by Hew Strachan
The demand for munitions generalized and made acute a problem that was more specific, in its operational implications as much as in its geographical incidence. Greater knowledge of what was really going on would have aided proper tactical analysis. Too often shell shortage acted as its substitute. It elevated material considerations over all others in the achievement of victory, denigrating training and instruction. It destabilized morale: soldiers without artillery regarded themselves as already defeated.47 And its circumvention demanded solutions that were much more multifaceted than simply that of increased production. In June 1915 one French general, Fayolle, questioned— in the privacy of his diary—whether, when shells did become available in abundance, breakthrough would then become possible.
To do that it will be necessary to knock out the enemy artillery. Is that really possible? If there are several successive lines of defence, the second sufficiently far in the rear to make it impossible to prepare simultaneously against them both, it is clear that there will have to be a pause and that everything will be begun afresh.48
Some generals appreciated, in line with Fayolle’s logic, that the most appropriate palliatives to shell shortage could be tactical rather than industrial. If methods of fighting were adopted that were less reliant on high explosive rather than more, then the edge would be taken off the crisis. In December 1914 the French 10th army ordered two twenty-minute gaps between three twenty-minute bursts of artillery fire; Fayolle himself, as a corps commander, preferred continuous fire, but with the heavy artillery preceding the 75 mms.49 Both aimed to limit consumption. For the British attack at Festubert on 16 May 1915, Birch, the 7th division’s artillery commander, devised a scheme using bluff and pauses so as to draw the Germans out of their shelters. He followed a three-minute bombardment with a two-minute pause, and then resumed with a two-minute bombardment.50 Thus, working within the context of restricted supplies generated tactical innovation.
Shell shortage may have been exaggerated in the winter of 1914–15, but belief in it as a conditioning phenomenon was real enough. It became the means by which failure could be rationalized and strategy justified. In the recriminations prompted by the setbacks of 1914–15 shell shortage generalized problems that were more specific, and gave objectivity to grievances that were frequently fuelled by no more than personal animus. The case of Austria-Hungary illustrated both of these tendencies.
On 18 September 1914 the Austrian commander on the Serb front, Potiorek, complained to Bolfras, the head of the emperor’s military chancellery, of a shortage of munitions. Austrian shell shortage was characterized by many of the features current elsewhere. Although Vienna seems to have learnt less from the use of artillery in the Balkan wars than did Paris or Berlin, its shell stocks— 800 rounds for each field gun—were not so very different from those of other armies. What made the Balkans significant as a precursor to the conditions of the First World War were their mountains, their passes, and their defiles. The geography of south-eastern Europe favoured positional warfare and defensive battles. Thus, the timing of Potiorek’s complaint, Austria-Hungary’s first major encounter with field fortifications, mirrors that of Joffre’s on the Marne. But although the Austrian War Ministry responded that it had no reserves of shell, Potiorek’s problems were not simply created by lack of stocks. The inadequacies of an outdated mountain gun had encouraged his artillery to put its faith in howitzers; thus, the shortage was greater in shells for the latter than the former. Secondly, pre-war calculations had pitched the consumption of small-arms ammunition at much higher levels than proved to be the case; so even Austria-Hungary had its own modified form of munitions abundance. And third was the issue of transport: when, in November, Potiorek renewed his offensive into Serbia his line of communications became extended over glutinous tracks, awash with melted snow. By the end of November munition wagons took four days to cover 20 kilometres. Even if the empire had been producing sufficient shells, Potiorek’s men would still have suffered shell shortage.
Potiorek could, therefore, have taken steps to ameliorate his position— tactically, by urging his troops to use what they had rather than call for what they did not have; operationally, by setting more limited objectives. But to do this would have required him to sacrifice quick strategic success. This he could not do, not just because of the political pressures for victory, but also because he wished to establish his personal primacy over Conrad von Hötzendorff, and to assert the priority of his own front over that of Galicia. Potiorek’s complaints infuriated Conrad on both counts: his appeal to Bolfras bypassed the army high command, and Conrad regarded Potiorek’s claim that the guns on the Russian front were being favoured over those on the Serb as false. Shell shortage became a fulcrum for their personal and professional rivalry. Ultimately it became the means by which Potiorek—thrice thwarted by the Serbs in five months— endeavoured to explain away his own failings as a commander.51
What was unusual about Potiorek’s expedients was their employment in the furtherance of rifts within the high command. Much more typical was their application by soldiers against outside bodies. Politically, shell shortage became the stick with which generals beat civil administrations: in Britain it was to be an agent in the fall of Asquith’s Liberal government in May 1915.
In these circumstances, shell shortage coloured discussions between soldiers and civilians in the winter of 1914–15. It was an important factor in the shaping of their decisions over strategy. Britain and France looked to Russia to take the principal burden in the fighting of the following year. Their eastern ally pleaded lack of munitions as a reason for being unable to mount an offensive before July.52 By then Germany’s concentration on the eastern front would turn such thoughts into pious hopes. But for Germany too a conditioning factor in their switch to the east was shell shortage. Lack of munitions had curbed operations in Flanders in November 1914; relative mobility on the Russian front in 1915 would make shell supply less critical.53
THE SHORT–WAR ILLUSION
On 1 November 1912 Moltke wrote to the Prussian War Ministry scotching the notion of a quick campaign culminating in decisive victory. ‘We must prepare ourselves,’ he went on, ‘for a long campaign, with numerous tough, protracted battles, until we defeat one of our enemies; the application of effort and the consumption of resources must increase, if we have to achieve victory in different theatres in west and east successively and have to fight with inferior forces against superior.’54
As Moltke was pleading for increased munitions production, he had a vested interest in making the case against the expectation of a short war. But his remarks were not at odds with sentiments he expressed elsewhere. Famously, he told the Kaiser in 1906, when he took up his appointment as chief of the general staff, that the next war ‘will not be settled by a decisive battle but by a long wearisome struggle with a country that will not be overcome until its whole national force is broken’; it would be ‘a war which will utterly exhaust our own people, even if we are victorious.55 He wrote in similar terms to his wife. And much that he did over the next nine years bore testimony to these convictions. The decision to bypass Holland, the caution in his undertakings to Austria-Hungary concerning the eastern front, the call for the creation of an economic general staff—all are evidence of his willingness to follow up his predictions with practical remedies.
It has become a truism of 1914 that men went off to fight in the expectation of a short war. But overstatement has led to misrepresentation. Many soldiers before 1914 anticipated that the next European war would be long. The fact that this was so is remarkable, not simply because it is at odds with the conventional wisdom concerning 1914. Optimism in the face of adversity is almost a requirement of successful command. Generals, after all, need to temper the rendering of sober advice in peacetime with sufficient faith in their own abilities and in the strengths of their armies to ensure victory if hostilities begin. The belief in the possibility of a quick war crowned by a triumphant denouement can be a basis for p
rofessional success. Rare indeed is the commander who allows his realism about the nature of war to become pessimism concerning its outcome or its duration. Moltke did, but Moltke was not alone in 1914. Professional wisdom on the likely nature of the First World War was remarkably uniform.
Kitchener was already predicting a war of three years in 1909. On 7 August 1914, at his first cabinet meeting as secretary of state for war, he repeated this view and then set about the creation of a mass army to give it effect. Typically, he did not vouchsafe to his colleagues in government the inner workings of his calculations. He later claimed to have been influenced by the American Civil War. But more immediate was his own experience in South Africa: in 1899 the Boers had no more been defeated by Christmas than the Germans would be in 1914.56 Kitchener was not an isolated voice in the army. Two of the 1914 corps commanders, whose careers would prosper thanks to the war’s length, were of a similar persuasion. One was Henry Rawlinson.57 The other, Douglas Haig, told the council of war held on 5 August that the war could last for years, and that the BEF should be the basis for the creation of an army of a million men.58
Across the Channel Joffre predicted a long war, albeit without Haig’s effort to be precise. In saying this, he was doing no more than reflect the teaching of Commandant Benneau at the École de Guerre in the 1880s,59 and the views of one of France’s most perceptive military theorists, General Langlois, expressed in 1911.60 In Morocco, Lyautey was in no hurry to leave when the war broke out. He reckoned that he could finish his work there and still have time to move to a major post (he already had the Ministry of War in mind) in the metropolis.61
Further east, Schemua, Conrad’s stand-in as chief of the general staff during the latter’s fall from grace, told Franz Joseph on 13 February 1912 that the next war would be a Volkskrieg: all industry would be mobilized in its prosecution and armies would fight until utterly broken. Certain quarters in the Austrian military press were of the same view.62 In Russia, the fragmentation and diversity of doctrine spawned by the war in Manchuria included powerful writers who warned against the ideal of short, sharp campaigns. General N. P. Mikhnevich, the chief of the main staff, saw advantages for Russia in a protracted war: ‘Time is the best ally of our armed forces’, he wrote in Strategifia in 1911. ‘Therefore, it is not dangerous for us to adopt “a strategy of attrition and exhaustion”, at first avoiding decisive combat with the enemy on the very borders.’ In taking this line he was opposed by General A. A. Neznamov, who— while affirming his faith in a short war—warned that firepower would dominate and that the decision would be reached, not in a single climactic engagement but in sequential battles of exhaustion. A theorist who became much better known after the war than he was before it, A. A. Svechin, pragmatically concluded in 1913 that armies should plan for an early victory but prepare for a protracted conflict.63
The military view that the war would be long and indecisive was rooted in three factors. First, the creation of armed alliances had made the swift victories of 1866 and 1870, achieved against single powers, unrepeatable. This was the basis of Moltke the elder’s gloomy forecast to the Reichstag in 1890. Echoing historical precedent, he warned of a war lasting seven or even thirty years. Caprivi, Bismarck’s successor as chancellor, was accordingly persuaded of the need to plan for a long war. In this respect, as in others, Moltke the younger was the heir to his uncle’s realism.64
Secondly, the adoption of universal military service enabled a state to draw on its full resources in the event of war while making it unlikely that it would go to war unless the cause was right. The vocabulary of social Darwinism, of cultural decline and regeneration, provided a framework within which such concepts could be subsumed and which made the prospect of early (or any) surrender remote.65 The combination of national mobilization and deeply felt motivation would prompt states to fight on until their reserves were exhausted. Both Wilhelm von Blume and Colmar von der Goltz, two of the most important German writers on strategy before 1914, recognized that in such circumstances victory would not be ceded easily or quickly.
Thirdly, most soldiers were sensitive to the implications of the revolution in firepower effected between 1871 and 1914. The advent of breech-loading rifles and quick-firing artillery, allied to field fortifications and barbed wire, pointed to the strength of the defence. Attackers committed to a frontal assault were unlikely to make rapid progress. Battle would be robbed of its decisiveness. Major-General Ernst Köpke, quartermaster-general on the German general staff, warned in 1895 that an attack on France’s eastern frontier by way of Nancy would soon resemble siege warfare: gains would be limited and there could be no expectation of quick, decisive victories.66 The Germans’ emphasis on operational envelopment sprang precisely from the awareness of possible tactical stalemate.
The problem for the German general staff was that it could not live with the implications of this logic. Protracted warfare implied not victory for Germany, but defeat. In terms of combined resources and of total manpower the Triple Alliance was inferior to the Triple Entente: if Italy did not fight and Austria-Hungary proved as militarily weak as the Germans feared, then the staying-power of a coalition would be an advantage enjoyed only by the enemy. Furthermore, the internal picture was as depressing as the external. The army’s self-appointed role as the bulwark of domestic order against socialism made it acutely sensitive to the strains which a long war would generate.67 Schlieffen thus found himself confronted with a contradiction between his strategic sense and the needs of national policy. The tension this created was reflected in his response to the tactical conditions prevailing in the Russo-Japanese War. ‘Out there in Manchuria’, he wrote,
they may face each other for months on end in impregnable positions. In Western Europe we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of waging a war in this manner. The machine with its thousand wheels, upon which millions depend for their livelihood, cannot stand still for long... We must try to overthrow the enemy quickly and then destroy him.68
Therefore Schlieffen’s advocacy of a short war sprang precisely from his recognition of the possibility of a long one. The best, indeed the only prospect of a German victory, given Germany’s confrontation by superior numbers, lay in a rapid campaign of annihilation. Such an outcome would, of course, endorse the amour propre of the army and the status of the general staff within it. Having embraced this conclusion, Schlieffen had to find evidence to support it. Unable to do so on the basis of recent military experience, he began to argue that the next war would be short because the structure of international trade and the mechanism for domestic credit could not enable it to be long. And so, in a circular process, he could fulfil his own professional need, as a strategist in the Napoleonic tradition, to plan for a short, decisive, and victorious war.69
But here he was in uncharted waters. The German general staff was no more geared for the formulation of grand strategy, embracing economics and politics, than was any other general staff of the day. Indeed, it was the narrowness of its thinking about war that enabled it to interpret Frederick the Great’s strategy in the Seven Years War in such radically different terms from its great academic critic, Hans Delbrück. Delbrück saw the wars of Frederick as a whole, spread over years, punctuated by battles that did not in the long run necessarily prove decisive: what he dubbed an Ermattungsstrategie, a strategy of attrition. When he shifted his gaze to the present, the strength of the tactical defensive served to confirm his grasp of this continuity. Schlieffen’s thinking, like the general staff’s history, saw each campaign as an independent operational undertaking. Thus, he could effectively shrink the coming war in Europe, and the apocalyptic imagery associated with it, to a single campaign against France, rationally conceived in the tradition of cabinet warfare.70
Schlieffen’s success as a propagandist for the idea of a short war created confusion. Moltke the younger could not abandon his predecessor’s plan for quick victory for exactly the same reasons that had led Schlieffen to adopt it in the first place. But a
t the same time Moltke could not delude himself as thoroughly as did Schlieffen. Thus, he ended up developing operational plans for a short war while urging civilian administrators to prepare for a long one. In doing so he achieved little more than to confirm his reputation for indecisiveness.71
The effects on Falkenhayn were even more ambivalent. It was Falkenhayn’s task, as minister of war, to respond to many of Moltke’s pre-war demands for greater preparation for a long war and for the industrial mobilization to sustain it. Ludendorff, as head of operations, seconded his chief in very similar terms,72 and these general staff views were echoed within Falkenhayn’s own ministry by Franz Wandel.73 Any lingering hesitation on the point entertained by either departmental head was quashed by Britain’s entry. On the night of 30/1 July 1914 Moltke told Hans von Haeften that if Britain joined the Entente nobody could foresee either the length or the outcome of the conflict.74 A few days later, and in the knowledge that Britain was indeed a belligerent, Falkenhayn tried to be more precise: speaking to an American diplomat, Henry White, he anticipated a war of three to four years.75 The Kaiser spoke in comparable terms to White’s superior, the American ambassador James Gerard, and neither Bethmann Hollweg nor Kurt Riezler dissented.76 While minister of war, Falkenhayn’s actions conformed to these prognostications. But when Falkenhayn himself became chief of the general staff he seemed determined to prove himself the worthy heir of the Schlieffen tradition in this respect as in others. The minister of the interior, Clemens von Delbrück, who before the war had been the subject of Moltke’s call for an economic general staff, once the war began found Falkenhayn particularly dismissive of the need for long-term planning. Similarly, in November and December 1914 Groener and Helfferich could not get the chief of the general staff to consider new railway construction on the grounds that the war would be over before it was complete.77