World War I, 1914-18
2.1. Opening Moves
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Serbia from two separate directions. With about the same number, the Serbs, proving a tough nut to crack, resisted and within two months succeeded in repelling the invaders. The French commanders in Alsace, in Lorraine, and in the Ardennes obeyed their instincts and attacked. At one point, they succeeded in occupying Mulhouse, but later they, too, were repulsed with vast losses. The British also did what they had expected to do, embarking their expeditionary force and sending it to the French channel ports.
From there, they marched east practically unopposed until they nally met the Germans at Mons.
Meanwhile, in southern Poland, about a million Austrian- Hungarian troops clashed with a somewhat larger number of Russians. At rst, fortune favored the Austrian-Hungarians in the northern part of the front, the Russians gaining in the south as battles named for such obscure Polish towns as Kasnik and Zamosc- Komarow came and went. The equilibrium did not last. By late September, the Russians had surrounded the great fortress city of Lemberg, occupied part of the Carpathian Mountains, and in icted losses numbering in the hundreds of thousands. These were defeats from which the Austrian-Hungarians never completely recovered, and from this point on, whenever they wanted to achieve something notable either on the defense or on the o ense, they rst had to call on the Germans for aid.
With 6 million men under arms, the Russian army was the largest in Europe, and even as it fought the Austrian-Hungarians its commanders still felt strong enough to meet the request of their hard-pressed French allies and launch more than half a million troops into East Prussia. After achieving some initial successes, they found themselves opposed by German forces under the command of two soon-to-be-famous German generals, Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendor ; the fact that, incredibly, the Russians sent their radio transmissions en clair did nothing to help. By the end of September, the invaders had been heavily defeated in the battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. The threat to East Prussia having been removed, Hindenburg and Ludendor were able to
send their forces south so as to defeat a Russian attempt to exploit their victories over the Austrian-Hungarians and invade Silesia. The Russians were defeated at Lodz and forced to call o their invasion.
In early December, the fronts were frozen.
As most people had expected, the most signi cant operations of all were those carried out by the Germans on the Western Front. The total number of front-line German troops in this theater was about a million and a half, divided among seven eld armies (only one army, the Eighth, had been left to defend East Prussia). The greatest concentration of all consisted of about seven hundred thousand troops who formed the First, Second, and Third armies on the right wing. Moltke’s critics have often blamed him for not making his right wing stronger still by adding to it the new divisions that had become available in the last years before the war. Worse still, he took away two army corps in mid-campaign and sent them to East Prussia. And while it is true that Moltke’s nerves were not among the strongest, his resignation on September 14 being accepted in favor of the minister of war, General Erich von Falkenhayn, these criticisms overlook two points.
First, by refraining from violating Dutch neutrality and allocating far fewer troops to the investment of Antwerp than Schlie en had wanted to use, Moltke saved at least as many forces for carrying out the plan as he took away from it. Second, the Belgian network of roads and railroads was already congested. Had additional troops been fed into the country, then surely the only result would have been growing supply di culties and monumental tra c jams.2
The Belgian forti cations at Liege were the strongest in the world, holding up the advance for a few days until the country was nally forced to capitulate when the Germans brought in the heaviest artillery used by any army in history. With its fall, a steady, if not quick, advance into the interior began, and for the rst three weeks it went very well. Strangely, under the so-called Plan XVII, the French deployment was the mirror image of the German, with most of their troops concentrated on their right wing. This was put into operation even though the French high command was aware of the
Germans’ intention to go by way of Belgium. Facing such a juggernaut, the Belgian army was brushed aside, its remnants retreating into the fortress of Antwerp where they were joined by a British brigade hastily shipped over from England. The British, whom the German Second Army encountered at Mons on August 23, were also pushed back. These were not inconsiderable successes, yet some German o cers were disturbed at the ease of it all. If the French were indeed being defeated, then there should have been masses of prisoners, guns, and other trophies; in fact, however, the number of those taken was very small.
Considering the distances the troops had to cover and the di culties in supplying them as they did so, the original German plan for enveloping Paris from the west may have been megalomaniac—and all the more so because the main French railways, radiating from the city, ran across the German supply lines and thus could not be used to support such a movement even if they were captured intact. In any case the commander of the First Army on the right, General von Kluck, felt that he could not risk losing contact with the Second Army on his left, which, confronted by the British and some French units, moved forward more slowly than his own. On August 20, acting on his own initiative, he changed the direction of his advance from southwest to southeast, thus turning his right ank toward Paris and leaving a growing gap between himself and the channel farther to the west.
The German movement was discovered by a French aviator who reported on the gray columns “gliding” in the new direction—an early example of aerial reconnaissance at its best. The French chief of sta at this time was a wine-drinking, imperturbable general by the name of Joseph Jo re, and by an astonishing feat of sta work he and his subordinates were able to bring up troops from Lorraine, form them into a new army, and direct them at Kluck’s rear. By an even more astonishing feat of sta work, Kluck was able to turn his columns around, make them cross their own communications, and counterattack on the Ourcq River. It was at this point that additional troops, always assuming that they had been available and
that they could have been supplied, might have played a decisive role. In their absence, Kluck’s maneuver, though brilliantly executed, caused the gap between him and Second Army to reopen.
Into the gap moved the British expeditionary force, which had rallied after the setback it su ered at Mons.
As the Second Army began to retreat, a lieutenant colonel by the name of Hentsch arrived at Kluck’s headquarters on September 9.
Hentsch had been sent by Moltke, who, isolated in his Luxembourg headquarters, had little idea of what was going on and was desperately trying to nd out. On his way, Hentsch had passed through the headquarters of the Second Army and learned that it was about to retreat. Together he and Kluck made the decision that the First Army should retreat as well.3 With that, the French had won the so-called battle of the Marne, and the initial German plan had failed.
Had the war ended that fall, it would have met expectations, more or less. That it did not was due to several factors, and rst and foremost was that the meaning of the term battle was changing.
As the combination, in many languages, of the terms battle and eld shows, from Marathon in 490 BC to Gettysburg in AD 1863, commanders preparing for the former had sought to concentrate as many forces as possible at a single point. From Rafa in 217 BC to Sedan in AD 1870, the troops in question hardly ever numbered more than a quarter million or took up a front longer than ten miles.
Thus even the largest armies formed mere specks in space. Once they had been defeated, often there was little to back them up.
When Napoleon spoke of “battles that decide the fate of states, nations and crowns,” he knew what he was talking about.
Over the next half century, things changed. On the one hand, the growing numbers of support troops meant that those on the front line comprised a diminishing fraction of all armies. Whereas, as late as the American Civil War, perhaps nine out of ten men had been combatants, in 1914 only ve were. On the other, the advent of modern levels of repower forced the troops who were deployed at
the front to disperse until, on the average, each man occupied up to twenty times as much space as had his Napoleonic predecessor.4 Meanwhile, armies had grown until they numbered not tens or hundreds of thousands but millions, far outpacing the capabilities of the railways on which those armies depended for transportation.
With the transport problems and supply di culties that such masses implied, the very possibility of concentrating one’s “main” forces to give “battle” in a single “ eld” was lost. Conversely, even a dramatic victory on the front lines meant no more than that only a fraction of the total opposing army was defeated.
This fact was re ected in the number of casualties and the way they were distributed over time. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, a few hours of intensive slaughter on a eld such as Wagram (1809), Leipzig (1813), or Solferino (1859) could sometimes account for as many as 20 to 30 percent of the total number of troops on either side. However, in the years from 1914 to 1918, the above factors meant that the “main” forces of either side were rarely if ever present to oppose each other. However powerful the weapons and however great their e ect now was, the rate of casualties su ered even on the bloodiest occasions was lower by far
—to the point that any day on which more than 1 or 2 percent of an army was lost was considered a disaster.
Acting as the grand introduction to twentieth-century warfare, the battle of the Marne re ected these realities. Nothing like it had ever been fought before, and the absolute number of casualties on both sides was staggering. The German gures have never been published and, by now, are probably lost. This, however, was a roughly symmetrical struggle in which neither side enjoyed any particular technological or tactical advantage. Relying on what intelligence they could obtain, both sides advanced and retreated and wheeled and turned and countermarched. Neither fought from forti ed positions, and both were simultaneously on the o ense and on the defense; hence it would be surprising if German losses were very di erent from those su ered by the French, which amounted to eighty thousand men.5 Surely the deaths of 160,000 men is
monstrous, yet compared with the 9 million men that Germany and France had under arms at this point it carried little weight. As Churchill was to write to his wife not long thereafter, entire
“avalanches of men”6 were preparing to take the place of the dead and the wounded.
Thereafter, almost without pause, the rst battle of the Aisne, the battle of the Yser, and the rst battle of Ypres came and went. So heavy were German losses at Ypres that the battle acquired the nickname Kin-dermord, the massacre of the innocent. Yet, in all the slaughter, a decision did not result. Having reached the channel at Ostend on October 15, the Germans kept almost the whole of Belgium except for a small corner in the southwest where the Belgian army, having broken out of Antwerp, succeeded in maintaining a toehold. The French in their turn retained control over their channel ports, without which continued British participation in the war would have had to be routed through Brittany and the Gulf of Biscay and made considerably more di cult than it was. More important from our point of view, the stalemate led to the opening of trench warfare.