home | world news | 1901-World War II | Rebellion in Ireland, 1916

More Failures in War

For 1916, Britain, France, Italy and Russia planned for simultaneous offensives, assuming this would overwhelm the Germans. Britain and Canada, which had been relying on volunteers. They had seen military conscription as something for feckless Latins or servile Germans, but now they put those opinions aside and began calling to service men between the ages of 18 and 41 and to extend the service of those whose enlistments had expired. In Britain only 16,000 men would declare themselves as conscientious objectors to war. Of these, 819 would spend more than two years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement.

Germany's plan for 1916 was to hold its line in the east and knock France out of the war. Germany transferred a half million men from the Eastern to the Western Front and planned to launch an attack at Verdun, in hope of luring French forces into a salient where they would be more vulnerable to German fire power. The French military command received ample warning of Germany's plan to attack at Verdun, and they saw holding the salient there as militarily useless. A pullback there to a shorter line would have strengthened rather than weakened the French line, but public opinion in France played into the hands of the Germans. The French public was driven more by sentiment than cold realities and they gave the old fort symbolic significance and credited it with being the cornerstone of France's defense. No effort was made to convince the French public that the fort was useless. France's premier, Aristide Briand, feared that if Verdun fell to the Germans, public outrage would bring down his precarious government. So he decided to defend the fort. And the commander-in-chief of France's armies, Joffre, needed Briand's support against politicians who wished to replace him. So Joffre sided with Briand and chose to defend the fort.

The French defense of Verdun came before their planned offensive, which was to come in June. The Germans launched their attack against Verdun in late February. The French pushed troops through the salient they called The Sacred Way, and the slaughter of French troops began as Germany had planned. But now it was German public opinion that interfered with military strategy. The German public demanded a more aggressive effort at Verdun. For them, Verdun had also acquired symbolic significance, and they wanted  Verdun's capture. German forces led by the son of Kaiser Wilhelm, Crown Prince Wilhelm, was eager for glory and went on the offensive. By the end of June the French at Verdun had suffered 315,000 casualties and the Germans 281,000. And the fighting at Verdun went on.

Meanwhile, in March, as loyal allies, the Russians and Italians had launched offensives to relieve pressure on the French. The Russian offensive was along ninety miles of front and lasted only ten days before it bogged down, stopped by German machine guns and artillery. The Russians suffered over 100,000 more casualties – about 10,000 a day. The Italian offensive went nowhere and lasted through the year, with the Italians losing 147,000 men and Austria-Hungary 81,000.

The planned French and British offensives for the year began at Somme, in June, while the Russian in June launched one more offensive. The French and British offensives began with heavy artillery bombardments that lasted a week, giving the Germans warning of the coming infantry assault and time to prepare their line. The first day that the British infantry attacked it lost 60,000 men. The offensives appeared a waste from the beginning, but it was too much for the British and French commanders to admit error in judgment or defeat, so they stayed the course through the year, to mid-November, the British losing over 400,000 men, the French 200,000 and the Germans another 450,000.

The Russian offensive began along a two hundred-mile front opposite troops of Austria-Hungary and only a few German divisions, the Germans too involved at Verdun to give Austria-Hungary additional support. The Russian offensive was led by Russia's most able general: Brusilov. Out of artillery shells, Brusilov could not begin his offensive with the usual bombardment, and his attack caught the enemy off-guard. And rather than strike at their enemy's strongest point, as military tradition demanded, the Russians struck at a weak point. The slipping past the enemy, gained fifty miles and inflicted on Austria-Hungary a loss of  600,000 men.

The Romanians were impressed with Russia's success. The British, French and Russians promised Romania territory at the expense of Hungary, to the Tisza River, just sixty miles short of Budapest. In late August, Romania declared war on Austria-Hungary, but with unhappy results. The Germans sent fifteen divisions from the Western Front and stopped a Russian and Romanian military advance. Then the Germans and Bulgarians launched an attack against Romania, and on December 6 the Germans overran Romania's capital, Bucharest.

Germany's efforts at Verdun, meanwhile, had tapered off, and the fighting there ended in mid-December. The French had suffered an additional 85,000 casualties there, and the Germans another 69,000. The German commander on the Western Front, Falkenhyn, was held responsible for the failure of Germany's strategy for 1916, and in late August he was replaced by the old war hero, von Hindenburg, and his aide, General Erich Ludendorff - two men who were to be big players in Germany's future.

Suffering on the Home Fronts

The year 1916 ended with misery on the home fronts. Britain’s grain reserves were low and potatoes and sugar were scarce. People had to stand in long lines to buy things. And, in Britain, feeding pigeons and throwing rice at weddings were prohibited. In France prices had risen forty percent,  food was rationed, people were standing in long lines, and with a shortage of coal people were shivering in their homes.

Britain's new Prime Minister, David Lloyd-George, believed that the  will to continue fighting was fading, and he saw that Britain's fiscal resources were fading. Britain had become deeply mortgaged to U.S. creditors in order to purchase goods from the United States, and Lloyd-George believed that Britain could not hold out much longer.

German workers were now putting in fourteen-hour days. And, according to official German counting, 121,114 Germans had starved to death in 1916, up from 88,232 in 1915 – deaths the Germans attributed to the British blockade but which was also the result of a decline in Germany's farm production, the result of Germany taking men and horses from its farms for the war effort. During 1916, food riots had occurred in approximately thirty German cities. And premature frosts that came that killed the potato harvest. The coming winter would be known as the Turnip Winter. And short of coal like the French, German civilians were shivering in their homes.

Corporal Adolf Hitler had been wounded in 1916, and late that year while on leave in Berlin he was shocked by the hunger and resignation and disaffection he saw on the home front. He was shocked by the sight of "slackers" proud of their cleverness in getting out of the war. He was disgusted by the bickering of Germany's political parties. Steeled in his patriotism, he returned to the front to do his part in producing Germany's victory.

Czechs and Slovaks were unhappy about their obligations to support the Austro-Hungarian empire in its war. They had become more outspoken in their opposition to Habsburg rule. Franz Joseph had gone to war to primarily for the sake of leaving his empire as grand as it had been when he inherited it in the 1860s, and he almost succeeded. His empire was falling apart as he died, in November, while his government was combating nationalist subversion, executing activist nationalists and sending other nationalists to newly created concentration camps. Franz Joseph was succeeded by his grandnephew, Karl, who had proven himself courageous in battle, but, like many veterans, he had developed less tolerance for war than a typical government bureaucrat, and he announced that he would "banish the horrors and sacrifices of war at the earliest moment."

In Russia, the faith that people had in their tsar, Nicholas, was fading. The public, with its usual inclination toward fanciful notions, took note that Nicholas' wife, Alexandra, was a German princess, and many believed that she was passing secrets to the Germans. Russia had increased its production of armaments and its over-all industrial output since the beginning of the war, but this had put a strain on an already inadequate system of transportation, and war material was piling up miles from the front. Like the other belligerents, Russia was financing the war with inflation, and people in its cities were suffering from prices four times what they had been at the beginning of the war. Strikes were breaking out as workers demanded more money with which to buy food. To replace the men already lost in the war, Russia had begun ordering into the military the sole breadwinning males of families, and this produced peasant unrest and brought into the military bitter conscripts. More soldiers were deserting. And unknown to Nicholas and most others, discontent was at the point of undermining tsarist rule.  Nicholas, the commander-in- chief of Russia’s armies, was laying the ground for turning the Great War into a great revolution.

Strategies for 1917

In planning for their effort on the Western Front in 1917, Britain and France put hope in a French general, Robert Nivelle. Nivelle was an artillery officer who had become a hero at Verdun and  famous for his declaration, referring to the Germans, that "they will not pass." He believed he had invented the formula for a successful offensive against the Germans: a massive, denser, creeping bombardment that would breakdown the German defenses, followed closely by a massive assault of troops. He declared that if he did not produce a breakthrough within the first 48 hours of battle he would stop the offensive rather than shed more blood.

The Germans, meanwhile, were placing their hope on their submarine offensive, and they planned to remain on the defensive on the Western Front in 1917. In places on the Western Front, they secretly withdrew to what was known as the Hindenburg Line - the Germans making their front line straighter, twenty-five miles shorter, and stronger.

On April 5, the French began the shelling as the first step in Nivelle's offensive, shelling that continued to April 15. Meanwhile, on the 9th, a British offensive began that was designed to pull Germans away from the impending French offensive, and it was immediately costly in British lives. Nivelle began his assault with troops on the 16th, and his forces in the center and right flanks advanced a mile and a half or two miles, but his left flank, supported by the first few tanks in warfare, failed. German machine guns continued killing numerous attackers. Nivelle's hoped for breakthrough did not happen. But admitting defeat at such a gigantic, historical moment was too much for Nivelle, and rather than admit defeat and call off his offensive as he had promised, Nivelle continued trying. And the slaughter went on. Weary soldiers, fed up with the prospect of death and what they believed were government lies about the war, mutinied, led by older veterans of the war. Soldiers being transported to the front ganged up on their officers, against military policemen and against railway men taking them to the front. An entire division that had fought at Verdun refused to go into battle. And the revolt spread to half the French army.

Stretches along the French front were undefended, but the Germans, remaining on the defensive, failed to notice. French civilians joined the unrest. People demonstrated in the streets. Labor went out on strike. The French high command managed to keep the rebellion a secret from the outside world, and Nivelle was replaced by a general who had long believed in a defensive strategy: Henri Pétain. Pétain doubled leaves of soldiers and improved their food. He had ringleaders of the mutiny shot or sent to Devil's Island. In some rebellious units, every tenth man was shot as a demonstration that authority had to be obeyed. French troops were told there would be no more offensives, and by mid-June the crisis had passed, with soldiers defending France's entire line and France now on the defensive waiting for the arrival of troops from the United States.

The Germans remained focused on their submarine offensive, which had begun in February and was sinking ships at a rate that posed a great danger to Britain. Lloyd-George urged a new convoy system - convoys of warships to accompany freighters. Most of Britain's admirals resisted the idea, complaining, among other things, that it would put "too many eggs in one basket" and present too big of a target for the Germans. The commander in chief of Britain's navy, Admiral David Beatty, supported Lloyd-George. Admiral William Sims of the United States Navy also supported the convoy system. And the first convoy began at the end of May.

A British offensive in Flanders began on June 7, the primary goal of which was to clear the Belgian coast of Germany's submarine bases. This offensive was preceded by a British artillery bombardment announcing its coming, a bombardment that could be heard in London. Around the Belgian town of Ypres, the British advanced only a couple of miles - another failure. But plans were made for another assault. A preparatory air offensive began on July 11, with 500 British and 200 French aircraft. Artillery bombardment began on July 18. The assault on the ground began on July 31, and it brought no appreciable gains. Bombardments had destroyed water drainage in the area, and with the heavy rains the battlefields had become soft mud and contiguous pools of water-filled shell holes. Men easily sank up to their waists. Nothing could move. The British commander, Douglas Haig, ordered the advance to continue anyway, and by November the British had lost another 300,000 as dead or wounded.

The British and the French had been improving their ability to calibrate artillery barrages, keeping artillery rounds "just over the shoulders" of their advancing troops while keeping the Germans pinned down. And the British had been developing a new weapon called the tank - a step up from armored cars and from tractors that were being used to pull artillery. The British had used eleven tanks without success in an attack at the Somme in 1916. On November 20, 1917 the British used a large number of tanks - 381 - for the first time, in an offensive near Cambrai, about 40 miles south of Ypres. The tanks ran in front of and with troops in a surprise attack - an attack without preparatory artillery shelling. And a breakthrough was made along a six-mile stretch of front. The British took 7,500 German prisoners and captured 120 guns, with few casualties. But with their previous losses in 1917 the British lacked the reserves needed to keep going, and they had made a vulnerable bulge in their line. Then the  Germans counterattacked in a flanking maneuver, and the British fell back.

The Italian Front

An Italian offensive that had been planned to help the French and British had begun in May, with 38 Italian divisions massed along its mountainous front against 14 Austrian divisions. The Italians gained little ground, and they lost 157,000 in dead and wounded and the Austrians 75,000.

In August, Italy launched its second offensive for the year, while enjoying a two to one advantage in men over the Austrians. The Austrians fell back. German troops again went to the rescue of the Austrians. The Germans wished to see Italy knocked out of the war in 1917, as Serbia had been knocked out in 1915 and Romania in 1916. But the Germans were able to spare only six divisions, given the British offensive they were facing - divisions it pulled from its Russian front. A combined German and Austrian counter-offensive against Italy began along the lower elevations on the eastern half of the Austrian-Italian front. And in late October they broke through the Italian line, with a great battle being fought at the little town of Caporetto. The Italians fell back in a rout - more the fault of Italy's military leaders than its rank and file. Some Italian units fought with bravery and determination, but the breakdown of the front broke troop morale.

The unexpected collapse of the Italian front was more than the Germans had been prepared for, and they and the Austrians were unable to exploit it. Six French and five British divisions arrived in Italy and shored up the Italian defense line along the Piave River, while Italy was at a new low economically for fighting the war. But among the Italian public the war had become more popular, as they sought revenge against their nation's humiliation.

to the top | 1901-World War II | Rebellion in Ireland, 1916

Copyright © 1998 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.

address of this article: http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch05c.htm