by Chris McNab
Our men got nowhere on the first day. They had been mown down like grass by German machine-gunners who, after our barrage had lifted, rushed out to meet our men in the open. Many of the best battalions were almost annihilated, and our casualties were terrible.
A German doctor taken prisoner near La Boiselle stayed behind to look after our wounded in a dugout instead of going down to safety. I met him coming back across the battlefield next morning. One of our men was carrying his bag and I had a talk with him. He was a tall, heavy man with a black beard, and he spoke good English. ‘This war!’ he said. ‘We go on killing each other to no purpose. It is a war against religion and against civilisation and I see no end to it.’
The poignancy of this single day was heightened by a feature of British Army recruiting practice in the early years of the First World War. At the start of the conflict in 1914, the total manpower available to the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was just 250,000 regular troops. This was nowhere near enough to face the German onslaught in Western Europe, thus Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, on 6 August began an impassioned appeal for men to join the ranks of the military as volunteers. Hundreds of thousands of men signed up in a matter of days, causing chaos at recruiting stations and recruit training depots. The men were encouraged to join up not only by the patriotism that fuelled the early weeks of the conflict, but also in many cases by the simple desire to enlist with their friends and colleagues, often with the added bonus of escaping a grinding industrial existence in Britain. An extremely localised form of recruiting produced what were known as the ‘Pals Battalions’, units of men connected through living on the same street, working in the same company, or belonging to the same guild or society. Aside from their official battalion designations, these battalions had evocative titles such as the ‘Hull Commercials’, ‘The Grimsby Chums’, ‘Glasgow Tramways Battalion’ and ‘Footballers Battalion’. Some 300 Pals Battalions were formed in 1914–15.
Looking back, the romanticism and comradeship of the Pals Battalions masked an obvious truth – if a battalion was decimated in battle, the losses would have a disproportionate effect on the home community from which the battalion was formed. Such was proved in graphic fashion at the Battle of the Somme. In the space of that single, terrible opening day, entire battalions were virtually destroyed. The Leeds Battalion lost some 700 of its 900 men, and the famous Accrington Pals – more fully known as 11th (Service) Battalion (Accrington) East Lancashire Regiment – suffered 584 dead, wounded and missing of the 750 men who had joined the attack.
The Battle of the Somme would rumble on for months to come, wavering in its intensity and the levels of human destruction. By the time it ran out of steam in November 1916, for advances of no more than 5 miles (8km), the British and French troops had taken 623,000 casualties. The Germans had also lost half a million men on the Somme – this was no one-sided battle.
As appalling as the Somme was, it sits comfortably alongside other epic battles of the war, some with even more excessive casualty lists. Also in 1916, the vast clash of arms between the Germans and French at Verdun in north-eastern France resulted in nearly one million dead and wounded between 21 February and 20 December. The battle was actually little more than a colossal exercise in attrition, the outcome of German efforts to ‘bleed to death’ the French Army. The British battle known as Third Ypres – more popularly called the Battle of Passchendaele after one of its key landmarks – inflicted 310,000 casualties on the BEF, and 250,000 on the German forces. Not only was this battle a horrifying trial by fire for the men involved, but the landscape itself became an enemy. Heavy rainfall, plus the high water table in the clay-heavy soil of Flanders, meant that for much of the battle men fought through an endless, ripped landscape of vacuous mud, in which both men and horses could and did drown if they fell from their duckboard walkways. In 1918, the German Michael Offensive added another 1.5 million casualties between 21 March and 18 July.
And lest we forget, the war on the Eastern Front between Germany and Russia was nothing short of apocalyptic. The Russian Brusilov Offensive, a vast Russian onslaught against German forces in the Ukraine, cost the lives or health of around 2.5 million men in the space of three-and-a-half months of fighting in June–September 1916.
Listing the casualties of battle in the First World War can eventually have a numbing effect, the statistics disconnected from the realities on the ground and the trauma suffered by those left to grieve. But the fact was that the world of warfare had changed. One hundred years previously, the armies met in battle armed with muzzle-loading flintlock muskets, capable of firing just two or three rounds a minute even in the hands of a skilled rifleman. Heavy firepower was delivered by smoothbore cannon, firing solid lumps of shot over ranges of several hundred yards. The men would frequently close up, deciding the battle with bayonets and swords.
By the time the First World War began in 1914, military traditionalism still lingered on in ideas of the nobility of the frontal assault or the grandeur of a cavalry charge. But the tools of war had changed beyond recognition. Now every infantryman had a breech-loading bolt-action rifle capable of firing fifteen rounds a minute, killing out to ranges of well over a mile. More significantly, machine guns were an integrated part of companies, battalions and divisions. A single German MG08 or British Vickers gun could send out streams of lead at around 450rpm. With such tools, the process of killing became virtually industrial – all that was required was to keep the gun fed with ammunition and the barrel cool (or changed when required) to deliver constant streams of death into the ranks of the enemy in no-man’s-land.
Then there was the artillery. Artillery was now rifled and breech-loaded, meaning that it was accurate over great distances and had high rates of fire. Furthermore, the shells that the guns fired were filled with high-explosive, each round delivering enormous destructive effect at the point of impact. In total, some 70 per cent of all casualties in the First World War and the subsequent world war were caused by artillery, and in some armies up to 40 per cent of total military personnel were serving in the artillery arm.
TOTAL MANPOWER MOBILISED IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR
There was also innovation in air and sea warfare. Although the Wright brothers had only made the first controlled, powered flight on 17 December 1903 (for the epic duration of 12 seconds), just over a decade later aircraft were being repurposed for combat. At first, the men of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC), formed in 1912, were mainly tasked with reconnaissance duties (aided by the progressive development of two-way radios and aerial cameras), flying biplane aircraft over the battlefield to provide intelligence on troop movements and artillery fire control. Onboard weaponry consisted of little more than a handgun or a grenade carried for personal defence. From 1915, however, new generations of aircraft were emerging, pure fighter types armed with machine guns, eventually synchronised to fire through the propeller (meaning the pilot could shoot along his direct line of sight), and larger bombers that could deliver bomb payloads of several thousand pounds well behind enemy frontlines. Although pilots gathered a glamorous image amongst the British public, their lives were actually brutal and short – the average life expectancy of a combat pilot on the Western Front between 1915 and 1917 was in the region of eleven days.
At sea, the war was dominated by the big-gun turreted warships. The pre-war international naval arms race had been transformed by the arrival of the Dreadnought class of warship. The type was established with HMS Dreadnought, a Royal Navy vessel commissioned on 2 December 1906. Dreadnought demonstrated a new vision of the capital warship: heavily armed with multiple large-calibre turreted guns (typically 15in and above), with ranges of many thousands of yards; powerful secondary armament; steam-turbine propulsion that gave speeds of more than 20 knots; armour applied to hulls and decks. Soon every nation was racing to produce larger and more potent versions of the Dreadnought, creating a world of metal monsters vying for control of the waves. In the First World War this led to t
he epic clash that was the Battle of Jutland (31 May–1 June 1916), which pitted the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet against Germany’s High Seas Fleet in the North Sea off Denmark. (Note that the Grand Fleet included a significant number of Australian and New Zealand vessels and personnel.) In this thunderous engagement, nearly 9,000 men were killed and twenty-five major vessels were sunk, and both sides claimed victory. Although major fleet actions such as this were rare, they were a salutary reminder that naval personnel were far from immune from the horrors of war.
BRITISH SMALL-ARMS FIREPOWER THROUGH THE CENTURIES
Another aspect of the naval war during the First World War was the German U-boat. Sailing from bases on the European coastline, the U-boat campaign against British shipping escalated to a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. (‘Unrestricted’ meant that the U-boats would target and sink merchant vessels without warning, as opposed to operating by ‘prize rules’ where the ship was first stopped and the crew placed into lifeboats before the vessel was sunk.) The U-boat war, conducted primarily in the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Arctic waters, was a serious threat to the British war effort. Between 1914 and 1918, some 5,000 British vessels were sunk, costing the lives of 15,000 mariners.
As we have seen, the First World War was a seismic event on human, technological and political levels. It ended in November 1918, with a German capitulation. Although the war was a victory for the Entente powers over the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, the celebrations would be muted. The war had slaughtered or crippled millions of young men. Those who survived and returned home often found post-war economies virtually ruined by four years of conflict, thus many veterans entered the ranks of the long-term unemployed. Worse still, the peace contained the seeds of another world war.
THE SECOND WORLD WAR
As is often the way following long periods of armed conflict, the British armed services suffered from a lack of investment and interest during the interwar period. By 1930 its regular army was little more than five divisions strong, the weakness in manpower compensated for partially by fourteen Territorial divisions. Britain also started to lag behind in terms of the technological advantages it had forged in the First World War, particularly regarding armoured vehicles. The evident rise of Nazi Germany during the 1930s did spur British rearmament, but when Britain went to war again in September 1939, there was no denying that it was woefully unprepared to face the might of Germany’s new army and air force, which now ranked as the best in the world. (Britain’s one saving grace in these early days of the conflict was the Royal Navy, which still wielded great power on the waves.)
Here is not the place, nor the space, to present a history of those apocalyptic years between 1939 and 1945. Suffice to say that the Second World War evolved into what was a ‘total war’, a conflict in which the combatants aimed to destroy the entire military, civilian and cultural infrastructure of the enemy. The fighting was also truly global. What started as a Northern European war spread through the Mediterranean, the Balkans, North Africa, into the Baltic States and the Soviet Union. Once Japan began its own campaign of conquest in late 1941, bringing the United States into the conflict (and widening the British theatre of operations considerably), the war zones reached out across the Pacific Ocean, from the northern coastline of Australia to the Aleutian Islands, and from humid jungle trails in Burma to sun-bleached atolls thousands of miles from continental Asia. One frequently overlooked aspect of the conflict is the war between Japan and China that had been waged on the Chinese mainland since 1937. By 1945, that aspect of the broader war had cost the lives of 20 million people.
It must also be remembered with solemnity that the estimated Soviet war dead numbered about 25 million. The war on the Eastern Front was conducted with a level of brutality and lack of pity rarely experienced anywhere else. The Soviet Union lost more people in the first weeks of the German invasion than Britain and the United States did in the entire war. German Einsatzgruppen (Special Purpose Units) also began to implement the first stages of the Holocaust in 1941 and 1942, conducting the mass executions of 1.1 million Jews in woods, forests, gardens and ravines. The Eastern Front had a voracious appetite for German manpower – more than 70 per cent of Germany’s casualties were taken in this theatre, some 3 million soldiers.
Looking back to Britain, the Second World War was a turning point in the nation’s political and military history. Between 1939 and 1941, it seemed touch and go whether the nation would survive at all. Hitler’s army had conquered virtually the whole of Western Europe by June 1940, the BEF dispatched to France defeated and ejected from Dunkirk. Only the Channel separated German forces and free Britain, which now stood quite alone on the periphery of Europe. In the summer of 1940, Hitler pitted his Luftwaffe (air force) against the Royal Air Force (RAF), attempting to rid the island nation of its air cover in preparation for a planned invasion. The Battle of Britain, as it is now called, was an incredible victory for the British, bought at a heavy cost in both British and German aviators. (Within the category of ‘British’, we here must include the many foreign pilots who flew for the RAF, including those fighting in exile from their own Nazi-occupied countries, such as the Poles and the Czechs.) It rendered (alongside the undiminished power of the Royal Navy) a German invasion impossible, although by the autumn of 1940 Hitler’s strategic focus was swinging to the east rather than the west. Nevertheless, truly awful days were ahead for the beleaguered British. The Luftwaffe unleashed the ‘Blitz’, a campaign of strategic bombing against British cities that ran until May 1941. Sporadic air attacks on the British mainland, plus a vicious V-1 and V-2 missile campaign from 1944, continued until nearly the end of the war. What this meant was that death came as much to Britain’s civilians as it did to its military – more than 60,000 civilians died on the mainland during the war.
Looking at the wider context of the Second World War, what made it especially dreadful was the way that the lines between military and civilian targets at first blurred and then eventually collapsed completely. An estimated total of 60 million people died in the Second World War, triple the fatalities of the First World War, and more than half that figure were civilians. This imbalance was partly due to genocidal policies, none more notorious than Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’, in which 6 million of Europe’s Jews were exterminated with an industrial ruthlessness that defies imagination. Yet also, air power had also reached a destructive ascendancy. Not only had the aircraft types diversified and increased in performance, but long-range strategic bombing could visit destruction on distant cities, raining high-explosives and incendiaries onto industrial targets and civilian housing areas alike. While Germany and Japan never quite developed the aircraft types or strategic focus for such bombing, the Allies unleashed hell upon Axis towns and cities, particularly between 1943 and 1945. The devastation of places such as Hamburg, Cologne and Dresden in Germany was little short of apocalyptic. In Hamburg, for example, an unrelenting pounding by British (at night) and American (by day) bombers between 24 and 28 July 1943 killed an estimated 30,000 people. During the raid a firestorm developed that generated 1,800°F (1,000°C) heat and 120mph (193km/h) windspeeds, immolating all those in its path. Japan also received the full force of strategic bombing in 1945, when US B-29 bombers began to make regular visitations. The Operation Meetinghouse air raid of 9–10 March 1945 on Tokyo has been classified as the single most destructive bombing raid in history – through using incendiaries against the city’s predominantly paper-and-wood houses, the US Air Force destroyed 16 square miles (41km2) of city and killed more than 100,000 people. And of course, the ultimate expression of civilians as ‘legitimate’ targets came with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 respectively. Two cities were vaporised in two instants, and the new era of nuclear warfare was inaugurated.
SECOND WORLD WAR CASUALTIES (DEAD, WOUNDED AND MISSING)
FRONTLINE VOICES: THE BLITZ
The following is an
extract from the Manchester Guardian, recording just one of many incidents during the Blitz:
Children sleeping in perambulators and mothers with babies in their arms were killed when a bomb exploded on a crowded shelter in an East London district during Saturday night’s raids. By what is described as ‘a million-to-one chance’ the bomb fell directly on to a ventilator shaft measuring only about three feet by one foot. It was the only vulnerable place in a powerfully protected underground shelter accommodating over 1,000 people. The rest of the roof is well protected by three feet of brickwork, earth, and other defences, but over the ventilator shaft there were only corrugated iron sheets. The bomb fell just as scores of families were settling down in the shelter to sleep there for the night. Three or four roof-support pillars were torn down and about fourteen people were killed and some forty injured. In one family three children were killed, but their parents escaped. Although explosions could be heard in all directions and the scene was illuminated by the glow of the East End fires, civil defence workers laboured fearlessly among the wreckage seeking the wounded, carrying them to safer places, and attending to their wounds before the ambulances arrived.
Manchester Guardian,
9 September 1940
BRITISH BOMBER CREWS
Although British bomber crews delivered some of the most devastating raids of the war against German cities, they in turn faced the worst odds of survival of almost any branch of service. The threats they encountered included swarms of German fighters and night-fighters, dense anti-aircraft fire, enemy radar (which alerted enemy gun and fighter crews long before the bombers arrived on target), adverse weather and mechanical failure. Some 125,000 men served in Bomber Command, and 55,573 were killed, a mortality rate of 44 per cent. Bomber crewman life expectancy dropped to around six weeks in 1943–44, much less than that of an infantry officer in the trenches of the First World War.