World War I, 1914-18
2.4. A Continent in Flames
greatly outgunned and outnumbered by the entire grand eet—
which literally covered the horizon—and with his escape blocked.
His response was the only possible one: namely, to send his light vessels on a near-suicidal charge against the British battleships while most of his own heavy ships, by means of a second brilliant maneuver, were able to extricate themselves and disappear.
Critics have often blamed the British commander, Admiral John Jel-licoe, for being too fearful of the German light vessels and torpedoes. It is certainly true that Jellicoe had a well-ordered, meticulous mind tending toward caution.30 It is also true that the belligerent whose main naval forces he commanded had so much more to lose as to make almost any kind of risk taking foolhardy;
besides, this was probably the rst time in more than two centuries that the British navy faced an enemy whose ships and training were superior to its own. During the night of May 31–June 1, Jellicoe may indeed have missed a chance to destroy the German high sea eet. On the other hand, since that eet never ventured out of port again, the result actually achieved was almost equally good.
Considering the stalemate that had developed on land, Jutland was the one great battle that might have knocked a major belligerent out of the war in short order, and perhaps decided it in favor of Germany and its allies. Once it had ended as it did, the only thing that remained was attrition, as both sides were now given more time to mobilize their resources and throw them into action.
In this way, a struggle that was already the largest ever waged was destined to become much larger still.
screaming for four times as many,31 and a year later production had risen to a hundred thousand per day. Preparing to go on the o ensive in Champagne in September 1915, the French were able to stockpile eight hundred thousand shells—at that time, about a week’s production. That, however, was just the beginning. At the Somme in 1916, the British red 1.2 million shells, a total weight of twenty-three thousand tons. But the peak was reached at Ypres in the fall of 1917, when the British red 4.3 million shells with a total weight of over a hundred thousand tons. Taking over from the tsar at about the same time, the Bolsheviks inherited no fewer than eighteen million shells, and by the last year of the war the Germans alone were consuming as many as three hundred million rounds of small-arms ammunition per month. Yet ammunition was just the tip of the iceberg; even before the Americans came in, the total number of major-caliber guns deployed by both sides on the Western Front alone was over thirty thousand.32 To focus on just one country, between 1914 and 1916, British annual production of cannon went from 91 to 4,314. That of tanks went from zero to 150, that of aircraft from 200 to 6,100, and that of machine guns from 300 to 33,500.
This, then, was a war not just between armies but also between factories. Nothing like it had been foreseen in the prewar plans, and indeed very often those plans ran at odds with what was actually to take place. For example, French military authorities, in calling up workers to serve, caused employment at Schneider-Creusot to drop by half; yet this was the rm that manufactured more artillery pieces and more shells than any other.33 Their counterparts in other countries were no more prescient. Britain, the country of free trade par excellence, went to war with the idea that business could and should continue as usual, and throughout the war there was a tug- of-war between the army and industry as to who should obtain the available manpower. In Germany, the early months of the war led to the giant chemical rm Bayer losing almost half of its eight thousand employees, causing production to fall by a similar
amount.34 The tendency to look at war as an activity in itself, the almost complete separation between military and civilian education, and the expectation of a short con ict all contributed to this outcome.
As so often in this period, the model for what followed was provided by the railways. Not only were railways absolutely vital to the war e ort, but they were also among the largest enterprises of all. In service since the middle of the nineteenth century, most railways had originally been privately owned, though in some countries they were later taken over by the state. Even in countries where they remained in private hands, special legislation empowered the authorities to take them over and run them for the bene t of the public—read: the military—in case of a national emergency. Now, though no state went so far as to nationalize its factories outright, the same system was extended to other parts of the economy.
Step-by-step, arms-manufacturing plants (to the extent that they were not already government-owned), the energy supply, and the raw materials that fed them were brought under government control. In this way, it was government o cials rather than factory owners who decided how resources would be allocated, what would be produced, by whom, with what tools, under what conditions, and, very often, at what prices as well.
Those who worked the system at the top were often prime ministers such as David Lloyd George—who, not accidentally, had taken up his post after serving as minister for munitions. Under them, the controls were entrusted to existing or newly established ministries. Day-to-day regulation and supervision were normally exercised by businessmen who were the only people with the requisite hands-on experience to establish such giant systems and make them work.35 Serving them, in turn, were vast, often newly raised armies of clerks with budgets to match. The obstacles to the establishment of governmental control were mainly political as neither manufacturers’ associations, nor trade-union leaders, nor
consumers necessarily liked the restrictions that were placed on their freedoms. Many of them engaged in active, if necessarily sporadic, resistance, quietly sabotaging the state’s e orts by striking, and engaging in black-market activities.
Whereas manufacturers felt the e ect of controls over production, ordinary people, to the extent that they had not been conscripted, experienced the heavy hand of government mainly through its mobilization of labor. Among the countless prewar predictions, one of the few that did come true was the expectation of increased unemployment as living standards and, with them, demand for nonessential items fell. As early as 1915, however, the situation reversed itself as the roaring armament factories, the mines that provided them with raw materials, and the transportation arteries that served them grew rapidly. Thus in Britain, France, and in Germany, the armed forces began exempting men so that they could return home, take up work, and produce what was needed. By the last months of the war, for example, the number of German men who enjoyed this privilege stood at two and a half million. Among them, just over half were classi ed as K.v. (Kriegsverwen-dungsfaehig,
t for eld duty).36
Far removed from the trenches, and often earning very good wages, workers who gained exemptions had excellent reason to bless their luck. On the other hand, the very fact that they had been exempted meant they were placed under a certain kind of discipline;
they could always be recalled to duty, either in a military emergency or because of insubordination. Other means by which governments tightened their grip on labor included increased working hours; abolishing restrictions on shift work, night work, and dangerous work; and attempts to restrict workers’ freedom to move from one employer to the next. They also tampered with training standards so as to permit less skilled labor to be used, regulated the pay scales, and prohibited strikes. A tremendous propaganda e ort did what it could to make workers redouble their e orts, though it was not always e ective.
As dramatic as these changes were for labor on the whole, the e ect the war had on the women’s labor force was less severe than one would rst guess. Taking Britain as our example, when everything is said and done women’s contribution to the war e ort remained limited. Total female employment went up by about 1.5 million, from 3,276,000 in July 1914 to 4,808,000 four years later.
However, these gures probably overestimate the change that took place. They mask the fact that, before the war, many women working as household servants or else in small, unregistered sweatshops failed to be included in the statistics. Now, provided with the opportunity to earn more, they simply changed from one job to another.
Even at a time when more than four million British men were on active service and wore army or navy uniform, six out of ten people in the British workforce remained male. As the government recognized, the elds of economic activity absolutely essential for the country’s survival were coal mining, merchant shipping, and food production. Of the three, the rst two were among the most dangerous, so the near-complete absence of women from them is hardly surprising. As to the third, an attempt was made to meet labor shortages by setting up a Women’s Land Army; however, it met with resistance and never got o the ground.37
Of the eight principal belligerents, only two, Britain and the United States, permitted women to join the military. This probably had something to do with the fact that these countries, before the war, held the military in the least esteem. From 1916, Britain allowed women to enter either the army or the navy. Later the United States made similar arrangements. To prevent what people today would call sexual harassment, then known as “corruption of morals,” women were formed into their own separate corps and put to work in a very great variety of elds such as nursing, communications, administration, food preparation, as drivers, and so on.
The total number of women who wore uniforms was not large;
they certainly did not comprise more than 1 or 2 percent of those
who did.38 What distinguished them was the fact that, coming from a middle-class background, they tended to be better educated than either the female population as a whole or their male comrades.
This may help explain why they generally performed their functions quietly and e ciently. Besides, being both volunteers and women, in case they did commit an o ense it was always easier to get rid of them than to discipline them. As the American Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, wrote when his subordinates wanted to punish a woman: “one cannot deal with women as with men.”39
Whether or not one was in the workforce, the factor that brought the war home to practically every citizen of the belligerent countries was food rationing. There was, of course, nothing new about rationing cities under siege. Still, based on the administrative capabilities of the modern state, this was probably the rst time in history when an attempt was made to apply it to entire countries.
Whether because imports had been reduced (Britain), or because the supply of fertilizer was interrupted (Germany), or because so many men had been called up that farm work had to be done by women and youths (all countries), the war led to food shortages. The primary objective of rationing was to counter those shortages by preventing waste and making sure that the available stocks would be utilized as e ciently as possible. At last on paper, another one was to cope with rising prices. In all countries wartime expenditure, which was only partly covered by taxes and loans, led to in ation.
In all countries, in ation could easily create a situation where available stocks would be bought up by the well-to-do, shortchanging the majority and leading to social unrest in the form of demonstrations, strikes, etc. Rationing was supposed to put everybody on an equal basis. In addition, it permitted the available stocks to be distributed in ways that adjusted consumption to the nutritional needs of various groups of people such as the very young, the old, workers engaged in hard labor, etc., as calculated by experts.
The system worked better in some countries than in others.40 In all countries, there existed people—large property owners, war pro teers, and the women who, with or without marriage, depended on them— who could buy whatever was on o er at whatever prices and whom rationing left untouched. In all countries, the combination of rising prices with food-scarcity hit urban residents more than it did villagers. While the latter usually had enough to eat, the former did not. Often they had to trek to the countryside so as to sell their possessions and obtain food; in this way the modernizing process, which tends to concentrate wealth in cities, was to some extent reversed. In ation also hit members of the middle classes harder than it did workers, some of whom actually found themselves entitled to buy and consume more and better food than they had been able to a ord before the war. Furthermore, whereas middle-class incomes remained xed, workers were often able to make more than before by leaving their jobs and moving into the armaments factories. As a result, in Britain at any rate living standards among the working classes probably rose rather than fell.41
Historians writing before 1990 or so have generally claimed that the German and Austrian-Hungarian mobilization-systems were less e ective than those of Britain and France and tried to blame authoritarianism, conservatism, and militarism for that “fact.” Since then, relying on an analysis of enemy troops killed per unit of currency spent, at least one well-known historian has claimed that they were more e ective.42 However, this overlooks the fact that, instead of having to rely on long lines of naval communication, the
“Central” Powers were operating on internal lines. Be this as it may, the really decisive factor was that the Central Powers lost their overseas trade, largely because of the blockade, but also because, unlike Britain in particular, they did not have any considerable overseas assets that they could have used to pay for what they bought. Hence they were unable to substitute imports for domestic production; hence real shortages developed and some people starved.
Worst of all was the situation in Russia. Before the war, in spite of its generally very low living standards, Russia had been the largest European producer of food by far (in fact its output, 68,864 thousand metric tons, was triple that of the remaining countries combined). Though the war caused farms to be neglected and the production of wheat to fall by about 12 percent (1917 gure), the drop was partly balanced by curtailed exports due to the fact that trade routes through the Baltic and the Dardanelles were blocked.43 What really did the Russians in were not any absolute shortages but a combination of very high in ation with the di culty of imposing e cient administrative controls on a huge, underdeveloped country with a relatively meager railway system and a largely illiterate population. In ation gave farmers every incentive to hide their production in the hope of obtaining higher prices later on.
Ine ciency prevented the state from extracting those products against the farmers’ will, a feat nally achieved only by the Bolsheviks who used ruthless methods that included starving millions to death. As Bloch had predicted twenty years before, the outcome was hunger, strikes, and revolution.
When it comes to Russia, few will doubt that hunger, strikes, and revolution played a key role in bringing about defeat—as is also re ected in the fact that, even before October 1917, the rouble had lost more of its value against the dollar than any other currency.44 The evidence in regard to Germany and Austria-Hungary is less clear. That the civilian population of both countries su ered grievously there is no doubt and indeed by the last year of the war German o cial rations only allowed seven pounds of potatoes, 250 grams of meat, and less than 100 grams of fat a week. That these factors led to considerable dissatisfaction and social unrest during the last year of the war is likewise not in doubt, though it is arguable that France and Italy had encountered similar di culties in 1917 and, in the end, succeeded in overcoming them. It is also certain, though, that the last weeks before the armistice saw these countries’ armies, as well as their Ottoman and Bulgarian allies, being defeated in the eld and pushed back. When Hin-denburg,
who in 1916 had been promoted army chief of sta , went to see the kaiser on the 2nd of October to demand that hostilities be ended, it was this fact he had in mind. Writing to his sovereign later on the same day Ludendor , Hindenburg’s second in command and arguably the most powerful man in Germany, took the same line. It was the inability of the army to sustain the ght that made further sacri ces on the part of the civilian population pointless, not the state of the civilian population that demanded that the army lay down its arms.45
In summary, the superiority of the defense over the o ense generated attrition on practically every front where armies were sent in the hope of producing a decision. While attrition meant that naval operations played a greater role than expected, its most important e ect was to give the belligerents what they needed to bring about a change in the nature of war: time.
Previously, war had consisted very largely of the employment of force against force—a fact re ected in the military literature of the time and which explains why military and civilian education had been kept almost completely separate. Now it turned into a vast exercise in coordinating all national resources—from factories to labor and from raw materials to machine tools—until, in theory and to some extent in practice as well, not a screw could be produced nor a calorie consumed without o cial permission.
Though the beginnings were often confused, all the expertise at the disposal of the modern state, all its administrative capabilities, all its means of communication and transportation, were thrown into the e ort. With the notable exception of Russia, a semi- developed country that had only started exing its industrial muscle some two and a half decades earlier, most of the belligerents probably mobilized their resources about as e ciently as they could. Putting aside the United States, which thanks to geography and the fact that it was only in the war for eighteen months had an exceptionally easy time, in the end it was the belligerents that both escaped blockades and devised e cient production, manpower- allocation, and rationing systems that won the day.