Nineteen-Fifteen: Into The Maelstrom

Nineteen-Fifteen: Into the Maelstrom
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Excerpts from John Keegan,The First World War,(London: Hutchinson, 1998)

Following her induction into the Entente, the United States embarked upon a rapid drive to full wartime mobilisation. America’s new parliamentary institutions were strengthened; First Secretary Joseph Cannon, a member of the President’s Republican Party, stepped down, and Taft duly appointed Woodrow Wilson to his second tenure as chief of government. Though Wilson was a Democrat, he was the one man with the experience necessary to lead the state in the crucial affair of a national unity government. Wilson’s Cabinet, for its part, wasted no time in making itself the focal institution for managing the war effort. Taft’s newly created “War Cabinet” was quickly and decisively wrested under the control of the Wilson-Gillett duumvirate.
[…]
The government’s political difficulties were, however, immense, in spite of its commanding control of the United States Congress. While the coalition of dissenters, led by the Socialist Labor Party, controlled perhaps, at best, the votes of about 80 representatives and eight senators, the anti-war faction had tapped into massive public support outside the councils of government. Following the successful vote for war credits and military mobilization in early December of 1914, America’s radicalized labour federation, the International Workers’ Solidarity Union (IWSU) voted to walk out en masse.

The government’s reaction to the anti-war strike was swift and brutal. Wilson, for lack of legal options, invoked the state of exception. The federal government quickly assumed extraordinary and extralegal powers to crush the strike. Habeas corpus was suspended, militia and police forces around the country were nationalised, and the army itself was mobilized without regard to Posse comitatus. Order was soon restored, but at a bloody cost. The American rail workers had paralyzed the nation’s commerce for almost three weeks, and production nearly stopped altogether in many of the nation’s industrial cities.

As part of the state of exception, the increasingly corporatist state assumed a greater role in directing the national economy. American dirigisme quickly crystallised, and the full might of the American economy was quickly marshaled towards war production. The Congress itself, long a target of derision for its rampant infighting, quickly assumed the role of a rubber stamp to the War Cabinet’s directives. A slew of new laws, granting new powers to the state over both economic and personal life, were adopted: the Espionage and Sedition Acts, the Rationing Act, the Selective Service Act, the Industry and Commerce Act.

All this and more would be necessary. The United States entered the First World War with an army comprised of seven infantry and two cavalry divisions, with scarcely 150,00 men in the whole of the active army. In spite of the massive public diplomacy campaigns to support the mobilization for war, less than ninety thousand young men volunteered for service within three weeks of the declaration of war. Drafts would be necessary to sustain the war effort…
[…]
The mobilisation of industry, proved complicated as well. While the magnates of big business were enthusiastic at the commercial opportunities that the war effort and the powerful War Industries Committee in the Department of Industry would allow, organized labor remained militantly opposed throughout the war. While the major strikes quickly petered out in the face of state repression, small wildcat strikes, work stoppages, “work to code” slowdowns, and absenteeism plagued the mobilized industries. Unions also organized oppositions to recruitment, rationing and state repression of free speech.

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Excerpts from Boyan Caan,Fighting Quaker: A Biography of Smedley Butler , (Annapolis: Naval Academy, 1971)*

The United States Marine Corps entered the Great War with 712 officers and 16,890 enlisted men. Under pressure from the Entente to commit at least a token force in support of its beleaguered allies, the War Cabinet pledged a number of ships and men to support peripheral campaigns while the it raised the National Army to fighting readiness to deploy to France.
With its deep reserves of professional NCOs, the Marines were the ideal scalpel to be deployed quickly, sending the message of unity after the disastrous setbacks of the frontier battles, which had obliterated significant fractions of French industry and placed the country on the backfoot. As the country mobilized for war, Butler itched with anticipation. As the Marines expanded and called up reserves, his experience fighting the brushfire wars in Latin America earned him the command of 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment.

He spent the winter of 1914/15 dividing his time between his family and his cryptic official duties with the newly formed Marine Expeditionary Brigade. Expecting to go to France as part of the American Expeditionary Force, now Lt. Colonel Butler focused his free time on studying French, and socializing with Haitian sailors, hoping to turn his conversational French into mastery by the time of deployment.

To his chagrin, he would learn at Christmas that his unit was to be deployed to Egypt, to begin drilling with Mediterranean Expeditionary Force.
[…]
Butler would find General Sir Ian Hamilton’s command mostly agreeable. While initially blanching at the notion of being under foreign command, it was the only way to get into the fight quickly. He would reflect in his memoirs that, “the two months spent marshalling in Egypt were the longest in my life.

Rehearsals, attached to the Australasian Army Corps, took place on 7 April 1915, utilizing the Greek island of Lemnos. The preparations, however, were wanting. Circulars sent from the MEF’s general staff painted a picture of the Ottoman Empire as a rotting structure that would collapse as soon as the door was kicked in, Ottoman soldiers as oriental barbarians and ignoramuses.
[…]
The Marine Expeditionary Brigade would land just after dawn on the second day, 26 April 1915, after a failed lobby by Brigadier General Lejeune to join the vanguard of the attack. Butler would arrive with the first wave, wading ashore under Turkish artillery bombardment. The thin beachhead, three and a half kilometers long, and seven hundred meters at the deepest, was hemmed in by elements of the Ottoman 9th and 19th Divisions, under the local command of Colonel Mustafa Kemal.

Stalled far short of their objective, clinging to the reverse slope of the krags overlooking the Aegean, the Australasian Corps was in dire straights. Butler immediately took the initiative, moving his battalion forward to shore up one of the undefended zones of the beach head.

By noon, the Turkish counterattack began. The 19th Division, supported by six battalions of the 9th, advanced under artillery and machine gun cover.They were far from the cravens the British had expected. While short on the modern implements of war, the soldiers themselves were crack riflemen, well disciplined and orderly. The Marine Brigade, similarly understrength in machine guns, held the slopes beneath the 400 Plateau with grim tenacity.

The counterattack did not push the Entente back into the sea. But Kemal’s offensive placed constant pressure, pinning the troops to the beachhead. At 1400, Butler was ordered to take the 400 Plateau, thereby relieving pressure on the center of the beachhead. The waning Turkish offensive seemed like an opening, and with the typical enthusiasm of the Marines, Butler roused his troops, declaring that “immortality is just beyond that bluff. It’s ours for the taking. Huzzah!”

The attack proceeded with calculated ruthlessness. Though wounded in the initial assault, Butler refused evacuation, and continued to command as the battalion clawed its way forward, pushing the Turks from their positions. At 1430, triumph seemed in reach, until additional Turkish forces moved in to reinforce. Pinned to the plateau, the Marines fought off two attacks, often resorting to shovels and bayonets, until dusk settled.
[…]
The Marines at Gallipoli would endure eight long months of disappointment. Pinned far from objectives, eeking out a few meters of progress at a time proved demoralizing even to the once cavalier Butler. He found the experience seldom pleasant. The genteel British officers, with whom he was expected to socialize, treated Butler and the other Marines like provincial rubes, well beneath their station. He confided that he much preferred the company of his men, or the Australasians, who received similar contempt from the gentry.

Aside from picking up a love of rugby, and a rudimentary grasp of Turkish, Butler generally reflected sourly on his time spent with the MEF, both in the pigheadedness of the leadership and the ill-conceived strategy.

Although the man himself denied it, Marine lore credits Butler for popularizing the moniker batıkurtlar , “western wolves”, earned from Turks impressed by the soldierly courage of the Marines, recalling the proverb of the “thick-necked wolf who fights”.

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**Excerpt: A selection of posts from the alternatehistory.com discussion titled “Writing a TL – How do I get a Central Powers victory in WW1?”

HerrBean: **Hai gaiz, I want to write a TL with a Central Powers victory over the Entente in OTL, but I don’t exactly know how to get it. I also want to do something maybe different from other stuff on the subject, but I’m not quite sure what’s come before. Here in the DFSR, it’s not exactly a very popular subject. Almost taboo really…If there’s one thing that’s even close to as hated as the Nazis, it’s the Hohenzollern Reich.
I think I know where to go with this, but I’m having trouble getting there. Thanks in advance!

LeninsBeard: We can definitely never have too many Germans on this board.
I think the bare minimum consensus that we’ve reached over the years is that America needs to be kept out of the war. American industrial might and troops definitely stacked things in the Entente’s favor. That’s not a silver bullet, but definitely a good start. I don’t know enough about WW1 to comment further.

Laserz: Well, at the same time, it’s become kind of a trope that American neutrality just leads straight to Entente defeat. Even a neutral American is still trading with the French and especially the British, supplying them with arms and credit to support their war effort. I really can’t see America’s hypercapitalists missing out on that bonanza of buying.
Even if America is neutral at first, they could get drawn in at a later date. The economic reasons for war are pretty plain. Still, having American divisions gone during those crucial days in 1915 and 1916 might mean the Germans can pull of some kind of successful offensive operation. The deteriorating morale of the French army could turn the tide.
IOTL, there was a pretty common complaint among French soldiers that Britain and America would fight the Germans to the last Frenchman, and in a lot of ways, it’s unfortunately true. The French received the disproportionate share of the casualties thanks to political pressure to reduce British and American deaths.
Not like it helped all that well. The Americans lost almost a million men in those trenches, largely thanks to idiotic attempts to break trench warfare.

DeOppressoLiber: That’s a common misconception about WWI and trench warfare. The large casualties of the war were not due to a military leadership out of touch with reality, but the nature of the ground on the Western Front. In the East, the German Army maintained largely open mobile warfare against the Russians due to the larger frontage and the terrain.
The Franco-German frontier is much smaller. The size of the forces involved, and the tendency of artillery to wreck lines of communication and make supporting your attacks difficult ensured that breakthroughs would be all but impossible until some disruptive technologies could be fielded. That, and the Germans were holding ground that had much of France’s core industry. France could only win by repelling the Germans. Attack was absolutely necessary.

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The Naval War

On 12 January 1915, the American heavy cruiser USS Montana (CA-13) was attacked by a German U-boat approximately 100 kilometers off the Azore Islands. The 14,000 tonne ship, returning from a training cruise, was ambushed just after dawn. She quickly took two torpedoes on her port side. Taking on water rapidly, the Montana began to list heavily. In spite of this, her crew mustered to general quarters, and launched several salvoes from her complement of sixteen 5 inch guns. However, she could not hit the small target presented by the U-Boat’s periscope. While the third torpedo missed, a fourth struck her just aft of midships, flooding the main-engineering spaces. She suffered a catastrophic boiler implosion, and quickly foundered. At 10:23 a.m., she slipped under the waves. Less than one quarter of her 859 man complement were rescued.

The naval war against Germany began long before the American Expeditionary Force set foot in France. With Germany’s attempted U-Boat blockade of Britain, both economic and military considerations required that the Kaiserliche Marine be driven out of the North Atlantic. It would not do, either for the War Cabinet or American corporate interests, to see millions of dollars of war material end up at the bottom of the Atlantic.

The naval arms building began in earnest. U.S. Steel, chafing under the depressed state of the steel market, soon found an influx of orders for steel to sustain the massive expansion of the American Navy: fifteen new battleships in three classes, all built around an all-or-nothing armor scheme, four main turrets, and top speed of 21 knots; twenty new light cruisers, starting with the Omaha -class, and close to forty new destroyers spread across six classes of “thousand tonner” ships. Taken together with the growing losses of ship tonnage to German submarine warfare, it ensured that the steel industry would remain profitable throughout the war. The beginning of the naval building campaign saw U.S. Steel acquiring a large stake in the Atlantic shipbuilding industry. Naturally, this proved to be quite profitable to the shareholders in the steel cartel.

In February of 1915, the US Navy sortied four of her coal-firing dreadnoughts to Scapa Flow, as a token of American involvement in the war effort. While the four ships were obsolete compared to the fast, oil burning super-dreadnoughts that were the pride of the Home Fleet, they were reliable, and even twelve-inch guns were deadly enough for most purposes. However, it was the symbolism of the act that was most important: the American Navy would stand with the British in defending their home island. And most importantly, the coal-fired ships wouldn’t cut into Britain’s scarce oil supplies.

War Mobilization

The War Cabinet first met on 14 January 1915. The first item on the agenda was not unexpected, but still controversial. In spite of the general agreement among the assembled leaders of the Democratic and Republican Parties about the need to give the war effort the full resources of the United States, most had reservations about taking the despotic measures against the right to property that would be necessary to mobilize the economy.

The American military itself was tiny and woefully unprepared. Preliminary estimates delivered by the War Department recommended a full twenty-fold expansion of the US Army; the current volunteer rates would not come close to meeting that. The lack of enthusiasm also betrayed a greater problem in the public’s lack of confidence in the motivations for war. The Wilson government agreed early on to solve the problem from two fronts. The beginnings of what would be the National Service Act of 1915 were laid down in this first meeting. Under the act, all able-bodied males between the ages of 19 and 31 would be registered for potential service. Exemptions were made for those men who were working in vital war industries. The target set by the War Cabinet in January was to have just under one-million men inducted into the US Army by the end of the year, with a further two million drafted or volunteered by the end of 1916.

Beyond the shortage of men, the US Army was critically short of experienced officers. At the recommendation of the Army Chief of Staff, the Army would transform its light triangular divisions - viz., each division composed of three regiments, each regiment composed of three battalions, etc, into square divisions. This would enabled the few officers with experience in controlling large formations to command the basic building blocks of the army and conserve on high level staff officers. But it would reduce flexibility, and burden commanders with keeping control of a larger number of subunits.

New bureaucracies were created to instill a sense of enthusiasm in the effort into the public. The most powerful of these would be a new Committee for Public Information and its ancillary agencies. Chaired by the journalism magnate George Creel, and including among its members the Secretaries of State, War and Commerce, as well as media moguls such as William Randolph Hearst, the CPI would become a permanent fixture of the American state.

Every form of mass media available, from newspapers and radio, to the burgeoning movie industry, to even dime-store novels, became mobilized for the purpose of dragging an unwilling public into the war effort. The face of Progressivism, upon which most members of the second Wilson government had built their political careers, had changed. Progressivism had been shaped into something gaudy and lethal; equal in militancy to the “Jack-booted Huns” the nation was being mobilized to fight.

For now, the campaigns bore their bitter fruit. The CPI was instrumental in halting the advance of the Socialist Labor Party-led anti-war coalition, and for a time managed to turn the tide of public opinion back against the SLP. The Army and Navy would have their warm bodies to fill their ranks.

But warm bodies were not enough to fight a war, especially a modern one. As the American Expeditionary Force found in its first series of engagements in May-June of 1915, the American Army was woefully unprepared for the tenacity of trench warfare. While the 1st Infantry Division was well trained, and entered with high spirits, the unit entered combat under-equipped in both machine guns and artillery support. Lacking in both number of guns as well as ammunition stocks, 1st Infantry fared poorly in the first engagements in support of the French attacks near Artois.

In all, there was a tremendous burden placed on American industry to support the war effort. By winter of 1914, the federal arsenal at Springfield, Massachusetts had produced some two hundred thousand of the Model 1903 bolt-action rifle, chambered in the .303 Springfield cartridge. The Army would need millions more.

Everything from trench knives to boots, mess kits to artillery guns, would need to be mass-produced in short order to support a modern army that would quickly number in the millions. Mistakes were bound to be made along the way. Production problems, work stoppages, and confusing orders would plague the war industries throughout the war, but most acutely during the crucial first months. While the Army was able to eventually scrape together enough British and French surplus machine guns to supply the six lead divisions of the AEF adequately, the tide of new soldiers coming in the winter and next spring would need an American-built alternative capable of using the same round as the standard battle rifle if the logistic system was to have any chance of coping.

The Browning Model 1915 machine gun was an excellent design, lighter and more reliable than the British Vickers or Maxim guns. However, its production, subcontracted to multiple manufacturers, was plagued by problems in the first runs. Most of the first run, serial numbers 1000 to 27000, faced considerable jamming problems due to tolerance problems, and had to be completely remachined. Other orders were delayed due to machining and assembly line problems.

Production orders with private arms manufacturers such as Colt and Winchester for the M1903 Springfield rifle were further complicated by the British Army’s order for several hundred thousand of the Springfield rifles rechambered in the .303 British cartridge. During initial production runs, the receivers were not stamped effectively enough to differentiate the American and British models, and often times large orders of the British model would wind up in the hands of American units and vice-versa.
In spite of the complications, the Department of Industrial Coordination’s ever expanding bureaucracy proved efficient in coordinating the war effort and managing the collective affairs of the increasingly top-heavy cartels that dominated the American economy.

The Entente Offensives

At the beginning of 1915, the German Heer occupied a large swath of Northeastern France. Large sections of French industry were under German occupation, and the frontlines themselves were perilously close to Paris. With the French General Staff and government fearing the possibility of a disastrous German breakout, and large portions of the country’s warmaking capacity occupied or threatened, it became both politically and militarily imperative to push the Germans back.

In spite of mass strikes and war resistance, a steady stream of American reinforcements began starting in April. While the 1st Infantry Division saw some fighting during June and July, the bulk of the AEF was held in reserve for a fall combined Entente offensive. In late July, the British Army renewed its offensives at the Loos. In August, the French began attacks at Vimy in the North and from the great fortress of Verdun in the South. The AEF joined the offensives at Champagne, with five divisions of green American infantry, supported by a rag-tag collection of French artillery units, and American units utilizing scrounged British and French field guns as well as American guns.

In terms of the cost, in both manpower and equipment, they were staggering failures. The attempts to close the Saint-Mihiel salient south of Verdun received devastating casualties from German artillery and machine guns as they went over the wall into no-man’s land. While they succeeded in taking German forward positions by the dawn of the third day, the French army was soon overwhelmed by German counterattacks, which soon pushed into the French front-line trenches and then into the rear. By the time the operation was cancelled in late October, the French Army had suffered over 90,000 casualties against 60,000 German casualties, gaining at best a few meters of ground here and there.

Up North, the British and German offensives, continuations of previous spring offensives, were similarly futile. Tens of thousands of men were lost for no appreciable gain. Neither side seemed capable of breaking the stalemate of trench warfare. The only appreciable progress in the whole of 1915 was in the combined Franco-American offensive at Champagne. In twelve weeks of desperate fighting, the AEF and the French Army pushed the frontlines forward approximately nine kilometers.

American soldiers in particular felt the brunt of the losses. They were literally being killed as fast as reinforcements arrived from across the Atlantic. The American attack, beginning with around 190,000 men in five divisions, would ultimately result in ninety thousand casualties . Reserve units took up the attack as soon as one division was ground to the nub, continuing the maelstrom near to the point of futility. The attack, under the command of French Marshal Joffre, was a political disaster for Franco-American relations. American units, previously under French general command, would be separated in the fallout. American General John Pershing would be placed in command of American forces in Europe. On December 7, the United States Congress authorized the creation of new flag ranks for the Army and Navy, to give American flag officers parity with their Entente counterparts. Pershing would be the first promoted to the rank of General of the Armies of the United States.