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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Everything You Need to Know
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Our understanding of the twentieth century and beyond hinges upon the First World War. In this new and comprehensive book, the fascinating facts are presented in an accessible way, allowing anyone to brush up on the devastating conflict that changed the world we live in. Discover everything you need to know about: The battle of Ypres The Somme The forgotten wars between Italy, Austria and Russia The invention of the tank and how it changed the war The role of the USA The siege of Kut The battle the Germans won and much more . . .
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THE BATTLES OF WORLD WAR I:
Everything You Need to Know
CHRISTOPHER CATHERWOOD
To the memory of my great-uncle Harold Lloyd-Jones 1898–1918, who never saw the Allied victory, and to his wonderful great-niece-in-law, my wife Paulette
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD
The year 2014 heralds the centenary of the beginning of perhaps the most important war in history. Because of World War I many of the extraordinary events and creations of the twentieth century came about. Outstanding examples would include: the Russian Revolution, the rise of Nazism, World War II, the origins of the state of Israel and the creation of several new countries without regard for ethnic mix or ancient rivalries.
Many excellent books have been published recently to begin the commemorative process for this landmark centenary event. Most of them have one thing in common – they are substantial in length. Some of these books, such as those by Max Hastings and Margaret MacMillan, also take us no further than the end of 1914. If they were to cover the whole war they would be several volumes. This is indeed the case for the series that Professor Hew Strachan at Oxford University is now writing.
What, though, if you want just a straightforward overview of some of the key battles of World War I? In an ideal world we would have time to read long books, but in practice there is always a place for something shorter and more succinct. This book aims to fulfil the quest for the latter: a work that gives the key battles and their outcomes in nutshell form.
Brevity, of course, means that some things need to be left out. Regimental histories are great at telling us what brave lieutenant or sergeant accomplished what heroic feat, but with battles containing hundreds of thousands of troops from dozens of regiments, such microscopic detail becomes impossible. Thankfully the Imperial War Museum believed from early on in oral history. The memories and letters of countless British soldiers are not only there to inspect but have been published as well. Precise accounts of individual regimental movements down to unit level are best left to such works. But the bigger picture is also important, and the interpretation and significance of the various confrontations lie at the heart of this particular book.
Inevitably some memorable battles have also had to be omitted. Much of the war in Flanders and northern France from late 1914 until the summer of 1918 consisted of futile attempts by the British and French to batter through German lines. Millions of soldiers died in the horror of the trenches, in the attempt to gain but a few yards of enemy land. And the outcome of many of these battles, each one seen at the time as being so vitally important for the descendants of those who took part in them, sadly ended up being just as fruitless. Only the truly epic clashes such as the Somme or Passchendaele stand out, often, tragically, because of the sheer scale of the carnage involved.
In addition, I have not given details of the Home Front, which has been ably documented in a recent book by Jeremy Paxman. In concentrating on individual battles I have mentioned their context, so some of the background wider history of the war does come in through that route.
Some other issues are important to note.
Firstly, no one ever seems to agree on precise casualty figures. Even standard works disagree with each other, and one of these, by Correlli Barnett, shows that this can sometimes lead to discrepancies of several million deaths. The figures for Britain and its colonies tend to be somewhat more precise, but the reporting of German and Russian figures can differ wildly. Wikipedia is tremendously helpful as a starting point. However, some of the details there need to be checked against other statistics for a different point of view.
Secondly, town names change, and sometimes have changed more than once. St Petersburg briefly became Petrograd, then Leningrad for many years before becoming St Petersburg again. Towns in German Poland changed their names, as did cities in Austrian-ruled Galicia or Bohemia. I have tried to use the name that was employed at that time.
Finally, it is important to emphasise that, if we are to get a balanced picture of the whole war, we need to look beyond the Western Front. Communism came to power as a result of the stalemate on the Eastern Front. So desperate were the Germans to get Russia out of the war that they sent Lenin back home from exile in Switzerland. The plot worked. The Communists under Lenin took power and withdrew from the conflict. But the world then had seventy-four years of the USSR. During that time millions were killed by the secret police. What became the Cold War lasted from the 1940s down to more recent times.
This book is being written against the backdrop of acute conflict in the Middle East. Many attribute this tragically fairly normal state of affairs to the creation of Israel in 1948. But with no British capture of Jerusalem in 1917 there would have been no Israel to create thirty-one years later. Similarly, without the capture of Damascus in 1918 there might have been no Syria in existence to have a civil war in our own time.
This is an overview, therefore, of battles on both Eastern and Western Fronts. By and large I have not given many eyewitness accounts, since these are readily available in much longer books listed in the bibliography, online through the BBC or Imperial War Museum. Maps are a necessary aide to understanding the geography of war. Today’s interactive online maps are superior to classic static ones. The bibliography lists some of the more helpful of these. This work is, if you like, a starter course, designed to whet the appetite for people to gain the aerial photograph view of the war and its causes. The results of World War I are still with us a century later, so that is the focus of much of our book. It looks not just at the key battles of long ago, but at the impact that they have had on the world we live in today.
INTRODUCTION
HOW WAR BEGAN
CHANGING PERSPECTIVES
In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row
‘In Flanders Fields’ (1915) by John McCrae, probably the best-known poem of the First World War, reminds us all too vividly of the horrors of that conflict. To the poet’s images we can add men sitting in trenches preparing to go ‘over the top’, cratered landscapes resembling the moon, poison gas and lists of the dead found in nearly every town square, church and school. A generation of young men lost – and to what purpose?
These memories of the First World War remain with us, even though the last veteran died a few years ago. Every year we still stand silent on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and recall all our war dead. With more recent deaths in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan fresh in our national consciousness, it has become easier to understand again the human sacrifice and sense of loss with every ending of life in combat. War does not seem so remote to us any more. We can therefore get a better grasp of what happened in 1914–1918 than during the recent long years of peace. World War I is relevant again.
Some wars can be described easily. World War II was started by Nazi aggression; about that we have few doubts today. But World War I remains as complex as ever in how it began. Even a century later, debate still rages over who started it and why. We can all see why war broke out in 1939 and why stopping Hitler was necessary. But with 1914, nagging doubts still persist. How did ninety-nine years of peace since Napoleon come to an end, and with such terrible results?
In order to understand this, we need to look at three questions:
1) Why were France and Germany enemies in the first place? 2) What led to war in 1914? 3) Was war inevitable?
We will explore these three questions in the chapters that follow. Historians, like the politicians of an earlier era, still cannot fully agree on who was responsible and why. Yet it is an important discussion even today. We still live with the consequences of the ‘Great War’ of 1914–1918.
One legacy of this war is the situation in today’s Middle East. At the time of writing, fighting is raging in Syria. Once part of the vast Ottoman Empire, Syria was seized by the French as a spoil of war, despite that region being liberated by Australian, British and Arab forces towards the end of World War I. Many of the major problems of the Balkans in the 1990s and the endless violence of the twenty-first-century Middle East stem from the outcome of the battles that we will be examining in this book. There is general agreement that World War II was caused by the inconclusive end to the fighting in 1918. So too, one can argue, was the Cold War. In fact some historians see the various global conflicts as one, either a new Thirty Years’ War (1914–1945) or as a ‘Short Twentieth Century’ of perpetual uncertainty mixed with actual fighting (1914–1989). So the events of 1914 did not just begin four years of war but decades of conflict, certainly up until 1945 and arguably extending to as recently as 1989 and the end of the Cold War.
While the interest in World War I has remained constant, the interpretations of its events have been numerous. History is just like fashion – always changing! The facts remain the same, but how we interpret them changes continually. Someone puts forward a point of view, which everyone believes for a while. Then some revisionists come along and say that the old view was a major misinterpretation, and that a new theory is the one that really represents why something happened. Debate continues and numerous books and articles get written. Finally, many years later, and with much more perspective available as the original events become more distant in time, a final consensus emerges that either takes a middle view between the extremes, or decides that the original view was right in the first place!
Of few events in history is this truer than of the First World War. Reputations come and go. A general is a hero one moment and a lunatic the next. Battles seen at one time as victories become devastating defeats at another. To take one example, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig began as a towering hero, following which he was seen as a donkey leading brave lions to their needless deaths. Now, nearly a hundred years after the battles he commanded, he is finally seen as a leader who did his utmost best with the terrible cards he was dealt. Similarly Churchill’s terrible errors of judgement at Gallipoli are now seen in the light of the lessons he successfully learnt. Because he saw that the army and the navy should co-ordinate their efforts – as had not happened at Gallipoli – come 1940 he was able to co-ordinate Britain’s military effort, save his country from defeat and thereby redeem his reputation.
On what, then, do historians concur? They certainly tend to agree that an old rivalry between France and Germany was a crucial factor in the lead-up to the First World War. In order to understand this we must return to events some decades earlier, and to a war that took place in 1870.
A CONFLICT BETWEEN TWO COUNTRIES
At the start of 1870, France was an empire, ruled over by Emperor Napoleon III, the nephew of the great Napoleon Bonaparte. There was no such country as Germany at this time, only a number of independent German states. There was a powerful kingdom in the north of that region, namely that of Prussia, that stretched from the Dutch border in the west to the Russian in the east. Alongside Prussia there were several much smaller kingdoms (such as Bavaria), grand duchies, principalities and some states of just a few square miles. These nations had been part of the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire, which lasted from 800–1806, and which for the last 400 years or so had a ruler from the House of Habsburg – one of the most important European royal houses – as its emperor. The attempt by the Austrians to control the future of a potential new German state had been destroyed at a battle in what is now called the Czech Republic, at Sadowa in 1866. The Prussians also coveted being at the heart of a genuinely German nation, in their case one from which Austria would be excluded.
In 1870 Napoleon III fell into a trap laid by the Chancellor (or prime minister equivalent) of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck. This enabled an army under Prussian leadership, but also consisting of troops from the other smaller kingdoms and duchies, such as Saxony and Hesse, to invade French soil. On September 1st 1870 France was completely routed at the Battle of Sedan, a town in northern France. Napoleon III was captured and later deposed and France became a republic, as it has been ever since. The commander of the victorious coalition army was a Prussian general, Helmuth von Moltke, the Elder, who then became one of the most revered soldiers in his country’s history.
On January 18th 1871, all the kings, grand dukes and princes whose forces had won at Sedan gathered together for a significant occasion just outside Paris. This gathering only reinforced France’s humiliation at the loss of territory. In the Hall of Mirrors in the vast Palace of Versailles, the building constructed to glorify the seventeenth-century French King, Louis XIV, a brand-new country called Germany was created. The Prussian king now became emperor of the new German Empire. It was in fact the Second Reich (the Holy Roman Empire being the First Reich), although few people called it that at the time.
The war that had just happened was called the Franco-Prussian War. But it could equally be called the War that Created Germany. For over a thousand years Germany or its equivalent had been part of larger units, such as the Holy Roman Empire, which included, for example, what is now Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and much of northern Italy in its wider territory. At last, Germany was a country in its own right.
The Germans now added to their new nation areas that had originally been part of the Holy Roman Empire for centuries, but for many years had been an integral part of France. The area we call Alsace, centred on Strasbourg, had been French since as long ago as 1648. Lorraine, centred on the town of Nancy, had swapped sides several times but had been definitively French since the early eighteenth century. Both Alsace and Lorraine were now ceded to the new German Empire.
One key thing must be remembered about this war: Britain played no part. In many other parts of the world, such as the scramble to obtain colonies in Africa, the United Kingdom and France had been rivals for much of the nineteenth century and were not on friendly terms. Now that rivalry was lessening, but still no British soldier would die to help France. And the new little kingdom of Belgium, independent only since 1831 when it broke away from the Netherlands, was neutral, such status having been guaranteed by both Britain and France in a treaty of 1839.
France therefore lost a major war, its emperor and substantial territory to a country that had not existed prior to 1871. This was a total humiliation, and one that the French resolved would never happen again. They drew up a series of plans, the latest of which, by 1914, was called Plan XVII. This made clear that if France and the new German state were ever to be at war, France would immediately invade its former territories – Alsace and Lorraine – in a bid to win them back and also knock Germany out of the fight. But it was not just the French who were making plans.
Having beaten the French easily in 1870, the Germans also drew up plans to ensure that they would be able to do so again. The Prussian General Moltke retired, but one of his successors in charge of the army, Field Marshal Count Alfred von Schlieffen, drew up a master plan on his retirement to ensure that Germany would be able to defeat France easily within forty days. This was critical because as France became friends with the Russian Empire, which lay to the east, the danger existed that the German Empire could find itself at war on two fronts at the same time. We shall look at this in much more detail in the next few chapters, since the infamous Schlieffen Plan was to fail utterly. This was all the more poignant, as the leader of Germany’s armies in 1914 was none other than Count Helmuth von Moltke, the Younger, the nephew of the great victor of the 1870s.
In 1914 war did break out, with Germany fighting on two fronts at the same time, against both France and Russia. Everyone, especially the Germans and French, remembered the events of 1870. As the German war machine now went actively into operation, the question was: would France be defeated again?
THE ROAD TO WAR
On the question of who was responsible for the Great War, the victorious Allies in 1919 had no doubts: the Germans started the war and would now pay for it. The Treaty of Versailles, which concluded the main conflict with Germany, had some controversial clauses. Some of the Allies claimed large payments, or reparations, from Germany to pay for the huge losses that Britain and France had suffered as a result of four years of fighting. This was tied to the infamous ‘war guilt’ clause of the Treaty that specifically accused Germany of starting the conflict and of responsibility for it. Consequently the Germans associated what they believed to be false guilt with the vast payments that they were forced to make to the British and French. Who caused the outbreak of war in 1914 thus became a political issue rather than a simple matter of historical debate.
Everybody agrees that the trigger that led to war was the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, by young Bosnian Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip. The leaders of Austria-Hungary were furious and determined to humiliate the Serbs, whom they deemed responsible for the act, whether indirectly (the government) or directly (the ‘Black Hand’, rogue elements of Serbian intelligence). Since the path to war clearly began with this shooting and the Austro-Hungarian reaction, questions of ‘who started it’ might seem a bit odd. Surely, one would think, it was the Austrians who began the conflict? But this is perhaps an overly simplistic way of looking at it. What we should ask instead is this: what was it about the events leading up to World War I that resulted in such a massive and international conflict? Balkan wars had occurred before the Great War without major international involvement. In fact, several had taken place only just prior to 1914, with terrible loss of life but with no Great Power intervention. In 1870 the kingdoms and duchies that were soon to form Germany had invaded France, again without any British action. What was it that made the events in Sarajevo different?
The main suspect has always been the network of alliances that came into being in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bismarck, the creator of Germany in 1870, had been careful to ensure that his country did not have enemies on both sides. He had therefore linked Germany to the other two imperial nations, Russia and Austria-Hungary, in the League of the Three Emperors. But in 1890, the young new Emperor of Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had very different ideas, dismissed Bismarck’s caution in international affairs. Germany was still allied to Austria-Hungary, but any sense of friendship with Russia evaporated, so that in 1894 old-fashioned, despotic tsarist Russia signed an alliance with modern, republican, democratic France. Since Poland had been carved up and abolished in the late eighteenth century, this meant that Germany had a hostile power to the west in France and to the east in Russia – what is called ‘encirclement’, enemies on both sides.
Meanwhile, Britain’s alliances were also changing. Historically Britain’s enemy had been France. The core state of Germany, the kingdom of Prussia, had been the British ally against French aggression, most notably at the battle of Waterloo in 1815. As recently as 1898 Britain and France had almost gone to war with each other over an oasis in the African desert at Fashoda. But in 1904 the two old enemies had patched up all their differences with the Entente Cordiale. And in 1907 Britain, who had spent much of the nineteenth century hostile to Russia – as during the Crimean War – patched up its differences with the Russians, and reversed centuries of alliances.
All attempts to create a close British-German friendship, however, foundered time and again. As the German economy prospered, Britain was seen not as a potential ally but as a rival. Germany, after its unification in the 1870s, soon became the industrial, economic and scientific powerhouse of Europe. But it was a new country, and increasingly resentful of Britain, which, in addition to its own economic might, was the world’s most powerful country with the biggest overseas empire of its age. When the British invented a brand-new kind of battleship, a dreadnought, the Germans decided that they too wanted to have a fleet that matched the Royal Navy. An arms race now ensued, pitting Britain against Germany, just at the very time when Britain and France were friends and not hereditary enemies.
Therefore by 1914 old alliances of ancient vintage had gone and new ones replaced them. But the question arises: how much did these ties in reality bind the countries involved to go to war?
Cutting short volumes of debate and decades of argument, the main thrust of ideas today is that the states that declared war on each other in August 1914 did not fully understand modern warfare. Once an army mobilised, for instance, it was very difficult to get it to stand down again, especially since the comparatively recent invention of railways made transportation much faster than in the past.
And here we need to remember two key things:
1) There had been no major Europe-wide war since Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, almost a century earlier: all nineteenth-century wars had been local and had not escalated into wider conflict.
2) European nations completely failed to take on board any of the lessons of the American Civil War, which should have showed clearly what modern weapons could do. 1914 saw new technology combined with pre-Civil War ways of thinking.
Therefore, in allowing the new system of alliances to determine their actions, the European nations really had no idea of what they were letting themselves in for if war broke out. In Britain and Germany, for example, the overwhelming consensus was that war would be over by Christmas. The carnage and millions of deaths were beyond the comprehension and wildest imagination of all those leaders involved in the decision to go to war, and of the men who cheerfully signed up to fight in what everyone thought would be a short and fleeting conflict.
As a result, the escalation of events between Sarajevo at the end of June and the outbreak of hostilities in August, while clear in retrospect to those of us who know what happened next, simply never occurred to the participants at the time. In hindsight they are deeply guilty, but they had no idea of what they were unleashing or of the long-term consequences of their actions. It is only through hindsight that we now understand why World War I is so important. Not only were they launching the ‘Great War’ but everything that stemmed from it: World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War, Stalin and Mao’s purges, the Middle East conflict and all the horrors with which we are still living today.
In essence, one can say that war was caused by the way in which the alliances formed locked countries into their membership. War with one country under such a system automatically led to war with that nation’s allies. Russia went to war with Austria-Hungary because the latter had attacked Serbia. As a result Germany went to war with Russia and, as the Russians were allied with France, the French also went to war with Germany.
This, however, is still too simplistic. Although Britain and France had signed agreements with Russia, the British Empire was not obliged to enter the war. The United Kingdom had been neutral when France was defeated in 1870 by what became the newly formed German state. But Britain had signed an agreement that guaranteed the neutrality of Belgium in 1839. At that time the fear was of a French invasion of Belgium, as no such state as Germany then existed. When it came to 1914 the French were so anxious not to violate Belgian neutrality that they waited until after the Germans had breached it.
As for other countries, Italy had been allied to Germany and Austria-Hungary since 1882, but in 1915 decided to switch sides and join Britain and France in order to gain territory from Austria. The Ottoman Empire, which ruled over most of today’s Middle East and, until 1913, also over much of Europe and North Africa, had been on the same side as Britain and France in the nineteenth century. But the Ottomans’ deadliest enemy had for well over a century been Russia – who was now allied to France! So weeks after the war began, the Ottoman Empire switched from its historic allegiance to France and the United Kingdom and entered the war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary. So too did the Ottomans’ recent former enemy Bulgaria, who had fallen out with Serbia over the spoils of the Ottoman collapse in Europe. Until the war began, therefore, Italy had ignored the alliance system and both Bulgaria and the Ottomans had been outside it.
So, in brief, the powers aligned at the beginning of the Great War were: the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary, against the Triple Alliance of France, Russia and the British Empire. Later the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria joined the Central Powers, while Italy (which until 1915 had been theoretically linked to the Central Powers), Japan and the US joined the Allies.
