The First World War

by John Keegan

  Douglas Haig, the hero of the First Battle, the defender of Ypres in the Second, had long nurtured plans to make the Ypres salient the starting point for a counter-offensive that would break the German line, while an amphibious attack cleared the coast, depriving the Germans of their naval bases at Blankenberghe and Ostend, and thus also dealing, it was hoped, a deadly blow to the U-boats. Haig had first proposed the scheme on 7 January 1916, soon after he succeeded French in command of the BEF. He reworked it for consideration at the Chantilly conference in November, only to see it set aside in favour of Nivelle’s project for breakthrough on the Chemin des Dames. With that devastated, Haig’s Flanders plan took on a certain inevitability. It was discussed at an Anglo-French conference held in Paris on 4–5 May, when Pétain, Nivelle’s successor, gave assurances that the French would support it with up to four attacks of their own. By June the French could no longer conceal from their British allies that such attacks could not be delivered. On 7 June, Haig met Pétain at Cassel, near Ypres, to be told that “two French Divisions had refused to go and relieve two Divisions in the front line”; the true figure was over fifty and Pétain’s assurance that “the situation in the French army was serious at the moment but is now more satisfactory” was wholly meretricious.88 Lloyd George had, at Paris, guessed at the truth when he had challenged Pétain to deny that “for some reason or other you won’t fight.”89 Pétain had then merely smiled and said nothing. By June, with the truth of the French mutinies no longer deniable, it was clear that the British would have to fight alone. The matter of moment was to find a justification for their doing so.

  Haig was adamant that they should and believed they would win a victory, the best of all reasons for fighting a battle. Local events in June, south of the Ypres salient, lent credence to his case. There on 7 June, the day he heard from Pétain the first admission of the French army’s troubles, Plumer’s Second Army had mounted a long-prepared assault on Messines Ridge with complete success. Messines continues the line of the Flemish heights east of Ypres, held by the Germans since the First Battle of October 1914, southward towards the valley of the Lys, which divides the plains of Belgium from those of France. So gradual are the gradients that, to the eye of the casual visitor, no commanding ground presents itself to view. More careful observation reveals that the positions occupied by the Germans dominated those of the British all the way to the only true high ground in Flanders, Mount Kemmel and the Mont des Cats, while denying the British observation into the German rear areas between Ypres and Lille. It had long been an ambition of the British commanders of the Ypres salient to take possession of the Messines crest and during 1917 their tunnelling companies had driven forward nineteen galleries, culminating in mine chambers packed with a million pounds of explosives. Just before dawn on 7 June 1917, the mines were detonated, with a noise heard in England, and nine divisions, including the 3rd Australian, the New Zealand and, veterans of the first day of the Somme, the 16th Irish and 36th Ulster, moved forward. Nearly three weeks of bombardment, during which three and a half million shells had been fired, had preceded the attack. When the assault waves arrived on the Messines crest, permanently altered by the devastations, they found such defenders as survived unable to offer resistance and took possession of what remained of the German trenches with negligible casualties. At a blow the British had driven the enemy from the southern wing of the Ypres salient. Haig’s ambition to drive in the centre and thence advance to the Flemish coast was greatly enhanced thereby.

  The obstacle to a second major Western Front offensive, to follow the Somme the previous year, remained the hesitation of the Prime Minister. David Lloyd George was oppressed by the rising tide of British casualties, already a quarter of a million dead, and the paltry military return gained by the sacrifice. He looked for alternatives, in Italy against the Austrians, even against the Turks in the Middle East, policies that came to be known as “knocking away the props” of Germany’s central military position. None commended themselves and Haig’s insistent demand for permission to launch a great Flanders offensive gained strength. Haig’s belief in its promise was not shared by Lloyd George’s principal military adviser, General Sir William Robertson, the ex-cavalry trooper whose innate intelligence and strength of character had carried him to the British army’s highest position. Yet he, despite his doubts, preferred Haig’s military single-mindedness to the Prime Minister’s political evasions and, when required to throw his weight one way or the other, threw it behind Haig.

  In June Lloyd George formed yet another inner committee of the Cabinet, in succession to the Dardanelles Committee and the War Council, to assume the higher direction of the war. The Committee on War Policy, which included Lords Curzon and Milner and the South African, Jan Smuts, first met on 11 June. Its most important sessions, however, took place on 19–21 June, when Haig outlined his plans and asked for their endorsement. Lloyd George was relentless in his interrogation and criticism. He expressed doubts all too accurate about Haig’s belief in the importance of the Kerensky offensive, questioned the likelihood of capturing the U-boat ports and enquired how the offensive was to be made to succeed with a bare superiority, at best, in infantry and nothing more than equality in artillery. Haig was unshaken throughout two days of debate. Despite Lloyd George’s fears about casualties, compounded by the difficulties in finding any more men from civil life to replace those lost, Haig insisted that “it was necessary for us to go on engaging the enemy … and he was quite confident, he could reach the first objective,” which was the crest of the Ypres ridges.90

  This was the nub of the difference: Haig wanted to fight, Lloyd George did not. The Prime Minister could see good reasons for avoiding a battle: that it would lose many men for little material gain, that it would not win the war—though Haig at times spoke of “great results this year,” that neither the French nor the Russians would help, that the Americans were coming and that, in consequence, the best strategy was for a succession of small attacks (“Pétain tactics”), rather than a repetition of the Somme. He weakened his case by urging help to Italy as a means of driving Austria out of the war but his chief failing, unexpected in a man who so easily dominated his party and parliamentary colleagues, was a lack of will to talk Haig, and his loyal supporter, Robertson, down. At the end, he felt unable, as a civilian Prime Minister, “to impose my strategical views on my military advisers” and was therefore obliged to accept theirs.91

  The consequences would be heavy. The “Flanders Position,” as the Germans called it, was one of the strongest on the Western Front, both geographically and militarily. From the low heights of Passchendaele, Broodseinde and Gheluvelt, the enemy front line looked down on an almost level plain from which three years of constant shelling had removed every trace of vegetation; it had also destroyed the field drainage system, elaborated over centuries, so that the onset of rain, frequent in that coastal region, rapidly flooded the battlefield’s surface and soon returned it to swamp. To quagmire and absence of concealment the Germans had added to the BEF’s difficulties by extending the depth of their trench system and its wire entanglements and by building a network of concrete pillboxes and bunkers, often constructed inside ruined buildings, which offered concealment to the construction teams and camouflage to the finished work.92 The completed Flanders Position was actually nine layers deep: in front, a line of listening posts in shell holes, covering three lines of breastworks or trenches in which the defending division’s front-line battalions sheltered; next a battle zone consisting of machine-gun posts, supported by a line of pillboxes; finally, in the rearward battle zone, the counter-attack units of the division sheltered in concrete bunkers interspersed between the positions of the supporting artillery batteries.93 As important as the physical layout of the defences was the formational; the German army had, by the fourth summer of the war, recognised that the defence of a position required two separate formations and reorganised their divisions accordingly. The trench garrison, which was expected t
o bear the initial assault, had been thinned out, to comprise only the companies and battalions of the division in line. Behind it, in the rearward battle zone, were disposed the counter-attack divisions, whose mission was to move forward once the enemy assault had been stopped by the fixed defences and local ripostes of the troops in front.94

  The defenders of the Flanders Position belonged, in July 1917, to ten divisions, including such solid and well-tried formations as the 3rd Guard Division and the 111th, in which Ernst Jünger was serving with the 73rd Hanoverian Fusiliers. On the main line of defence, that to be attacked by the British Fifth Army, 1,556 field and heavy guns were deployed on seven miles of front. The British had concentrated 2,299 guns, or one to five yards, ten times the density on the Somme fourteen months earlier. Fifth Army, commanded by the impetuous cavalryman Hubert Gough, also deployed over a division to each mile; they included the Guards Division, the 15th Scottish and the Highland Divisions, arrayed shoulder to shoulder between Pilckem, where the British Guards faced the German Guards north of Ypres, to the torn stumps of Sanctuary Wood, south of the city, which had given shelter to the original BEF in 1914.

  The Fifth Army had also been allotted 180 aircraft, out of a total of 508 in the battle area; their role was to achieve air superiority above the front to a depth of five miles, where the German observation-balloon line began.95 Visibility, in good conditions, from the basket of a captive balloon, was as much as sixty miles, allowing the observer, via the telephone wire attached to the tethering cable, to correct the artillery’s fall of shot with a high degree of accuracy and at speed. Improvements in wireless were also allowing two-seater observation aircraft to direct artillery fire, though laboriously, for two-way voice transmission was not yet technically possible. The war in the air, which in 1918 would take a dramatic leap forward into the fields of ground attack and long-range strategic bombing, remained during 1917 largely stuck at the level of artillery observation, “balloon busting” and dogfighting to gain or retain air superiority.

  The French air service, though a branch of the army, was unaffected by the disorders which paralysed the ground formations during 1917. It operated effectively against the German air raids over the Aisne in April and May and lent important support to the Royal Flying Corps during the Third Battle of Ypres. Its best aircraft, the Spad 12 and 13, were superior to most of those flown by the Germans at the beginning of the year and it produced a succession of aces, Georges Guynemer and René Fonck the most celebrated, whose air-fighting skills were deadly. When Guynemer was killed during Third Ypres on 11 September, the French Senate ceremonially enshrined the victor of fifty-three aerial combats in the Pantheon.96 The year was also to see, however, the emergence of the most famous German aces, including Werner Voss (48 victories) and the legendary “Red Baron,” Manfred von Richthofen (80 eventual victories), whose achievements were owed not just to their airmanship and aggressiveness but also to the delivery to the German air service of new types of aircraft, particularly the manoeuvrable Fokker Triplane, which displayed a significant edge in aerial combat over the British and French equivalents. Aeronautical technology, during the First World War, permitted very rapid swings in superiority between one side and the other. “Lead times” in the development of aircraft, now measured in decades, then lasted months, sometimes only weeks; a slightly more powerful engine—when power output ranged between 200 and 300 h.p. at most—or a minor refinement of airframe could confer a startling advantage. During 1917 the Royal Flying Corps received three rapidly developed and advanced aircraft, the single-seater Sopwith Camel and S.E.5 and the two-seater Bristol Fighter, which provided the material to make its numbers, inexperienced as many of its pilots were, tell against the German veterans.97 It began also to produce its own aces to match those of the French and German air forces, the most famous being Edward Mannock, James McCudden and Albert Ball. McCudden, an ex-private soldier, and Mannock, a convinced Socialist, were cold-hearted technicians of dogfighting from backgrounds wholly at variance with the majority of public school pilots whom Albert Ball typified.98 Of whatever class or nation, however, all successful participants in the repetitive and unrelenting stress of aerial fighting came eventually to display its characteristic physiognomy: “skeletal hands, sharpened noses, tight-drawn cheek bones, the bared teeth of a rictus smile and the fixed, narrowed gaze of men in a state of controlled fear.”99

  The outcome of the Third Battle of Ypres would be decided, however, on the ground, not in the skies above it. As at Verdun, and the Somme, the key questions at the outset were: could the weight of artillery preparation crush the enemy’s defences and defenders sufficiently quickly and completely for the attackers to seize positions within his lines from which counter-attack would not expel them? There was to be no initial attempt, as Nivelle had desired on the Aisne, for an immediate breakthrough. Instead, the first objectives had been fixed 6,000 yards away from the British start line, within supporting field-gun range. Once those had been taken, the artillery was to be moved forward and the process recommenced, until, bite by bite, the German defences had been chewed through, the enemy’s reserves destroyed and a way opened to the undefended rear area. The key feature to be taken in the first stage was the “Gheluvelt plateau” south-east of Ypres and two miles distant from the British front line, whose slight elevation above the surrounding lowland conferred important advantages of observation.

  The bombardment, which had begun fifteen days earlier and expended over four million shells—a million had been fired before the Somme—reached its crescendo just before four o’clock in the morning of 31 July. At 3:50 a.m., the assaulting troops of the Second and Fifth Armies, with a portion of the French First Army lending support on the left, moved forward, accompanied by 136 tanks. Though the ground was churned and pock-marked by years of shelling, the surface was dry and only two tanks bogged—though many more ditched later—and the infantry also managed to make steady progress. Progress on the left, towards the summit of Pilckem Ridge, was rapid, at Gheluvelt less so. By late morning, moreover, the familiar breakdown of communication between infantry and guns had occurred; cables were everywhere cut, low cloud prevented aerial observation, “some pigeons got through but the only news from the assault was by runners, who sometimes took hours to get back, if indeed they ever did.”100 Then at two in the afternoon the German counter-attack scheme was unleashed. An intense bombardment fell on the soldiers of XVIII and XIX Corps as they struggled towards Gheluvelt, so heavy that the leading troops were driven to flight. To the rain of German shells was added a torrential downpour which soon turned the broken battlefield to soupy mud. The rain persisted during the next three days, as the British infantry renewed their assaults and their artillery was dragged forward to new positions to support them. On 4 August a British battery commander, the future Lord Belhaven, wrote of “simply awful [mud], worse I think than winter. The ground is churned up to a depth of ten feet and is the consistency of porridge … the middle of the shell craters are so soft that one might sink out of sight … there must be hundreds of German dead buried here and now their own shells are reploughing the area and turning them up.”101

  Rain and lack of progress prompted Sir Douglas Haig to call a halt to the offensive on 4 August until the position could be consolidated. He insisted to the War Cabinet in London, nevertheless, that the attack had been “highly satisfactory and the losses slight.” By comparison with the Somme, when 20,000 men had died on the opening day, losses seemed bearable: between 31 July and 3 August the Fifth Army reported 7,800 dead and missing, Second Army rather more than a thousand. Wounded included, total casualties, with those of the French First Army, numbered about 35,000, and the Germans had suffered similarly.102 The Germans, however, remained in command of the vital ground and had committed none of their counter-attack divisions. Crown Prince Rupprecht, on the evening of 31 July, had recorded in his diary that he was “very satisfied with the results.”

  The battle, however, had only just begun. Rupp
recht could not reckon with Haig’s determination to persist however high losses mounted or wet the battlefield became. On 16 August he committed the Fifth Army to an attack against Langemarck, scene of the BEF’s encounter with the German volunteer divisions in October 1914, where 500 yards of ground was gained, and the Canadian Corps to a diversionary offensive in the coalfields around Lens, that awful wasteland of smashed villages and mine spoilheaps where the BEF had suffered so pointlessly during the winter and spring of 1915. He also continued a series of fruitless assaults on the Gheluvelt Plateau, from which the Germans dominated all action on the lower ground. Little ground was gained, much life lost.

  On 24 August, after the failure of a third attack on Gheluvelt, Haig decided to transfer responsibility for the main effort at Ypres from Gough’s Fifth Army to Plumer’s Second. Gough, a young general by the war’s gerontocratic standards, had recommended himself to Haig as a fellow-cavalryman, noted for his “dash” and impatience with obstacles. His troops had already learnt reasons to feel less confidence in his generalship than his superior held. Plumer, by contrast, was not only older than Gough but looked older than he was and had an elderly caution and concern for those in his charge. He had commanded the Ypres sector for two years, knew all its dangerous corners and had endeared himself to his soldiers, in so far as any general of the First World War could, by his concern for their well-being. He now decided that there must be a pause, to allow careful preparation for the next phase which would take the form of a succession of thrusts into the German line even shallower than Gough had attempted.