I feel like the time-line is moving a bit slower than I would like, so I’m going to change the way that I do updates for a bit. Instead of giving a granular blow-by-blow of events, I’ll try to cover a certain aspect of the war over a set duration of time in a single post. So, the posts will look like this: “The Military History of the Great War, 1917”, or “The British Home Front: 1916-1917”. I’ll be focused primarily on covering those areas where there are the largest divergences from OTL. I’m also going to dispense, for now, with the authorial device of in-universe texts. The way that the events of 1914-1919 are perceived by the various participants varies a great deal; for now, I want to avoid making readers feel as if they need to triangulate from whatever bias the text might have to get a true picture of events.
I’m also posting a short poll, just to get a sense of what kind of pacing people feel is best. The level of granularity I need to have is something I’ve struggled with somewhat, and any feedback would be appreciated. I’m also sorry it took so long for this update to come out; for anyone who also has Long Covid, I don’t recommend getting re-infected!
The Military History of the Great War, 1914-1915
The Western Front, 1914
Faced with an enemy which had an overwhelming advantage in raw materials, man-power, and naval might, the German general staff devised the “Schlieffen Plan”, hoping to knock France out of the war in the first few months before pivoting to the East. The plan called for an invasion through neutral Belgium to bypass the heavy fortifications in Lorraine. It required the German Army’s most well-equipped and thoroughly trained forces to be dedicated to the northern portion of the Western Front. Only a single field army was assigned to the east to hold Russia at bay in East Prussia. The plan informed much of the structure of German mobilization: a German general famously remarked that even if the German Army wished to divert additional armies to the East at the start of the war, it would have been logistically incapable of doing so.
The Schlieffen Plan was doomed to fail. It was a plan designed with 19th, rather than 20th century military technology in mind. It was also a plan which could only emerge from a military-political complex which believed deeply in its own strategic mythologies, in the notion of the decisive offensive which would shatter enemy lines with such force and vigor that the opposing army would be placed on the permanent defensive. Unfortunately, the failure of the Schlieffen Plan did not disabuse the German general staff of such notions.
In retrospect, it is a testament to the tactical brilliance of the German officer and extent of Franco-British incompetence that the offensive still saw German troops occupy many of the resource-rich regions in Northern France and come within 40 kilometers of Paris itself. In August, the German armies seized the Belgian fortress of Liege, occupied Rheims, and foiled the French offensive into Alsace-Lorraine. However, sabotage by Alsatian citizens and Franc-tireur activity made it difficult for the German Army to launch a counter-offensive in the region. On August 25th, Moltke refused the request of Prince Rupprecht to launch an offensive to the south in order to encircle French troops in Lorraine, instead committing additional reserves to the northern armies approaching the river Marne. Three days later, a request for a corps to reinforce the East was only begrudgingly supplied with a single division after it became clear that the Russian Army was still having trouble mobilizing sufficient forces for a sustained assault into East Prussia.
By September 5th, a sizable Franco-British force had emerged to oppose the armies at the Marne. With the front widening with every further advance, a gap had emerged between the German armies in the area between the towns of Chantilly and Meaux. In the “Battle of Oise”, a British force attacked this region, slipping behind the German armies and threatening their rear. Moltke threw in his reserves for a counter-attack on the flanks of this advance. Although the counter-attack was inconclusive, it convinced the British commander in the region that they were at risk of encirclement, and the British troops promptly withdrew to their previous positions, giving the German armies time to re-establish communications and close any remaining gaps on the line. Nonetheless, the German Army as a whole was quickly losing its strategic initiative. Attacks on its flanks continued, and the Franco-British concentration of forces swelled further as troops were ferried in from Britain.
The German General staff was paralyzed by indecision. While Falkenhayn wished to mount a direct assault on Paris, Moltke believed that the flanks of the German Armies were not secure enough for such a move. The inadvertant operational pause which this dispute caused allowed the French Armies to the Northwest of the German position to muster their forces and attack just north of the river Oise. A simultaneous assault on Moltke’s Southern flank by forces in Lorraine ensured that no reserves were sent to deal with the attack until the main axis of advance was determined.Tthough the attack out of Lorraine was halted at the expense of several German divisions, in the North several French armies broke through the German lines. This time, they did not retreat, and the General staff was forced to order a retreat of the armies to the south toward the river Aisne.
Moltke believed that the Schieffen plan had failed because it had not led to the destruction of the actual French Army. With it becoming clear that a “long war” was now inevitable, he decided on committing the remainder of the offensive power of the German Army to encircling the French Armies to his north. While the rest of the army retreated to the Aisne, he ordered the Third Field Army, thus far the least bruised in the fighting, to launch a counter-offensive around the town of Noyon, with the goal of pushing toward Amiens and creating a pocket of French troops stranded between the German position on the Aisne and the Somme river. It was hoped this would also render suspect the position of any French forces north of the Somme river, forcing a retreat from Belgium and Pas-de-Calais.
The counter-offensive began brilliantly. It started a phase of the war known as the “march to the north” as both armies increasingly shifted forces away from Lorraine and Paris. Moltke mused that “the war might still be won” after resigning himself to its loss only days ago. The French troops were caught off guard by the frontal german assault after several days of advancing largely without organized opposition. Within days, the German forces had captured Noyon, Mondidier, and Roye. The German forces dug-in on the Aisne River inflicted devastating causal-ties on several French counter-attacks from the south. Nonetheless, by the time the Third Army reached Amiens, it was exhausted. More than that, its flanks were exposed to French forces to both its north and south. In the days since the advance started, fresh BEF divisions were diverted to Amiens, and their heroic - and successful - defense of the city was a massive propaganda victory for the entente which helped smooth over tensions between the two nations.
The advance French forces cut off by the German thrust toward Amiens were nonetheless still quite vulnerable. But Moltke, now increasingly paranoid about the potential of encirclement, refused to immediately divert forces from Amiens for an offensive against them, and they largely managed to make their way north toward Passcendale, Ypres, and Givenchy. As a result, when an offensive from the 2nd army did begin to move north from Montdidier toward Albert and eventually Arras, these forces were able to engage in a fighting retreat that slowed down the German Armies and provided crucial time to organize a defense around Arras itself.
Arras was the point at which both armies lost their capacity to conduct offensive operations. Lead elements of the 2nd army had managed to occupy around a quarter of the town, but French reinforcements in the region had prevented them from advancing further. Flanking attacks to the town’s north failed to make progress, and the rest of the town was turned into something of a bunker by French troops. Over the course of a week and a half in October, the French, British and German armies jointly suffered around 500,000 causalties in and around the historic city, with the Germans hoping to take the entirety of the town after flanking attacks to the town’s north were defeated. The “Razing of Arras” saw much of the baroque town square destroyed by German artillery fire.
In the end, German forces were forced to withdraw from the ruins of Arras due to the pressure of flanking counter-offensives from the French and British. Despite this, the damage done to the French and British armies in the battle ensured that it would take at least a year before the Entente could launch a large offensive in France. By the end of 1914, the Central Powers occupied a line in Northern France running from along the river Aisne, and moving North toward Montdidier, Villiers, Albert, Vimy, Lens and Ypres.
The Eastern Front, 1914
Perhaps the most salient facts about the Eastern Front during the first month and a half of the war was its relative absence of real fighting. This was largely due to the “mobilization fiasco” in Russia. This fiasco was largely fore-seen by Russian generals, who warned that partially mobilizing some miitary districts but not others would likely result in confusion if a general mobilization of Western Military districts was ever called. The Tsar, who had initially hoped to confine the war to a Russian-Ottoman one, rebuffed the advice of his generals. Consequently, many weeks were spent with the Southern districts on a full mobilization footing while the Western ones were either partially or completely non-mobilized. When the call for general mobilization came out, trains intended to be used to transport troops to the West were already being employed to ferry soldiers and supplies to the South. The French plan for an early Russian invasion of East Prussia to divert German troops to the East failed spectacularly, and would have perhaps been fatal for the French war effort were it not for the equally spectacular failure of the Schlieffen plan.
In late September, around 500,000 Russian soldiers had finally coalesced to begin their invasion of East Prussia. The much smaller German force of 135,000 troops at first retreated after a Russian advance on Gumbinnen, but quickly redeployed to a more defensible position and halted the advance. After Ludendorff and Hindenburg arrived, they attempted to lure the Russian Army into several envelopments, but the commander of the 2nd Russian Army, General Samsanov, remained wary of advancing with his rather ill-equipped forces. Hindenburg and Ludendorff embarked on several counter-offensives, and they did manage to push the Russians out of most of East Prussia, but they were unable to inflict anything like a decisive defeat on the much larger and continuously swelling Russian Army, which by the end of 1914 numbered 800,000 to the Germans 150,000 troops. Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s repeated requests in for additional troops to launch an offensive to push the remaining Russian forces out of Gumbinnen and other border towns in East Prussia were denied.
Developments further south were similarly ambiguous. While the fall of Belgrade was an unambiguous victory for the Central Powers, it was unclear who, if anyone, had won the Galician campaign. While the Russians had not managed to take Lviv, the infamously poorly planned counter-attacks of the Austrian General Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf did succeed in decimating at least a third of the Austrian forces in the East. The Russians suffered similar losses, but had greater ease in replenishing them, as well as an army which wasn’t riven by the same ethnic tensions as the Hapsburgs’.
The Western Front, 1915
At the beginning of 1915, the German general staff had a decision to make: to renew the offensive in the West, or strike East in the hope of inflicting a blow devastating enough to Russia to force them out of the war? Unsurprisingly, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who controlled the armies in the east, advocated for the transfer of at least six corps from the West for a massive offensive to drive the Russians out of East Prussia and then Congress Poland. Bethmann Hollweg supported the two commanders in this plan, but there were also important figures aligned with the clique around Falkenhayn who advocated for a decisive blow in the West, such as Tirpitz, who was invested in the strategy of commerce raiding with Britain, and eventually the Kaiser himself, who had been stung by British entry into the war.
In the end, Falkenhayn’s clique won the struggle. The failure of the Russian armies to take Lviv and the fall of Belgrade conspired to weaken Bethmann Hollweg’s warnings about the instability of Austria-Hungary. Ludendorff and Hindenburg’s inability to drive the Russians completely out of the Reich’s borders harmed their credibility. And the tantalizing closeness to victory in the West during the initial months of the War led many in the OHL to believe that one more offensive would break the back of the French Army and force Britain into a negotiated peace.
Thus in early April, the Germans began the First Battle of the Somme. Instead of directly assaulting Amiens, fourteen German divisions in the salient running from outside the city South to Montdidier attacked directly west after bombarding Allied troops with the first use of poisoned gas in the war. Once again, the offensive was initially spectacularly successful. Amiens was out-flanked, and then captured on April 11th. German armies rushed into the breakthrough, and France began scrambling to evacuate troops from north of Somme for a second defense of Paris. The penultimate target of the offensive was the town of Abbeville, just north of the Somme.
The battle of Abbeville, referred by the British simply as the “miracle of Abbeville”, saw the German offensive halted by the extensive fortification network that had been built up around the city. The futile German assault in this area led to the exhaustion of the German divisions participating in the offensive. These divisions may have prevented the wild success of the coming British counter-offensive to the south if it had not lost around a third of its officers and artillery pieces. As it was, the British counter-offensive forced a general retreat of the German divisions in the area. After Amiens was recaptured, the French joined in the counter-offensive, and forced the demoralized German troops out of their initial positions in Montdidier and Albert, and back toward Noyon and Ham.
The offensive was a disaster. It was one of the first battles which had a higher proportion of German causalties than Entente ones. It also saw the German Army lose ground, and though the position it now held was somewhat more defensible, its defeat in the First Battle of the Somme nonetheless demonstrated that there would be no easy victory in the west. Perhaps most importantly, it led to a loss of face for Falkenhayn, which would have large consequences for later German strategy in the war. Though he was not demoted from his position at the head of the OHL, it was now Hindenburg and Ludendorff who had the ear of the Kaiser. Their “eastern strategy” would soon become unofficial German policy.
On the Western Front, the remainder of 1915 would see several failed Entente offensives in the north, around Ypres, and the south, near the Aisne. As German high command became convinced that the Entente was unable to break through the fortified German lines, more and more troops were committed to the east for a massive, Austro-German-Bulgarian offensive meant to knock the Russians out of the war. Reports received from both Britain and France about the massing of troops in Prussia and Galicia convinced them of the need to launch a more concerted and focused offensive early in 1916 to force Germany to bring forces back to the west.
Quick note: I will cover the Eastern Front in 1915 in the next post!
Bình luận
0