War: What is it good for?

by Ian Morris

  At first, the answer seemed obvious. “Breaking through the enemy’s lines,” the British commander concluded in January 1915, “is largely a question of expenditure of high-explosive ammunition. If sufficient ammunition is forthcoming, a way can be blasted through the line. If the attempt fails … either more guns must be brought up, or the allowance of ammunition per gun must be increased.”

  This put the emphasis on the home front. He who channeled his economy most efficiently into churning out guns and shells, it appeared, would win the day. In every country, production soared as governments took over everything from munitions and transport to food and wages. Women had to be lured out of the home and into fields and factories to replace the men drafted into the armies; food had to be rationed and distributed; production had to be rationalized to give the armies just enough of everything they needed. All this meant more bureaucrats, more taxes, and more regulation. Leviathans exploded.

  But despite it all, neither side could make a decisive breakthrough. Once again, the Red Queen pattern seemed to be at work. The armies’ offensive powers improved dramatically. Millions of shells were manufactured, tens of millions of horses were coaxed and beaten to drag them to the front (Germany alone lost a million horses during the war, more to exhaustion and starvation than to enemy fire), and artillerymen became more sophisticated, mixing short, intense barrages with long, sustained ones and firing creeping barrages that moved forward just ahead of advancing infantry. But for every improvement attackers made, defenders found a response. They dug multiple lines of trenches, four or five miles deep. They manned the forward positions lightly, rotating troops in and out of the line to keep them fresh. Most men stayed back out of artillery range, letting the enemy capture the front lines and counterattacking when the assault outran its artillery cover.

  The real issue, generals realized as early as 1915, was that Moltke’s problem went all the way down. Once battle was joined, commanders could not control their armies. If their men did overrun enemy defenses, hours might pass before headquarters heard about it, and the opportunity to commit fresh reserves and exploit the opening would be lost. “Generals were like men without eyes, without ears and without voices,” the historian John Keegan observed.

  In this age of science, both sides turned to technology for ways to beat the Red Queen. Germany led the way, using tear gas in Poland in January 1915. It was not a success; the day was so cold that the gas froze. But when they tried chlorine gas on the Western Front three months later, the results were dramatic. A light breeze carried the poisonous green clouds into trenches full of unsuspecting French and African troops. Chlorine is a nasty way to kill: it burns the lungs, stimulating them to overproduce fluids; gassed men drown. Although the gas killed only about two hundred men (a mere handful by the bloody standards of World War I), thousands more ran away “like a flock of sheep,” a German officer observed. The rout left a gap nearly five miles wide, but unfortunately for the Germans their own troops were nearly as surprised as the enemy’s and failed to push through the opening. By the second day of the attack, all surprise was lost, and because chlorine is soluble, the Canadians who plugged the gap in the line could neutralize it by just tying wet rags over their faces.

  Gas pervades popular memories of World War I (“If you could hear,” wrote Wilfred Owen, “at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, / Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud / Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues”), but to armies that expected it, it was more a nuisance than a game changer. Less than one in eighty of the war dead died from gassing, and only one war pension in a hundred was gas related.

  Britain tried a different technological fix: tanks. H. G. Wells had written a short story titled “The Land Ironclads” back in 1903, and engineers were already discussing armored, tracked vehicles by December 1914. The internal combustion engine was still in its infancy, and the technical challenges of moving several tons of steel over trenches and shell holes were enormous, but by September 1916 almost fifty tanks were ready to fight. Thirteen of them broke down before the battle began, but the Germans fled at the mere sight of the others, which advanced two miles before they, too, broke down. In late 1917, Britain massed 324 tanks on a five-mile front at Cambrai and pushed forward four miles—a massive advance for World War I—before they got stuck. British church bells were rung in celebration, but the German line held.

  Other innovations were less spectacular, but arguably more important. When the war started, artillerymen often had little patience with technicians who wanted to bring too much science to their craft. “My boy, this is war, this is practical stuff!” one subaltern remembered being told. “Forget all that nonsense they taught you at ‘The Shop’! If it’s cold, cock her up a bit!”1 By 1917, though, fire control had improved by an order of magnitude—much of it owed to the war’s other great technical advance, aviation. There had been no aircraft at all until 1903, and none was used in war until 1911, but by 1918 two thousand planes were buzzing above the western front, correcting artillery fire, attacking enemy infantry, and even shooting each other down.

  Yet still the great breakthrough did not come. Despairing, in 1916 generals resorted to making the body count an end in itself. When the Germans attacked at Verdun in February, instead of trying to break through, they aimed to bleed the French white. Seven hundred thousand men died in a few square miles of mud over the next nine months. Nor did the British really expect to break through when they attacked along the Somme River that July; their aim was just to distract the Germans from Verdun. By lunchtime on the first day, 20,000 Britons had been killed, and over the next four months another 300,000 followed them.

  Germany generally had the better of this war of attrition, killing more men than it lost and doing it more cost effectively. By one gruesome calculation, Britain, France, Russia, and (eventually) the United States spent $36,485.48 for every enemy soldier they killed, while Germany and its allies spent just $11,344.77 per corpse. Where German efficiency broke down, however, was in the realm of strategy. After starting the war with no Plan B, Germany soon had too many Plan Bs. Some generals argued that Germany should concentrate on knocking out Russia. On the eastern front, they pointed out, the challenge was not how to break through—there was so much room for maneuver that armies regularly did this—but how to sustain advances in a land largely lacking railways and roads. Solving that problem, they suggested, would be much easier than finding a way through the trenches in France. Other generals, though, argued that Russia was a sideshow; the only way to win the war was by breaking the British and the French, whereupon the Russians would fold too.

  First one faction, then the other gained the upper hand, dissipating German efforts, and to make things worse, other influential voices hoped to win the war outside Europe. “Our consuls in Turkey and India,” the kaiser wrote in 1914, “must rouse the whole Muslim world into wild rebellion against this hateful, mendacious, unprincipled [British] nation of shopkeepers.” The jihad went nowhere, but in 1915 the navy started pressing another global strategy. Since Britain depended even more than Germany on imports, the admirals observed, why not use submarines to close its trade routes?

  After much back-and-forth, in February 1917 Germany committed to sinking merchant ships on sight, regardless of what flag they flew. German leaders knew that this would probably bring the United States into the war, but as they saw it, Americans were virtually combatants already. Before the war, Britain had dominated the world-system by exporting capital and industrial goods, but now Britain was importing a quarter-billion dollars’ worth of American war matériel every month. Adding insult to injury, much of the money to do this was borrowed on the New York markets. German economists calculated that if they cut this Atlantic lifeline, Britain could only fight for another seven or eight months. Provoking the Americans might lead to defeat, but, they pointed out, doing nothing would definitely lead to defeat. To hedge their bets, however, the Germans came up with the stagger
ingly bad idea of offering to bankroll a Mexican invasion of the United States. This was the final straw, and in April 1917 the Americans declared war on Germany.

  This was the moment of decision. The United States was throwing its weight behind Britain and France at the very moment that attrition and a focus on the east were beginning to work for Germany. By early 1917, Russia had lost three million dead (one-third of them civilians), and its army was disintegrating. A mutiny in March (known, thanks to the old-fashioned Russian calendar, as the February Revolution) overthrew the tsar, and the October Revolution (in November) brought Bolshevik agitators to power. Russians now turned to fighting each other, and Germany bullied the new Soviet Union into surrendering its non-Russian territories.

  This produced borders uncannily like those that followed the Soviets’ final collapse in 1991, except that in 1918, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States received assorted German royals as rulers. “German prestige,” explained Erich von Ludendorff (Germany’s quartermaster general and, by this point, virtual dictator), “demands that we should hold a strong protecting hand, not only over German citizens, but over all Germans.” This included Germans in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was now more or less a satellite of Berlin. Had Ludendorff won the war, a Greater Germany would have stretched from the English Channel to the Don Basin, which would surely have meant the end of the British globocop.

  Russia’s collapse freed up half a million Germans to fight in the west before the American flood could arrive. But even more important, the fighting in Russia also showed how to solve the fundamental problem of command and control.

  I have mentioned several times the military historian Victor Davis Hanson’s theory of a Western way of war, stretching from ancient Greece to modern Europe and America, which wins battles with “a single, magnificent collision of infantry.” What the Germans discovered in 1917, though, was a “modern system” of war-fighting (as the strategist Stephen Biddle calls it) in which infantry does just the opposite, not colliding magnificently, but “reducing exposure to hostile fire”; seeking not concentration and shock but “cover, concealment, [and] dispersion.”

  This modern way of war once again revolutionized military affairs. It tapped into the energies of people’s war by pushing initiative down the ranks, into the hands of noncommissioned officers and even individual storm troops (as Germans called the new kind of soldier). Given proper training, these men could be relied on to exercise their own initiative without officers around to drive them forward. Small groups would sneak across no-man’s-land, rushing through the killing fields by exploiting shell holes, tree stumps, and whatever other cover survived (Figure 5.6).

  Figure 5.6. To the green fields beyond: German storm troops infiltrating through the ruined French village of Pont-Arcy, May 27, 1918

  Storm troops carried light but powerful weapons—the first submachine guns and flamethrowers—but the modern way of war was not about technology. It was about surprise. Instead of intense shelling, giving the game away, attacks now opened with short blasts of gas, enough to sow confusion among defenders scrambling to fit their masks (“Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling, / Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time”), but not enough to give them time to prepare for what was coming. The storm troops then infiltrated into the trenches, bypassing well-organized defenders and crawling forward to find command posts and artillery. These they hit hard, decapitating the enemy organization and throwing everything into confusion. For most of the defenders, the first sign of trouble was shooting coming from behind them.

  By then, a second wave of Germans was already assaulting the strong-points left behind by the first, but when all went well, this was not even necessary. Surrounded, getting no orders, and with no idea where the real battle was happening, armies regularly ran away or gave up. A British officer who had been on the receiving end of the new German tactics called the effect “strategic paralysis.” “To attack the nerves of an army, and through its nerves the will of its commander,” he learned, “is more profitable than to batter to pieces the bodies of its men.”

  The first time the Germans tried storm-troop warfare, at Riga in September 1917, the entire Russian line collapsed. At Caporetto in Italy six weeks later, the panic (immortalized in Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms) was even more overwhelming. At one point, one German lieutenant—Erwin Rommel—captured fifteen hundred Italians with the help of just five of his own men. In all, a quarter of a million Italians surrendered, and the Germans and Austrians surged forward sixty miles.

  These, though, were just rehearsals. By the end of 1917, the only thing that mattered was caving in the Western Front before too many Americans arrived. Ludendorff saw no option but to bet the house on breaking the British line, pushing the globocop’s troops back into the Channel ports, and driving the French to the negotiating table. In March 1918, he rolled the dice one last time.

  Just two days into the attack, the British Fifth Army folded. Thousands of men threw away their rifles and ran, leaving thousands more behind them, permanently (Figure 5.7). The kaiser gave every schoolchild in Germany a victory vacation, but unlike at Riga or Caporetto, this time the defenders kept their heads and rushed reserves into the gap. As the German advance slowed to a crawl, Ludendorff attacked a new section of the line, and in early May the British position was once more critical. “With our backs to the wall,” the order came down, “and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end … There must be no retirement.”

  Figure 5.7. Some corner of a foreign field that is forever England: British dead at Songueval, March 1918

  There was in fact quite a lot of retirement, but the British again blunted the attacks. Ludendorff made another push, pressing the French so hard that Americans, fresh from the Atlantic crossing, had to be thrown in. The French fell back, recommending that the U.S. Marines follow them, only to receive the immortal reply: “Retreat? Hell, we just got here.” The position held. Ludendorff had lost.

  It was now the Germans who buckled under the weight of attrition. Each side lost around half a million men in the spring of 1918, and a hor rendous new enemy, Spanish influenza, was raging through both armies (the H1N1 virus probably evolved in crowded army camps in 1917–18 and killed fifty million to a hundred million people by the end of 1919). But while the Allies could replace their casualties—700,000 Americans were already in France, with twice as many more on the way—Germany could not. The Anglo-Franco-American alliance planned huge new offensives for 1919, talking of parachute drops far behind German lines and armored breakouts using thousands of tanks (although whether the planes and tanks of 1919 were up to this remains an open question), but in the end Britain’s old Plan B—of starving the enemy into submission—beat these grandiose schemes to the finish line. In the fall of 1918, famine gripped Germany. Soldiers and sailors mutinied. Bolsheviks seized cities. Civil war began.

  At the front, German soldiers began giving up in huge numbers. Americans netted 13,251 in a single day, and between April and October 1918 the German army shrank by a million men. Ludendorff had a breakdown at the end of September; the kaiser fired him and then fled into exile. Finally, on November 11, the shooting stopped on the Western Front. “At eleven o’clock this morning,” Prime Minister David Lloyd George told Parliament, “came to an end the cruellest and most terrible war that has ever scourged mankind. I hope we may say that thus, this fateful morning, came to an end all wars.”

  Peace Without Victory

  Why was Lloyd George so badly wrong? Some blame the Treaty of Versailles for being too harsh, leaving Germany seeking revenge. Others blame it for being too soft, leaving Germany intact instead of reversing its 1871 unification. Others still blame the U.S. Congress for refusing to ratify the treaty or Britain and France for scheming to exploit it. The truth, though, is much simpler. Real peace required a strong globocop.

  Germany had not gotten the counterproductive war it wanted, which wo
uld have broken up the European alliance against it and crippled the British globocop, but neither had Britain gotten a productive war restoring its pre-1870 prominence. Britain came out of the war virtually untouched by shot, shell, or bomb, with an economy second only to the United States’, with the largest fleet in the world, and, after gobbling up various German colonies, with an empire that ruled roughly a quarter of the planet. But the price of victory had been ruinous. More than a third of a millennium had passed since Pepys had grumbled that “want of money puts all things, and above all things the Navy, out of order,” but it was even truer in 1919 than it had been in 1661. Britain’s debts were twice as large as its gross national product. They were smaller than the burden the nation had borne after the wars against Napoleon, to be sure, but in 1815 Britain had been the world’s only industrializing economy, and in 1919 it was not. Nineteenth-century Britain, its GDP growing by leaps and bounds, had steadily paid down its debt, but trying to repeat that feat in the twentieth century by slashing spending and raising taxes only brought on recession.

  By 1921, British unemployment was over 11 percent, and inflation passed 21 percent. Strikes wasted eighty-six million workdays, and the economy—which had shrunk by nearly a quarter since the war ended (Figure 5.8)—was smaller than it had been in 1906. Deep spending cuts drove the chief of the Imperial General Staff to despair that “in no single theatre are we strong enough—not in Ireland, nor England, nor on the Rhine, nor in Constantinople, nor Batoum, nor Egypt, nor Palestine, nor Mesopotamia, nor Persia, nor India.” Unable to fund its fleet, Britain accepted naval parity with the United States in 1922, achieved by voluntarily scrapping more ships than the Royal Navy had ever lost in a battle. “We cannot alone act as the policeman of the world,” the leader of the Conservative Party conceded.