The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  A British fatigue party carrying duckboards over a support trench Ime at night, Cambrai, 12 January 1917 A million helmets, made of hardened manganese steel, were issued to the British army in the first half of 1916, with the result that head wounds fell by over 75 per cent

  The French were experimenting with helmets when the war broke out, and issued the Adrian helmet in mid- 1915. It was also adopted by Belgium, Italy, Serbia and Romania. But the best protection against shellfire for these soldiers was the dug-out itself

  When Falkenhayn ordered the adoption of defensive positions on the western front at the end of November 1914 he saw them as a means to an end: tactically to confer on his troops the benefits of the defensive, and strategically to enable him to manoeuvre elsewhere. For the German supreme command, with its possibilities in the east, that relationship was always explicit. But for those who served only on the western front trench warfare became institutionalised, a self-fulfilling routine, and ultimately an end in itself. British and French troops were taken out of the line less to be deployed to other theatres, and more to go into reserve. Charles Carrington reckoned that he spent 101 days of 1916 under fire, in the front-line or support trenches. He passed more than two-thirds of the year in the hinterland of reserve positions, training areas, billets and munition dumps. The longer positions were held, the stronger the labour of their occupants made them. In the chalk-lands of Picardy deep dug-outs almost domesticated the line. Further north the land was lower lying and boggy, but the result was that the front came to consist of breastworks and pillboxes, structures which not only took the defenders clear of the water-table but also conferred an air of permanence. At its most extreme, this pattern prompted the phenomenon of ‘live and let live’. ‘The military situation at le Touquet was curious,’ George Coppard remembered of his service in 1915, ‘for it seemed almost as if both sides, the Germans and ourselves, had tacitly agreed that this part of the line should be labelled “Quiet”, it being understood that if one side started up any bloody nonsense, then the other would follow suit.’5

  Raids, another night-time activity, were designed to disrupt these patterns. They prevented the loss of the skills of mobile warfare; they asserted the dominance of one side over no man’s land; and they might bring back valuable intelligence. This was a form of fighting which relied on stealth and surprise, which bypassed long-range fire, and instead required the weapons of an older generation, not only grenades and bombs but also picks and shovels. However, as raids, too, became institutionalised, so they grew in scale and elaboration, ‘a battle in miniature with all the preliminaries and accompaniments magnified’. Watching a raid from the fire-step of a trench held by the Royal Welch Fusiliers on 25 April 1916 was ‘a hair-raising affair at the start, for our field-guns had so little clearance that the draught of their shells could be felt on the back of one’s neck. What was to be seen was like nothing else. Against the night there was a wild dance of red fan-shaped spurts of fire seen through a thickening haze.’6

  Artillery was the key weapon of trench warfare. Envelopment, the leading operational idea of staffs before the war, still found its proponents in the east, but in the west there were no exposed flanks. The task that confronted the French and British armies, committed to the recovery of the lost territory of northern France and to the liberation of Belgium, was that of breaking into and through the German positions. Only then could they break out and manoeuvre. In the winter of 1914-15 this seemed to be a matter of guns and high-explosive shell. ‘Breaking through the enemy’s lines’, the British commander-in-chief, Sir John French, minuted in January 1915, ‘is largely a question of expenditure of high explosive ammunition. If sufficient ammunition is forthcoming, a way can be blasted through the line. If the attempt fails, it shows, provided that the work of the infantry and artillery has been properly coordinated, that insufficient ammunition has been expended, i.e. either more guns must be brought up, or the allowance of ammunition per gun increased.’7

  In mobile war the constraint on the use of artillery was the supply problems of batteries in the field - not only in terms of shells for the guns but also of fodder for the horses. The quick-firing 75mm field gun, the agent of the French victory on the Marne, could loose fifteen - and some claimed twenty - rounds a minute, and a battery of four guns could fire off its total stock in a couple of hours. Static war minimised the logistical constraints, especially as light railways replaced horse-drawn transport, but increased the numbers of targets. The first consequence of the generals’ responses to trench war was pressure not on their supply services but on home production.

  MUNITIONS PRODUCTION

  The conversion of factories to the output of munitions proved as contentious for the industrialised economies of Western Europe as it was problematic for Russia. When Douglas Haig’s attack at Aubers Ridge failed on 9 May 1915, Sir John French deflected blame from the army to the government by attributing the defeat to the lack of high-explosive shell for the British 18-pounder field gun, a misleading refrain which The Times picked up and which was in flat contradiction to statements which the prime minister, Asquith, had given in a speech to munitions workers in Newcastle. When the shells crisis broke, Britain’s last Liberal government was already under challenge. It coincided with the resignation of the First Sea Lord, Jackie Fisher, who opposed ‘further depletion of our Home resources for the Dardanelles’ and now regarded his political superior, Winston Churchill, as ’a bigger danger than the Germans‘.8 The upshot was the formation of a coalition government, albeit still headed by Asquith, and of a Ministry of Munitions under Lloyd George.

  Britain was not the only country where shell shortage generated civil-military conflict. In France the invasion and the evacuation of the government to Bordeaux in September 1914 vastly increased the powers of Joffre and his headquarters. However, here, too, the failures of spring 1915 prompted the generals to seek scapegoats outside the army. Abel Ferry, a reserve officer and junior minister, attended the Council of Ministers on 4 July 1915: ‘One feels that the military, becoming less optimistic, are preparing themselves to point the finger at the civilians and say: “It is your fault.”’9 Albert Thomas, ‘a killing, fat little man, all round with shaggy hair, spectacles an impossible tan-colored beard ending in two impossible curls’,10 had been appointed under-secretary of state for war with particular responsibility for artillery and munitions on 18 May 1915. Just as Lloyd George did in Britain, the government responded to the generals’ accusations by pinning the failures in munitions procurement on the army itself. These debates were predicated on national circumstances, and their resolutions were administrative and ministerial. IIowever, the fact that shell production rose in 1915, and did so for all the belligerents regardless of political complexion, confirms that the phenomenon of shell shortage had some common characteristics.

  First was the issue of raw materials. It was particularly acute for Germany, whose imports from overseas were cut off by the allied blockade. On 9 August 1914 Walther Rathenau, who as a Jew could not be sure of his reception by the army, persuaded Falkenhayn, in his capacity as minister of war, to establish a raw materials agency. Its initial task was to take stock of the raw materials within not only the Reich but also the occupied territories, particularly Belgium, so as to allocate them centrally to the firms that could make best use of them. Each commodity was the subject of its own raw materials company, with a board drawn principally from the very firms that used the materials in question. Rathenau himself ran the electronics giant AEG, which was anxious about copper supplies. The accusation that the free market had been enlisted to serve the state, but on its own terms and with guaranteed profits, was repeated elsewhere. In France Thomas, a socialist, was criticised for being too close to the industrialists of the Comité des Forges, and in Britain Lloyd George turned his new ministry over to those he called ‘men of push and go’, in other words businessmen and entrepreneurs.

  More pressing for the French and British than the issue of raw
materials was that of labour. Conscription had mobilised skilled workers in the munitions industries but also enabled their return. The state which ordered men into uniform could also, if it suited the national interest, order them out of it. By June 1916 the French army had released 287,000 men back to the arms industries. They remained liable to military law and so were not free to strike. With industry an arm of the war effort, the need to get a sensible division of labour between the armed forces and domestic production was as important a pressure as the manpower demands of the army. When Britain at last introduced conscription in January 1916, this was the essence of the debate within the cabinet, not any principled objections to compulsion. In 1914 employees of the major arms firms had responded with disproportionate enthusiasm to the call for volunteers for the army. By June 1915 even those firms already engaged in arms production before the war were short of 14,000 skilled workers, and plant was lying idle for lack of hands to use it.

  One solution to the manpower needs of the munitions factories was to ‘dilute’ labour, to replace skilled workers with unskilled. The greater use of automated processes and the division of production into a large number of distinct, but repetitive, operations permitted such a switch. The principal job of the skilled worker was to maintain the plant that made the arms, not to produce the arms themselves. In Britain the trade unions feared that working methods brought in under the umbrella of wartime necessity would be perpetuated in peacetime and so undermine both their status and their restrictive practices. On 5 March 1915 Lloyd George persuaded both employers and trade unions to accept dilution, but only for the duration of the war and only in the production of munitions.

  Salvage and recycling, especially of metals, were essential features of industrialised war. French women unioad spent shell-casese at Toulion

  The result was that in Britain, as in France, women were engaged in the manufacture of armaments in disproportionate numbers. Before the war French peasant women, like their equivalents in Germany, worked on the land: the war did not alter that. In 1916 the French censors reported that ‘moving letters written from the countryside show us women killing themselves with work without being able to replace the men who fight or who are dead’.11 Across Europe, large numbers of women were already in employment before the war, and the numbers entering work for the first time during the war should not be exaggerated. In 1914 7.7 million French women already had jobs, and they made up 32 per cent of the total workforce; by the war’s end they accounted for 40 per cent of the workforce. In Britain women workers rose from just under 6 million, or 26 per cent of the workforce, to just over 7.3 million, or 36 per cent, in the same period. In Germany the number of females in insured employment expanded so quickly in the two decades before the war that the increase during the war, from about 3.5 million to just over 4 million, represented a decline in the rate of growth. Germany makes very evident the pattern that prevailed elsewhere, too: that those who entered munitions production did so from other occupations; the war caused working-class women to change jobs more than it brought women into the workplace. In Bavaria, by December 1916 three times as many women were involved in gunpowder production as before the war, but half of them had previously worked in factories and only a quarter had not had a job. 12 British women in 1914 were employed overwhelmingly in domestic service or in the textile industry. Munitions production, freed from the constraints of trade-union dominance and expanding under the demands for shell from the front, provided newly created and better-paid jobs. Much of the work involved the use of toxic chemicals, and TNT caused bilious attacks, blurred vision, depression and, in particular, jaundice: Lilian Miles saw her black hair turn green, and remembered that ‘you’d wash and wash and it didn’t make no difference ... Your whole body was yellow’.13 The British metal and chemical industries and the government factories employed a total of 212,000 women in July 1914, and 923,000 by July 1918. Before the war 17,731 French women worked in the metal industries, but 425,000 at its end.

  The rapid expansion of munitions output and the equally dramatic shift in how that production was carried out had long-term benefits for battlefield performance, but could only be achieved quickly by the lowering of standards over the short term. In August 1914 Louis Renault said that his car factories could manufacture shells using turning lathes rather than hydraulic presses. The resulting shell had to be made in two parts because the lathes could not shape the shell’s nose cone. The so-called ‘bi-blocs’ helped overcome France’s shell shortage, but their weaknesses generated shortages in other areas: over 600 French guns were destroyed - and their crews killed or injured - by premature explosions in 1915. Germany likewise used turning lathes to produce what it called ’auxiliary ammunition’ from cast iron: in 1915 it lost 2,300 field guns and 900 light howitzers to premature explosions, as many as were disabled by enemy action. The difficulties were not just those of materials and plant. Expansion had overtaken the procedures for quality control. In January 1915 one German observer reckoned that half the shells fired by the French were duds. Some failures were the result of incompetence and haste, but others were the fruit of profiteering and fraud. At the battle of the Somme in July 1916 25 per cent of British guns were put out of action as a result of design faults and inferior materials, and 30 per cent of shells failed to explode.

  Much of the manufacturing effort in the first half of the war therefore failed to reap any reward on the battlefield until the second half. French and German holdings of field guns were essentially static, as new guns replaced those that had been lost, and plant was devoted to the repair of those that were damaged. Germany had 5,096 field guns on mobilisation and 5,300 at the end of 1915. Increased output only met increased wear and tear. Factories which had not been in the arms business before the war could not acquire either the expertise or the machine-tools for weapons production in a matter of months. One short-term solution to the problems of conversion was the production of weapons with less demanding specifications and lower performances. Here the reintroduction of the mortar stands as the supreme example. A portable tube which fired bombs and mines at high angles over short ranges, it was ideally suited to the tactical conditions of trench warfare. But, just as importantly, it and its projectiles were sufficiently simple to enable firms without weapons expertise to make them. In August 1914 the German army possessed 180 Minen-werfern of all calibres; by January 1918 it had taken receipt of 16,127. The British adopted the Stokes mortar in 1915, and 11,421 were manufactured in the war.

  The links between the conversion to war production at home and tactical application on the battlefield were not completed until 1917. Douglas Haig, reflecting on the lessons of Aubers Ridge two days after, on 11 May 1915, made clear why: 1. The defences in our front are so carefully and so strongly made, and mutual support with machine-guns is so complete, that in order to demolish them a long methodical bombardment will be necessary by heavy artillery (guns and howitzers) before Infantry are sent forward to attack.

  2. To destroy the enemy’s ‘material’ 60 p[ounde]r. guns will be tried, as well as the 15-in[ch], 9.2 and 6-in[ch] siege how[itzer]s. Accurate observations of each shot will be arranged so as to make sure of flattening out the enemy’s ’strong points’ of support, before the Infantry is launched.14

  In 1915 the British did not have enough heavy artillery to do what he wanted. During the course of the entire year they took delivery of just 134 60-pounders. In August they adopted a programme which aimed to produce 2,825 heavy guns by December 1916. Only the existing arms manufacturers, like Vickers and Armstrong, had the capability to undertake this work. Consequently the pressure on them to produce other armaments was reduced. While Germany and France grappled with maintaining their existing numbers of field guns, the British Ministry of Munitions cut back on the output of lighter guns by 28 per cent, while increasing that of medium calibres by 380 per cent and of heavy artillery by 1,200 per cent. From the very outset, British generals, even cavalrymen like Haig and French, were dedic
ated to using weight of material and sophisticated technology in the pursuit of breakthrough. It was an approach to war which suited Britain for two reasons. It was the first industrialised nation in the world, and before 1914 it alone of the major powers had spurned the mass army. Its ability to hold a sprawling empire had relied not on manpower but on the use of technology as a force multiplier.

  TACTICAL ADAPTATION

  The year 1915 was a formative experience, one in which the lines of development which would be followed through into the battles of 1918 were put in place. Although the front was static, the thinking of the armies was not. The western front was an intensely competitive environment, where the innovation of one side was emulated, improved upon or negated by the other. Ironically, it was this very cycle of action and reaction, designed to break the deadlock, which confirmed it. But at its conclusion the armies of both sides were equipped, organised and fought in very different ways from those of 1914.

  Immediately Haig’s prescription created fresh problems more than it resolved old ones. ‘In this siege war in the open field, it is not enough to open a breach‘, General Marie-Emile Fayolle confided to his diary on 1 June 1915, ’it is necessary that it is about 20 km wide, at the least, or one cannot fan out to right and left. To do that needs a whole army and there has to be another one ready to carry on.‘15 But in 1915 neither the British nor the French had enough guns or shells, let alone heavy artillery, to be able to attack on a broad front. By concentrating on a narrow front, the available guns might reach into the depth of the enemy positions, but the attackers were then liable to enfilade from the flanks. Furthermore, the concentration of artillery and its preliminary, and increasingly extended, bombardment forfeited the element of surprise. Most attacks succeeded in breaking into the enemy’s position. The problem was that of reinforcing and exploiting success, and that in turn depended on immediate support from troops to the rear.