by John Keegan
The tanks, massed on a front of 10,000 yards, were to advance in dense formation, with the infantry following close behind to take prisoners, capture guns and consolidate the ground conquered. The way into the enemy positions would be secured by the tanks crushing lanes through the wire—in the Hindenburg position at Cambrai several hundred yards deep—while the tanks would find a way across the trenches by dropping into them “fascines”—bundles of brushwood—as bridges. There were three successive German lines, 7,000 yards—nearly four miles—deep, and it was intended to break through all in a single bound on the first day. Because the Cambrai front had long been quiet, it was garrisoned by only two divisions, the 20th Landwehr and the 54th Reserve, supported by no more than 150 guns.114 The 20th Landwehr was classified “fourth-rate” by Allied intelligence. Unfortunately, the 54th Reserve, a better formation, was commanded by an officer, General von Walter, an artilleryman, who had, unusually among German soldiers, taken account of the tanks’ potentiality, and trained his gunners to engage moving targets from protected positions.115
Walter’s keen interest in tank operations—at a time when the German army had no tanks—was to be of the greatest influence on the outcome of the battle. So, too, was the failure of comprehension of the tank’s potential on the part of General G. M. Harper, commanding the 51st Highland Division, the infantry formation at the centre of the front of attack. Harper, brave but conventional, did not like tanks but loved his Highland soldiers. He had formed the view that tanks would attract German artillery fire on to his infantry and so, instead of insisting that they follow closely, ordered them to keep 150–200 yards behind.116 The resulting separation was to spell doom to the British attack at the now critical moment of the battle.
All began well. The unfortunate German soldiers garrisoning the Cambrai sector were unprepared for the hurricane bombardment that descended upon them at 6:20 on the morning of 20 November and the appearance of dense columns of tanks, 324 in all, rolling forward with infantry following. Within four hours the attackers had advanced in many places to a depth of four miles, at almost no cost in casualties: in the 20th Light Division, the 2nd Durham Light Infantry lost four men killed, the 14th Durham Light Infantry only seven men wounded.117
The difference was in the centre. There the 51st Highland Division, gingerly following the tanks at some hundred yards’ distance, entered the defended zone of the German 54th Reserve. Its gunners, trained by General von Walter, began to engage the British tanks as they appeared, unsupported by infantry, over the crest near Flesquières village, and knocked them out one by one.118 Soon eleven were out of action, five destroyed by a single German sergeant, Kurt Kruger, who was killed by a Highlander when the 51st Division’s infantry at last got up with the tanks. By then, however, it was too late for the division to reach the objective set for it for the day, so that, while on the left and right of the Cambrai battlefield, the whole German position had been broken, in the centre a salient bulged towards British lines, denying General Byng the clear-cut breakthrough espousal of Elles’s and Tudor’s revolutionary plan should have brought him.
In England the bells rang out for a victory, the first time they had sounded since the beginning of the war. The celebration was premature. Byng’s cavalry, which had picked its way across the battlefield in the wake of the tanks in the twilight of 20 November, was held up by wire they had not cut and turned back. His infantry nudged their way forward on 21 November and the days that followed. Then, on 30 November, the German army demonstrated once again its formidable counter-attack power. In the ten days since the attack had been unleashed, twenty divisions had been assembled by Crown Prince Rupprecht, the local commander, and in a morning attack they took back not only much of the ground lost to the tanks on 20 November but another portion, which the British had held beforehand. The Cambrai battle, which should have yielded a deep pocket driven into the German front, ended on ambiguous terms along the line of the “Drocourt-Quéant Switch,” a sinuous double salient which gave both the British and the Germans some of each other’s long-held territory. It was an appropriate symbol of the precarious balance of power on the Western Front at the end of 1917.
TEN
America and Armageddon
“THEY WILL NOT EVEN COME,” Admiral Capelle, the Secretary of State for the Navy, had assured the budgetary committee of the German parliament on 31 January 1917, “because our submarines will sink them. Thus America from a military point of view means nothing, and again nothing and for a third time nothing.”1 At the beginning of 1917, four months before the United States entered the war on the side of the Allies, its army—as opposed to its large and modern navy—might indeed have meant nothing. It ranked in size—107,641 men—seventeenth in the world.2 It had no experience of large-scale operations since the armistice at Appomattox fifty-one years earlier, and possessed no modern equipment heavier than its medium machine guns. Its reserve, the National Guard, though larger, with 132,000 men, was the part-time militia of the individual forty-eight states, poorly trained even in the richer states and subject to the sketchiest Federal supervision. The only first-class American force, the United States Marine Corps, 15,500 strong, was scattered in America’s overseas possessions and areas of intervention, including several Central American republics which the United States had decided to police in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of 1898.
Yet, by June 1917, the commander of an American Expeditionary Force, General John J. Pershing, had arrived in France and on 4 July, American Independence Day, elements of his 1st Division paraded in Paris. Throughout the following months, fresh units of an army planned to reach a strength of eighty divisions—nearly three million men, for American divisions were twice the size of French, British or German—continued to arrive. By March 1918, 318,000 men had reached France, the vanguard of 1,300,000 to be deployed by August, and not one had been lost to the action of the enemy in oceanic transport.3
Rare are the times in a great war when the fortunes of one side or the other are transformed by the sudden accretion of a disequilibrating reinforcement. Those of Napoleon’s enemies were so transformed in 1813, when the failure of his Moscow campaign brought the Russian army to the side of Britain and Austria. Those of the United States against the Confederacy were transformed in 1863 when the adoption of conscription brought the North’s millions into play against the South’s hundreds of thousands. Those of an isolated Britain and an almost defeated Soviet Union would be transformed in 1941, when Hitler’s intemperate declaration of war against America brought the power of the world’s leading state to stand against that of Nazi Germany as well as Imperial Japan. By 1918, President Wilson’s decision to declare war on Germany and its allies had brought such an accretion to the Allied side. Capelle’s “they will never come” had been trumped in six months by America’s melodramatic “Lafayette, I am here.”
The United States had not wanted to enter the war. America, its President Woodrow Wilson had said, was “too proud to fight” and it had sustained a succession of diplomatic affronts, from the sinking of the Lusitania and its American passengers to the German attempt to foment a diversionary war in Mexico, without responding to provocation by material means. Once committed to hostilities, America’s extraordinary capacity for industrial production and human organisation took possession of the nation’s energies. It was decided at the outset to raise the army to be sent to France by conscription, overseen by local civilian registration boards. Over 24 million men were registered in 1917–18 and those deemed most eligible—young and unmarried males without dependants—formed the first contingent of 2,810,000 draftees. Together with those already enrolled in the regular army, the National Guard and the Marines, they raised the enlisted strength of the United States ground forces to nearly four million men by the war’s end.
Many Americans were already fighting. Some, as individuals, had joined the British or Canadian armies. Others had enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. A large group of American
pilots was already serving in the French air force, where they formed the Lafayette Escadrille, one of the leading air-fighting units on the Western Front. Its veterans would bring invaluable experience to the American Expeditionary Force’s Air Corps once it crossed the Atlantic. Though forced to adopt foreign equipment—the American industrial effort failed to supply tanks, artillery or aircraft to the expeditionary force, which depended for supplies of those items largely on the French (3,100 field guns, 1,200 howitzers, 4,800 aircraft)—American pilots rapidly established a reputation for skill and dash. Eddie Rickenbacker, America’s leading ace, was as much a hero in France as in his home country.
A blind spot in America’s mobilisation lay over its response to its black population’s willingness to serve. W. E. B. DuBois, one of the most important champions of black America in the early twentieth century, argued that, “if this is our country, then this is our war.” White America, particularly the white military establishment, continued to believe that blacks lacked military spirit and were suitable for use only as labour or service troops. That despite the fact that the “buffalo soldiers,” the four regular regiments of black infantry and cavalry, had always performed well in the wars on the Indian frontier and that black regiments had fought with tenacity in the Civil War. Reluctantly a black division, the 92nd, was raised, with some black officers, none holding higher rank than captain, commanding sub-units. It did not do well in action. Its failure—“Poor Negroes—They are hopelessly inferior,” wrote the commander of the corps in which the 92nd Division served—was ascribed throughout the army to racial incapacities. No professional American officer seems to have taken note of the reliance the French were already placing on the black contingents of Tirailleurs sénégalais, who showed a readiness to fight in the second half of 1917 that native white Frenchmen had, at least temporarily, lost. The racially supercilious American officers of the AEF may be forgiven for failing to anticipate the outstanding performance of black combat troops in America’s wars of the later twentieth century. The poor record of black American troops on the Western Front in 1918 bears the classic signs nevertheless of self-fulfilling prophecy; little being expected of them, little was given.
The ordinary soldier of the Allied armies, British or French, remained unaware of a racial problem that proved a solely domestic concern. To the battered armies that had attacked and defended throughout 1914 to 1917, the appearance of the doughboys, as the American conscripts of the last year of the war were universally known, brought nothing but renewed hope. Their personal popularity was everywhere noted. The Americans were light-hearted, cheerful, enthusiastic, dismissive of difficulties. “We’ll soon settle this,” was the doughboy attitude. The French and British military professionals, alarmed by the AEF’s deficiency in technical military skills, particularly in artillery method and inter-arm cooperation, propagated the message that the Americans were suitable only as replacements or subordinate units. Pershing was to have none of it, insisting that a united American army, under American command, was the only force that would do justice to his country’s involvement. The point of principle on which he stood was to be justified by the American Expeditionary Force’s contribution to victory.
The arrival of Lafayette’s expeditionary force to the aid of the colonists in 1781 at the crisis of the American War of Independence had confronted their British enemies with an alteration of force they could not match. The arrival of the Americans created no such unalterable imbalance in 1917. By the end of the year, the Germans, too, overstretched as they had been throughout 1915–16 by the need to prop up their Austrian allies, by the losses incurred at Verdun and on the Somme, and by the unanticipated recovery of the Russians in 1916, had turned a corner. The political collapse of Russia had released from the Eastern Front fifty divisions of infantry which could be brought to the west to attempt a final, war-winning offensive. Not indifferent divisions either; the total collapse of Russia’s military power at the end of 1917 allowed the German high command to leave in the east no more force than was needed to maintain order and collect produce inside the German-occupied area. It consisted chiefly of overage Landwehr and skeleton cavalry formations. The shock troops that had sealed the Kerensky army’s fate—Guard and Guard Reserve Divisions, Prussian and north German divisions of the pre-war active army—had been successively disengaged during the winter and brought westward by rail to form, with others already on the Western Front, an attacking mass of sixty divisions.4
The German high command, which had for so long been compelled to sustain defensive strategy in the west, had given great thought and preparation to perfecting the offensive methods to be employed by the attack force, the last reserve it could hope to assemble.5 It was a grave deficiency that the German army had no tanks. A clumsy prototype was under development, and British tanks captured during 1917 were being pressed into service, but no concentration of tanks such as was already available to the British and French stood to hand. Hindenburg and Ludendorff counted, in its absence, on a refinement of artillery and infantry tactics, practised in the last stages of the Russian campaign, to compensate for German weakness at the technical level. The infantry had been re-equipped with large numbers of stripped-down machine guns (the 08/15), rough if not wholly adequate equivalents of the British and French light machine guns, the Lewis and Chauchat, and had been trained to “infiltrate” enemy positions, by-passing centres of resistance, rather than stopping to fight when held up directly to their front. These tactics anticipated blitzkrieg, which the German army would apply so successfully in mechanised operations in a later war. Each attacking division, in addition, had been ordered to form specialised “storm” battalions of lightly equipped infantry which, with grenade and carbine, were to drive deep but narrow cavities through the crust of the enemy positions, breaking it into isolated sections to be overcome by the following waves of conventional infantry at a slower pace.
The emphasis of the German attack plan, however, was on speed. Nivelle had hoped, unrealistically, to overcome the German position on the Chemin des Dames the previous year in a few hours. He had lacked the trained troops and weight of artillery to bring his hope to realisation. Ludendorff now had the necessary troops and guns and a realistic plan. The enemy was to be attacked both on a broad front—fifty miles—and in depth, the depth of the attack to be achieved by concentrating an enormous weight of artillery firing the heaviest possible bombardment at short, medium and long range in a brief but crushing deluge of shells, lasting five hours. Ludendorff’s bombardment force amounted to 6,473 field, medium and heavy guns and 3,532 mortars of varying calibre, for which over a million rounds of ammunition were assembled.6 All the guns, many of which had been brought from the east, were “registered” beforehand at a specially constructed firing range, producing data of each gun’s variance from a theoretical norm which, when combined with detailed meteorological allowance for barometric pressure and wind speed and direction, would ensure, as far as was humanly possible, that all would hit their designated targets, whether enemy trenches or battery positions. Explosive shell was also to be intermixed with varieties of gas projectiles, lachrymatory and asphyxiating phosgene, in a combination calculated to outwit the protection offered by enemy gas masks. Lachrymatory or tear gas was designed to make the enemy infantry take off their gas masks, in a relief reflex, when phosgene would disable them.
Some combination of all these measures had been tried in the last offensive against the Russians at Riga in September 1917, when the German artillery had fired without preliminary registration on the Russian positions and created the conditions for a breakthrough.7 Bruchmüller, Ludendorff’s artillery supremo, there proved to his satisfaction that the firing of guns previously registered behind the front, and so not needing to betray their positions by ranging on enemy targets until the moment of attack, could create the circumstances in which an infantry assault would lead to victory.8
It was with Bruchmüller’s verified experiment in mind that Hindenbu
rg had, at Mons on 11 November 1917, come to the decision to launch an all-or-nothing offensive in the west in the coming year.9 The expectations pinned to its outcome were far-reaching. As Ludendorff expressed the mind of the high command in a letter to Hindenburg on 7 January 1918, “the proposed new offensive, should … lead to the decisive success for which we hope … We shall [then] be in a position to lay down such conditions for peace with the Western Powers as are required by the security of our frontiers, our economic interests and our international position after the war.”10 Eventual victory might bring rewards in the west, notably control of Belgium’s industrial economy and the incorporation of the French coal and iron basin of Longwy-Briey within the wider German Ruhr industrial area.11 Belgium’s Flemish-speaking region, traditionally hostile to French-speaking Wallonia, was not immune to German seductions. In February 1917, a Council of Flanders had been set up in Brussels, under the patronage of the German military government, and in the following months had bargained autonomy for itself under German patronage. Flemish expectations of what autonomy would bring were, however, not what Germany intended to concede. Flanders wanted democracy and true independence; Germany required subordination. Its external policy, in the Belgian direction, thus foundered during 1918 on the stubborn liberalism of a people whose pan-Teutonic feelings did not extend to the surrender of their national rights.12