To Arms
Page 53
The Russians were slow to realize what was afoot. Ruzskii emphasized the non-existent danger in East Prussia. The 10th army was therefore supported on its left, around Mlawa and north of Warsaw, by the 1st, under Rennenkampf. The 2nd and 5th armies in Poland were delayed by Ruzskii’s caution and by their ongoing supply problems. Stavka endorsed the South-West Front’s priority, that of defeating the Austro-Hungarians, but without consistency. The 4th army, advancing in southern Poland, was allocated to Ruzskii’s front, so that the latter might have overall co-ordination of the invasion of Germany. The effect was to weaken Ivanov’s Front in its battle with the Austrians. Reports of a German concentration around Thorn, received from 10 November, were disregarded both by the North-West Front and by Stavka. The Grand Duke’s attention remained focused on his own planned advance, timed to begin on 14 November and aimed at the railway, running southwards from Ostrovo inside the length of the German frontier. Not until the night of the 16th did the North-West Front halt its attack and begin to regroup to meet Mackensen.
Thus, the 9th army made good progress. Frost hardened the ground. The Vistula acted as a flank guard for the German left. Rennenkampf had detached only one corps to the south or left bank of the Vistula; the 2nd army contributed another. But communications between the two armies were not firmly established and, by striking at their hinge, Mackensen exploited their lack of coordination. The Germans broke through, detached a single corps to observe Rennenkampf, and pressed on towards Lodz with their remaining four, covering 80 kilometres in four days. On 14 November Scheidemann, commanding the 2nd Russian army, began to redeploy, changing front to his right and so facing north, flanking Mackensen’s advance up the left bank of the Vistula. But Plehve’s 5th army continued with its westward advance until the 16th. Although Rennenkampf had thrown an additional corps across the Vistula on 12 November, the remainder of the 1st army stayed out to the north. Scheidemann’s army faced defeat in detail.151 By the 18th Mackensen had encircled Lodz and with it four Russian corps. That morning the Germans intercepted a message ordering the Russians to retreat from Lodz. Another German victory seemed imminent.
Blame for what had happened so far, and credit for what followed, was hotly disputed by the Russian generals. Stavka, the North-West Front, and the army commanders each rejected the former and claimed the latter. The dispute is itself indicative of the continuing divisions and rivalries within the Russian command. What happened was what ought to have happened. The 2nd army held fast and its southern neighbour, the 5th, by dint of determined marching, regrouped around it. The South-West Front continued to attack, so pinning the Central Powers and preventing any further deployment in support of Mackensen. On the night of 18 November Plehve’s 5th army struck the right wing of the German envelopment, so buttressing Scheidemann’s left. Thus the Germans were no longer pursuing a retreating and defeated enemy, as Ludendorff imagined, but were facing a position of considerable strength. Lodz was base to both the 2nd and the 5th armies; the Russians, close to their supplies, mustered twice the numbers possessed by Mackensen.
Rennenkampf’s 1st army, however, could not move as fast as Plehve’s. Blooded by Mackensen’s initial breakthrough, it was kept back from the German left. The latter was therefore free to move east and then south of Lodz, in order to cut off the Russian retreat and so complete the German victory. The battle that followed was immensely confused, almost continuous, and conducted in freezing temperatures and limited visibility. On a 40-kilometre front there were eight separate fighting lines, back to back or face to face.152 By 21 November Scheffer’s XXV reserve corps, the left wing of the German envelopment, had stuck fast, deep in the Russian defences to the south-east of Lodz, and still 32 kilometres from the German right.
Ober Ost had sent orders to Scheffer not to go so far, but to halt north-east of Lodz and hold Skiernievitse and Lovich, thus blocking any Russian relief from Warsaw. The orders never reached their destination.153 Therefore the route from the north-east into Lodz remained open. Rennenkampf, jockeyed into activity by Ruzskii, directed one group from Lovich on 20 November and another from Skiernievitse on the 21st, to cut off Scheffer’s retreat. A major Russian victory seemed to be in the offing: the envelopers would themselves be enveloped. Danilov ordered up the transport for 50,000 prisoners. But the Skiernievitse force was too weak to make any progress. The advance of the Lovich group was limited to between 10 and 15 kilometres a day. Freezing conditions and heavy snow did not help. Once again, however, the real problem was the Russian command. At 6 p.m. on 20 November Rennenkampf, dismayed at the Lovich group’s slow start, replaced its commander. The new man was insufficiently briefed on the overall situation; communications with 1st army headquarters were poor. On the 21st the commander of the Lovich group was changed once again, this time by Ruzskii. The force was divided, half to reinforce the 2nd army and half to move south-east against Scheffer. Finally, on 2 December, the Lovich group took possession of Brezeziny and Strykoff, east of Lodz. Scheffer’s corps and its attendant formations were cut off. That evening they were ordered to retreat.
After the action was over, Ruzskii blamed Rennenkampf for the Russian failure to secure the victory which now seemed theirs. ‘In the army commanded by General Rennenkampf chaos reigned,’ he claimed, not without justification. ‘The troops marched without specific objectives; the direction of march was constantly changed; the troops were driven hither and thither and never received orders.’154 When considered in conjunction with Rennenkampf’s conduct of the East Prussian campaign, much of the mud thrown at the commander of the 1st army was bound to stick. But in doing so it obscured Ruzskii’s own failings. The initial weakness at the hinge of the 1st and 2nd armies had been his. Now it was his task to co-ordinate the manoeuvres around Lodz. The Lovich group, which barred Scheffer’s escape, was weak, the 5th Siberian division having suffered 70 per-cent losses and the 6th being exhausted by its efforts. However, units of the 5th army were fast approaching the Lovich group’s right flank. If the Front command had relayed this information via the 1st army, as it could have done, perhaps the Lovich group would have held. As it was, Scheffer broke through the 6th Siberian division on 23 and 24 November, and escaped north-westwards to be reunited with the main body of Mackensen’s army. The achievement of Scheffer’s men—who took with them 10,000 prisoners—was immense; it was indicative of the psychological superiority which German troops (even, in this case, reservists) had established over Russian. But it also confirmed a sense of inferiority higher up. Despite the crushing numerical superiority which his Front enjoyed, on 22 November Ruzskii planned to withdraw the 1st, 2nd, and 5th armies to a line running from Mlawa to Lovich and Tomashoff.155 The belief in German superiority was clearly flowing in two directions, not only from front to rear, but from rear to front.
Danilov checked Ruzskii from immediate action. Thus, the battle of Lodz could be seen as a draw. But ultimately Ruzskii’s view prevailed. Lodz had proved the validity of Russian pre-war planning: no advance from Poland into Germany was possible unless the East Prussian flank was first secure. Danilov argued at the end of November that the Russians were strong enough to set about doing this. Ruzskii disagreed. Russian superiority in numbers was not matched by Russian munitions. Shell shortage, reported as acute even before the advance into Poland, although probably exaggerated then, was real enough by late November. The opportunity for a Russian advance after Lodz was, in any case, fleeting. The Ypres battle over, the German strength in Poland was gradually built up. On 6 December the Russians abandoned Lodz to the Germans. Ruzskii took up positions along the rivers Bzura and Ravka, 56 kilometres west of Warsaw. The shorter line allowed the creation of a compact defensive position: the three divisions of Gourko’s VI corps, which had embraced a 40-kilometre front at the end of November, were now reduced to one of 15 kilometres.156 The North-West Front could re-equip and recuperate.
Ruzskii’s decision to fall back and consolidate raised once again the danger to the South-West Front’s northe
rn flank if it continued its offensive westwards towards Cracow. Conrad’s decision to pull Böhm-Ermolli’s 2nd army out of the Carpathians and north to the Silesian frontier, so as to allow the 9th German army’s advance on Lodz, only increased the apparent validity of Ivanov’s worries. But Brusilov urged his Front commander to attend to his southern flank, not his northern. The release of Böhm-Ermolli’s army was facilitated by the defensive strength of the line of the Carpathians. As the 3rd Russian army, on the right flank of Brusilov’s 8th, once again pushed towards Cracow in November, its southern flank lay exposed to the remaining Austrian troops occupying the Carpathians, Pflanzer-Baltin’s group and Boroevic’s 3rd army. The lack of material felt on Ruzskii’s Front began to worry the armies of Ivanov. On 10 November one corps of Brusilov’s army, together with the 11th army, resumed the siege of Przemysl. Two further corps were pulled west and north to support the 3rd army before Cracow. Only a single corps, in the first instance, and the besiegers of Przemysl in the second guarded the southern flank of the over-extended advance of the South-West Front.157
Conrad was beleaguered. The renewed threat to Hungary provoked Tisza to echo criticisms already prevalent among some army commanders. The incorporation of the 1st Austro-Hungarian army in Germany’s Polish operations had resulted first in a request for its transfer to Hindenburg, and then, at the beginning of November, in a suggestion that a joint Austro-Hungarian/Ger-man command be established for Poland and Galicia. Conrad’s defence—that Austro-German relations on the eastern front were bedevilled by the fact that the 9th German army had to route its communications via OHL at Mézières— was rendered less strong by the creation of Ober Ost. In September a joint command had been likely to see the elevation of Conrad at Hindenburg’s expense; by November the reverse applied. Archduke Friedrich would be the nominal head, with Ludendorff as his chief of staff. Franz Joseph was both keen on the proposal and ready to see Conrad as the casualty of its implementation. Only the continued support of Archduke Friedrich saved the chief of the general staff, and in keeping Conrad Austria-Hungary rejected its military subordination to its ally.158
Ivanov’s belief that the South-West Front was about to achieve a breakthrough gave Conrad the opportunity both to refurbish his reputation and to carry off the sort of envelopment operation which so tickled his fancy. At the beginning of December the 4th Austro-Hungarian army attacked south of Cracow, and the 3rd struck towards Sanok, south-west of Przemysl on the San. Brusilov’s 8th army regrouped to cover its flank, and the 3rd Russian army fell back from Cracow in conformity. Although it was the thrust of Boroevic’s 3rd army which had checked the Russians, the attack by elements of the 4th on the rear of the Russian 3rd army south-east of Cracow, and driving south to north from Limanova-Laponow, was what Conrad himself highlighted. AOK, desperate to claim an Austrian victory, trumpeted its success south of Cracow, and claimed that Austria-Hungary itself was now secure. In practice, the Austrians were not able to exploit their success. At the year’s end Ivanov counter-attacked and Boroevic’s army and the right-wing of the 4th army fell back to the high ground of the Carpathians.
Thus, 1914 closed with the eastern front in a condition as static as that of the west. The line rested for much of its length on natural obstacles—on the Carpathians, on the Dunajec, on the Vistula. But the trenches themselves lacked great sophistication. The hard weather made excavation difficult. The length of the front, double that of the western front, meant that it lacked the density of troops characteristic of France and Belgium. Firepower encouraged dispersion and breadth, and so in operational terms troops lacked the concentration and mass needed to effect a decision. In the east 1.5 German divisions occupied a front that would have been held by five divisions in the west.159 Moreover, the poverty of communications rendered rapid reinforcement harder to achieve, and so counters to enemy penetrations were slower to take effect. The lack of movement in the east was therefore less the product of defensive strength, as it was in the west, than of exhaustion. The battles of the eastern front in 1914 had been characterized by all the mobility and decisiveness which pre-war thinking had led generals to expect. That these battles had not produced a strategic outcome was not so much the product of operational problems as of broader considerations—of Germany’s prior commitment to another front, of Austria-Hungary’s efforts in Serbia, of French pressures on Russia. Mobile warfare in the tactical conditions of 1914 was enormously costly. In the first two years of the war the Russians captured more Germans than did the British and French combined. Therefore the stagnation that gripped both fronts in December 1914 was similar only at a superficial level. All the armies needed to retrench and rethink. All saw the lack of movement as temporary. However, the conditions which made this assumption incorrect in the west did not apply in the east. The battles of 1915 on the eastern front were to be as full of incident and fluidity as those of 1914; those on the western front were not.
5
THE WAR IN NORTHERN WATERS 1914–1915
PREPARING FOR WAR
The development of the British Expeditionary Force from 1906, its orientation towards Europe rather than the empire from 1910, the apparent triumph of Henry Wilson’s continentalism at the Committee of Imperial Defence in 1911—all these generate a sense of creeping inevitability about British military support for France, of the primacy of land operations over sea, that is doubly distorting.
In the first place, it gives undue emphasis to hindsight. That a continental commitment was one option open to Britain in 1914 was not in dispute; that it was the obvious one was much less clear. Hankey, the secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, wrote to Lord Esher on 31 July 1914: ‘The great question as to whether we shall do what our War Office friends want or not is, I believe, quite undecided, and it must be settled at the Cabinet and not here.’1 Indeed, the cabinet in the following days opted for what it thought was a naval war. For many, including Grey, the antithesis was in any case a false one: the commitment of Britain’s regular army to France did not mean that the nation’s major contribution would not be at sea. Naval and military strategies could be complementary in their effects, even if independent in their execution.
Secondly, land operations in Europe presented a choice only to ‘strategic man’. For the British people as a whole, for those not intimately versed in the diplomatic machinations of the previous decade, the navy was both historically and currently Britain’s pre-eminent fighting arm. It impinged directly on their lives in a way which a small professional army, committed to imperial policing, could not. Naval spending, having more than doubled between 1884 and the end of the century, doubled again by 1914. The rise in naval costs levelled off after 1906, but began again in 1909 thanks to the threat of fresh German building (in the event, a crisis manufactured out of faulty intelligence), worries about Austro-Hungarian construction in the Adriatic, and an end to economic recession; by 1914 annual naval spending stood at £48.7 million, and was due to rise to £51.5 million in 1914–15. The navy was paid for out of taxation, and by 1914 consumed a quarter of the total tax yield. Thus British sea-power was a means by which fixed capital was brought into circulation, and wealth redistributed; thus too, by 1914 Britain, unlike France or Germany, already had the machinery to pay for war out of income.2 The cost of the navy had a second, albeit more indirect, democratizing effect. The commitment to cheap food and the refusal to protect British agriculture, the symbols of liberalism’s attachment to free trade, made Britain disproportionately dependent on grain imports from overseas. Expenditure on the navy, as the protector of the nation’s trade routes, was thus an indirect subsidy for the population’s food supply.3 The disproportionate increase in naval spending up until 1905–6 and again after 1909 might have called both policies into question—the basic rate of income tax rose from 5d. in the pound in 1884 to 1s. 3d. in 1903, and the trade-off between food imports and naval costs became a bad bargain. But a growing navy had other beneficial effects on the economy. Its need to remain at
the forefront of new technology made it a force for innovation and investment in British engineering and British heavy industry. By 1913 one-sixth of the total British workforce—according to one presumably exaggerated but still significant calculation—was dependent on naval contracts.4 These links between the navy and the nation were kept active by a flair for publicity and propaganda that made nonsense of the idea of a ‘silent service’. The scare of 1909 was nurtured by the patriotic press and the Navy League to fuel appropriations for capital ship construction up until war itself.5 The fleet, not the army, was vital to both the perception and the reality of Britain’s status as a great power.
Throughout the century since Waterloo the Royal Navy had measured its capabilities by European yardsticks. Lord Roberts, the last ever commander-in-chief of the British army, and an advocate of the army’s primacy in continental strategy, argued in 1912 that the navy’s reach was global, and that particularly if Britain were free from the danger of invasion its ships should be so deployed. But, as Fisher recognized, Roberts missed the point. The withdrawal of the fleet to home waters rested on the premiss that its putative opponents were other industrialized nations. Similarly, the introduction of the Dreadnought, a step which for many was absurd since it rendered obsolescent all the navy’s existing ships, was mandatory for a power which aspired to dominate the oceans: British battleships had to lead the way in design and in technology. Neither pressure—the need to concentrate nor the need to innovate—was as great for the army, at least while its combat roles were confined to the imperial periphery. When the navy set itself the two-power standard in 1889 its targets were France and Russia; the army’s preoccupations were with Afghans and Dervishes.