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  Thus, Michael had seen the first German spring offensive launched against the BEF’s Fifth and Third Army front in the Somme area; April 1918 saw the second major operation concentrated upon Lys in Flanders; and the third occurred in May on the Aisne, where a number of recuperating British divisions were badly mauled. In all this, the AIF added fresh laurels to an already impressive Western Front record at or near Hébuterne, Dernancourt, Albert, Morlancourt and Hazebrouck. And burnt forever into Australian military folklore were the two actions at Villers-Bretonneux: the first (4 April 1918) saw the German attack there first blunted after an initial break-through, and then a brilliant counter-attack that restored the situation; and the second, after the German capture of that village on 24 April, in one of the most extraordinary and audacious feats of arms during the war—on the eve of the fourth Anzac Day—the 13th and 15th Brigades, AIF, counter-attacked and re-took Villers-Bretonneux. During the period March–April 1918, the AIF sustained some 15 000 casualties.

  Ludendorff’s final offensive was checked at the Second Battle of the Marne (15 July to 6 August 1918). After initial impressive gains threatening Paris, the Germans were finally thrust back to where their offensive had begun, costing some 95 000 French, 13 000 British and 12 000 American casualties. But the Germans paid a heavier price: around 165 000 casualties. For all the seemingly impressive territorial gains, Ludendorff’s spring offensives had been finally blunted, and his strategic aims comprehensively denied. The initiative had now passed to Foch and the Allies.

  ***

  Given the unprecedented slaughter and seeming futility of the massive confrontations on the Western Front—particularly during 1916 and 1917—followed by the stunning Allied reversals during the German spring offensives of 1918, the consequent rapid and spectacular transformation from despair to victory in a mere 100 days is extraordinary. We have chronicled the divisions between the military and their governments in both the strategic and tactical aspects of the war, and we have noted that these impediments to progress existed within both Britain and France, and embodied, in the wider sense, in the difficulties of coalition warfare.

  It will now be shown that this remarkable 100-day change was the end result of a gradual evolution of expertise in the science laboratory, in the factory and, most of all, in the spectacular refinement of how a battle on the Western Front should be planned, coordinated and fought. In doing so, some of the myths of the Great War will be exposed, and a definitive understanding of the Australian contribution to that victory will be gained.

  CHAPTER 2

  Sharpening the tools

  Paddy Griffith, in Battle Tactics of the Western Front:

  The first two years of the war represent the essential preliminary charcoal sketch over which the whole war-winning tableau would subsequently be painted in oils.1

  An army’s doctrine is its repository of administrative and tactical knowledge that facilitates its deployment and conduct of operations on the battlefield. When Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, the basis of its ‘preliminary charcoal sketch’—its doctrine—was in no way prepared for a massed-army and industrial Continental war; much less for the static, crushing and relentless confrontation of trench warfare that would soon unfold. In the first years of the war this ‘charcoal sketch’ would be painfully and painstakingly ‘edited’ and at times ‘redrawn’ as the BEF learnt its lessons. The ‘painting’ would begin in 1917 and come to its fruition the following year.

  At the onset of the Great War, Britain possessed two standing armies. The first was the British Regular Army which, numbering around 247 500 officers and other ranks, constituted the British Empire’s ‘police force’—its primary task was the occupation and protection of British interests around the world. The second was the Indian Army numbering some 160 000 men whose chief duty was the protection of the Indian frontier. Of the former, 75 000 were stationed in India. For service at home the Territorial Force, composed of part-time reservists, totalled some 270 000 men. While the quality of its personnel was often apparent in this relatively small British Army, it lacked quantity. In contrast, at the beginning of the war France’s standing army and its reserves numbered some 4 million men, Germany 4.5 million, and Austria–Hungary 3 million.

  It follows that the Staff Corps was also of modest proportions. In 1914 there were only ‘908 officers in the British Army who could put the letters “psc” (passed Staff College) after their names, or were otherwise qualified for Staff duties’.2 Further, during the Edwardian era, the chances of promotion in the British Army were greatly enhanced by ‘class, upbringing, schooling, and powerful patrons . . .’3 Thus, an officer’s advancement might be accelerated by his patron’s endorsement, reliant to a large measure upon the prestige and influence of that supporter. In fact, the strong attachment and influence of an officer’s regiment—and his patron’s ‘guidance’—often proved far more effective than attendance at the Staff College. Ian M Brown has left us with a number of that institution’s further limitations:

  Students entered the Staff College by passing a series of competitive examinations . . . Some . . . entered on the recommendation of the Commander-in-Chief, which allowed for patronage and the potential of less able officers getting in . . . the artillery, the engineers, and the Indian Army suffered under-representation, due to regulations that limited the artillery to four entrants per year and the engineers two . . . In addition, artillery, engineers, and the Indian Army officers did not receive ‘corps’ pay while at the Staff College, thus increasing their financial burden still further.4

  A relatively popular joke during the war was, ‘If bread is the staff of life, what is the life of the Staff? One big loaf!’ Nothing could have been further from the truth. As the BEF rapidly expanded, some original, capable staff officers were promoted and an ongoing pool of their peers with often only a year’s combat experience were sent to train at Hesdin in northern France. Their expertise in both administration and operations grew as their experience of war progressed, until, within that critical two-year period already discussed, the BEF’s staff work eventually became unrivalled.

  From a command perspective, the senior officers who were to lead the BEF on the Western Front had learnt their craft in open warfare: in India and on the Frontier, in the Sudan, during the First Boer War, and in particular, the Boer War of 1899–1902. Neither they—nor the Central Powers—could have dreamt of trench warfare, and the subsequent expenditure of thousands of tons of explosives during massive artillery duels, which often mixed the terror of shrapnel with a dose of dreaded chemicals, or a screening cover of smoke; devastating machine gun, trench mortar and flamethrower fire; the gradual advent of steel monsters traversing battlefields with massed infantry on a scale undreamt of; or that warfare would journey to the skies to add a totally new dimension to that conflict. Colonel David Brook, Royal Australian Artillery, (Retd):

  You learn very fast! And of course things unravel the moment the first shot is fired. It’s as quick as that, as instant as that. Because you have no idea what you’re going to be up against, what tactics that will be employed . . . generals are always blamed for training for the last war. The sad fact of the matter is that they haven’t got any experience of what’s going to happen in the future and all they can do is . . . try and learn the lessons, learn from the mistakes they make . . . it’ll take them two years to square themselves away before they’re a viable proposition.5

  The Great War quickly became a war of technological expertise, where the urgent need was for a blueprint of a new or refined weapon from the laboratory to then be translated into a prototype. Then there was the trialling, then its mass production by a skilled labour force in converted or new factories, and finally, its movement to the battlefield via an intricate logistics infrastructure. And all of these urgent aspirations, resulting plans, and their final completion in construction and deployment took considerable time.

  To compound these challenges, at the beginning of the war
the BEF faced arguably the most numerous, professional, well-trained and -led Continental army of its time. Manned primarily since 1871 by the armies of Prussia, Saxony and Bavaria, the German Army was a by-product of a militaristic society disciplined and structured for conflict; its General Staff were extremely efficient; it could deploy 25 regular corps, each comprising two divisions, and all equipped with a full establishment of artillery; it greatly outnumbered both the French and British in heavy guns; it had abundant, well-trained and available reserves; and, critically, at the onset of the war, it had an industrial infrastructure that enabled it to satisfy its requirements. Further, the nation that had set the pace in the development of a relationship between science and industry had been Germany. Procedures had been put in place to ensure that ‘research chemists in universities met the requirements of industry’, and to encourage such relationships numerous technical institutes were established.6 In contrast, the relationship between British and French universities and their industries lagged behind the Germans prior to the war. Again, although the scientific and industrial transformation for war by Britain and France would prove to be dramatic, that process would take time—another important portion of ‘the essential preliminary charcoal sketch’.

  ***

  In essence, the Great War was an ongoing, relentless and ruthless artillery duel. The great majority of the casualties on both sides—the killed, the maimed and the traumatised—were the result of the artillery, both in the attack on, or the defence of, any given location. From the start to the finish, no other arm of warfare remained such a critical constant in the planning and execution of a Great War battle.

  In direct response to its importance was its development from the traditional, mobile and dashing gunnery actions before and during 1914—where direct fire upon an observed enemy over quite short ranges could be employed—to its gradual evolution in 1918 into a weapon that could pinpoint an unseen, distant target; could surprise the enemy by delivering accurate, concentrated fire upon that target without prior registration; could disrupt the enemy’s rearward communications and transport and concentration of reserves for counter-attack; and could support the advancing infantry with a high-explosive creeping barrage, or on-call fire with either or both gas and smoke being employed as required. The extraordinary scientific and tactical artillery advances made during the Great War were learnt through constant technological and industrial invention and refinement, which was driven by hard-won and costly experience on the battlefield.

  Given that the Great War was initially perceived by both sides as a mobile war of relatively short duration, the onset of static trench warfare produced an unquenchable demand for artillery guns and shells of all types. Two battles during 1915 provided the artillery with some limited lessons. The first was the Battle of Neuve Chapelle (10 March 1915) where, because of an acute shortage of ammunition, a narrow 2000-yard front was employed to achieve a suitable concentration of fire; an intense fire plan was brought to bear for 35 minutes before the attack; and 13- and 18-pounder guns were designated to hit selected targets. The initial phase of the attack was successful, but the soon-to-be familiar problem of a slowness in bringing up reserves caused by communication difficulties stalled the attack. In September of that year, the Battle of Loos saw the lessons of Neuve Chapelle ignored: while the front was five times larger, the same number of guns were used, and thus the concentration of fire was diminished; the barrages lasted for four days and any hope of surprise was therefore forfeited; gas was used in adverse wind conditions; and the emphasis of the artillery barrage was to obliterate the enemy and his trenches in the belief that the infantry could then cross the intervening ground virtually uncontested. It would take considerable time to fathom that the artillery was best employed in neutralising the German ability to contest the infantry’s crossing of no-man’s-land.

  By mid-September 1914 the BEF had used all of its heavy howitzer ammunition, and one month later, ‘at the start of the First Battle of Ypres, British divisions were warned that they could each expect only three truckloads of ammunition per day’.7 As the size of the conflict grew, there was a consequent desire for more guns and more ammunition, and, as a result, the logistical challenges became immense. Colonel David Brook, RAA, (Retd):

  . . . this was part of the problem with horse transport, that often, given the terrain and the conditions, that it took hours and hours for one ammunition wagon with its horses to get up to where it was to go, and often, of course, you had mule transport with pack saddles and not the limbers . . . and also, a special little, you might say jacket . . . and there were two pockets on either side, that the troops could put on . . . each taking a round of ammunition. Apart from the ammunition, there’s the fodder for the horses . . . an 18-pounder battery had 50 riding horses and 122 draught horses [for the guns and the wagons] . . . for six guns they had one two-horsed cart, twelve six-horsed wagons, and one bicycle, that was it. The forage for 172 horses each day is substantial, plus water.8

  The Somme offensive fought during the period 1 July to 18 November 1916 along the Somme Valley (consisting of twelve main battles) provides us with a number of gradual lessons learnt—at enormous cost—by the BEF’s GHQ and artillery. As the main Allied offensive of 1916, the Somme was originally planned as a joint French and British attack in France to coincide with a major offensive on the Eastern Front. But the mammoth German thrust at Verdun in February 1916 caused the French to greatly reduce their contribution to the Somme in order to defend that critically important fortress. The first day of the Somme offensive, Saturday 1 July 1916, remains the most costly and infamous day in British military history. The BEF suffered nearly 60 000 casualties, of whom some 20 000 were killed in action. By mid-November 1916, the British and French had fought themselves to an exhausting standstill, which had yielded a paltry seven-mile gain in ground at a cost of about 420 000 British and Dominion casualties and around 200 000 French. The Germans suffered about 500 000. This offensive constituted the escalation of a war of attrition on a scale not previously witnessed. The AIF’s main contribution to the Somme was at Pozières and Mouquet Farm between 23 July and 3 September, and attacks around Flers during November 1916.

  The plan for the opening of the offensive involved an attack by Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Rawlinson’s newly constituted Fourth Army and a part of General Sir Edmund Allenby’s Third Army across a front of some eleven miles. The objective and the means of obtaining it was to cause an ongoing divergence of opinion between Haig and Rawlinson.

  During the eighteen-month period leading up to the battle, both British manpower and industry had grown enormously. By mid-1916 General Haig had an infantry strength of four armies comprising up to twelve corps of 43 divisions; he could deploy over 1000 field guns, 400 heavy guns and howitzers, and possessed ample shells for all of them. But that rapid growth in manpower and artillery production had a severe limitation in quality, which began with its commanders. Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, in Command on the Western Front:

  The five men who were now Army commanders had, back in 1914, been in charge only of divisions. Most of the present corps commanders had then led infantry brigades. And many of the current divisional generals had started the war commanding battalions. Of all the formation commanders directing the attack in mid-1916, only Haig, Rawlinson, and Gough had exercised real authority at the BEF’s last major operation—the battle of Loos just nine months before.9

  And to compound this lack of experience in its senior commanders, Rawlinson maintained that ‘neither our new formations nor the old Divisions have the same discipline that obtained in our Army of a year ago’.10

  The same problem of ‘quantity not quality’ applied to the BEF’s artillery shells during 1916. While the quantity from British and American factories was now increasing at an astounding rate, their quality and consistency were poor. A third of the shells used during the Battle of the Somme became known as the infamous ‘iron harvest’ whereby, for generations later,
farmers in the Somme region were to gather a wealth of dud shells. Thus, the price paid for an initial, rapid, mass-produced shell by a still-learning industry and workforce was often a flawed product.

  ‘Bite and hold’ has been a concept discussed by Great War historians for many years. Haig was an advocate of a decisive and concentrated break-through of all three of the German lines of defence, which would facilitate a resumption of the long-sought-after mobile battle that had eluded Great War generals of both sides. Until virtually the end of the war, Haig, the cavalryman, saw his mobile war returning through the deployment and exploitation of the BEF’s cavalry after an initial artillery–infantry break-through.

  Rawlinson, in contrast, believed that the ‘bite’ was contingent upon the range of the artillery: in other words, the ground gained in any offensive was restricted entirely by the field artillery being able to destroy the enemy trench lines within their range, and provide creeping barrages—an innovation on the Somme—to offer progressive support to the infantry advance. He also trusted that the 18-pounders might also cut the German wire belts to allow a less interrupted infantry access into the German trenches. In addition, the heavy guns might hamper the enemy’s communications, offer counter-battery fire, and disrupt the movement of reserves. In simple terms, while the width of the front could be determined in the planning of an operation, the length of that ‘bite’ or area of captured ground was absolutely restricted to the reach of its ‘jaw’—and the ‘jaw’ was the field and heavy artillery. Having conducted a successful ‘bite’, the next necessity was to deploy sufficient infantry onto the captured ground to hold it and consolidate that gain. This was no easy task, given the German propensity to both concentrate reserves and counter-attack very quickly. Rawlinson thus saw the war as a series of ‘bite and hold’ operations: destroy the enemy’s front trench system, cut their wire, advance under artillery fire, occupy and hold the captured ground, bring the guns forward, register the new objectives, and repeat the process.