactics combining armoured trains and cavalry were the most suitable. The newly formed Red Army managed to take over a few of the armoured trains used by the Tsar, and then embarked on a remarkable building programme, with the number rising from twenty-three at the end of 1918 to more than a hundred two years later: ‘the armoured trains were by far the most complicated and expensive weapons operated by the Red
Army and undoubtedly the most effective’.11 It was quite fitting that the villain in the famous railway scenes in David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago should be the dogged pursuer, Strelnikov, and his terrifying-looking armoured train, based on Leon Trotsky, who for a time ran the civil war from his mobile nerve centre in an armoured train.
Armoured trains were used most intensively on the Trans-Siberian, on which much of the war was fought, including a key battle between the Communists and an amazing band of Czech soldiers who had found themselves marooned at the wrong end of the line and enlisted in the White, anti-revolutionary, cause. The Czech Legion, initially around 40,000 strong but eventually reaching more than 70,000, were prisoners of the Russians and deserters from the ranks of the Austro-Hungarian Army who had found themselves stranded in Russia by the cessation of hostilities between Germany and Russia. Unable to be guaranteed safe passage through European seaports, they were despatched east on the Trans-Siberian towards Vladivostok, where it was planned for them to board ships to return to Europe. While the Legion’s troops were supposed not to take part in the fluid and dangerous political situation in Russia, an incident at a railway station in Chelyabinsk, at the foot of the Urals, brought them into the conflict. A Hungarian soldier, in a train passing in the opposite direction, 12 was lynched after a fracas started by an insulting remark, and the incident soon escalated with Trotsky, the head of the Red Army, foolishly ordering that the Czechs be disarmed. Instead, in May 1918, they rose up against the Bolsheviks, taking over the whole 5,000-mile eastern section of the line. The Czechs were strung along the line in trains heading for Vladivostok and therefore were able to take over the whole railway with relative ease, helped by using improvised armoured trains, as the Reds had little presence at that stage in eastern Russia and Siberia. The Czechs supported the hastily cobbled together regime led by Admiral Alexander Kolchak and based in Omsk in south-western Siberia, 4,500 miles west of Vladivostok.