The First World War, a Very Short Introduction by Michael Howard

Author:Michael Howard [Howard, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: non.fiction, short.intro
ISBN: 9780199205592
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2007-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

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It did not work out like that. A large percentage of the shells fired, ar of A

hastily manufactured by unskilled labour, were duds. Those that did ttrition explode failed to destroy defences dug deep into the chalk hillside, from which machine-gunners emerged, when the barrage lifted, to fire point-blank at the long lines of overloaded troops plodding across the bare chalk slopes towards them. Once the battle had begun, the careful co-operation between infantry and artillery on which so much depended disintegrated in the fog of war. By the end of the day 21,000 men were dead or missing.

Had the battle ended in spectacular success, these losses, which were no worse than those suffered by the French and Russian armies during the previous two years many times over, might have been regarded as an acceptable price to pay. But there was no such success. Instead they became, in the British group-memory, the epitome of incompetent generalship and pointless sacrifice. The attacks continued for a further four months. By then the Allied armies had advanced about ten miles, the Somme battlefield had been churned, like that of Verdun, into a featureless lunar 65

landscape, and the Allies had lost a total of 600,000 men. The size of the German losses has been a matter of furious controversy, but they were probably little less than those of the Allies, and the sufferings of their troops under continuous artillery bombardment had been no less terrible. Since the object of the attack had always been unclear – Haig’s own expectations of a breakthrough had never been shared by his subordinate commanders – the Allies claimed a victory in terms of attrition. Indeed by the end of the year they, like their German adversaries, could see no other way of winning the war.

Brusilov’s Offensive

Paradoxically it was the Russians, now almost written off by both sides, whose contribution to the Allied offensive of 1916 was to be r

one of the most successful of the entire war. In March they had a

attacked in the northern part of the front towards Vilna, but, in d Wrlo spite of having accumulated a superiority not only in men but in st W

guns and ammunition, they had been repulsed with a loss of e Fir

100,000 men. None the less they kept their promise to their allies Th

by launching, in June, an attack on the Galician front under General Alexei Brusilov that tore a twenty-mile gap in the Austrian armies, penetrated to a depth of sixty miles, and took half a million prisoners. Brusilov’s success can be partly attributed to the low morale of the Austrian forces and the abysmal quality of their High Command, together with the apparently limitless courage of the Russian troops themselves. But yet more important were the thought and preparation that had gone into the operation: the detailed planning, the close cooperation between infantry and artillery, the immediate availability of reserves to exploit success, and, above all, the measures taken to secure surprise. It was an indication that armies were at last beginning to feel their way out of the tactical deadlock.

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