The First World War

by John Keegan

  Despite its initial failure in the Caucasus, which the Ottoman government took care to conceal at home, Turkey’s influence on the war continued to ramify. For all its long decline, which had begun with the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699 and persisted until the conclusion of the Second Balkan War in 1913, Turkey remained, in the memory of its neighbours, particularly its European neighbours, a menacing military presence. For much of the preceding six centuries, ever since the Ottoman Turks had established their first foothold on the continent at Gallipoli in 1354, the Turks had been on the offensive against Christian Europe and, in the Balkans, had long been entrenched as occupiers and overlords. Greece, the first of the southern European Christian countries to win full independence from the Sultan, had done so only in 1832. Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania had achieved freedom much later, and the presence of Muslim minorities on their borders or within their territories was a constant reminder of former Ottoman overlordship. Italians, too, kept the memory of Ottoman power strongly in mind. Venice had waged centuries of war against Turkey and the loss to the Turks of the Venetian island empire in the Aegean rankled with them almost as much as did the more recent loss of the ports across the Adriatic to Austria. Turkey, weak though it had become, remained the only great power in the eastern Mediterranean. Its revival under the Young Turks had awoken ancient south European fears, which its defeat in the Balkan Wars had not quelled. Its alliance with Germany and Austria and its entry into the war had reinforced them.

  Moreover, the reputation of the Turk as a fighting man had never dulled. Pony-riding nomad he might no longer be, farmer he might have become, but the hardiness of the Anatolian peasant, indifferent to cold, heat, privation and apparently danger also, was known to all his neighbours. The Ottoman forces, under the Young Turks, had undergone a programme of modernisation that promised to make better use of his soldierly qualities. The army, organised into four Armies, based at Istanbul, Baghdad, Damascus and Erzinjan, could put thirty-six divisions into the field. Divisions were weaker in artillery than their European equivalents, with only 24–36 guns, but the material was modern, and there were sixty-four machine-gun companies.28 The supply and administration of the army, despite the efforts of the German military mission, led by General Liman von Sanders, remained dilatory, but the Turkish, if not the Arab, component of the army made up for shortcomings by its ability to live on very little and to march great distances without complaint. The Ottoman style of warfare had also traditionally laid great emphasis on digging. Behind earthworks, as at Plevna in 1877, the Turkish soldier fought with endurance and tenacity.

  Turkey’s decision to attack Russia in the Caucasus, however, its attempt against Egypt and its need to find forces to oppose the British expedition to the Tigris and Euphrates, appeared to create a military vacuum in the eastern Mediterranean that could be exploited by those with ambitions on its territory. Greece had such ambitions and, under its great nationalist leader, Venizelos, tilted towards joining the Allies. It was deterred by its military weakness and its common border with pro-German Bulgaria. Italy’s territorial ambitions lay towards Austria first, from which it had failed to “redeem” the Italian-speaking parts of the Tyrol and Slovenia in the last Austro-Italian War of 1866, but also towards the Turkish Dodecanese islands (of which she had been in occupation since 1912) and part of Turkish Syria. Diplomatically, Italy was still a party to the Triple Alliance of 1906, binding her to Germany as well as Austria, but had wriggled out of its provisions in August by a narrow interpretation of its terms, recognising that it was not strong enough to fight France by land or Britain and France by sea. The Italian navy, though recently modernised, was outgunned by their Mediterranean fleets.29 Moreover, while Austria proved unwilling to offer any transfer of territory as a bribe to bring Italy in on her side, the Russians had made free with promises of Austrian territory if she joined the Allies, and their readiness to alter boundaries in the event of an Allied victory aroused hopes that the other Allies might do likewise. In March the Italian ambassador in London began negotiations with Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, about what Italy might be offered if she came over to the Allies, and the talks proceeded into April.30 With Germany heavily engaged in France and Russia, Austria in the throes of a military crisis and Turkey overcommitted at the Asiatic borders of her empire, the reversion of alliance appeared not only risk-free but potentially highly profitable.

  Moreover, Britain was already undertaking operations in the eastern Mediterranean which gave assurance that Italy would not be fighting alone in that theatre. Russia’s appeal for assistance against Turkey, following the attack into the Caucasus, had had its effect. On 16 February part of the British Mediterranean fleet had entered the mouth of the Dardanelles, the waterway between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and bombarded the Turkish forts. The Italians had done likewise during their war with Turkey in 1911–12 and had sent light forces as far as the channel’s narrows before they were turned back. Italy’s purpose then had been to bring pressure on Turkey from Russia, by interfering with the economic life of Russia’s Black Sea provinces, dependent as they were on the Dardanelles for access to the Mediterranean and Atlantic. Britain’s purpose in 1915 was wider by far: to open a supply route to Russia through the Dardanelles and, in so doing, to “knock Turkey out of the war” by bombarding Istanbul. An indirect effect of Britain’s naval action against Turkey-in-Europe, however, was to buttress Italian resolution, promising as it did to sustain Serbia’s continued resistance to Austria, thereby weakening the Austrians’ ability to deploy troops on the Austro-Italian border, to deter Bulgaria from hostilities and eventually to bring arms and war supplies to Russia in quantities large enough to arm its unequipped millions and to reverse the balance of advantage on the Eastern Front.

  Territorial avarice and strategic calculation prodded Italy towards a declaration of war throughout March and April. The German ambassador, Prince Bernhard Bülow, laboured to check the momentum, even offering Italy the Austrian territory Vienna had previously been unwilling to give. The majority of Italians, people and parliamentarians alike, had no enthusiasm for the dangerous adventure. The impetus came from Salandra, the Prime Minister, Sonnino, the Foreign Minister, the King, Victor Emmanuel III, and a collection of political and cultural revolutionaries, including Mussolini, then a socialist, the poet D’Annunzio and the artist Marinetti, inventor of Futurism.31 The last, in particular, saw war as a means of dragging a backward Italy into the present and modernising it even against its will. The final stages of war preparations were conducted as a virtual conspiracy between Salandra, Sonnino and the King. On 26 April a Treaty of London was signed in secret with Britain, France and Russia, committing Italy to go to war within one month (in return for most of the Austrian territory it wanted, together with the Dodecanese islands in the eastern Mediterranean). On 23 May she declared war on Austria, though not yet against Germany.

  From the beginning things went badly, as any realistic appreciation of the state of the Italian army and the nature of the terrain in which it would have to operate should have warned. The whole of the Italian frontier with Austria rested against the outworks of the highest mountains in Europe, from the Tyrol in the west to the Julian Alps in the east, forming a semi-circle of often precipitous crags 375 miles in extent, along which the enemy everywhere held the crests. At the western end, the Trentino, nine routes led through passes into the mountains; at the eastern end, where the Isonzo river cuts through the curtain, there is an avenue of advance. The Trentino, however, was a detached pocket of Austrian territory and so an unprofitable objective, while beyond the Isonzo valley the ground rises to form two desolate plateaux, the Bainsizza and the Carso, “enormous natural fortresses towering two thousand feet or more above the surrounding lowlands.” The former is broken by a succession of steep ridges, the latter has been described as a “howling wilderness of stones sharp as knives.”32

  The terrain would have tried the skills of the best mountain troo
ps. Italy possessed such soldiers, recruited from its own alpine districts, but they were few in number, forming only two brigades equipped with their own mountain artillery.33 The majority of the army came from towns and farms, a quarter from the south and Sicily. The southerners had been subjects of the Kingdom of Italy for less than fifty years, had a low military reputation and looked to America rather than the cold and distant north as a point of emigration from their poor villages and overworked fields. The army as a whole was undertrained, it having no dedicated manoeuvre areas equivalent to those of France or Germany, was deficient in modern artillery, had only 120 heavy guns and had generally not made good its losses in all forms of equipment suffered during the Turkish War in Libya of 1911–12. Though able to put twenty-five infantry divisions into the field at the outbreak, it would remain the weakest among those of the major combatants throughout the war.

  Its main strength was the officer corps it had inherited from the Kingdom of Savoy, whose army had been the instrument of the unification of Italy in 1870. Patriotic, professional and well-educated—the King of Savoy’s army was the only one in Europe in which Jews enlisted freely and rose to high rank—the northern officers knew their business and had a mission to teach it to others. The Chief of Staff, Luigi Cadorna, was a martinet. He not only stood on his constitutional rights of supreme authority—independent of King and Prime Minister—over the army once war began; he exercised that authority with a brutality not shown by any other general of the First World War. During its course, he dismissed 217 generals from duty and, in the crisis of 1917, ordered the summary shooting of officers of retreating units with pitiless inflexibility.34 This style of command, as opposed to leadership, had its effect on the Italian army at the outset. Hopeless attacks were renewed, heavy losses accepted with an abnegation as remarkable as that of the British on the Somme or the French at Verdun. Indeed, given the uniquely impenetrable nature of the front the Italian army was set to attack, its early display of self-sacrifice may be thought unparalleled by any other. The price was paid later, in its moral collapse at Caporetto in October 1917.

  Cadorna’s plan for the opening of the war promised a rapid breakthrough that would avert losses. Choosing the Isonzo as the front of attack, he foresaw an advance, once the mountain barrier was broken, through the gateways cut by the rivers Drava and Sava to Klagenfurt and Agram (Zagreb) and thence into the heartland of the Austrian empire. His hopes resembled those of the Russians who, earlier in 1915, had believed that, once the crestline of the Carpathians could be taken, they would descend victorious into the Hungarian plain and capture Budapest. Cadorna’s were even more misplaced. The land beyond the Isonzo is not a proper plain and the Julian Alps are an obstacle far more formidable than the Carpathians. When the Italian army attacked in what would become known as the First—of twelve, though the future kindly hid that from those involved—Battle of the Isonzo, beginning on 23 June 1915, its advanced guards did little more than establish contact with the enemy front line. That consisted of a single entrenchment, weakly manned. The Austrian army, already fighting a two-front war, in Poland and Serbia, had been holding the Italian border before the outbreak of hostilities with local militia battalions. In February some of these had been organised into two divisions. Early in May another division was detached from Serbia and later in the month three more sent from Poland.35 By 23 May, the day of Italy’s entry, General Boroevic, the Austrian commander of the Isonzo sector, had scraped together seven divisions in total, to form the Fifth Army, but they were heavily outnumbered. Had the precaution not been taken to dynamite shelters in the rock of the Carso and Bainsizza, and had the Italians been able to deploy more than 212 guns, Cadorna’s hopes of a breakthrough might have been achieved. As it was, the Italian infantry, moving forward with great bravery but little tactical skill, were stopped in no man’s land. Nearly 2,000 were killed and 12,000 wounded. The very high proportion of wounded was to prove a recurrent feature of the campaign, rock splintered by exploding shells becoming secondary projectiles which caused frequent injury, particularly to the head, and eyes.

  There were to be three more battles of the Isonzo in 1915, in July, October and November, each incurring a heavier toll of killed and wounded, 6,287, 10,733, 7,498 dead respectively, for almost no gain of ground at all. The Austrians also suffered heavily, since artillery had the same effect on defenders in their rock-cut trenches as on attackers in the open, and by the end of the Fourth Battle they counted 120,000 killed, wounded and missing.36 Nevertheless, they had held their positions and were beginning to receive reinforcements to strengthen the overpressed trench garrisons which had borne the brunt of the first months of fighting. By the end of 1915 the Isonzo front had been stabilised and no longer posed a major hazard to the strategic provisions of the Central Powers.

  Italy’s decision to go to war had, in truth, been ill-timed. If taken earlier, during the desperate battles around Lemberg, which tried the Austrians so hard, or later, when the British army had developed its full fighting strength and the Russians had staged their military recovery, an Italian initiative might have precipitated a real crisis for the German and Austrian general staffs. As events fell out, the First Battle of the Isonzo was narrowly preceded by a genuine German-Austrian victory, the breakthrough at Gorlice-Tarnow, which devastated the Russian position on the Eastern Front, saved the Austrian army from impending collapse and won the breathing space for Germany in its two-front war that would allow it to mount the Verdun offensive against France in 1916.

  Gorlice-Tarnow was to be a second Limanowa-Lapanow, the battle that had saved Austria-Hungary from disaster in December 1914, but on a larger scale and with far more dramatic consequences. Like Limanowa, Gorlice was launched on a narrow front, in the gap between the River Vistula and the Carpathian Mountains; unlike Limanowa, it was to be a German rather than an Austrian victory for, though Conrad von Hötzendorf contributed sizeable numbers to the striking force, its cutting edge was German and so was its direction. The plan was Austrian, nevertheless, in its conception. Conrad was aware that the Russian army, for all its superiority of numbers, was in severe material difficulty. Between January and April, its divisions on the Eastern Front, excepting the small number in the Caucasus, received from the factories only two million shells, at a time when preparatory bombardments with several hundred thousand shells were becoming the norm; worse, the output of the Russian arsenals was insufficient to provide soldiers with the most essential tool of warfare, a personal weapon.37 About 200,000 rifles were needed each month, to equip the new intakes of recruits, but only 50,000 were being produced. The stories of Russian infantrymen waiting unarmed to inherit the rifle of another killed or wounded were not tittle-tattle; they were nothing less than the truth.38 Shell shortages, admittedly, were the common experience of all armies in 1914–15. All had myopically underestimated shell expenditure in intensive fighting, despite the evidence from the Russo-Japanese War that daily rates consistently exceeded factory output, with the result that production often lagged behind use by a factor of ten or more. In April 1915, for example, the field artillery of the BEF was receiving ten rounds of 18-pounder ammunition per gun per day, when ten rounds was easily shot off in a minute of bombardment.39 Britain managed to increase its production of field-artillery ammunition from 3,000 rounds per month at the outbreak to 225,000 rounds by April 1915, and acquired other stocks by placing purchasing orders in America, but was still obliged to adjust demand to supply by limiting expenditure to a fixed number of rounds per day. The French and Germans were similarly obliged, though industrial mobilisation would dramatically increase output during 1915.40 Russia would also, by 1916, secure adequate, if not ample, supplies of shell, much of it from British and American sources. In 1915, however, Russia’s deficiency was serious, and compounded by inefficiency in distribution. For the Gorlice-Tarnow offensive, the Germans accumulated a stock of a million shells, a quantity available to the Russians only in a few fortified sectors, such as Novogeorgevis
k and Kovno, where shells were stockpiled in quantities not disclosed by the fortress commanders to the General Staff.41

  The covert concentration of men, shells and guns on the Gorlice-Tarnow sector during April 1915 therefore predisposed towards a victory. The front was short, only thirty miles. On the Russian side, it was defended by the fourteen infantry and five cavalry divisions of General Radko-Dmitriev’s Third Army; opposite the assault sector, between Gorlice and Tarnow, the front was held by only two divisions, the 9th and 31st. Against them the Germans had positioned some of the best of their troops, including the 1st and 2nd Guard Divisions and the 19th and 20th (Hanoverian) Divisions. On the whole attack front, the Germans and Austrians had a superiority of over three to two in men and a very large superiority in guns, generously supplied with ammunition; their total artillery strength was 2,228 guns, heavy and light. The Russian entrenchments were sketchy and the no man’s land separating them from the enemy’s was wide, enabling the Germans and Austrians to push their outposts forward and dig new positions, close to the Russian wire, in the days before the attack, without being detected.

  The plan for the offensive was Falkenhayn’s, who entrusted its execution to Mackensen, victor in the East Prussian battles of 1914. Ludendorff and Hindenburg would have preferred not to prepare a breakthrough in the centre but to launch a double envelopment of the Russians from the Baltic and Carpathian fronts; like Schlieffen, they disfavoured “ordinary victories,” which led only to Russian withdrawal to lines further east, and argued for cutting off the enemy from the great spaces of the Tsar’s empire by a manoeuvre of encirclement. Though exercising command in the east, they were, however, subordinate to Falkenhayn, whose fear was that their encirclement plans would require withdrawals of troops from the west on a scale dangerously weakening the German front there, and so overruled them. Moreover, the Ludendorff-Hindenburg plan placed a reliance upon Austrian participation which the continuing decline in quality of the Habsburg forces, Falkenhayn believed, made unrealistic.42