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On
June 28th 1914 Archduke Ferdinand of Austria,
heir to the monarchy of the Habsburgs, visited the
Bosnian Town of Sarajevo to inspect Austrian troops
there, Bosnia and its sister province Herzegovina, were
former Turkish possessions, which had been annexed by
Austria – Hungary in 1908. Many of its Serb
inhabitants were bitterly resentful at not being allowed
to join Serbia, their native state, on of them a grammar
school student named Gavrilo Princip assassinated the
Archduke and his wife as they rode through the streets
of Sarajevo in a an open car.
On
July 28th Austria – Hungary retaliated by
declaring war on Serbia,
A
diplomatic rather than a military move as it would take
several weeks for Austrians to mobilise. The Russians
then stepped in on the side of the Serbs, their fellow
Slavs. The Russians could not allow the Serbs to be
humiliated, nor permit the Austrians and their Germany
ally to dominate the Balkans and by extension Russia’s
access to the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles
Straits. Russia mobilised on 29th July 1914.
On
August 1st Germany declared war on Russia and
mobilised. Russia
ally France also mobilised on that date. On August 3rd
Germany declared war on France. The next day Germany
invaded Belgium, which had been declared a neutral
country by the Treaty of London in 1839, now the British
were drawn in. They sent Germany an ultimatum asking her
to withdraw from Belgium. There was no reply and by
midnight on 4th August, Britain and Germany
were at war. They had been the only nation to declare
war on Germany rather than the other way round. As the
British Foreign Secretary waited for the midnight
deadline, he remarked, “the lamps are going out all
over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in out
time”.
The
staff of each army had prepared detailed war plains in
advance. Those of Germany and France involved the use of
precise railway timetables for the mass movement of men
and material. The Germans were in control and not the
politicians. In the first two weeks of August some 20
million men donned uniforms and took trains of war, all
believed that they would be back home “before the
leaves fell”
On
the eve of war the German army drawing on a reserve of
4.3 million trained men, was organised in 25 army corps
comprising of 87 infantry and 11 cavalry divisions. The
great strength of the German artillery lay in 125 heavy
guns for use in the field, particularly the 5.9-inch
howitzer. Its Austrian – Hungarian ally with 49
infantry divisions and 11 cavalry was more a liability
than an ally. Over half of it troops were Slavs, Czechs
and Italians – men whose natural sympathies lay with
Austria’s enemies rather than the dual monarchy. This
was a factor behind some of the more spectacular
Austrian collapses of the war.
When
mobilised the Russians would field 114 infantry and 36
cavalry divisions, the legendary “steamroller”. The
French army were able to field 75 infantry and 10
cavalry divisions. For their small regular army the
British supplied 6 infantry divisions and 1.5 cavalry
for the expeditionary force to France. Compared with its
European counterparts the BEF was lavishly motorized,
its 75000 men supported by 1,485 motor vehicles of all
kinds. The cavalry had useful mounted infantry training.
The artillery’s lack of heavy guns was balanced by the
excellent 18-pounder field gun.
The
First Days
The
opening days the August 1914 saw the Germans drive
through Belgium with the French launching their own
attack with a headlong offensive in Alsace-Lorraine
where German machine-guns mowed down thousands of men
advancing in open order. However with the German army
swinging around into France its army on the extreme
right turned south – eastward exposing its flank as it
marched across the face of the defences of Paris, this
action left a gap in the line, with the French
endeavouring to meet head-on, and this was taken by the
BEF with the French fifth army on its right. This
resulted in the Germans retreating to the Noyon-Werdum
Line.
The
allies attacked then for five days before they were
halted on the Aisne by a hastily improvised line of
German Trenches.
After
this battle both sides extended operations northwards,
each trying to work around the others flank, at this
sorties of leapfrogging manoeuvres reached its
conclusion, the BEF sought to deny the Channel ports to
the Germans at Ypres on October 20th, the
British line held supported by the French on their
right, on their left the Belgians opened
sluice gates to halt the German advance. Bitter
fighting on a narrow front continued until 11th
November when torrential rain and snow halted the final
German offensive. The first battle of Ypres was the last
chapter in the history of the Old British Regular Army
of which 80% had been lost in fighting. From the Channel
to the Swiss frontier both sides now began to dig in.
Trench warfare had arrived.
Trenches
The
opening weeks of fighting had given the false impression
of a war of movement, but by September 1914 as each side
tried to outflank the other side in the “Race to the
Sea”. The first trenches, initially mere scrapes in
the ground, began to make their appearance. Within weeks
the stalemate they had produced on the Aisne spread down
the 500-mile battle line from the North Sea to the Swiss
Frontier, the British system set the basic pattern,
which troops endured for the next four years, from the
mud of Flanders to the chalk lands of the Somme and
Champagne to the wooded terrain of Vosges. The British
dug a three-line system of front, support and reserve
trenches and
lined by
zigzag communications trenches. Beyond the trenches, at
a grenade throws distance, lay the barred wire
entanglements and beyond that the narrow strip which
divided the opposing trenches – “no man’s land”.
Its width varied from sector to sector, from as much as
500 yards to as little as 50. Near Zonnebecke in 1915
the British and Germans were only 10 yards apart.
As
the war progressed, trench engineering became ever more
elaborate. The German Hindenburg line, built in the
winter 1916-17, consisted of three lines of double
trenches to a depth of two miles, the first of which was
protected by six belts of barred wire, the densest of
them 100 yards thick. Dozens of communication trenches
linked the lines and to the rear where sited hundreds of
guns zeroed to plaster “no man’s land” with
shrapnel and high explosives or gas shells, further
forward, machine guns with interlocking fields of mines
were positioned to strafe “no man’s land” the
moment the enemy went “over the top”. Railways were
built right up to the rear areas to speed reinforcements
and supply.
Living
conditions in the Trenches were often grim. During the
wet season, they became morasses, particularly in the
British sector on the Western Front. Men and mules could
drown in the glutinous mud. Wounded men were
particularly vulnerable. Sanitary conditions in the
trenches were appalling. Rats gorged themselves on
corpses lying in “no man’s land” or embedded in
the walls of trenches themselves. Trench foot and
frostbite claimed about 75000 British casualties during
the war.
Use
of Gas
On
April 22nd 1915 two sinister greenish-yellow clouds
crept across “no
man’s land” towards allied lines at Ypres. They where pressurized chlorine gas
released from over 500 cylinders in the German trenches
as the preliminary to a major offensive. German
prisoners and a deserter had warned of this new tactic,
but no countermeasures had been taken. The two French
colonial divisions on the North of the Ypres salient
were engulfed by the cloud and died or fled in panic,
leaving a 4 mile gap in the front peopled only by the
dead and those who lay suffocating in agony from
chlorine gas poisoning. Having achieved total surprise
the Germans failed to exploit the breakthrough.
Nevertheless the gas has caused at least 15000
casualties, 5000 of them fatal. Chlorine gas poisoning
led to a slow and agonizing death by asphyxiation, in
September 1915 the British released chlorine gas on the
German lines at Loos but little of it reached the enemy
trenches, thereafter increasing use was made of gas
shells, some 63 types of gas had been developed by 1918
with the most familiar been mustard. At first counter
measures against gas were primitive, among them pads of
cotton waste soaked in urine. The famous box respirator
did not appear until the winter of 1917 and soon became
standard issue for troops on the front. Gas caused
nearly a million casualties during the war.
The
Dardanelles
In
October 1914 Turkey entered the war on the side of the
Central Powers. In Britain operations against the Turks
were considered necessary both to safeguard the Suez
Canal and to relieve
the Russians by opening up a supply and
communications route to them through the Dardanelles
Straits, a passage from the Aegean to the Black Sea, a
lodgement on the Gallipoli Peninsula, on the Northern
side of the straits, would also provide springboard for
a drive to Istanbul, forcing the Germans to withdraw
troops from the Western Front.
A
Franco-British naval attempt to force the Dardenelles in
March 1915 came to grief on Turkish minefields. A
hastily assembled expeditionary force of 80,000 men
landed on the rocky coastline of the Gallipoli Peninsula
on April 25th. The Turks were taken by surprise but the timid leadership of
the commander allowed them to rush up reinforcements and
trap his men in their landing areas. The British,
Australian and New Zealand army corps (ANZAC) was to be
pinned down for almost a year. Trench warfare ensued in
conditions far worse than in France. The allies held no
secure rear, only beaches exposed to Turkish shellfire.
Everything – even water – had to be landed at night.
Disease particularly dysentery, took a terrible toll.
Two
more landings at the beginnings of August offered a
fleeting chance breakout from the beachheads but the
chance was frittered away. The Troops were eventually
evacuated in December without a man been lost, the
Dardanelles fiasco led to Churchill’s Resignation and
the end of the Liberal government in Britain.
War
at Sea
When
war broke out, Admiral Beatty, Commander of the Royal
Navy’s battlecruiser squadron exulted “ for thirty years I’ve
waited for this day”.
The German High Seas Fleet did not oblige the flamboyant
Beatty. Most of it withdrew to port. The losses the
Germans sustained in the action off the Heligoland Bight
on 28th August when Beatty’s battlecruisers
sank three light cruisers and a destroyer reinforced the
German High Command’s reluctance to risk its battle
fleet in the North Sea. The German navy hit back on 1st
November off the coast of Chile, where its China
squadron destroyer a squadron of obsolete British
cruisers. The Germans success was short-lived. Its two
battlecruisers were hunted down and sunk off the
Falklands Islands by a British task force led by the
battlecruisers Invincible and Inflexible.
Meanwhile
the Germans continued to play tip and run in the North
Sea. Its battlecruisers bombarded the coastal towns of
Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby. Five weeks later on
the January 24th 1915 on another sweep into
the North Sea a German force of three destroyers was
intercepted by Beatty’s battlecruiser squadron. In the
ensuing Battle of the Dogger Bank the British sank the
elderly cruiser Blucher and badly mauled the rest of the
German force before it slipped away.
In
the battle for the Atlantic the German and British
admirals saw the submarine as an auxiliary to their main
fleets, acting as scouts and harrying battleships. At
the beginning of 1915 the German navy stepped up its
u-boat operations after the declaration of a blockade of
the British Isles. On May 7th a u-boat sank
the liner Lusitania, among whose 2000 passengers were
124 Americans. Fear of drawing the United States into
the war prompted the Germans to bring a halt to
“unrestricted” submarine warfare in September 1915.
Deadlock on the Western Front led to renewed demands for
the reinstatement of unrestricted submarine warfare, in
January 1917 the Germans announced that all shipping,
including neutral vessels, would be sunk in the war zone
of the Eastern Atlantic, the measure which brought the
Americans into the war. This did not unduly trouble the
German High Command, which had calculated that Britain
would be starved into submission in five months, before
American intervention could be effective.
The
u-boats nearly succeeded. In April 1917 the month
America entered the war, they sank over a million tons
of shipping. The answer to this was the convey system,
in the vastness of the Atlantic 100 ships sailing in
convey were as difficult for a u-boat to locate as a
ship sailing alone and unprotected.
The
Somme
In
December 1915 both the British and French began to lay
plans for a big offensive on the Somme, where their
lines met. For most of the war this had been a quiet
sector where battalions had, on occasion, drilled
undisturbed on open fields in full view of the enemy.
Their extensive preparations were noted by the Germans
who strengthened their front-line defences to meet the
attack announced by a massive bombardment, which began
on 24th June 1916. The British High Command
expected that the bombardment, which expended over 1.5
million shells, would break-up the German barbed wire,
bludgeon their batteries into silence and entomb the
defenders in their dug-outs they were wrong on all
accounts. At 7.30 am on a boiling hot morning of 1st
July the bombardment moved on the German second line,
the German machine gunners emerged from their dug-outs,
shaken but unscathed, to pour a withering fire into the
13 British divisions advancing at a walking pace across “no
man’s land”.
Here the 36th Ulster division was to suffer
horrendous losses. By nightfall the British had lost
60,000 men, 19,000 of them dead. The offensive ground
on, making only minor gains. On 15th
September British tanks were used to pierce the German
line south of Bapaune, but there was no breakthrough,
only autumn rain and seas of mud. The Battle of the
Somme ended on 18th November, by which time
the British had suffered some 420,000 casualties and the
Germans, a similar number. All idealism about the
conduct of the war on the Somme.
Mutiny
In
the spring of 1917 after the French failure at Champagne
its army was rapidly reaching the end of its tether. For
many units leave had all but ceased and desertion had
more than doubled. In May 1917 isolated acts of protest
and indiscipline flared into open mutiny. By the end of
the month it was estimated that only two of the 12
divisions in Champagne could be relied upon and none of
those between Paris and Soissons. As the Germans
remained unaware of the crisis gripping the French Army,
the task of restoring order was given to Pétain, who
employed a mixture of brute force and concessions. He
restricted the death penalty to the worst offenders, of
whom 55 faced the death squad, although many more were
summarily executed. He also forced disciplinary
companies for those found guilty of mutiny, assigning
them the post hazardous of justices.
He
also improved communications between headquarters and
the men at the front. As well as increasing pay and
enhancing conditions for his troops. Above all he put
into practice his theory of wearing down the enemy with
limited inexpensive attacks. This package of measures
hauled the Army back from the brink of disintegration
and repaired it for the German offensive of 1918.
With
the Americans entering the war in April 1917 it brought
almost unbounded manpower and material resources to the
allies, but it would take time for them to be mobilised.
In France the American build-up was painfully slow, by
May 1918 there were scarcely 8 United States divisions
in France, the bulk of them unprepared for action. Their
commander wanted to form them in a separate army group
rather than set his small force dissipated by
detachments to help the British and French forces
staggering under the impact of the offensive launched in
the previous March.
This
war was a global conflict spilling far beyond the
Eastern and Western fronts of Europe. Even within Europe
there was the war between Austria-Hungary and Italy
after the latter joined the allies in May 1915, in an
attempt to help the Serbs, an Anglo-French force nearly
600,000 allied troops were tied down in the dead-end
theatre, which the Germans sardonically dubbed the
“Greatest Allied interment camp of the War”. The
Allied war against Turkey embraced the Dardanelles
campaign of 1915, the Russian campaign in the Caucasus
and the British campaigns in Egypt, Palestine and
Mesopotamia. Campaigns were also waged in the German
colonies of the Cameroon’s, Togo land and German South
West and East Africa. In the latter the Germans with
strength of only 4000 men tied down a British Force of
140,000 in a four-year guerrilla war. A succession of
frustrated British generals failed to get the better of
the German force who only surrendered 12 days after the
November 1918 Armistice. (Click
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