Engines of War

by Christian Wolmar

  For the most part, though, the railways in Britain performed heroically throughout the conflict, but in America, the other country heavily involved in the war but on whose territory no battles were fought, their performance was patchier and did not improve until they were brought under government control. The American railroad companies were in a poor state at the outbreak of the war, beset on one side by strong trade unions demanding increased pay and reduced hours, and on the other by a government which, aware of the companies’ unpopularity and strong monopoly position, was reluctant to allow them to increase their freight rates or fares. By the time the USA declared war on Germany in April 1917, the railroads had already seen an increase in traffic thanks to preparations for the conflict, but they were nevertheless in a parlous state, with many major companies in receivership or making heavy losses. The railroads were still the only effective form of long-distance travel, for both passengers and freight, and therefore it was essential that they worked efficiently once American troops and matériel were being despatched across the Atlantic. Initially, the railroads struggled. Not only did the government refuse to increase freight rates, but the failure of the railroad companies to co-operate with one another led to a vast waste of resources. Most notably, since there was no pooling arrangement of rolling stock, there were numerous trains pulling empty wagons which could have been used to transport other companies’ freight.

  The presidents of nearly 700 railroad companies eventually tried to co-ordinate their services by signing an agreement to operate like a unified ‘continental rail system’. This proved impossible because of anti-trust legislation which prevented them working together too closely and the companies’ readiness to exploit any competitive advantage gained as a result of this supposed co-operation. Their difficulties were compounded by the fact that all war freight was needed at a small number of eastern seaports, which were overflowing with wagons that could not be unloaded, partly as a result of the loss of shipping to attacks from German submarines. The efficiency of the whole network, measured in terms of wagon mileage per day, reduced by 20 per cent and was made worse by a misguided attempt to prioritize government freight which backfired badly. Thousands of government agents were despatched around the country with bundles of preference tags to give cars a right of way, but they were handed out so indiscriminately that 85 per cent of the wagons belonging to one company, Penn Central, were tagged. An analysis of the role of US railroads in the First World War recognized that the lessons of the American Civil War about the management of rail traffic had been ‘forgotten’ and concluded: ‘This was not a breakdown in rail transport, but the result of abuse and mishandling of rail transport.’36 By Christmas 1917, the situation had reached a crisis point, forcing the government to step in and assume control of the railroads. Many railroad bosses were replaced by federal appointees and decisions over the operation of trains were made by the National Railroad Administration. Rolling stock was pooled and priority given to wartime traffic. It worked, with distinct improvements to passenger as well as freight services, and both troops and matériel arrived in Europe on time. Nevertheless, in the land of free enterprise, and raw capitalism, it was a source of great shame for the railroad companies that it had taken nationalization to sort out their problems and, as we shall see in the next chapter, in the Second World War they were determined that they would not suffer the same humiliation.

  On the other side of the Atlantic, as we saw in the previous chapter, the arrival of the Americans placed extra strain on the French railways. Their arrival prompted the final decisive stage of the war. The Germans were anxious that America’s entry into the war would tip the balance of power in the Allies’ favour. They called on fifty divisions (600,000 men) from the Eastern Front, who were now available thanks to Russia’s collapse, and launched what was supposed to be a final offensive on 21 March 1918 against a British-held section of the front with the immediate target of capturing the key railway town of Amiens and with the ultimate goal of pushing the British back to the Channel. On the first day of the attack, the Germans, using stormtrooper tactics for the first time on the Western Front after their successful use in the east at the battle of Riga in September 1917, managed to advance up to twenty miles, helped by the early-morning fog which allowed them to go past the British machine guns unnoticed. However, the Germans did not get to Amiens as their attack petered out, at the cost of tens of thousands of their crack troops. They were hampered by advancing too far beyond their supply lines and by the difficulty of the terrain they were crossing, a morass of shell holes and mud. By this stage of the war, the Germans were also critically short of horses and had failed to mechanize their transport at anything like the rate of the Allies. Artillery, a vital component of the stormtrooper tactics, could not easily be moved forward and anything but the lightest loads proved too cumbersome for the pock-marked terrain. As John Keegan suggests, ‘the Somme may not have won the war for the British in 1916 but the obstacle zone it left helped to ensure that in 1918 they did not lose it’.37 The German spring offensive may have failed in its objectives but it did break the long stalemate on the Western Front. However, while the war was no longer static, it could hardly be described as one of great movement either since the conditions were too difficult and the lines of communication too tenuous. According to A. J. P. Taylor, ‘the impetus of the German advance gradually ran down. Allied reserves arrived faster by train than the attacking infantry could move on foot.’38 The Germans had run out of reserves to exploit their initial success and their manpower was severely depleted, notably by the influenza epidemic which had started to take a heavy toll on the battle-worn troops.

  The British lost huge amounts of artillery and had to destroy or abandon 300 light-railway tractors and locomotives as their positions were overrun. It was ironic that once the need for the light railways had been accepted wholeheartedly by the government and military and massive resources were being devoted to them, the nature of the war changed. Nevertheless, in the southern section invaded by the Germans, where the entire line was lost, a whole new system of light railways was built up between May and July, demonstrating they were still considered a vital part of the supply line. The Germans launched four more attacks, each increasingly more desperate, culminating in the second battle of the Marne in July, whose failure finally passed the initiative to the Allies.

  Although the Germans failed and the Allies realized this was their enemies’ last throw of the dice, these attacks placed an enormous burden on Allied resources, which were also very much depleted. In particular, the French railway network was on its last legs. Not only had it to cope with the extra demands placed on it by the arriving US troops and their matériel, but ‘the permanent way, the locomotives and rolling stock were wearing out, the skilled railway personnel insufficient and tired, and the stocks of essential materials dangerously low’.39

  The foundering of the German attack gave the Allies a couple of months to improve their railways, creating supply lines with yet more light railways, and repairing crucial parts of the standard-gauge network. They were waiting, too, for the American forces to build up and finally, in August, with the help of 1.3 million American troops, the Allies launched the hundred-day offensive, that would end the war. The first attack was early in the month at the battle of Amiens, where tanks proved to be the decisive factor in the victory.

  It was not easy. Moving these huge armies with little effective transport posed insuperable problems and any rapid advance risked breaking the line of communication with the crucial railhead. The Allies’ own supply lines were taxed to the maximum by their advance. The gares régulatrices system broke down as the huge demands placed on these stations was simply too much. Instead of all the goods and personnel being transferred at one station, other nearby stations were called into use with, for example, one being used for artillery, another for animals destined for slaughter, and a third for hospital and ambulance services.

  Just as the Germans had foun
d when they advanced, progress into country where roads and rail had been destroyed was slow. While the military planners had envisaged that light railways would play little part during the advance, in fact several of the advancing armies made heavy use of them and constructed new ones as they moved forward. Moreover, lengthy sections of 60cm railways abandoned by the Germans were taken over by the Allies.

  There were, though, great difficulties in keeping the lines of communication open as the advance into previously held German territory progressed. While in previous offensives there had been several railheads to feed into the advance, now they tended to be lined up behind one another with few roads fit for lorries or light railways connecting them. The distances to be covered by the columns grew longer and road congestion more acute. By early November, the front was advancing faster than the roads could be reopened and the zone of country only passable by animal transport was rapidly widening. Progress was further hampered by numerous rail accidents, and derailments sometimes caused by delayed-action mines left by saboteurs. By the time of the armistice on 11 November, the most advanced British troops, the 4th Army, was fifty miles ahead of its railhead, and in the north the 5th Army was thirty miles ahead.

  Shortly before the armistice, horse transport from the ammunition columns was being used to carry the loads forward and were taking seventy-two hours for what should have been a 24-hour journey. The official report on transportation concluded: ‘until the railways could deliver further forward and the roads could be made fit for MT [mechanized transport], it was no longer possible for the army to advance at full strength; little more than a thin screen to keep touch with the retreating enemy could have been kept supplied.’40

  Some of the Allied leaders wanted to chase the Germans beyond the Hindenburg Line that they had built in 1916 as a defensive barrier to prevent any invasion of the Fatherland. However, as the Germans retreated and winter approached, the Allied leadership saw this would prolong the war into a fifth year since it would take time for the lines of communication to be established while railways and roads were constructed. With no appetite back home to prolong the war, peace eventually became inevitable, stimulated by the inadequacy of the transport system. This hasty end to the war, strangely, left Germans still on French soil and no foreign troops on theirs, the source of the myth exploited by Hitler that Germany had not really lost the war. According to the official report on transportation: ‘The growing impossibility of railway and road reconstruction keeping pace with the rapid advance of the allies was undoubtedly an important factor in influencing the mind of General Foch when he agreed to accord an armistice.’41 The war on the Western Front had, quite literally, run out of steam, but its rather unsatisfactory end contributed to the next one.

  NINE

  HERE WE GO AGAIN

  The period between the two wars marked the true beginning of the motorized age. While before the First World War the ownership of automobiles had been confined to a small affluent minority and the railways still carried the bulk of freight even for short journeys, by the outbreak of the Second World War this had changed completely. Cars were commonplace and the lorry had become the transport of choice for many kinds of freight carriage. Coupled with the development of air transport, the railways were expected to play a much lesser role in the Second World War than in the First World War. The growing competition from air and road had restricted railway investment during the interwar years in all the combatant nations. While there had been improvements to signalling and rolling stock, many of the world’s railways, largely built in the nineteenth century, were in desperate need of modernization and refurbishment, but little had been forthcoming because of the expectation that the car and the lorry would be the key to meeting future transport needs.

  This assumption neglected a crucial advantage that railways had over motor transport – they used coal, still in most countries in plentiful supply even after the conflict broke out, while oil, frequently dependent on shipping, would become scarce. Neither Germany nor Britain had oil, and even the US was not self-sufficient, and therefore railways regained their place as the key mode of transport during the war precisely because they used old technology, still mostly based on coal, and had not been modernized. Fortunately, for the most part the railways were still serviceable and the networks still dense as the days of widespread closures would not start until after the Second World War.

  Their role was, though, not the same as in the First World War. The Second World War was not a railway war in the way that the conflicts of the previous three quarters of a century had been because of the existence of the alternatives to rail transport and the development of more sophisticated weaponry. It was far more mobile as entrenched positions were now too vulnerable from the air and tanks to be sustained for long periods. Even when positions became fixed, railways were no longer needed to bring supplies right to the front, as trucks could do the job over short distances. Artillery was self-propelling or could be towed, reducing the need to carry it on trains. Nevertheless, the role of the railways remained central to the logistical needs of the combatants, because they were still unrivalled for the transport of heavy loads and for journeys of, say, more than 200 miles. Railways were still the workhorses, often unsung, of the logistics of war and where no lines were available, or as in Russia were insufficient, supply bottlenecks invariably developed. Roads had greatly improved in the quarter of a century since the First World War, but away from the main routes were still primitive. There were no motorways apart from the German Autobahnen, and even main highways were easily blocked by marching troops, as the Germans found to their cost when invading Russia. Cars and lorries now provided much of the basic transport needs for shorter trips, but to a large extent they replaced the horse rather than the railway. The railways were, therefore, again a crucial aspect of the conflict and their role, while often unappreciated, can hardly be overestimated. Even many of the fortresses of the Maginot Line, the series of concrete fortifications that were designed to protect France against German invasion, were supplied from depots up to thirty-five miles behind the line by 60cm railways, which went right into the larger ones.

  As in the First World War, there was a long build-up during which the expectation of a conflict grew. German resentment about the settlement at the end of the First World War had led to Hitler’s rise to power and the country’s rearmament. Once Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, war appeared inevitable despite Neville Chamberlain’s infamous trip to Munich, and arrangements for a likely conflict began to be made across Europe. While there was no equivalent of the Schlieffen Plan, there had been considerable logistical preparation on both sides in the 1930s. In Britain, the railways were not in a particularly good shape as competition from motor transport had begun to erode their market, while they were still required by government regulation to provide a universal service to all, which was expensive and often unremunerative. There had been insufficient investment in the interwar period and the railways had belatedly started a campaign for a ‘square deal’ just before the war in an effort to be relieved of their ‘common carrier’ obligations, which required them to transport any goods offered to them, from small parcels to lifeboats and circuses. Preparations for war had started as early as 1937 with, in that British way, the establishment of a committee to examine what protection and precautions were needed for the railway in the event of a war. Grants were made by the government to the Big Four railway companies, which had been created in the aftermath of the First World War, and London Transport to build up supplies of material to permit rapid repairs, to improve telegraph equipment, to develop lighting systems that could not be seen by aircraft and, interestingly, for preparations to move all four company headquarters out of London. Lighting was a particular obsession of the war planners and tests were even carried out early in 1939 to investigate whether it was possible to continue running services under blackout conditions. In 1938, work started on a public evacuation plan from the cities which was complete
d just two months before the outbreak of war. The scheme, which envisaged running 4,000 special trains, involved not only moving thousands of vulnerable people out of the cities, but also Britain’s cultural heritage in the British Museum, the Tate and other buildings was to be conveyed to a remote destination in Wales, where the artefacts were to be housed in specially adapted disused mines.

  As in 1914, it was envisaged that a government committee consisting of senior railway managers would take over the railways as soon as war broke out. Again, the British railways excelled in the early stages of the war when they were called upon to deal with the expected huge increase in demand. On the very day that war was announced, 3 September 1939, huge numbers of people flocked to the railways – foreigners anxious to get home, holidaymakers cutting short their vacations, colonial civil servants heading for ships from Liverpool to get back to their postings. This was quickly followed by the evacuation of 1.3 million children and other vulnerable people out of London and a number of big cities. Ambulance trains which had been fitted out during the build-up to war were now used to ferry hospital patients from London and other major cities to safer locations. The first contingent of the British Expeditionary Force, 158,000 strong, was despatched to France over the next few weeks with a minimum of fuss. This time, realizing that there would be greatly increased demands on the railway, about half the normal train service was cancelled but again there was a great reluctance on the part of the British people to obey the injunctions not to travel. The pinnacle of the British railways’ efforts in the early stages of the war was the unexpected task of having to cope with the rapid influx of 338,000 evacuees, many of whom were injured, from Dunkirk in May 1940. Virtually the whole of the Southern Railway network was reorganized to cope with the arrivals, with, for example, one line being devoted solely to stabling rolling stock in readiness to pick up the passengers.