The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  It did not matter. Haig and Pétain had agreed a scheme for mutual assistance which the French fulfilled to the letter. On 20 January Pétain had undertaken to release up to twelve divisions immediately in the event of a German attack against the British, and up to half the French army if need be. By the end of 23 March, he had committed fourteen divisions to the battle, all of which were in action by the 28th. By then half the French army was on the move. The roads were jammed with troops and transport. Haig consistently underestimated his own requirements and the scale of French support. Before the blow fell he thought six French divisions would suffice, and on the 21st itself he asked for only three. He requested twenty divisions on the 25th, but by then he already had the support of twenty-one, with a further nineteen on the way. Pétain created a whole new army group, under Fayolle’s command, to straddle the front between the Somme and Oise rivers. Of its front of thirty-six miles, fully two-thirds was held by British troops, the elements of the 5th Army, which Haig told General Byng, commander of its northern neighbour, the 3rd Army, was finished.

  Normally calm and imperturbable, Haig was exhibiting the nearest to panic of which he was capable. He confronted a crisis with unfamiliar tools: his staff had been emasculated over the winter, and Wilson, his new spokesman in London, was ‘our only military black-leg’, seemingly determined to curb the powers of the individual commanders-in-chief. When Wilson came to France and saw him on 25 March, Haig ‘said that “unless the whole French army came up we were beaten” and “it would be better to make peace on any terms we could’”.7 Haig was convinced that the greater danger lay to the north, towards Flanders. Pétain disagreed: he correctly concluded that the thrust south of the Somme, spearheaded by Crown Prince Wilhelm’s army group, constituted the major threat. Haig’s desire to pull back to the north, using the British 3rd Army to guard his right flank, reflected the operational logic of what his enemy ought to have been doing, but not what he was actually doing. Ludendorff’s offensive was being carried on the back of its own tactical opportunism, and Pétain, who had paid more attention than the British to the evolution of German tactics, recognised that. Haig’s subsequent claim that the French failed to support him and were pulling back to defend Paris was the exact opposite of the truth.

  That is not to say that there was not deep despondency in Entente circles by 23 March. Paris was shelled, and it was suggested that as in 1914 the French government should leave the city. The Australian corps commander, Lieutenant-General John Monash, an engineer in civilian life and a brigadier at Gallipoli, recalled from leave in the south of France, reached Doullens at about 3 pm on the 25th: ‘Viewed from that particular locality it almost looked as if the whole British Army in this part of the world was in a state of rout’.8 On the following day Poincaré, the president of France, arrived in the town to chair a meeting attended not only by the headquarters staffs of the British and French armies but also by Clemenceau and, for the British war cabinet, Lord Milner. Henry Wilson was also there. After seeing Haig the previous day, he had then met his friend Ferdinand Foch, the putative commander of the allied reserve if it had existed. Both of them were convinced advocates of a united command, both of them knew that Foch was the logical choice to exercise it, and they had little difficulty in persuading their political superiors at the meeting, Clemenceau and Milner, that that was the way forward. Haig’s alleged role in the appointment of the allied generalissimo was little more than a face-saving exercise conducted for the benefit of his own dignity and posterity.

  Some doubted Foch’s mental faculties: his head had received a severe blow in a recent car accident. He was, in Clemenceau’s words, ‘not superabundant in nuances’.9 Furthermore, he had been educated by Jesuits, a definite disqualification in the mind of the anti-clerical prime minister. But will-power and faith were precisely the attributes that the situation demanded. On 26 March Foch was given the task of coordinating the actions of the British and French armies on the western front. At Beauvais, on 3 April, his powers were extended to embrace ‘the strategic direction’ of all the armies, including that of the United States. Foch conveyed the sort of rhetorical determination that politicians like to hear. ’I shall fight without ceasing‘, he was reported to have said to a group of officers. ’I shall fight in front of Amiens. I shall fight in Amiens. I shall fight behind Amiens. I shall fight all the time.‘10 It could have been one of Clemenceau’s own speeches. It meant nothing, but it conveyed an aura of command.

  Foch visited Gough the same day. He ‘said in a loud, excited manner, “There must be no more retreat, the line must now be held at all costs,” and then walked out of the room back to his car’.11 He offered no troops and no specifics. His role was to rally, not to plan. Haig grumbled that Foch ‘spoke a lot of nonsense’ and complained - with some reason - that he was ’unmethodical and takes a “short view” of the situation. For instance, he does not look ahead and make a forecast of what may be required in a week in a certain area and arrange accordingly‘.12 In late March and early April 1918, the only allied commander with that sort of vision was Pétain, whom Haig, like Clemenceau, had convinced himself was defeatist. The French commander-in-chief was bent not simply on stopping the Germans and on closing the gap between the two allied armies, but also on preparing the counterattack that would strike north-east into the salient created by the German advance. The effect of his taking the ’long view’ was ironically to widen the gap in understanding between himself on the one hand and Haig and Foch on the other. Pétain’s attacks were conceived within an overall context of mobile defence and of conserving lives. For Foch, there was only one sort of attack: ‘Everything that will not be achieved rapidly will not be achieved at all.... Our offensive must therefore be mounted both with speed and force.’13 He spoke in the accents of 1914, as did Haig. Haig may have been a Presbyterian, but his inner certainty meant that more united than separated him from Foch, and in the second half of the year the circumstances of the war swung their way, bringing events on the ground into harmony with their notions of warfare.

  The allied supreme command pose for the camera. Left to right Pétain, Haig, Foch and Pershing

  Pétain’s credibility was further dented on 27 May 1918. He had long forecasted a German attack on the Chemin des Dames, but he had not anticipated its scale and his subordinates were reluctant to apply his defensive tactics: it was the most significant defeat suffered by the French on the western front since 1914. Five British divisions had been transferred to the sector to ‘rest’ after the spring offensives but Haig refused more, so showing the limits of reciprocity as well as of Foch’s authority to bend the national commanders-in-chief to his will. By 1 June the Germans were held and Pétain turned his thoughts once more to the counterattack, rather than a step-by-step withdrawal. Foch rejected the idea, but the French were ready when the Germans attacked again, in Champagne on 15 July. Pétain’s instructions on defence in depth were implemented as they had not been on 27 May. The French ’put up no resistance in front‘, a German officer, Rudolf Binding, wrote in his diary; ’they had neither infantry nor artillery in this forward battle-zone . . . Our guns bombarded empty trenches; our gas-shells gassed empty artillery positions; only in little hidden folds in the ground, sparsely distributed, lay machine gun posts, like lice in the seams and folds of a garment, to give the attacking force a warm reception. The barrage, which was to have preceded and protected it, went right on somewhere over the enemy’s rear positions, while in front the first real line of resistance was not yet carried.‘ 14 The Germans had walked into a sack. This time Foch, even more than Pétain, saw the opportunity for a successful counterattack. On 18 July, Crown Prince Wilhelm recalled, ’Without artillery preparation, simply following the sudden rolling barrage, supported by numerous deep-flying aircraft and with unprecedented masses of tanks, the enemy infantry - including a number of American divisions - unleashed the storm against the 9th and 7th Armies at 5.40 in the morning.‘15 Dubbed the second battle of the Marne
, the blow drove the Germans back from Château-Thierry to Soissons on the River Aisne.

  THE TOOLS OF VICTORY

  There were now twenty-five American divisions in France. Pershing’s insistence on independence seemed to have confirmed the Germans’ expectation that the United States army would not make an effective contribution until 1919. In the event, although it undoubtedly delayed the Americans’ impact, it was moderated in practice. Elements of eight divisions took part in the Marne battle, and they did so under temporary French command. The Americans’ arrival was speeded by the decision to provide them with British and particularly French equipment, including the 75mm field gun and the Renault light tank. The shipping space thus saved brought over men instead: 1.5 million US soldiers arrived in Europe in the last six months of the war, with the result that there were forty-two divisions in the field by the time of the armistice and twenty-nine of them had seen action. In the space of eighteen months the army had grown from 100,000 men to 4 million, and had sent over 2 million overseas. By then the American Expeditionary Force was comparable in size with both the British imperial forces, which totalled 1.8 million in France, and those of France itself, which had fallen from a peak of 2.2 million in July 1916 to 1.7 million.

  Equipped by their allies, from British helmets to French light tanks, the Americans go forward to the forest of Argonne, 26 September 1918

  The effect of these numbers, and the prodigious effort that had produced them, was above all psychological. In April 1918, when the British army was fighting its desperate defensive action against the second of Ludendorff’s offensives, Vera Brittain, serving as a nurse in Étaples, saw a contingent of American soldiers march down the road. They looked like ‘Tommies in heaven’. ‘I pressed forward ... to watch the United States physically entering the War, so god-like, so magnificent, so splendidly unimpaired in comparison with the tired, nerve-racked men of the British Army’.16 That confidence and self-assurance both helped and hindered the American Expeditionary Force in its adaptation to European warfare. It bred a courage not yet dimmed by age, loss and experience, a product of ignorance and naivety. But what Pershing could not accept was that in losing that vigour, which they, too, had possessed in 1914, the British and French armies had also learnt tactical wisdom. He believed that mobile warfare was the path to victory, that battle should be fought in the open, and that the key to success was aimed rifle-fire. He rejected the views of those who urged that machinery could substitute for manpower. The American division consisted of 28,000 men, twice the size of those of its allies, which were being restructured as smaller units with fewer men but greater firepower. It was short of lorries and guns, and it proved cumbersome in manoeuvre and poor in its ability to coordinate infantry and artillery.

  It also had few tanks. The French had attacked with 375 Renault light tanks on 18 July. These were the brainchild of Jean-Baptiste Estienne, a French artillery officer, whose service in an aviation unit before the war had awoken him to the possibilities of inter-arm tactical cooperation. He encountered his first caterpillar tractor, the key to the tank’s cross-country capability, in service with the British army in 1915. On 28 December 1915 he wrote to Joffre urging the development of the tank as an armoured platform for a gun, so as to provide direct fire support for the infantry. Like those under development in Britain at the same time, the first French tanks were heavy machines which were also designed to cross trenches and crush wire. Excessive weight, the result of emphasising armour over mobility, often proved a false friend on the muddy battlefields of France. It also put great mechanical strain on the power-to-weight ratio of the tank. The British models of 1917 and 1918 weighed around 30 tons, and German tank production, based on British types, fell flat on its face because of its pursuit of excessive weight. The breakdown rate of tanks in the First World War was very high - the speed pf most ranged between 2 and 4 mph across country - and their range was restricted. The argument that the British had forfeited their surprise value by using them prematurely on the Somme in September 1916 is nonsense: here was an imperfect but evolving weapon which needed the benefit of combat experience. In essence the tank was only just moving into full series production when the war ended. However, in December 1916 Estienne proposed that tank development move in a radically different direction. He favoured lightness and manoeuvrability over protection, designing a two-man tank, with a weight of 5 tons. Unlike British tanks, which were rhomboidal in shape and carried their main armament on the sides, the Renault had a turret in which was mounted either a machine-gun or a 37mm gun. British tanks required special trains to transport them: the Renault did not, and could therefore be shifted from one sector to another with greater ease and concentrated for the attack in greater secrecy. Over 3,000 entered French service in 1918. The French manufactured about 800 heavy tanks, and the British about 5,000 of all types; about 20 of the monster German A7V were produced, and the handful of tanks the Germans deployed on the western front were mostly captured British models.

  The tank was the most striking evidence of a number of points: that the Entente tackled the integration of science, technology and tactics with greater success than the Germans; that the link between tactical experience and factory production was a continuous loop, involving fresh blueprints and the rejigging of machine-tools and plant, as well as feeding munitions into the battle; that by 1918 the Entente, not the Central Powers, derived greater benefit from the trade-off between the mass army and mass production; and that the ultimate benefit was on the battlefield, in the reintegration of fire and movement.

  The exponential growth in the numbers of aircraft during the course of the war illustrated similar arguments. Aerial combat at the start of the war was an affair of individuals, and generated its own heroes, the aces so loved by propaganda and the press. By 1917-18 it was a matter of masses, and was therefore sustained as much by the capabilities of its industrial base as by the skills and courage of the pilots who flew the aircraft. In the last year of the war, Britain, France and the United States jointly produced an average of 11,200 machines and 14,500 aero engines per month; the German equivalents were each below 2,000. The corollary of this point was that the air forces were themselves being reshaped. At the start of the war, their role was reconnaissance; by the middle fighters were contesting control of the air above the battlefield; by the end bombers were targeting positions on the ground and interdicting lines of communication. The products of war industries themselves, heavy bombers were beginning to be used to target war production. In 1917 German Gotha heavy bombers raided Paris and London. Spurred to retaliate, the British established the world’s first air force on 1 April 1918 and created an ‘Independent Force’ to target factories, railways and airfields. This strategy set missions which were beyond the capabilities of the existing aircraft, but its implications were already becoming clear: ’I would very much like it‘, Lord Weir, secretary of state for air, instructed the head of the independent air force, Hugh Trenchard, on 10 September 1918, ’if you could start up a really big fire in one of the German towns. If I were you, I would not be too exacting as regards accuracy in bombing railway stations in the middle of towns. The German is susceptible to bloodiness, and I would not mind a few accidents due to inaccuracy.‘17 In practice, bombing against civilian targets produced negligible results in the First World War, but ground attack on the battlefield played a crucial role in checking the German spring offensives in 1918 and in the combined arms offensives of the late summer and autumn. ’The whistling of the falling bombs was like the noise of a thousand door-keys used to hiss a bad play‘, wrote Rudolf Binding as he fell back to the Aisne on 30 July. ’On explosion they burst into millions of splinters, which flew out horizontally and caused hundreds of casualties.‘18 In the last year of the war the aeroplane as well as the tank embodied in one platform the ability both to manoeuvre and to deliver accurate fire on a target.

  Neither of them, however, was the true artisan of victory: that was the artillery. The bigges
t single intellectual shift in making war between 1914 and 1918 was that the combined-arms battle was planned around the capabilities of the guns rather than of the infantry. On 20 November 1917 the British had attacked at Cambrai with 378 tanks; they achieved complete surprise, penetrating up to 4,000 yards on a six-mile front. British tank advocates, including their most effective spokesman after the war, J. F. C. Fuller, who was involved in the planning of the battle, later used the victory as evidence of the decisive independent use of armour. It was not. Fuller himself had written in February 1917: ‘It must be remembered that the Creeping Barrage will usually be more effective than the Tank and that the Tank is in no way intended to replace this Barrage but to supplement it when it breaks down or becomes ineffective’.19 By November the Royal Artillery had perfected the techniques of predicted fire. It used microphones to record from different points the low-frequency sound waves following the firing of a gun in order to take a cross-bearing and locate the position of an enemy battery. Unlike aerial observation or the visual spotting of gun flashes, both also methods of immense value in identifying targets, sound-ranging could be used in bad visibility. Consequently, artillery could register its guns in advance of an attack without the preliminary bombardment that had squandered surprise in the past, particularly when the tanks could themselves take on the tasks of crushing wire and destroying enemy machine-gun nests.