THE THIRD BATTLE OF YPRES - PART TWO
THR THIRD BATTLE OF YPRES – PART TWO
On 28 July Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Russia, as the self-proclaimed protector of all Slavs, had already begun to mobilise, as had France, allied to Russia. On 29 July Britain warned Germany that she would not remain neutral in the event of war. On 1 August Germany declared war on Russia and on 3 August on France. On 4 August Germany declared war on Belgium and invaded, and as a result the British Empire declared war on Germany and Austro-Hungary. In 1914 the German standing army was 700,000 strong, with immediate reserves of around three million. France’s standing army was 820,000 strong with reserves of two and three quarter million. By far the world’s largest army was that of Russia, which with available reserves numbered almost six million men but with serious deficiencies in artillery, communications and logistic units. At this stage the British contribution on land would be tiny, just four infantry divisions, a cavalry division and an independent brigade, but both France and Russia saw the Royal Navy as being essential to successful prosecution of the war, even if its traditional weapon of the blockade would take time to be effective.
Germany, having seen the Russian and French alliance grow, had long prepared for a war on two fronts. Planning proceeded on the basis that Russia would take longer to mobilise than would France and therefore France should be dealt with first, before turning on Russia. The plan for the west had originally been devised by Alfred von Schlieffen, chief of the German general staff from 1891 to 1906, and proposed a wide sweep along the Channel coast, through Holland and Belgium and into France, before hooking in west of Paris and trapping the French armies against their own frontier defences. The plan had been tinkered with by Schlieffen’s successors, principally by altering the invasion route to avoid going through Holland – invading one neutral country, Belgium, was bad enough, without doing it to two – and by withdrawing some of the troops from the right wing to bolster the centre where it was expected that France would attack. French war plans were based on the premise that she had been beaten in 1870 because she had adopted a defensive posture, so the way to win must be to attack and her Plan XVII as promulgated by General Joseph Joffre, the sixty-two year old professional head of the army, envisaged an offensive into Alsace and Lorraine. Joffre had begun his service in the artillery, later transferring to the engineers, and had fought in the war of 1870 as a young artillery officer.
At first all went well for Germany. In what became known as the Battle of the Frontiers the French advance into Germany was stalled and General Lanzerac’s French Fifth Army, with the British Expeditionary Force on its left flank along the Mons Canal in Belgium, was driven back. The Schlieffen Plan seemed to be working with the right wing of the German First Army commanded by Generaloberst (colonel general, equivalent to full general in the British army) Alexander von Kluck sweeping through Belgium and into France with the Second Army of Colonel General Karl von Bulow on his left. Von Kluck and von Bulow, both sixty-eight years old, were highly experienced soldiers, both having fought in the Prussian-Danish and the Franco-Prussian wars. Von Bulow, who answered to the chief of the general staff, Colonel General Helmuth Graf von Moltke, was also overall commander of the right wing, being senior to his fellow army commander. Simultaneously on the Eastern Front the Russians had mobilised rather faster than the Germans had calculated, and initially drove the Germans back in East Prussia, before Colonel General Paul von Hindenburg, with Generalderinfanterie (general of infantry, equivalent to lieutenant general) Erich Ludendorff as his chief of staff stabilised the front and defeated the Russians at the Battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes.
By late August, however, on the Western Front the Schlieffen plan was beginning to come unstuck. Superbly trained though they were, the German army simply could not march fast enough, and even then the supply system could not keep up with them. A gap was beginning to open between von Kluck’s left flank and von Bulow’s right, and a concerned von Bulow ordered von Kluck to sweep inwards, south, although they would not now be coming down to the west of Paris but to the east. By now the French and the British had retreated south of the River Marne, and Joffre saw his chance and mounted an attack northwards through the gap in the two German armies, and east by the French Sixth army and the Paris garrison, half a division of the latter being moved to the front in Paris taxis (who kept their meters running and were partly reimbursed by the French government). The Germans were driven back forty miles as far as the River Aisne, where they went on the defensive, and now began the ‘race to the sea’. It was not, of course, a race but successive attempts by both sides to turn the other’s flank, with each army moving further and further north to achieve it, which neither did. The Allies won the ‘race’ (just) when they got to Nieuwpoort, on the Channel coast in the first week of October.
That was the end of mobile warfare on the Western Front, as both sides dug in for what would in effect be siege warfare for four more years, punctuated by attempts by both sides to break out and break through. The Germans attempted to reach the Channel ports in the First Battle of Ypres, but failed to break through the British lines. In April 1915 the Second Battle of Ypres saw the first use of gas by the Germans, followed by the British riposte at the Battle of Loos, a part of a larger French offensive in September 1915, and a failed attempt by the British and French to open the Dardanelles at Gallipoli. In 1916 a joint allied offensive was planned, with an Anglo-French attack either side of the River Somme coordinated with an Italian offensive against the Austrians over the River Isonzo and a Russian drive on the Eastern Front. Then, on 21 February 1916, the Germans attacked the French at Verdun, and more and more French troops had to be diverted from the planned Somme offensive, which nevertheless started on 1 July 1916, with the British now taking the lead. It was the first major deployment of the ‘New Armies’, those units raised from 1914 to turn a small all-professional army into one large enough to play a meaningful part on the Western Front. Once started the offensive had to continue, to take the pressure off Verdun and to prevent the Germans from switching the divisions facing the British and employing them against the French. By the time the offensive ended, in November 1916, British casualties had been hugely more than the British army had ever sustained in any war, made to seem even worse by being inflicted on infantry whose battalions were recruited on a territorial basis – the ‘pals’ principle. Because the British experience had been one of limited colonial warfare these casualties have become embedded in British popular history as an unmitigated disaster, with more weight than they perhaps deserve, for the Somme pushed the Germans back seven miles and liberated seventy square miles of French territory and fifty-one villages. It pulled in sixty-nine German divisions, most of whom could otherwise have been employed at Verdun, and inflicted half a million casualties on them. Ludendorff said that the German army could not withstand another Somme.
By 1917 the British had learned from the Somme. Their army on the Western Front was now over one million strong, its tactics and equipment had improved enormously, the Empire contingents had come on stream and it was now a well-honed and well led killing machine. Field Marshal Sir John French, who had commanded the BEF on first deployment had been replaced by General (field marshal from 1 January 1917) Sir Douglas Haig. French, who had been a dashing cavalry commander in the South African war, was just not up to commanding and deploying a mass army. There was a plentiful supply of tanks and a graze fuse had been invented which allowed artillery to cut wire. All was not well with their major ally, however.
The French army had long been based on universal conscription, with military service being seen as part of the rite of passage to citizenship. There was no question of having to cajole men into joining, for they had no choice. Rates of pay and other terms of service reflected the fact that the vast majority of the rank and file would be serving for only two, or latterly three, years. Senior non-commissioned officers and most of the officers were career professionals, and their conditions of service reflected that. Since the time of Napoleon the French army was, at least in theory, genuinely meritocratic, and many of the officers came from the same background as their men. This being so the difference in rank had to be enforced and while French officers led their men with great gallantry, usually from the front (and forty per cent of all French infantry regimental officers were killed in the war), once the action was over the Other Ranks were very much left to themselves. This contrasted with the British army which had always been made up of volunteers, so that conditions and terms of service (pay, rations, leave and the like) had to be sufficiently attractive to attract recruits and to retain them once enlisted. There was an existing class difference too, in that the officers, by and large, came from the middle and upper middle classes, while the soldiers came from the working classes. Of course there were exceptions, but in general this meant that there was an existing differentiation which did not have to be enforced, allowing the British style of officer leadership to be paternal, with officers very much involved with their men when off duty, in organising games, concerts, gymkhanas, amateur dramatics, inspecting food, organising leave, inspecting feet and kit, all intended to keep the men busy and morale up. While the British did introduce conscription in July 1916 regular standards were maintained, and no soldier could say that his officer was not interested in his welfare. This did not happen in the French army and it would never have occurred to their officers that it should.
The leave allowance for French soldiers was generous, seven days every four months, the trouble was it was regarded as a very low priority for the staff, and transport nominated to take men on leave was often sequestered for something else. In some units there had been no leave for twelve months. Men who did manage to get on leave were frequently harangued by anti-war protesters, pacifists, communists and anarchists, while propaganda opposing the war circulated amongst the troops. There were well organised agencies who would help to hide deserters. Rumours spread: munitions workers safe at home were paid far more than soldiers, colonial troops stationed in in garrisons in the interior in order to release French units for the front were having affairs with the wives left behind, and the government seemed unable or unwilling to close down anti-war newspapers like the Communist Bonnet Rouge.
For many of the soldiers, poorly paid and living in miserable conditions even by front line standards, the final straw was the failure of the spring offensive. In December 1916 ‘Papa’ Joffre had been replaced by General Robert Nivelle, an officer who had risen rapidly through the ranks since commanding an artillery regiment as a colonel in 1914. Astute, politically aware and a fluent English speaker Nivelle impressed both French and English politicians and was promoted over the heads of a number of others senior to him. He managed to convince himself (but not many others) that he had a plan that would rupture the German lines and end the war in a matter of weeks. The intention was to assault with forty-nine infantry and five cavalry divisions with 128 French tanks supported by 5,300 artillery pieces and with a further nineteen divisions in reserve, along a forty mile front along the River Aisne between Rheims and Soissons, against twenty-nine German divisions with another seventeen in reserve. There would be a ten day artillery bombardment (later extended to fourteen days) and the British would carry out a diversionary attack on Vimy Ridge. Neither French nor British generals were convinced, but the politicians were and after various delays while reservations were discussed and dismissed, the British Canadian Corps took Vimy ridge on 9 April 1917 and the French crossed their jump-off line on 16th.