the Great War [I]

~ notes from Stokesbury's History of World War One ~

being a three-part series

The turn of the 20th century saw the modern powers in various states of being. Germany, united under Otto von Bismarck, had become an industrial giant. The Third Republic of France, brutalized by a war with Germany in the late 19th century, began embracing pacifist ideals. Britain found itself in the clutch of labor riots and poverty, and Russia fared no better: the peasant class suffered under the Russian high-rollers, and the Russian leaders spent their time in lavish luxury while the lower classes struggled to survive. These great powers would find themselves at each other's throats; indeed, many politicians and historians speculated that a massive war lie on the horizon. This massive war enjoyed several accelerators in the early 1900s. France and Germany set their teeth against each other with the Moroccan Crises; France desired to colonize Morocco and add it to its imperial reach, but Germany resisted in volatile fashion. Tensions escalated when the Dual Monarchy (Austria-Hungary) annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, claiming them as part of their empire (they'd kept a military presence in these areas since the tail-end of the 19th century). The nation of Serbia saw Bosnia as its own heritage, and Russia wanted Bosnia, too. The explosion came with the assassination of Austria's Archduke Ferdinand at the hands of a Serbian assassin. The Dual Powers declared war on Serbia and invaded on August 12th of 1914. A string of alliances brought the larger powers into the conflict: Russia, France, and England set their teeth against Germany and Austria; Austria sought to spar with the Russians to the north and to invade both Serbia and Bosnia; Germany set its sights on France to the west and Russia to the east, hoping to quickly overrun France as Russia mobilized before taking the offensive to the east (this was part of the Schlieffen Plan). 

The opening battles in the west can be divided into three "campaigns": (1) the Germans forcing their passage through Belgium, (2) "the battle of the frontiers" in Lorraine, the Ardennes, and the battle of Mons, and (3) the Allied retreat. As the Germans pushed into Belgium, they had to destroy the Fortress at Liege; this battle lasted from August 5th to the 14th, and resulted in around 20,000 dead and wounded. As the Battle of Liege turned into a Germany victory, German and French troops sparred in Lorraine (between Germany and France) from the 14th to the 22nd with 60,000 casualties. The Germans then thrust into the Ardennes, and a two-day battle racked up 50,000 casualties. The British Expeditionary Force held out agianst the Germans at Mons on the 23rd, both sides suffering around 4000 total dead and wounded. The Germans were too strong, and the Allies too confused and disoriented, and the Allies began to retreat. The B.E.F. took up defensive positions around Le Cateau; abandoned by their allies, the British slugged it out with the Germans on the 26th of August before escaping at the cost of 12,000 casualties. Le Cateau had been the biggest British battle since Waterloo, but the next battle would be even worse: the Battle of St. Quentin on the 29th saw British and French facing off against the Germans at the cost of 19,000 dead and wounded. 

The Allies kept up the retreat, building their forces around the River Marne, and between September 5th and 10th, they held the German advance at bay; the Battle of the Marne was the biggest battle of the war so far, costing 500,000 casualties to the powers involved. Having broken the German thrust, the next series of battles, misnamed "the race to the sea," involved the various powers shuffling around one another, trying to gain the advantage. Stokesbury muses on the exhaustion of the German advance and the crumbling of the Schlieffen Plan, "[It] is perhaps legitimate to ask if Europe would not have been better off had the Schlieffen Plan worked. During the war the Germans came to be seen by the Allies as fiends incarnate, the Hun who raped nuns and bayoneted babies, but that view of them was a creation of the war itself. It is true that even their early demands for peace terms were exaggerated, but would a German hegemony of Europe have been any worse than the subsequent course of the war, with its millions of deaths, its influenza epidemic, its Bolshevik Revolution? Is it too imaginative to say that if the Schlieffen Plan had worked, Adolf Hitler might have remained a private in the List Regiment and Joseph Stalin a Georgian peasant? The Battle of the Marne was the end of the Schlieffen Plan, the end of the era of short wars, and the end of the old Europe as well." (57)

The so-called "race to the sea" started at the Marne and ended at the seacoast with the coming of winter in mid-November. The 1st Battle of the Aisne ran from September 12th to the 15th and cost 20,000 casualties; here was the beginning of trench warfare. The First Battle of Artois bloodied sands that would be seen two more times throughout the war. The Battle of the Yser in Belgium, from the 16th of October to that Halloween, cost 130,000 casualties. The 1st Battle of the Ypres ran from mid-October (the 19th) to the tail-end of November (the 11th) and cost 200,000 casualties. Slowly a line running from the North Sea to the Swiss border developed; here the battered, bloodied, and exhausted armies began digging trenches in anticipation of the coming spring offensive. 

Though the 300-mile western front has garnered most attention in the western world, battles were no less important (nor less bloody) on the eastern front, which ran four times the length of the western front, from east Prussia to neutral Romania. Russia attacked Germany on the 17th of August, and the subsequent Battle of Gumbinnen on the 20th saw 30,000 dead and wounded. The Battle of Tannenberg, lasting from the 26th to the 30th, cost 185,000 soldiers. Russia's drive lost steam at the Battle of the Masurian Lakes, fought from the 7th to the 14th of September, with 135,000 soldiers dead and dying in the field. The Germans attacked the Russians relentlessly: the Battle of the Vistula River (September 29th to October 31st) cost 200,000 casualties; the Battle of Lodz (November 11th to December 6th) saw another 120,000 men stripped from their units. The Winter Battle of the Masurian Lakes pushed the Russians back; from February 7th to the 22nd of 1915, the Russians lost ground and both armies lost soldiers (around 215,000). As Russia waged war against Germany, it also faced off against Austria. The Battle of Galicia, lasting from the 23rd of August to the 11th of September, cost 550,000 casualties. As Austria waged war with Russia, it also fought Serbia in a series of invasions and brutal battles that lasted from August through December; the skirmishes, battles, and invasions amounted to 425,000 casualties. Austria was burning itself out but thankful that the Carpathian Mountains created a natural hindrance to the Russians. 

The bloodiness on land was offset by the lack of blood spilled on the high seas. Germany had all but bled itself dry creating a vast battle fleet to counter the British in the North Sea; but because their fleet was so expensive and symbolic, they didn't want to risk using them to do what they were designed to do (i.e., wage war). The British had grown complacent in their Navy with the result that though they had lots of ships, their sailors weren't exactly up to par. The Battle of Heligoland Bight on August 28th cost Germany men and ships, and the kaiser freaked out, curtailing naval engagements. On January 24th of 1915, the British and Germans sparred again on the Dogger Bank. Submarines prowled the waters, but they weren't used against commerce (yet). Using submarines against merchantmen violated international rules of submarine warfare; but as Britain set about blockading Germany, Germany looked for a way to hurt Britain, too. It would only be a matter of time before Germany said "to hell!" with international rules and began targeting merchant ships, sinking their cargoes and crews.

The advent of spring in 1915 saw movement on the western front. Germany went into a defensive posture in the west, forced to focus offensively on the Russians. The British and French, however, weren't keen on sitting still. The battles along the western front were marked by sparring in the salients (or bulges) in the lines. The 1st Battle of Champagne raged from December 20th of 1914 to March 17th of 1915, and it cost about 140,000 men. The Battle of Neuve Chapelle cost another 20,000, and it took place between the 10th and 13th of March. The 2nd Battle of Ypres lasted just over a month, from April 22nd to May 25th, and it cost 100,000 casualties. Here the Germans used poison gas for the first time, though they didn't see how useful it could be. The 2nd Battle of Artois ran from the 9th of May to the 18th of June, and 200,000 casualties were exacted between the armies as they wrestled to control Vimy Ridge. The 2nd Battle of Champagne, fought between the 25th of September and the 6th of November, cost 235,000 men. The 3rd Battle of Artois, beginning at the same time as the 2nd Battle of Champagne but coming to a close two days earlier, saw 160,000 casualties. The legendary Battle of Loos (also known as the corpsefield of Loos) exacted 85,000 casualties, the majority of them British. The battles of 1915 foreshadowed the nature of the western front: vicious attacks seeking to budge the enemy from salients and, more often than not, failing. Many locations saw seesaw fighting (such as Vimy Ridge in the series of Artois battles) as the opposing sides slugged it out in a fistfight going nowhere. Meters of ground were lost and gained and hundreds of thousands lost their lives in the process.

Turkey came into the war relatively late; fractured and picked apart over the years by the Russians, British, and French, Turkey found an ally in Germany. The Turks shelled Russian ports in the Black Sea and began a campaign against the Russians and Armenians (whom they loathed) in the Caucasus Mountains. Italy, though allied to Germany as part of the Triple Alliance, suffered its own internal combustion and couldn't decide where it stood. Both Germany and the Allies entreated Italy to their cause, and the Americans went so far as to subsidize an Italian Socialist paper, Avanti, edited by none other than a fellow named Benito Mussolini. On the 23rd of May 1915, Italy joined up with the Allies. The Italians promptly went to war against the Austrians in the jagged mountain foothills. They made headway but got pushed back, and the Austrians dug into the 600-meter-high foothills and let the Italians come. Come they did, four times, and these battles of Isonzo racked up 410,000 casualties, the Italians unable to dislodge the entrenched Austrians. The only other major power not committed in some capacity to the war effort was the United States. President Woodrow Wilson declared American neutrality, and most Americans agreed with his isolationist position; "Why get tangled up in a European squabble? Let them sort it out!" Most Americans were sympathetic towards the Allies, but those of German heritage, especially in the Midwest, favored Germany; but as English papers printed reports of actual German barbarity (and some rumors of barbarity that simply weren't true), Americans began to see "the Hun" as an evil monster that had to be dealt with. Nevertheless, Wilson continued clinging to neutrality, and he opened trade to any belligerent nation. This was good news for American businessmen, but the British loathed America for this: we were, after all, selling war necessities to Germany.

Meanwhile, as the British blockade threatened to strangle Germany, German submarines began attacking British merchant ships. The British responded by arming their merchant ships. International law stated that a submarine could sink a merchant ship, but first it had to board the ship and check the manifests; if war material were found on-board, they could sink the boat, but only once they guaranteed safe passage to the crew. Because submarines risked life and limb announcing their presence, they simply stopped and just fired their torpedoes. The British were enraged but could do nothing but keep an eye out. On the 7th of May 1915, a U-boat off the coast of Ireland sank the Lusitania, killing 1,198 people (including 128 Americans). Woodrow Wilson threatened war if Germany didn't get their submarine forces in line, and the kaiser backed off. The media played up the Lusitania as a cruise liner; what most people didn't know was that, though it was a cruise ship, it had been transporting war materials and soldiers. This fact was kept out of the public eye; both Wilson and Churchill hoped this piece of propaganda would further alienate Germany in public opinion and provoke her to watch her submarines on the high seas.

Austria's campaigns against Russia perturbed the Tsar; he didn't know if he could handle another front with Turkey massing for war. He petitioned the Allies for help, and Winston Churchill devised a plan: "Let's attack the Dardanelles and push Turkey out of the war." The Dardanelles, previously called the Hellespont, was a narrow strait in northeast Turkey connecting the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara. The Allies blasted up the strait and landed on the Gallipoli peninsula. The landings were nothing short of a bloodletting as Allied troops used rowboats to disembark on the beaches under heavy machine-gun fire. The forthcoming Battle of Gallipoli, lasting from the 25th of April 1915 to the ninth of January 1916, claimed half a million lives. The battle turned into a microcosm of the western front, with locations such as Cape Helles, Anzac Cove, and Suvla Bay becoming cemented as legend. Churchill's plan failed, and the quagmire on the peninsula would have far-reaching consequences.

In Russia, the Tsar's only male heir suffered from hemophilia, and a mystic holy man known as Rasputin (meaning "the drunkard") was brought into the palace to soothe the boy. Rasputin would gain credibility with the royal family, influencing the unfolding of the war. Instability in Russia gave the Germans the upper hand, and on May 5th the Germans launched their Gorlice-Tarnow offensive; it lasted nearly two months, cost 650,000 casualties, and broke Russian rule of Poland, which they'd enjoyed since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Russia wouldn't claim authority in Poland until 1944. In September, Bulgaria allied with Germany and Austria, encouraged both by German success in Poland and the Allied disaster on the Gallipoli peninsula. Bulgaria's first action was an invasion and conquering of Serbia between October and November 1915, knocking Serbia out of the war. "Thus 1915, as 1914 before it, came to an indecisive end. There was little to celebrate in the final days of the year and less for the Allies than for the Central Powers. Italy had come in, but Serbia had gone out; Salonika [in Greece] had been opened up, but the Dardanelles was closing down. The submarine remained a question mark, and as long as it did, Britain's command of the sea was tenuous. Russia was barely surviving. On the Western Front, France and Britain dashed their young men in vain against the prepared German positions, and hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded had gained them a few useless yards. The constant upgrading of artillery and the introduction of gas were plumping new depths of frightfulness, but all to little effect." (138) Stokesbury continues, "What was to be done? From London all the way east to St. Petersburg the nations were trapped in the war. Like men who had blundered into a swamp, knowing how much it had cost them to come this far, they could not bring themselves to turn about and go back the way they had come. Surely a bit more effort would see them safely through to the other side. With little thought of faltering yet, they girded themselves for an even more stupendous trial of arms. The sacrifice of those who had gone before must not be in vain. They must win through to victory." (139)