quickly.
In order to provide the manpower needed in any attempt to break the Ger- man lines, the British turned from a volunteer army to conscription in January
Debacles on the
Western Front
December 1915–December 1916
The city of Ypres in Flanders was devastated after years of bombardment. (Library of Congress)
6
1916. On January 27 the British put into effect the Military Service bill, order- ing conscription of single men between the ages of 18 and 41. The law provided for exemption from service for ministers, essential war-workers, the medically unfit, and conscientious objectors. The British extended conscription to mar- ried men in April and rapidly trained the new inductees, selected new officers, and shipped the New Army to bolster the British line in Belgium and Flanders. The conscription act excluded the Irish, although units of volunteers from both the largely Protestant Ulster counties and from the Catholic southern counties continued to serve. The Irish exemption from conscription somewhat backfired in the southern counties of Ireland, where the most strongly pro-British young men volunteered for service, leaving behind those most opposed to Britain and the war and most inclined to a more radical nationalist viewpoint.
The Germans began the Battle of Verdun in February 1916 and did not break off the effort completely until November 1916. Farther to the north and west, where the French and British sectors of the lines met at the Somme, the Allies began a massed attack near the town of Albert, pushing toward Bapaume on the British sector and Péronne in July. General Kitchener had planned that the New Army of conscripts would be ready for action in 1917, but he had fallen into disfavor over questions of supply and over the Gallipoli campaign. Then, in June 1916, Kitchener drowned when a British cruiser on which he was steaming to the Russian front struck a German mine and sank. Demands for more troops from the French and political pressure for more aggressive conduct of the war sped up Kitchener’s original timetable, so that conscripts began to appear in the British lines after a few weeks’ training in mid-1916.
General Douglas Haig had been appointed as commander of British forces on the western front in December 1915, and many of the failures and successes of British campaigning over the next two years have been attributed to him. It seemed to many observers then and later that Haig obstinately refused to under- stand the emerging conditions on the front, and, unlike the French, he and his officers refused to adapt their view that masses of courageous men, advancing in determined waves and supported by artillery, could eventually break the German defenses.
Both sides had concluded that the process of attrition, exhausting the enemy’s manpower and material resources by wearing them down, would be the only way to win the war. What the British called attrition, the French called la guerre
d’usure and the Germans thought of as Materialschlachten, or battles of material. By
this logic, the attackers hoped to lose fewer men, taking acceptable losses in order to gain territory and to inflict more severe damage on the defending enemy. Of course, in order to do that, the attackers had to sacrifice manpower and material. The question became who would break first. For the troops, the phrase acceptable
losses summed up the gulf of understanding between officers and men; only very
rarely would an enlisted man regard the loss of his own life as acceptable.
VERDUN
At Verdun, the German commander, Erich von Falkenhayn, made the decision to draw the French infantry into a destructive defense of that fortress city in early 1916. Sitting on the River Meuse, Verdun had been bypassed in the earlier Ger- man advances through Belgium and Luxembourg to the Marne, and Falkenhayn
and other German commanders may have believed that the French had under- defended the fortress. In front of the Verdun fort itself, the French manned several smaller forts, notably Douaumont and Vaux. The German attack began with a bombardment on February 21, 1916, in the heaviest artillery barrage of the war to that date. The guns homed in on two French divisions that held a section of eight miles along the Meuse River. After falling back and bringing new troops up to Verdun, the French held a line of trenches connecting the forward forts of Douaumont and Vaux.
General Philippe Pétain, commanding the defense at Verdun, ordered heavy artillery fire in defense and soon organized a massive resupply of Verdun with men and material. In order to bring in the vast quantities of transport, he ordered the widening of the road from Souilly. Crowded with trucks and guns, the high- way soon became known as La Voie Sacrée or the Sacred Way. The Germans took Douaumont in February, and the Germans captured the fort at Vaux after heavy losses on both sides on June 6. Verdun itself consisted of a strongly built fort rela- tively impervious to direct shell hits, surrounded with smaller outlying civilian structures that the German shelling soon demolished. The fort itself, however, withstood attack and could have been defeated only if German troops had cut it off from the rear and placed it under siege. The French lines, although pushed back, held in front of the fort.
With Allied attacks on the Somme that required German troops to bolster defense in that sector, Falkenhayn had fewer troops to call upon, but the attacks and counterattacks at Verdun continued into the late fall. By the time the battles had died down at Verdun, with the lines more or less restored to their original position, it had become the longest and most disastrous land battle in history. Although the figures have never been precisely established, the losses on both
The machine gun contributed greatly to defense. (National Archives)
the French and German side exceeded 300,000 each. If it had been Falkenhayn’s intention to bleed France of resources, he had partially succeeded, but only at the cost of depleting German human and material resources to an equal or greater extent. Materialschlachten had met la guerre d’usure in a virtual stalemate.
The Germans tended to overestimate the casualties inflicted on the French with their artillery. Pétain rotated units through the defense of Verdun, so that the casualties, although severe, did not destroy whole regiments. Meanwhile, the Ger- mans, who kept the same units at the front, found them weakened and diminished. German officers reported that troop morale had severely declined, with many of the men regarding Verdun as a lost cause as early as March or April.
Despite the horror of Verdun, many neutral and French observers saw the attack at Verdun as somehow more honorable than the swinging attack through neutral Belgium and Luxembourg that had started the war on the western front in August 1914. A military attack by Germany directly across the German- French border, against the line of French forts from Verdun to Belfort, seemed, in the values of the day, more decent than attacking France through neutral Bel- gium. If the German attack at Verdun had succeeded, neutral observers noted, it would demonstrate that the German dishonorable attack through Belgium had not been necessary. From the German point of view, the strong defense at Verdun, even though it had been undermanned at the opening of the attack, only proved that the original concept of the Schlieffen plan had been based on a logical premise, that the direct route to Paris by way of Verdun or the other French fortress sites of Toul and Belfort that faced toward the German border presented too high a risk.
The contemporary leadership on both sides tended to place credit or blame regarding Verdun on individuals, rather than on the fundamentals of strategic balance between offense and defense. The command removed Falkenhayn and sent him to lead on the eastern front, where, in fact, his troops had rapid successes against the Romanians, who entered the war on the side of the Allies in August. Pétain, who had led the early defense at Verdun and who had planned the supply route along the Sacred Way, came to be hailed as the hero who had saved Verdun, but the government replaced him with General Robert Nivelle, who led the counterattacks against the Germans. After the campaign, the French removed by promotion the commander of all forces, General Joseph Joffre, and replaced him with Nivelle, who promised a more aggressive method of warfare.
THE SOMME
By mid-1916, the British sector of the front extended from around Ypres in Belgium down through Flanders to the Somme. There on the rolling hills on both sides of the River Somme, the British and French planned a major offen- sive. After a lengthy artillery barrage, British troops advanced on July 1. Due to inexperience and poor planning, the artillery shelling, with more than a million shells expended, did little to dislodge the German defenders. Shrapnel shells, useful against exposed personnel, had little effect on the deep German dug-outs, and they served only to throw the barbed wire entanglements into even worse tangles. When the artillery preparation stopped, the German defenders emerged from their bunkers and dugouts and took defensive positions in the damaged trenches and in new shell holes. The British advanced in three lines, almost
shoulder to shoulder, only to quickly fall under machine-gun fire and shelling by German artillery. The slaughter increased to the point that in some sectors the Germans offered an informal truce and stopped firing to allow some of the sur- viving wounded to crawl back to their trenches. At the end of the first day, British deaths amounted to almost 20,000, the greatest single day’s disaster for the British in all their military history. Later, as British troops advanced to take various small wooded sections, they sometimes suffered from what a later generation would call friendly fire, in which their own artillery pounded into their own ranks.
The French made slightly greater advances, and, here and there, took sections of the German line. However, when the Allied forces attempted to follow up with cavalry charges, disaster ensued. The German defenders, at first astonished to see mounted lancers with plumed helmets charging across no-man’s-land, soon recovered their composure and struck down horse and rider alike with machine- gun and rifle fire. As at Verdun, the Battle of the Somme seesawed back and forth. In September, the British introduced a small number of tanks, thrown into the front at Flers and Courcelette, where their initial surprise value collapsed, as numbers broke down and others were knocked out by German shell fire. The British generals in particular earned criticism for lack of intelligent planning, simply falling back on the concept of pouring more men against machine-gun emplacements and attempting to wear down the enemy. By November, when the Battle of the Somme died down because of impenetrable mud, the British and French had lost some 600,000 casualties total. The British had advanced about six or seven miles on an 18-mile front, and the French had taken only slightly
Wounded soldiers in the Somme were evacuated by motor ambulance. (Library of Congress)
more ground. No significant or strategic objectives or resources changed hands, and the dent made in the German lines had no lasting importance.
Even though no strategic advantage had been achieved by either side in the Somme or at Verdun, the German command reacted to the two great battles with a reassessment of tactics and leadership. At the end of August, when Hin- denburg and Ludendorff took over the administration of the German war effort, they concluded that fundamental changes in how to handle defense, offense, and the management of the civilian war effort had to be undertaken.