by Hew Strachan
THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Volume I
To Arms
THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Volume I
To Arms
HEW STRACHAN
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
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© Hew Strachan 2001
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First published 2001
First published in paperback 2003
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Strachan, Hew.
The First World War / Hew Strachan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: v. 1. To arms.
1. World War, 1914–1918. I. Title.
D521.S86 2001 940.3—dc21 00–057122
ISBN 0–19–820877–4 (hbk.)
ISBN 0–19–926191–1 (pbk.)
3 5 7 9 1 0 8 6 4
Typeset by Kolam Information Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
Ashford Colour Press Ltd,
Gosport, Hants
In memory of my grandfather, Captain F. W. Strachan, wounded, Givenchy,
14 January 1915; of his brother, Second-Lieutenant E. S. Strachan,
missing presumed killed, Loos, 14 October 1915; and of Major R. B. Talbot
Kelly, M C, wounded, Ypres, 5 August 1917
CONTENTS
LIST OF MAPS
INTRODUCTION
1. THE ORIGINS OF THE WAR
Germany as a World Power
Austria-Hungary and the Balkans
The July Crisis
2. WILLINGLY TO WAR
War Enthusiasm
Socialism and the International
The Imaginings of Intellectuals
Popular Responses
3. THE WESTERN FRONT IN 1914
War Plans
The Battle of the Frontiers
Problems, and Some Solutions
The Battle of the Marne
From the Aisne to the Yser
4. THE EASTERN FRONT IN 1914
War Plans
East Prussia
Serbia
Galicia
Poland
5. THE WAR IN NORTHERN WATERS, 1914–1915
Preparing for War
The North Sea, 1914–1915
6. WAR IN THE PACIFIC, 1914–1917
Oceanic Security and the Cruiser Threat
Japan Enters the War
The Cruise of the German East Asiatic Squadron
Empire in the Pacific
7. THE DARK CONTINENT: COLONIAL CONFLICT IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA
War in Africa
Togoland
The Cameroons
South-West Africa
East Africa, 1914–1915
East Africa, 1916–1918
8. TURKEY’S ENTRY
The Escape of the Goeben and the Breslau
Turkey’s Decision to Join the Central Powers
Turkey’s Capacity for War
9. GERMANY’S GLOBAL STRATEGY
Holy War
The Caucasus, 1914–1915
Suez, Egypt, and Libya
French North Africa
Persia and Afghanistan
India
10. FINANCING THE WAR
The Gold Standard
Financial Mobilization
The Loss of Budgetary Control
Taxation
Domestic Borrowing
Foreign Borrowing
11. INDUSTRIAL MOBILIZATION
Shell Shortage
The Short-War Illusion
Raw Materials, Munitions Production, and the Central Powers, 1914–1916
The Munitions Crisis and the Entente, 1914–1916
12. CONCLUSION: THE IDEAS OF 1914
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
LIST OF MAPS
1. Europe in 1914
Based on Randal Gray, Chronicle of the First World War 1914–1916 (Oxford, 1990), i.
2. The Balkan Peninsula in 1914
Based on The Times War Atlas and Gazetteer (London, n.d.)
3. The Western Front
Based on The Times War Atlas
4. Alsace and Lorraine
Based on The Times War Atlas
5. Brussels to the Rhine
Based on The Times War Atlas
6. The Vosges
Based on The Times War Atlas
7. Belgium and Northern France
Based on The Times War Atlas
8. Paris to Verdun
Based on The Times War Atlas
9. The Eastern Front
Based on The Times War Atlas
10. Russia and East Prussia
Based on The Times War Atlas
11. Serbia
Based on The Times War Atlas
12. Galicia
Based on The Times War Atlas
13. Poland
Based on The Times War Atlas
14. The North Sea and the Baltic
Based on Julian Corbett and Henry Newbolt, History of the Great War: Naval Operations, 5 vols. (London, 1920–31), i.
15. German Cable and Wireless Communications
Based on Marine-Archiv, Der Krieg zur See 1914–1918: Der Kreuzerkrieg in den ausländischen Gewässern, by E. Raeder and Eberhard von Mantey, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1922–37), i.
16. China and the Far East
Based on The Times War Atlas and Corbett, Naval Operations, i.
17. The Cruise of Von Spee’s East Asiatic Squadron
Based on Corbett, Naval Operations, i.
18. Togoland
Based on F. J. Moberly, Military Operations: Togoland and the Cameroons 1914–1916 (London, 1931)
19. The Cameroons
Based on Charles Lucas (ed.), The Empire at War, 5 vols. (London, 1921–6), iv.
20. South-West Africa
Based on Lucas, The Empire at War, iv.
21. East Africa
Based on Lucas, The Empire at War, iv.
; 22. East Africa: North Eastern Region
Based on Lucas, The Empire at War, iv.
23. The Mediterranean
Based on P. Halpern, Naval History of World War I (London, 1994)
24. The Ottoman Empire’s Railway Communications
Based on Marian Kent (ed.), The Great Powers and the End of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1984)
25. The Caucasus
Based on Allen and Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields
26. The Sarikamish Region
Based on Allen and Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields
27. The Suez Region
Based on George Macmunn and Cyril Falls, Military Operations: Egypt and Palestine, 2 vols. (London, 1928–30)
28. Egypt, Libya, and the Sudan
Based on Macmunn and Falls, Military Operations: Egypt and Palestine and The Times Atlas of the World (1980)
29. French North Africa
Based on The Times Atlas of the World
30. Persia and Afghanistan
Based on F. J. Moberly, Military Operations: Persia
31. India
Based on The Times Atlas of the World
INTRODUCTION
This book was commissioned, far too long ago, by Oxford University Press, as a one-volume replacement for C. R. M. F. Cruttwell’s A history of the Great War, first published in 1934 and regularly reprinted thereafter. One of its admirers, Tim Travers, has described his book and Liddell Hart’s The real war (1930) as the founding volumes of what he calls the ‘objective tradition’ in British military history.1 Cruttwell did indeed achieve a remarkable degree of detachment. Nonetheless, both Cruttwell and Liddell Hart were describing events in which they themselves had participated, albeit at a comparatively humble level, and whose consequences continued to affect them for the rest of their lives.
Having been born after the Second World War, I fancied that I belonged to an age-group that could at last claim some distance from the events of 1914–18. The films and fiction of my childhood drew their inspiration from the deeds of my father’s generation, not of my grandfather’s. As the twentieth century closed, few who fought on the Somme or at Ypres still survived. If part of a historian’s function is to put the events of the past into perspective, the ability to do so should increase year on year.
And yet I am not so untouched by the First World War as I once imagined. One of the three men to whose memory this volume is dedicated is my grandfather. On the birthdays and Christmases of my early childhood the postman would bring a box of W. Britain’s toy soldiers. These presents, ordered by my grandfather from Hamleys, were no doubt a formative influence. The army that I assembled as a result was not arrayed in khaki, steel helmets, and gas masks. These were not the soldiers of industrialized war but of Queen Victoria’s empire, clad in scarlet tunics and spiked helmets. My grandfather’s toy soldiers were the toys of his own childhood rather than a reflection of his experiences as an adult.
Herein lies a wholly understandable ambivalence. His London club was a military one and he used his army rank. His wife’s brothers embraced military careers, and he had met her through one of them, a fellow officer. But he was not a professional soldier. He had joined up in 1914 as a private in the London Scottish, and had gone to France in November, as one of a draft sent to make up the battalion’s losses at Messines. In the failing light of 21 December the London Scottish attacked Givenchy, and established a line on the edge of the village. They occupied it for four weeks, over Christmas and New Year, in rain and sleet, the overnight frosts followed in the morning by thaw and dampness. The routines of trench warfare, designed to manage a hostile environment, had not yet established themselves. The exchange of fire was continuous. 2 On 14 January 1915, three days before the London Scottish came out of the line, my grandfather was severely wounded in the lung. He was brought back to Britain, recovered, and, although deemed unfit for further active service, commissioned. While convalescing he heard the news of the death of his elder brother, a New Army subaltern aged 36, reported as missing at Loos on 14 October 1915. Although he never served with them again, he remained a devoted London Scot. Shortly before his death my mother (and his daughter-in-law) discovered his kilt, now moth-eaten but its hodden grey stained with blood. She suggested that I might like to have it. His response was to consign it to the fire.
At school I was taught to draw by R. B. Talbot Kelly. ‘T.K.’ was famous as a bird painter, his watercolours and washes capturing geese in flight or waders picking their way along the shore. He offered to teach me to draw birds, but I wanted to paint soldiers. Much to my surprise, he acquiesced. T.K. had been commissoned from Woolwich into the Royal Artillery in 1915; his first career was that of a soldier rather than of an artist, though no doubt his experiences as a forward observation officer in 1915–16 honed his eye for landscape. Although I tended to depict the same sorts of soldiers as those toys my grandfather had given me, T.K. showed me his own watercolours of the First World War. The sketches which he made at the front were worked up into larger pictures later. At the time the BBC had begun its pioneering documentary series The Great War, broadcast in 1964 for the fiftieth anniversary of its outbreak.3 T.K. appeared in it, stressing, on the screen as he did in private life, the intensity of the experience and his gratitude for having undergone it. Later I came to interpret these responses as those of an old man, remembering his youth and endowing it with a romance that it may never have possessed in reality. But I was wrong. In 1980 T.K.’s memoir of the war, illustrated with some of his own pictures, was published posthumously as A subaltern’s odyssey. The book revealed that his enthusiasm for war expressed itself as forcefully in letters to his family in 1916 as it had been to me fifty years later. 4
Thus my first impressions of the western front were not derived from the war memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon or the poetry of Wilfred Owen. They came later. Indeed, it required the combination of Benjamin Britten’s War requiem (1961) and student outrage at America’s involvement in Vietnam to elevate Owen to canonical status. Today in Britain most schoolchildren learn about the war through its literary legacy. The differences in approach are profound. The war’s association with adventure, excitement, courage, and even purpose has been replaced by its connotations of suffering, waste, and tragedy. In truth, as my grandfather recognized—at least implicitly—neither is exclusive of the other.
Moreover, these themes are, by virtue of their metaphysical nature, universal and timeless. The emphasis on the experience of the war has made it more immediate than could any discussion of grand strategy or industrial mobilization. Or at least, that was the case in the 1970s and 1980s. But the end of the Cold War gave even the political events of 1914–18 a relevance. The First World War broke the Austro-Hungarian empire, and so unleashed the nationalisms of south-eastern Europe, creating volatility in the inter-war period and chronic instability at the century’s end. The result has been to clothe the Habsburgs not only with nostalgia but even with far-sightedness. From the collapse of another empire, that of Russia, emerged the Soviet Union, a child not just of revolution but of the war itself. The end of communism in 1989–90 gave birth to the notion of the ‘short’ twentieth century, an idea which brings the war closer, at times making it seem even more relevant to our lives today than the events of 1939–45.
Thus, the fact that my approach to the war has changed is in part a reflection of the length of time it has taken me to write this volume. It is now much longer than Cruttwell’s. Some explanations, if not excuses, are required.
The major general histories of the war in English available in the 1980s were, above all, military histories, narrowly defined. Even Cruttwell, by training a historian of international relations, devoted, according to Liddell Hart’s calculations, only 16 per cent of his book to non-military aspects.5 Therefore, when I began my own work I assumed that I could take as read the military history of the war. My task was to graft on to it the historiographical developments of the 1960s and 1970s—the war’s social histo
ry, the debate on causes and war aims, the mobilization of the economies. That agenda remains. But I also soon discovered the omissions in the English-language military histories of the war.
Liddell Hart’s is more important than Cruttwell’s in understanding the background. ‘For most of the world’, according to H. G. Wells in his novel of 1916, Mr Britling sees it through, the war ‘came as an illimitable multitude of incoherent, loud, and confusing expressions.’ However, Mr Britling, Wells’s semi-autobiographical hero, spent its early weeks ‘doing his utmost to see the war, to simplify it and extract the essence of it until it could be apprehended as something epic and explicable, as a stateable issue’.6 Of course, he failed. But in 1930 Liddell Hart succeeded. Much of his agenda still preoccupies English-language historians. The real war posed as an objective analysis of military operations. In truth it is a sustained critique of the British high command, and its purpose is more didactic than historical. Recent scholars have done much to answer Liddell Hart, using primary sources to confirm him when he was right, to correct him when he was wrong, and above all to write analyses that are more dispassionate without being apologetic. The result is that today our understanding of Britain’s conduct of the war on land is probably more profound than it is for that of any other belligerent.
But in pursuing this story British military historians have corrected only one of Liddell Hart’s failings, and in doing so have still marched to the beat of his drum. They have not broken the bounds of his own Anglocentricism. A major premiss of this volume is that the First World War was global from its outset, and its treatment aims to reflect that. Those geared to the biases of the anglophone tradition will find the western front less dominant than they have come to expect, and the British army’s role within it (especially for this early stage of the war) correspondingly reduced.
The real war concludes with a long and comprehensive bibliography in a range of languages. It conveys the impression that it is an authoritative synthesis of the literature on the war then available. In reality Liddell Hart could not read German, and there is little evidence that he used what had been published in French. Moreover, by 1930 the main official histories of the war had got no further than the year 1914; neither the British nor German histories of land operations were completed until after 1939. One of the delights of my own research has been discovering the variety and richness of the publications of the inter-war period. The Carnegie series on the war’s social and economic history remains unsurpassed. No subsequent French publications on the military history of the war begin to overtake in importance the serried ranks of Les Armées françaises dans la grande guerre, with its supplementary volumes of documents. And the availability, since the end of the Cold War, of the working papers of the Reichsarchiv, the body responsible for the German official history, has done much to confirm the value of its published work. The reluctance to use the inter-war German histories on the grounds that they are tainted by Nazism is not only chronological nonsense in some cases (much was in print before 1933) but also an absurd self-denying ordinance, given the destruction of the bulk of the German military archives in 1945. The Reichsarchiv historians saw material we can never see; not to refer to their output is a cloak for little more than laziness or monolingualism.