The Great War at midpoint A most terrible year

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21684766-two-long-battles-attrition-engulfed-european-powers-1916-year-crammed-both
Two long battles of attrition engulfed the European powers in 1916, a year crammed both with horrors and with consequences, many of which still endure Jan 2nd 2016 | From the print edition

BOOKS that focus on what happened in a particular year have become a publishing phenomenon. So Keith Jeffery, a British academic historian whose last work was a fascinating, if slightly plodding, official history of Britain’s secret intelligence service, MI6, must have thought it a clever idea to go for 1916, the midpoint of the first world war. Mr Jeffery’s purpose is to show that not only was it a year of tremendous events, but one in which the effects of the war spread across most of the world, often with consequences that can still be felt a century later.
By 1916, the war that some had believed would be over by Christmas 1914 had become an attritional slog on both the largely static Western Front and on the rather more fluctuating front in the East. To break the deadlock, the general staffs of all the main belligerents continued to work on new tactics, such as the creeping artillery barrage, and to seek new technologies, including the tank, which first saw action in September 1916. Contrary to a widely held view, the second half of the war was a period of unprecedented military innovation.

The idea that sheer offensive élan could overcome well-entrenched defences equipped with modern weaponry, in the form of accurate artillery and the machine- gun, had died during the appalling bloodletting of late 1914. In the four months before the war of movement in the West ground to a halt, France and Germany had between them suffered over 1.5m casualties—a loss rate that was not exceeded until manoeuvre returned to the battlefield in the final months of fighting. By 1916 most of the soldiers on both sides had not only lost faith in imminent victory, but had become fatalistically resigned to the war as permanent crucible for their generation which civilians and politicians at home could not begin to comprehend.


The last hope that the war might be brought to a swift conclusion by a stroke of strategic brilliance had faded with the abject failure of the Gallipoli campaign to deal the expected blow to the Ottoman Empire. Just a few days before the close of 1915, the Allied forces withdrew stealthily from the beaches at Suvla Bay and “Anzac” Cove (the acronym for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, which fought there with great gallantry, but, contrary to national myths, did not suffer the bulk of the casualties). The withdrawal, in contrast to the rest of the shambolic campaign, was rather brilliantly conducted. But the lesson was still a painful one: although “sideshows” continued to exercise the imagination of those with an imperialistic mindset, the grim reality for Britain and France was that the war would be won or lost on the Western Front.


That realisation fed into something else. By 1916 sentiment had hardened into a widespread feeling on both sides that the sacrifices had already been so great that the possibility of a negotiated peace had ceased to be politically conceivable. The only way forward, it seemed, was to prevail in a fight to the finish whatever the cost. That was one reason why 1916 saw two of the most terrible confrontations of the war: the battle of Verdun, which began in February, and the battle of the Somme, which was launched on July 1st.


During the whole of 1915 there were 1.8m casualties on the Western Front; in just eight months of 1916, thanks to those two epic struggles, France, Britain and Germany together sustained 2.2m casualties. For the German chief of staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, the fortress at Verdun was chosen as the place where “the forces of France will bleed to death”. Verdun, writes Mr Jeffery in “1916: A Global History” (Bloomsbury, $32 and £25) “became a byword for the manifest horrors of industrialised, ‘total’ war”. But for France, the defence of Verdun in the face of Germany’s greatest onslaught of the war so far became the ultimate symbol of national heroism. For the British, the battle of the Somme came to represent something less noble. At the outset, the British army suffered its greatest-ever loss in a single day (more than 57,000 casualties). The shock of July 1st 1916 came to stand for not just the suffering and courage of the soldiers, but, later, anger over the human cost of flawed tactics and supposedly callous military leadership.


Yet at the time the battle, which continued until November, was not regarded as a disaster. The French made significant gains during September, which, William Philpott, author of “Bloody Victory” (2009), believes was the “tipping point” of the war. He argues that the Somme “relieved the pressure on Verdun, restored the initiative of the Allies, wore down the enemy’s manpower and morale and…stretched German resources dangerously thin”. With their superior manpower and resources, the Allies believed the Somme was “a strategic victory in a war of attrition” which they would eventually win.


Paradoxically, the great naval battle of Jutland, two months before the Somme offensive, looked at best like a costly draw for the Royal Navy, which lost more ships and men than Germany’s High Seas Fleet, but was in fact a strategic success. Although, as Mr Jeffery points out, contrary to myth, it was not the last time the High Seas Fleet ventured out of Wilhelmshaven, the damage done to its smaller naval force at Jutland underlined the risks of seeking a definitive engagement. As a result, there was no further real threat to Britain’s naval blockade of Germany which, according to German apologists for their eventual military defeat, led to deteriorating conditions on the home front (malnutrition and sickness if not actual starvation) and the myth of the “stab in the back” by treacherous republican politicians.


A further consequence of Jutland was that with waning appetite for another major fleet action and its attendant risks, German U-boats went back to a largely commerce-raiding role. It was the fateful decision early in 1917 to expand into unrestricted warfare that led directly to America’s entry into the war a few months later, in April. A thread thus leads from Jutland to the single event that perhaps did most to ensure that Germany would lose the war.


The attritional struggles on both the main fronts were directly connected to the wider impact of the war as the fragile regimes of three of the belligerents, Austria-Hungary, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, began to crack under the strain. Austria-Hungary, whose attempt to chastise rebellious Serbia fuelled the initial descent into war, was by 1916 buckling at the seams. Neglecting the struggle against Russia in the East, Austria-Hungary’s chief of the general staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, had sent his best troops to fight the Italians, but had still got bogged down. Things turned from bad to worse when the Russian general Aleksei Brusilov launched a brilliantly conceived offensive in June. The Russian advance put intolerable pressure on the fragile loyalties of the multi-ethnic Habsburg armies. There were mass defections of Czech, Ukrainian, Croat and Slovenian units who were deeply reluctant to fight fellow Slavs.


Brusilov eventually ran out of steam when German divisions arrived to stiffen Habsburg resistance. But his offensive proved to be another major turning point. Austria-Hungary was more or less destroyed as a military power, increasingly dependent on Germany to stay in the fight. Less obviously, exhausted by the inconclusive effort of its greatest feat of arms in the war, the Russian army turned in on itself, creating the conditions for the revolution the next year that was hijacked by Lenin with help from Germany.


The battles on the Eastern Front in 1916 “crucially accelerated the political and social destabilisation of both the Russian and Habsburg empires”, as Mr Jeffery notes. Nearly all the areas where the fighting took place were in the colonised spaces of eastern Europe: that is to say, in places where “the population felt itself under the domination of a foreign power”. The war encouraged people to challenge the imperial status quo and assert their right to national self-determination, still a relatively new concept and one that has remained a source of conflict and controversy.


With every major belligerent by 1916 in extremis, it was not just in eastern Europe and the Balkans that nationalist movements surfaced to exploit the distraction of the colonial power. Ireland saw the Easter Rising when 1,400 armed republicans seized a number of Dublin landmarks, including the GPO building, only surrendering when British artillery was used to shell their positions. The subsequent execution of 15 of the rebels and the imposition of martial law increased opposition to Ireland’s role in the war and gave a boost the republican cause that led to the establishment of the Irish Free State six years later.


In the Middle East, the British and French pursued a policy of fomenting Arab nationalism as a means of undermining the Ottoman Empire and staving off German attempts to promote a pan-Islamist jihad against the two older colonial powers. In May 1916 two rather obscure diplomats, François Georges-Picot and Sir Mark Sykes, reached an agreement that divided Arab Ottoman provinces into areas of future British and French control or influence. The baleful results of their insouciant map-drawing are still being felt today, notably in the turmoil of Syria and Iraq.


That 1916 was an extraordinary year is not in doubt. It was the pivotal year of the Great War, which as Fritz Stern, a German-American historian, rightly observed, was “the first calamity of the 20th century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang”. The intensity and scale of the fighting was the trigger for a wave of political, economic and social upheavals that destroyed empires and forged national identities, sometimes for the better, very often for the worse. Historians have been hard at work teasing out the threads; readers can expect a deluge of new books in the coming months.