The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  The reality was that the mass army, with all its supply needs and its artillery, relied on an effective network of roads and railways to sustain its advance. ‘The Germans’, a Russian guards officer recalled, ‘had a line for every army corps and sometimes even for a division . . . Roughly, the Russian army had one line to supply an army of three or four army corps . . . The result was that the jamming of traffic affected the supply of the army, paralysed the evacuation of the wounded and interfered with the bringing up of the reserves.’ 11 But once the German army operated beyond its own frontier, it was subject to the same constraints as the Russian. That was precisely the reason why Schlieffen had forsaken his predecessors’ predilection for a war in the east and devoted greater attention to Germany’s western front.

  Tannenberg was a defensive victory. Following up speedily at the battle of the Masurian lakes, the 8th Army drove Rennenkampf back behind the Russian frontier. East Prussia was secure. But the Germans had not given the Austrians the aid they wanted: they had repulsed a Russian invasion but they had not drawn the bulk of the Russian forces away from the Austro-Hungarian front - nor, despite the scale of Samsonov’s defeat, had they squashed Grand Duke Nikolay’s plan to use Poland as the launching pad for an invasion of Silesia. At the beginning of September Conrad called for the implementation of the Siedlitz manoeuvre, the envelopment of Russian Poland from north and south. This held a double appeal for Hindenburg and Ludendorff: it would conform to their Schlieffenesque concept of operations and it would ward off the fresh threat to German territory. But the allies were now out of step. Conrad had summoned up a scheme to which his own army could not possibly contribute. It was retreating in disorder. By mid-September what he needed was direct assistance, not some ambitious plan hatched on the map and designed to wrap up the eastern front at a stroke.

  Then the pressure on the Austro-Hungarian armies eased. Nobody stopped to ask what the Russians were doing. The two allies were able to effect a joint advance towards the Vistula. On 9 October Przemysl was relieved. But the success was deceptive. Grand Duke Nikolay was massing three armies behind the Vistula, ready for his own advance into Poland. He planned not only to provide direct aid to France, but also to consolidate and broaden the Russian victory in Galicia. He, too, hoped to achieve a massive envelopment, and the Germans were walking into the trap. ‘On 11 October’, wrote August von Mackensen, whose corps was closing in on Warsaw, ‘the earlier appreciation of the overall operational situation changed utterly. A Russian order captured on the battlefield at Grojec ... revealed the views of the supreme Russian command and the deployment of their forces on the entire Vistula front.’12 The Germans fell back, blaming the Austrians rather than their own intelligence failures, and Przemysl was besieged once more. However, they had escaped the Russian envelopment, and transport difficulties again hampered the Russian pursuit.

  EASTERN FRONT V. WESTERN FRONT

  On 30 October Ludendorff travelled to Berlin to meet Erich von Falkenhayn. Nominally Falkenhayn was still minister of war, but since Moltke’s disgrace on the Marne he had also been de facto chief of the general staff. Falkenhayn enjoyed the favour of the Kaiser, a factor of crucial importance in the months ahead. He was good-looking, young by the standards of German generals (he was fifty-three), and his career had followed a very different trajectory from those of the general staff officers over whom he now presided. While they were being schooled by Schlieffen, he was serving in China. His overseas service had left him with a strong impression of Britain’s maritime and imperial power. Here for him was the hub of the Entente, and therefore the centre of gravity for German strategy. However, the fact that he was not fully part of that enclosed world of operational planning, of staff rides and map exercises, also meant that he had something to prove. His initial response in the aftermath of the Marne had been to seek envelopment through manoeuvre with all the zeal of a true pupil of Schlieffen. Each effort to do so had been thwarted by the French and British armies as they, too, cobbled together forces to extend their left flank northwards and so block German efforts to get into their rear. When Ludendorff and Falkenhayn met, the final stage of this process was being fought out in a vicious and protracted battle at Ypres, the ancient Flemish city whose fortifications guarded the Channel ports.

  Falkenhayn, fourth from right, directs the German 9th Army in its invasion of Romania, autumn 1916 The scale and speed of his victory gave the lie to those who questioned his grasp of operations

  Six new corps were forming in Germany and Ludendorff appeared to accept Falkenhayn’s wish to put them into the Ypres sector. But Falkenhayn, too, seemed to collude in Ludendorff’s aspiration to fight envelopment battles in the east. The Schlieffen legacy created mutual misapprehension: at the strategic level it led Ludendorff to acknowledge the priority of the western front over the eastern; at the operational level it led Falkenhayn to realise that great victories were more likely in the east. The eastern front was twice the length of the western, and its armies were more thinly spread over terrain which was less urbanised. The opportunities for manoeuvre were therefore greater. Following the meeting, on 1 November Hindenburg was appointed commander-in-chief of all German troops on the eastern front, with Ludendorff as his chief of staff. The task of OberOst, as the new command was called, was twofold. It was to mount a local counterattack in Poland while Falkenhayn got on with fighting at Ypres, and it was to provide a counterweight to the Austrian high command. Conrad von Hötzendorff blamed the failure in Poland on Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and had made an absurd request for thirty German divisions for the eastern front. The gap between imagination and reality in Conrad’s thought now meant that Falkenhayn was not alone in wanting to find a mechanism to curb him. Even Franz Josef wanted him to go.

  The formation of OberOst empowered rather than appeased Falkenhayn’s critics within Germany. Within two days, on 3 November, the mutual misapprehension between Falkenhayn and Ludendorff had flared into an open hostility which was to deepen over the next eighteen months and divide strategic counsels in Germany. Ludendorff elevated OberOst’s limited mission into a massive envelopment battle. It culminated in desperate winter fighting round ód in Poland. He wanted more troops. But on 4 November Falkenhayn, now publicly appointed chief of the general staff, renewed the attack at Ypres. It failed, with a total German casualty bill of 80,000. Falkenhayn’s response was not to redirect his strategic goals to where the Germans were able to achieve operational solutions. Instead he suggested that Germany abandon any hope of overall success. It was absurd for two conservative monarchies to be fighting each other in a war which could only benefit their real long-term rival, Britain. Germany should therefore seek a separate peace with Russia, so as to be able to concentrate its efforts in the west.

  In the context of November 1914 such pragmatism was tantamount to betrayal. Arthur Zimmermann, the under-secretary at the Foreign Ministry, was aghast. He saw the Balkans and Turkey as the strategic crux of the central powers’ war effort. This was their route to the wider world; their device to prevent the formation of a hostile Balkan league; and their means to outflank both Britain and Russia. In 1915 he was to be one of those in Berlin whose anxieties were focused on Gallipoli. The Austrians could hardly gainsay such arguments: this was what the July crisis had been all about. But Conrad was now of the view that the solution to the Dual Monarchy’s Balkan problems lay on the eastern front proper, with the defeat of Russia: kill the viper, and the contents of the nest would also die. OberOst therefore had powerful allies. Not even the chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, was on Falkenhayn’s side. Although he recognised the force of Falkenhayn’s logic, he believed that the Russians were more likely to be brought to the negotiating table if they had first been soundly beaten. Moreover, he - like many senior army officers - was appalled by Falkenhayn’s pessimism. Thus Germany’s best chance for the formulation of a sensible strategy - the formation of a pact between Falkenhayn and Bethmann Hollweg - was forfeit. Bethmann Hollweg, whom many British obs
ervers at the time counted a closet liberal, delivered himself into the hands of Hindenburg and Ludendorff.

  The debate between ‘westerners’ and ’easterners’ in Germany was far more real than the one between soldiers and politicians in Britain that went under the same title. The latter was largely fought out after the war in the pages of their memoirs; this one resulted in the failure of any hopes for domestic political reform and ultimately committed the country to the pursuit of a total victory which it could not achieve. If Germany had possessed more robust allies than either the Ottoman Empire or, more particularly, Austria-Hungary proved to be, the arguments would never have gained such momentum. But their weakness meant that Germany had constantly to bail them out and could never concentrate on the western front to the exclusion of others.

  On 25 November 1914 Falkenhayn recognised failure at Ypres and ordered the German armies in the west to abandon manoeuvre warfare and adopt deep, defensive positions for the foreseeable future. But his intention was not to elevate trench warfare into an end in itself; instead, it was a means to an end - the creation of disposable forces for use elsewhere. A systematic defence in the west would enable fewer men to hold the ground. In February 1915 the German army in the west was restructured: every division was reduced from four to three infantry regiments. This combination of tactical and organisational expedients created a strategic reserve for mobile and offensive operations elsewhere.

  Falkenhayn had not yet accepted that these attacks would be in the east and when he did - in March 1915 - he did not adopt OberOst’s agenda. Hindenburg and Ludendorff dreamt of massive envelopments in northern Russia and the seizure of the Baltic states. Falkenhayn’s priority was different: to buttress Austria-Hungary and in particular to finish with Serbia. Success here might sway the neutral powers in the Balkans and could even persuade the Central Powers’ nominal ally, Italy, to honour its obligations. But Conrad could not turn to the Balkans while he was under such pressure from the Russians in the Carpathians. Falkenhayn’s political judgement was evident not only in his sensitivity to the possible diplomatic consequences of military success but also in his handling of the command issue. The idea for the offensive that followed was Austrian, but its execution was German. The sector chosen, in Galicia, between Gorlice and Tarnow, close to railway communications and free of river lines immediately to its front, lay in Conrad’s area of responsibility. He said four German divisions would suffice for the attack, but Falkenhayn offered four corps, and so was able to create a joint Austro-German army group for the first time in the war. He then appointed a German, August von Mackensen, to its command, thus side-stepping not only Conrad but also Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Neither side forgave him. ‘I can only love or hate’, Ludendorff told Groener, ‘and I hate General von Falkenhayn.’13

  THE GREAT RETREAT

  OberOst was left out in the cold in more ways than one. Mackensen’s chief of staff was Hans von Seeckt. ‘It is endlessly less important where Mackensen and the Bug-Armee break through,’ Falkenhayn said of later operations, ‘than that they should merely break through somewhere.’14 In the conditions created by trench war breakthrough, not envelopment, was the crucial method. Seeckt had refined the technique at Soissons, on the western front, in December 1914. The key was the use of artillery - a short and sudden bombardment aimed to stun rather than destroy, and so less demanding of shell supply. At Gorlice-Tarnow the Central Powers collected 334 heavy guns to 4 Russian, 1,272 field guns to 675, and 96 trench mortars to none. It was the densest artillery concentration of the war so far: one heavy gun every 132 yards and one field gun every 45 yards. The Germans and Austrians could overlook the Russian positions to direct their fire. Their success was aided by the weakness of the Russian trenches compared with those in the west: they were devoid of overhead cover and the whole position - three lines of trenches forming a single defensive zone - lacked depth.

  The artillery began its preliminary registration on 1 May. In the early hours of 2 May German patrols went forward to probe for soft spots and destroy the wire, and then at 6 a.m. an intense bombardment opened. At 7 a.m. Hauptmann von Loebell’s Guards regiment pushed two of its battalions forward into an abandoned Russian position. At 10 a.m. the artillery lifted, seeking more distant targets and aiming to isolate the battlefield from Russian reinforcements. ‘The defenders,’ Loebell reported, ‘who had suffered little under artillery fire, were ready for the storm, but they did not believe that the storming columns had already broken out from the position, since they had not observed our preparations. When we suddenly came up the slope, they were completely surprised and fired too high, and as a result our losses were amazingly light. My company only lost, in spite of heavy machine-gun fire, three men dead and four wounded . . . We captured six kilometres of ground.’15 Within two days the Austro-German forces had broken through and within a week the Russians had lost 210,000 men, as many as 140,000 of whom were prisoners of war. Their entire position in the Carpathians was unhinged, and they had to fall back on a 160-km front. Przemysl was retaken on 3 June and Lemberg on 22 June. Mackensen and Seeckt, not Hindenburg and Ludendorff, were the most successful double-act in the German army in the First World War.

  Falkenhayn’s aims were limited and he had anticipated quickly turning against Serbia. But his stunning success reopened the hopes of a separate peace with Russia. In the north Hindenburg overran the Baltic states, providing cover for Gorlice-Tarnow but also reactivating his hopes for a massive envelopment. Falkenhayn accepted the case for a less ambitious operation with Poland as its focus. The offensive opened on 13 July and German troops entered Warsaw on 5 August. They crossed the Bug in the middle of the month, and captured the fortified cities of Grodno and Brest-Litovsk by its end. Vilna fell on 19 September. Russian losses since May totalled 1.4 million men.

  More than half of them were prisoners of war. And that was true for the war as a whole, not just for the summer of 1915. In a major action on the western front casualties normally divided one-third dead, one-third wounded and one-third captured, and, averaged over the war as a whole, the proportion of prisoners of war in relation to total losses was much smaller. The greater fluidity of the eastern front gave greater opportunities for capture. But Russia’s casualty profile is also revealing of the morale of the Russian army. Before the war the incidence of strikes - which had both soared in number and become increasingly politicised - peaked in July 1914, and conservatives had warned against war for its ability to stoke revolution. The actual experience of mobilisation suggested that such fears had been misplaced: ‘As if by magic the revolutionary disorders had died down at the announcement of war’. In Petrograd (as St Petersburg had been renamed), ‘patriotic military fervour had gripped the workmen . . . They cheered us enthusiastically as we marched by their factories.’16 Ninety-six per cent of reservists reported for duty, a rate not far behind that of France. But, as in France, public demonstrations of enthusiasm were urban phenomena, and of all the major armies of 1914 Russia’s was overwhelmingly made up of peasants. Their loyalties were regional rather than national. They had crops to harvest and families to feed. Mobilisation prompted rioting in 49 out of 101 provinces [oblast] in European and Asiatic Russia. Russia’s great resource in the eyes of its Western allies was its manpower. In 1914 Russia mobilised 6.5 million men, and it could still raise a further 5 million in 1915. But the loyalties of those men were brittle. ‘What would be the feelings of these people for their Little Father [the Tsar],’ Sir George Buchanan, the British ambassador, wondered, ‘were the war to be unduly prolonged?’17 As the army expanded, its cadres shrank. It had lost 60,000 officers by late summer 1915, and by September ‘the number of officers of every kind in the normal division of sixteen battalions and six batteries had fallen to an average of 110’.18 The surprise, as Britain’s military attaché observed, was not that the retreat had been so great but that the army was intact at all.

  The Germans first entered Szawle, in the centre of Lithuania, on 30 April 191
5, but they had to withdraw again on 11 May, and did not finally take it until 21 July. Realising that the Baltic states were not Russian, they determined to make them culturally German

  This did not stop both Britain and France complaining that Russia had failed to maximise its potential. It raised 15 million men in the war, a massive number in absolute terms, but only 39 per cent of its population of military age. France, with a population one-quarter the size of Russia‘s, drafted 79 per cent of its male population of military age to create an army half as strong. Britain, which did not introduce conscription until 1916, and which argued that its contribution to the war was industrial and economic, still enlisted 49 per cent of its men aged fifteen to forty-nine for military service. Russia’s response to its allies’ criticisms focused less on its lack of officers and non-commissioned officers for such a massive army and more on its shortage of munitions.

  All the belligerents faced a problem converting their industrial bases from peacetime to wartime production. In earlier wars armies had run out of shells because of difficulties with transport and supply. But in the winter of 1914-15 position warfare both eased that constraint on shell consumption and generated more targets for guns to engage. Given time to adapt plant and rejig machine-tools, industrialised societies could adapt to these demands. By late 1915 they mostly had. States struck compromises with capitalist enterprises which both presaged an intervention in the workings of the market and involved an acceptance of its freedom. But Russia had a further hurdle to surmount: it was an industrialising power rather than an industrialised one. Its comparative lack of railways, all too evident to its soldiers as they retreated across Poland and into Belorussia, was a case in point. It demanded help from its Western allies, whose production, particularly that of Britain, it seemed to regard as inexhaustible. But Britain, too, was having to convert its industry to war production and was simultaneously creating a mass army from scratch. Like Russia, it found that getting men was easier than giving them rifles with which to fight. It also wondered how far the aid it gave its ally was actually meeting the immediate demands of war rather than underpinning Russia’s long-term infrastructural needs. It was doing both.