A NEW KIND OF WARFARE
Norman Stone
guardian.co.uk
Wednesday November 12 2008 00.01 GMT
Things had gone well for Britain in the Napoleonic wars, and the
government expected the same strategy to work in 1914. But its plans
proved inadequate at this dawn of a new era, writes Norman Stone
The Guardian, Signing of the Russo-Teuton Peace Parley at Brest
Litovsk.
"World war" is something of a misnomer because this was overwhelmingly
a European war, with sideshows elsewhere. The European states had
their empires, and there were collisions in the Pacific and Africa,
where an extraordinary German commander, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck,
managed to invade Zambia two days before the armistice of 1918. Japan
and China became involved, seizing German concessions, and at the
end, in 1918, Latin American states were queuing up to declare war
on Germany so as to join the victors. But equivalents to such things
had happened even in the middle of the 18th century, not least with
Napoleon, whose doings reached from ValparaÃso to Cairo and Riga.
Portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte. Image: Alamy The shadow of Napoleon
fell heavily over the first years of the first world war. From a
Whitehall perspective, he had in the end lost for various reasons
relevant to 1914.
The Royal navy had speedily wiped the floor with the French one. Then,
the British had used their money to pay other armies, especially the
Russians, to do the land fighting. They had made the money in part
because, via blockade, they had stopped France and her allies from
trading with the outside world, and had thus deprived Napoleon of
essential goods while at the same time amassing large monopolistic
profits for themselves. They had also weakened the French army with
amphibious pinpricks, the largest of these in the Iberian peninsula,
the "Spanish ulcer". Finally, the French army had frozen in the
snows of Russia. Why not try this again? That model was in the
ultra-historical brain of Winston Churchill, then in charge of the
Admiralty.
It did not fit. In the first place, there was not going to be a
Trafalgar to destroy the German navy. Of course, all wars turn out
rather differently from expectations, but the gap, in the case of 1914,
was enormous. Before 1914 the Germans had spent one-third of their war
budget and the British almost all of theirs on battleships, of huge
weight and gunnery. But they were vulnerable to torpedoes and mines,
and the German high seas fleet only emerged for an afternoon in the
North Sea, on May 31 1916, for a great clash known as the Battle of
Jutland. More British ships were sunk than German, but German losses
were in proportion higher, so the battle was called off.
The great pre-war naval race between Great Britain and Germany turned
out to be, with very severe competition, the greatest waste of money
in the history of warfare.
Perverse story
Blockade was another perverse story. German exports were indeed
stopped, and British ones took their place: of all oddities, the
only year in statistically recorded time when the British had a
balance of trade surplus occurred in 1915-16. But that diverted the
British economy towards world trade; meanwhile, it freed up German
resources for proper war production, which got going faster than
on the Allied side. As for imports, the Germans could always take
in what they needed through neutral countries, especially Holland,
and if there were bottlenecks, the extraordinary advance of science
could find ways round. Germany could not get Chilean nitrates for
fertiliser or explosives. Instead, through the Haber-Bosch process,
she got them from the nitrogen of the air.
The greatest element in the Napoleonic model was of course Russia. Here
was a population of 120 million and therefore, in theory, a huge
army. Russia had had conscription since 1874. However, the expense of
feeding and clothing all those young peasants was too much for the
budget, and huge numbers – two-thirds – of them had to be exempted
for various reasons: if they were "breadwinners", for instance – ie
married. Two million young men got married in August 1914, to the great
bewilderment of elderly men in the war ministry. One immediate result
of this was that Russia had no more trained soldiers (five million)
than did Germany, with a much smaller population. The Germans had to
deal with France, which took two-thirds of their soldiers, but they
had the Austro-Hungarian empire as an ally, so the Central Powers’
forces in the east were not significantly fewer than Russia’s, except
at the outset.
Poor communications
When the war started, the pattern of the eastern front was set in
the first battles. To help the French, there was an immediate Russian
attack on East Prussia: two armies to one, the German Eighth. Russia
had been making considerable strides in the pre-war years, but there
were still great weaknesses: two-thirds of the men in the railway
battalions were illiterate, and the telegraph network was so primitive
that messages were delivered by motorcar, in bundles taken from the
central office in Warsaw. Command and control broke down, whereas
on the German side there was a railway link that could transfer
the Eighth army to destroy one of the Russian armies in isolation,
at the Battle of Tannenberg at the end of August.
On the Austrian front, however, it was the other way about. The
Austrians were also weak in terms of men, and they made things worse
for themselves by making an immediate muddle. Their war had broken
out because of Serbia, and nearly half of their army went off south to
deal with it. When Russia intervened, much of it then had to puff its
way very slowly across the Hungarian plains back to the Russian front
in southern Poland, and arrived too late. At the battle of Lemberg
(now Lviv) they were forced out of southern Poland with a loss of
500,000 men. Meanwhile, their force against Serbia was too weak for
the job, and was also defeated.
German diversion
This set the pattern. The German high command wanted above all to win
in the west, the decisive front, and resented diversion. But they could
not very well let Austria collapse, and besides, they had acquired an
even weaker ally in the shape of Ottoman Turkey, which also required
support. They were therefore compelled to send troops east, and in
1915 had the best year of the war from their point of view. From
early summer, the over-extended and badly supplied Russian army was
struck from north and south, and had to retreat out of Poland, losing
Warsaw in August. Two months later, an Austro-German force knocked
out Serbia, and brought Bulgaria into the war; there was now a land
route directly to Turkey.
Enver Pasha, Turkish minister for war, in 1914. Photo: Hulton Archive
Here had been another of Churchill’s Napoleonic themes. The Turkish
empire was vulnerable on all fronts, weak, and yet holding one of
the war’s greatest prizes, the oil of the Middle East. Enver Pasha,
the dominant figure in the regime at Constantinople, had gambled on
Germany being unbeatable (his army had been trained by an efficient
German military mission). In return for German help (the sale of
two battleships, which gave Turkey naval safety in the Black Sea)
he attacked Russia in the Caucasus, and lost an army. There had also
been a failed attack on the Suez canal, and the British were starting
to invade Iraq. On top of everything else, there was a rising of the
Armenian population in eastern Turkey. It all looked like collapse.
Failure at Constantinople
In March 1915, the British and French tried to force their way
with battleships through the Dardanelles Straits, leading towards
Constantinople.
That failed, because mines and shore guns sank or disabled six ships,
but the rest were deterred by German submarines from going out of
safe harbours.
The army had a go, and in late April troops landed on the Gallipoli
peninsula. They expected the Turks to run away, but that was not
a Turkish custom; instead the Turks held on, and the Allies faced
crippling difficulties, not least with dysentery and a shortage
of water.
In January 1916 they had to withdraw, in the only efficient operation
of the campaign (the army was so mean that it had not even paid for
mosquito screens on the windows, and an infected bite killed Rupert
Brooke). There was only one place for the withdrawn soldiers to go:
Salonia in northern Greece, also an insanitary place – where, as it
happened, the remnants of the Serbian army had collected. There, the
Allies were faced by a Bulgarian army, but logistical difficulties were
not overcome until 1918, so the Allied forces sat inactive. Another
push against Turkey, this time in Iraq, also fizzled out in woeful
circumstances at Kut el Amara south of Baghdad, where a British
division surrendered to the Turks in May 1916. Campaigns there and
in Palestine were later organised by better generals, but these were
not fully effective until the summer of 1917.
In 1915 there was another wash-out: Italy. Here, too, there were
Napoleonic reminiscences, the great man having won some of his greatest
battles fighting the north Italian cause against the Austrians. In
spring 1915 the Italians concluded that the Austrians were collapsing,
that they could gain much territory on both sides of the Adriatic,
and that if they were really prompt, the British would let them have
an empire in the Aegean as well, at Turkey’s expense.
But attacking the Austrians was easier said than done: most of the
common frontier was impassably mountainous, and there was only a
50-mile strip on the river Isonzo, north-east of Venice, that offered
any hope of advance.
Even then, most of the terrain was flinty karst, resistant to
bombardment.
Even though for a time the Austrians had little more than customs
posts and territorials to defend the frontier, the Italians got
nowhere. There were 10 battles of the Isonzo up to August 1917,
leaving the Italians a few square miles of karst for hundreds of
thousands of dead.
A few people, left and right, were by now arguing that the war had been
a gigantic mistake. But there was a monster of public opinion, inflamed
by wartime media and propaganda, and besides both sides could very
well think that, with just a final effort, victory would be theirs.
There was, for instance, a Russian revival, as the growing industrial
capacity was at last mobilised. And there was at last a general who
had his wits about him, AA Brusilov, who sensed that revolutionary
new methods of attack might succeed. Careful preparation would bring
surprise; artillery (generally a Russian strength) could be much
more sensibly used; and a broad, rather than a narrow, attack would
bewilder the enemy commanders and make them use up their reserves in
dribs and drabs. These methods, applied in the west in 1918, got the
war moving again.
In June 1916 Brusilov applied the first version, captured a whole
Austrian army, broke a second, and drove another one far back. It
took six weeks for the Germans to sort out the position, and then
Brusilov made the mistake of pushing on, with exhausted, ill-supplied
troops, against well-supplied Austrians and Germans who had come up
by railway. The attacks petered out.
They also gave the Germans an unexpected benefit. Roumania, expecting
great gains of territory, entered the war on the Russians’ side. Her
troops were utterly inexperienced, and the attack began with a
logistical jam in the Carpathian passes. Roumania could be attacked
from north and south (the Danube, where a mixed Bulgaro-German-Turkish
force was assembled), and by December 1917 her army was squeezed back
into the mountains of Moldavia.
Roumanian oil and grain then kept the Germans going for another year
of warfare, whereas their own economy was running down.
Revolt and revolution
There is a great mystery about the first world war: how the
ordinary men stood it all. There were mutinies, of greater or lesser
significance, but the only one of decisive significance happened
in Russia. The disappointments of the Brusilov offensive caused
widespread demoralisation in the Russian army, which was in any case
under-officered, and was seriously short of qualified NCOs (again
because there had not been enough money for the intensive training
of longer-serving soldiers, a German specialty). The mismanagement
of rear supplies was calamitous; war finance had been managed on a
wing and a prayer; banknotes were printed so fast that they had no
numbers, and a client accepting a bundle would be told to ink in the
numbers before he left the bank. A deadly combination of inflation and
dearth affected the Russian cities, themselves swamped by refugees,
bringing epidemics in their train.
In late February 1917 there were demonstrations by enraged housewives
in the capital, Petrograd (Saint Petersburg, the old name, had sounded
too Germanic, and had been Russified). The soldiers refused to put
down these demonstrations, and an enormous mutiny began. Generals,
bankers and politicians sacrificed the tsar in the hope of taming
the revolutionaries, but the causes of the original explosion did
not go away, and produced further flashpoints. The army became
unusable, because the soldiers had had enough and despised their
generals. By November, they had formed councils that were won over
by the Bolsheviks, acting in accordance with Lenin’s intuitions. He
seized power from a collapsing old order, and announced that he would
make immediate peace.
An armistice was arranged, at the frontier town of Brest-Litovsk, and
in March 1918 the first peace treaty of the war was signed there. The
Bolsheviks let go a vast amount of territory, where the Germans set
up satellite regimes (such as a supposedly independent Ukraine). But
they were safe in their Russian heartland, based in Moscow, and there
they set up a regime of their own, complete with a Red army capable
of fighting battles.
Lenin had acted as he did because he expected the Russian example
to be infectious – mutiny in all armies, especially the German. But
German public opinion was still very warlike, and the collapse of
Russia only seemed to show that victory was in sight. Late in 1917,
there came another extraordinary victory – Caporetto on the Isonzo
where, after a display of great virtuosity, an Austro-German force
managed to destroy an entire Italian army and to drive the Italians
almost back to Venice. They nearly collapsed, but the Germans outran
their supplies, the British came to Italy’s help and, at long last,
the Italian establishment got rid of its calamitous commander, Cadorna.
American hope
Morale on the Allied side was now worse than it had ever been, as
vast losses and debts piled up. But there was hope as the Americans
entered the war. This happened in large part because of events
at sea. After Jutland, the Germans made more use of the submarine
weapon. Britain depended on American goods, and ships would now be
sunk, without warning. To start with, hundreds of ships went down
every month, many of them American. In April 1917, after an absurd
and public attempt by Berlin to get the Mexicans to attack the US,
the Americans declared war. Sensible ways were found of protecting
the trading vessels, American ships reinforced the blockade, and
the Germans were running out of hard cash. They therefore began to
run short of goods. By 1918 their lorries had to use wooden tyres,
which churned up the military roads in France.
When the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed in March 1918, the British
and the Germans faced a choice. The British might just say: let us
abandon eastern Europe and Russia to Germany, and keep our own world
empire. A few voices to that effect were raised. They would have
gained many supporters if the Germans on their side had said, yes,
we will not try to dominate western Europe, we will give up Belgium,
but give us a free hand in the east. The Germans never suggested this,
and when a foreign minister even muttered it in autumn 1917 he was
bundled out of office by the generals. They were sure that one last
great campaign in the west would win them the entire war.
While that campaign went ahead, the other fronts were in a state of
suspended animation.
The beginning of the end
By summer 1918, as the German position on the western front crumbled,
so too did the Central Powers’ position elsewhere. Starting from
mid-September, Bulgarians, Turks, then Austrians recognised that the
game was up.
Revolutionary crowds were building up in their stricken capitals,
their armies were flaking apart, a great epidemic of killer influenza
had started, and much of the populace, especially in Vienna, was
starving. The American president, Woodrow Wilson, had promised that
there would be "self-determination of peoples" and some sort of decent
peace. He was taken at his word. Even the Germans got it into their
heads that if they got rid of the emperor and proclaimed republican
democracy, they would somehow be let off the hook.
By mid-November the war at least had stopped, and peace treaties
followed, though a civil war went on in Russia until 1920, and the
war in Turkey only ended, with the victory of Turkish republican
nationalists, in 1923.
At its conclusion, the first world war had far transcended even the
Napoleonic boundaries. The peace with which it ended had established
a worldwide system, and even a sort of United Nations. But that
peace was very unstable, and within a generation would be consumed
by another war – this time a truly global one in which there were no
Napoleonic echoes.
â~@¢ Norman Stone is professor of international relations at
Bilkent University, Ankara. From 1984 to 1997 he was professor of
modern history at the University of Oxford. His books include Europe
Transformed 1878-1919, The Eastern Front 1914-1917, and World War One:
A Short History.
Key dates on foreign fronts Aug 26 1914
The Battle of Tannenberg was perhaps Germany’s most emphatic victory
of the war. The Russians launch an offensive in East Prussia to help
the French keep the German armies at bay. But the German Eighth army
lays a trap for the Russian Second army, which is surrounded and
destroyed. 250,000 Russian casualties. 12,000 German soldiers killed
or wounded.
Sept 9 1914
The first Battle of the Masurian Lakes is another defeat for the
Russian army. They are ejected from East Prussia and off German soil
until the second world war. Casualties: Russia 125,000; Germany 40,000.
Jan 31 1915
At the Battle of Bolimov the German forces attempt to win control
of Warsaw against the Russians. While the outcome is indecisive, it
is notable for the first use of poison gas in the war. It is used by
the Germans without success, as freezing and windy conditions render
the gas ineffective.
Feb 3 1915
The conflict extends to the Middle East. The Turks fail in a surprise
attack on the Suez canal and British forces successfully fight to
defend control of it. Casualties and losses: Turkey 2,000; 150 British.
Feb 1915
Australian forces join British and French troops to invade Gallipoli
as part of a year-long attempt to control the strategically important
Dardanelles Straits and western Turkey. It is ultimately unsuccessful,
and the Allies suffer huge losses.
May 23 1915
Italy enters the war by invading Austrian territory; it marks the start
of a two-year struggle for the Isonzo river, north-east of Venice.
June 4 1916
Russia’s Brusilov offensive, led by General Aleksey Brusilov, begins
with the Battle of Lutsk, in which the Russians quickly overrun
Austro-Hungarian forces. It is the beginning of a disastrous campaign
for the Austro-Hungarians, who will lose 1.5 million men (including
400,000 prisoners) and nearly ends its part in the war altogether.
May 31 1916
The Battle of Jutland is to become the most important sea battle in
the first world war. The smaller German high seas fleet fails in a
surprise attack on the British grand fleet and the latter responds
with force. Both sides suffer heavy losses, but while the British
lose more heavy shipping, the battle increases British dominance in
the North Sea.
Nov 1916-Oct 1918
TE Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) unites Arab guerrilla forces fighting
the Turks in the Persian Gulf. Sporadic raids cripple Turkish supply
lines until Lawrence’s Arabs are able to join forces with the British
army. On September 30 1918, Lawrence takes Damascus – strategically
crucial for the Turks.
April 3 1917
Lenin returns from exile to Russia and takes advantage of economic and
social unrest and a demoralised Russian army to launch a revolution.
Oct 24 1917
The Battle of Caporetto sees the Austro-Hungarians join German forces
to launch a surprise attack on the Italian forces stationed at the
front along the Isonzo line. It is an extraordinary success, which
destroys the Italian Second army.
April 6 1917
President Woodrow Wilson declares war on Germany after repeated
sinking of its supply shipping.
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