The First World War

by John Keegan

  It was an odd outcome, both politically and strategically. The British and French, whose efforts in the struggle for the Greeks’ liberty had been the chief cause of their winning of independence from the Turks in 1832, and who had championed independent Greece in every subsequent international crisis, now began to behave as if its sovereignty was entirely secondary to their convenience. They had already requisitioned Greek Lemnos, largest island of the northern Aegean, as a base for the Dardanelles campaign. Their landing at Salonika, the kingdom’s second city, had been made without a by-your-leave. Once the Anglo-French decision had been taken to remain in Greece, the Allies proceeded to transform their Salonika base into an extraterritorial military settlement. King Constantine, at one point, protested feebly, “I will not be treated like a native chieftain,” but the Allies did so nonetheless.67 The Greek army maintained a nominal presence at the settlement’s perimeter. Within, in an area of 200 square miles, the French encamped three and the British five divisions, and together created an enormous stockpile of stores and war matériel. Strategically, their presence exerted no pressure at all on either the Bulgarians or the Germans, who maintained a scratch force on the frontier. It drew no enemy force away from the Western Front, brought no aid to the Russians and posed no threat to the Turks. The Salonika divisions suffered, nonetheless; malaria, endemic in northern Greece, caused ten casualties for every one inflicted by the enemy, and from the mosquito, as long as the Allies remained in the disease zone, there was no escape. German journalists contemptuously described Salonika in 1915 as “the greatest internment camp in the world.” It was worse than that. As numbers grew, and malaria rampaged, it became a great military hospital, where casualties from disease sometimes exceeded one hundred per cent of the strength of some units present.68

  The year of 1915 thus ended on an inconclusive note. In the external theatres of war, the Western Allies had prevailed. Germany’s colonies had been occupied, its colonial forces largely overcome and its cruising squadrons destroyed. Its Turkish ally had won a great, if local, victory at Gallipoli but had failed in its attempts to make either British Egypt or the Russian Caucasus diversionary fronts and was itself threatened by the British penetration of its Arab possessions in Mesopotamia. In southern Europe, Serbia had been overwhelmed and Bulgaria drawn into the Central alliance but Greece had been appropriated as an Anglo-French base and Italy persuaded to open an anti-Austrian front at its head of the Adriatic. On the two great fronts, Western and Eastern, the balance of success appeared to lie with the Central Powers. In France, the Germans had repelled every attempt by the French and British to break the trench line and had inflicted heavy losses on their enemies as the price of their efforts. On the Eastern Front, they had won a spectacular victory, at Gorlice-Tarnow, and pressed the Tsar’s armies back to and, in some places, beyond the frontiers of old Russia. Poland and the Baltic coastline were theirs and the danger of a Russian invasion of Austria-Hungary across the crests of the Carpathians had been averted, apparently permanently. On the other hand, the fighting power of the Russian army had not been destroyed, the French army had sustained its aggressive spirit and the British army was transforming itself from a maritime expeditionary force of marginal significance into an instrument of continental offensive power. Germany’s success in the seventeen months of fighting since the war had begun had been to survive the defeat of its plan to win quickly on two fronts, to rescue its weak Austrian ally from the collapse threatened by the prolongation of hostilities, to acquire secondary allies in the Balkans and Near East and to create a central strategic position, rich in industrial resources and raw materials, that extended from the Aisne in the west to the Drina, the Pripet and the Dniester rivers in the east. It had failed, however, to defeat any of its major enemies by land, to destroy the capacity of the Franco-British or Russian armies to return to the offensive, or to find means of breaking the maritime stronghold that was tightening about the perimeter of its landlocked base of operations. The coming year of 1916, all parties to the war recognised, would bring crisis on land, east and west, and at sea also. It would be a year of great battles between armies and fleets.

  EIGHT

  The Year of Battles

  WAR AT SEA

  IF THE WAR OF 1914 was not a war which the armies of Europe were ready to fight, that was not so with Europe’s great navies. The armies, as the opening campaigns had proved, were technically equipped to solve certain easily perceived problems, in particular how to overcome the defences of modern fortresses, how to move vast numbers of men from home bases to the frontiers and how to create impassable storms of rifle and field-artillery fire when those masses came into contact with each other. They were quite unequipped to deal with the unperceived and much more critical problems of how to protect soldiers from such fire storms, how to move them, under protection, about the battlefield, indeed how to move them at all beyond railhead unless on their feet, and how to signal quickly and unambiguously between headquarters and units, between unit and unit, between infantry and artillery, between ground and the aircraft with which, almost fortuitously, the armies had so recently provided themselves.

  The failure of the generals of 1914 had largely been a pre-war failure. They had had the wit to adapt the technologies ready to hand, particularly that of Europe’s many-branched rail network, to their purposes. They had lacked the wit to perceive the importance or potentialities of new technologies, among which the internal combustion engine and wireless-telegraphy, as radio was then called, would prove the most important; they had, indeed, lacked altogether the wit to perceive the problems to which such new technologies would be the solution. No such charge could be laid against the admirals of the years before 1914. With foresight they had divined the significance of the developing technologies likely to affect their service and had applied them to it with exactitude. Admirals have traditionally had a reputation as seadogs and salthorses, with little ability to see far beyond the bulwarks of their ships and little desire to change anything within them. Nineteenth-century admirals are commonly thought to have opposed transition from sail to steam as fiercely as generals opposed the abolition of scarlet coats. Nothing could be further from the truth. When the admirals of the Royal Navy were persuaded that sail had had its day, they displayed a ruthless lack of sentimentality for the beauty of pyramids of canvas. The sailing navy was abolished almost overnight after the Crimean War, in which steam gunboats had devastated wooden walls. Warrior, the Royal Navy’s first steam ironclad of 1861, was not an experimental but a revolutionary ship, which surpassed several intermediate stages of naval design in a single leap.1 Palmerston, seeing her at anchor among the old men-of-war in Portsmouth harbour, described her as a “snake among the rabbits” and the successors of the admirals who had commissioned her would build new snakes whenever they judged the old had lapsed into rabbit status. Naval design changed with almost bewildering rapidity between 1860 and 1914, from broadside to central battery to turret arrangement of guns, from all-round to “citadel” to “armoured deck” arrangement of protection, from wrought-iron to case-hardened to composite quality of armour, from piston to turbine engine power, from coal propulsion to oil.

  The changes came faster and faster, as admirals accepted the significance of the new technologies civilian industry was creating and took stock of the evidence presented by the clash of such technologies in engagements between navies in non-European waters: the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. In 1896 the Royal Navy, still the world leader, was launching battleships of 13,000 tons, armed with four 12-inch guns and capable of a speed of eighteen knots from piston engines fired by coal. By 1913 its most modern battleships, of the Queen Elizabeth class, displaced 26,000 tons, mounted eight 15-inch guns and achieved speeds of twenty-five knots from turbine engines fired by oil.2 The key intermediate ship between these two designs had been the Dreadnought of 1906, which gave its name to all subsequent classes of “all-big-gun-ships,” so called because the
y dispensed with the previous clutter of secondary, small-calibre weapons and concentrated their armour around the ship-killing main armament, their magazines and their turbine engines. Dreadnought, the brainchild of Admiral Sir John Fisher, was as revolutionary as Warrior had been and the decision to build her as brave, for, like Warrior, she made all contemporary battleships obsolete, including the Royal Navy’s own. Only a nation as rich, as fiscally efficient and as committed to its maintenance of maritime predominance as Britain could have taken such a risk and only a navy as technically adaptable as the Royal Navy could have seen the need to do so. The inspiration was not wholly British. Italian naval architects, always at the forefront of their profession, had anticipated the conception of the all-big-gun-ship. They did not nerve themselves to put conception into practice. The appearance of Dreadnought, and of a stream of similar and improved sister-ships appearing in rapid succession after her launch, forced all advanced navies—the French, the Italian, the Austrian, the Russian, the United States, the Japanese, the German—to do so. Between 1906 and 1914, Dreadnoughts went down the ways of the world’s shipyards in ever-increasing numbers, to fly the flags of every major country, and of many which had not before aspired to maritime position. Turkey placed orders for Dreadnoughts in Britain and a Latin American naval race broke out between Argentina, Brazil and Chile which, lacking the resources to build large warships themselves, distributed their commissions between American and British yards. The Dreadnought in those years became a symbol of a state’s international standing, whether or not it served an objective national purpose.

  Competition—and competition was fierce between the British and American yards, which operated in the free market and sold abroad whenever they could—ensured that design met the highest standards and followed the most recent innovation. The ships building in Britain for foreign navies in 1914—Almirante Latorre for Chile, Reshedieh for Turkey, Rio de Janeiro for Brazil—were of the most advanced class. The Admiralty had no hesitation in buying all three into British service in August 1914, when, as Canada, Erin and Agincourt, they immediately joined the Grand Fleet. Agincourt, which mounted twelve 14-inch guns, was the most heavily armed ship in any European navy. German Dreadnoughts were better protected than their British equivalents, having thicker armour and more elaborate internal division into small, water-tight spaces, which limited the danger of flooding, but mounted guns of smaller calibre. The latest class of the neutral United States’ Dreadnoughts, Oklahoma and Nevada, achieved a remarkable compromise between speed, hitting-power and protection, while Britain’s two Queen Elizabeth class (three more were building) clearly represented the newer generation of even faster, better armed and armoured battleships.

  Marginal differences in design between Dreadnoughts would prove significant in battle, often startlingly so, for a chink in the armour might be lethal. Modern naval warfare was unforgiving. Steel ships, unlike wooden walls, could not be repaired in action (trivial damage excepted), while the huge loads of volatile high-explosive they carried in their magazines threatened them with disintegration if they received a deep hit. What, nevertheless, is striking about the Dreadnoughts is, first, their similarity to each other, second, their “state-of-the-art” modernity. Admirals supported naval architects in striving to provide their ships with the very latest equipment on offer, from range-finding equipment (in which the German optical industry gave the High Seas Fleet a distinct advantage) to mechanical computers for calculating bearing and elevation in directing guns.3 The armies of 1914 may not have been very efficient battle-winning organisations; the Dreadnought fleets were as efficient as they could be made within the constraints of available technology.

  If there were any major technical deficiency in the equipment of fleets, it lay in their signalling arrangements.4 Navies had enthusiastically embraced the new science of wireless-telegraphy (radio) and its introduction had enormously enhanced their ability to communicate, both strategically and tactically. It allowed the disposition of fleets to be altered over very long distances and, by radio direction-finding, for the position of enemy ships which broke wireless silence to be established with a high degree of accuracy. It also revolutionised the business of scouting and reconnaissance, by a battlefleet’s attendant minor warships. Before the advent of wireless, signalling between scouts and scouts, and scouts and fleet, was limited by the height of masts above the visual horizon and by conditions of visibility within the radius thus defined, in practice twenty miles at most. After the introduction of wireless, scouts could communicate for hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles, and flagships directly and instantaneously with the humblest reconnaissance vessel and vice versa. It was the light cruiser Glasgow, the only survivor of the disaster of Coronel, that saved the latecomer Canopus from destruction and it was its wireless transmissions that set in motion the trans-equatorial chase which eventually brought Spee’s squadron to defeat at the Falklands.

  Naval wireless telegraphy in 1914 had, however, one critical drawback. It as yet did not transmit voice signals, only morse code. As a result, there was “a period which includes the time taken to write out the [message], to transmit it to the wireless office, to code it, to signal it, de-code it aboard the receiving ship, write it out and transmit it to the bridge,” a period estimated by Admiral Jellicoe, commanding the Grand Fleet, to be “ten minutes to a quarter of an hour.”5 This lapse in “real time” was unimportant when strategic signals were being transmitted and received. It was crucial in action, when densely ranked fleets had to manoeuvre simultaneously at the admiral’s command. Wireless was therefore judged to be ineffective as a means of tactical signalling, which continued to be done, just as in Nelson’s time, by flag hoist. An admiral, wishing to turn his battleline towards or away from the enemy, would instruct the flag lieutenant to “make” the appropriate flag hoist, which the yeomen of signals on the bridge of each of his subordinate ships was expected to identify by naked eye or telescope and announce to the captain. The procedure required first the hoist, perhaps copied by a “repeater” ship nearer the front or rear of the line, and then the display of an “executive” flag, which ordered the manoeuvre the hoist specified when dropped. The system had worked admirably at Trafalgar, when the speed of the British approach towards the Franco-Spanish line was five knots and the distance between the leading and last ship of a formation was two miles at most. Dreadnought fleets, manoeuvring at twenty knots in formations six miles long, were controlled by flag hoist only with great difficulty, as signallers struggled to identify tiny squares of coloured cloth, obscured by the smoke of funnels and guns, at distances of a thousand yards or more.

  In retrospect, it seems that it might have been possible to simplify wireless-telegraphic procedure, by dispensing with encoding and by locating a receiver on the bridge, to be used in tactical circumstances when the dangers stemming from interception, since they must occur in “real time,” would be minimised. It was not done, perhaps because, through one of those lapses into “backwardness” so characteristic of the armies of 1914, the “culture” of the signal flag had fleets in its grip. The lapse was common to all navies. Unfortunately for the Royal Navy, the High Seas Fleet had overcome the signalling difficulty to a degree by simplifying its system of manoeuvre, allowing large changes of direction and alignment to be achieved by fewer hoists than the Grand Fleet employed. That would prove greatly to its advantage during the battle of Jutland.

  Otherwise, in technical circumstances as remarkable for their modernity as for their similarity, only one shortcoming was notable, and that affected both the navies locked in the war’s critical confrontation, the British and the German. Neither had adequate reconnaissance resources. Traditionally, fleets had deployed, forward of what were now known as their “capital” units, the battleships, and their attendant light craft, a screen of intermediate ships fast enough to find the enemy and strong enough then to disengage before suffering crippling damage. In the decades before the First World War, they had acquired t
he name of “cruisers.” Admiral Fisher, the sponsor of the Dreadnought concept, had conceived the idea that the function of the cruiser would in future best be served by a vessel as large as the battleship and as well armed, but faster, its superior speed being achieved by dispensing with much of the battleship’s armour. By 1916 the Grand Fleet included nine of these “battlecruisers” and the High Seas Fleet, since the Germans had followed the British initiative, five. Of traditional cruisers neither had any number and those in service were old, slow and weak in armament and armour. That would not have mattered had the admirals restricted their employment to the appropriate reconnaissance role and deterred the battlecruiser squadron commanders from exposing their ships to punishment they were not built to withstand. Unfortunately for both navies, the belief had arisen that battlecruisers should, in extension of their scouting function, engage in action with the enemy’s battleships when found, using their main armament to “fix” them while their own supporting battleships came up, and trusting to their superior speed to escape damage in the interim. “Speed is protection,” Fisher had argued. His battlecruisers were indeed faster than any battleship then afloat by a margin of as much as ten knots (British battlecruiser Queen Mary = 33 knots, German battleship Kaiser = 23.6 knots). As battle would prove, however, speed was not protection against modern naval guns, firing 12-inch or heavier shells out to ranges of 17,000 yards. The illusion that it might prove so had caused navies to spend the money that could have bought dozens of smaller but effective cruisers on a handful of battlecruisers no better at doing their work and wholly unsuitable to challenge battleships even in the preliminaries of fleet action. The Royal Navy went into battle at Jutland in 1916 with but a handful of traditional cruisers, none up to their work, swarms of light cruisers too weak even to show themselves to the enemy’s heavier ships and an advanced guard of battlecruisers which would suffer terrible and pointless loss before the main action was joined.