Italy, hoping to acquire territorial spoils in exchange for opening a new front, had been enticed to declare war on Austria on May 23, 1915. The battered Russians were restocking their ranks with fresh conscripts, and by spring would have two million men in the field, most of them adequately equipped thanks to a notable manufacturing expansion. The French had increased their output of shells, field guns, rifles, and explosives sixfold, and by skillful reorganization and deployment of soldiers from the rear had formed twenty-five new divisions. (Keegan, pp. 275-276) With nearly a million men on the continent -- a number that was growing at the rate of one hundred thousand a month -- "the little army with which Britain had begun the war" had metastasized beyond recognition. (Meyer, p. 364)
It was an inevitable statistical inferiority that guaranteed ultimate exhaustion and a death sentence should the German leadership continue to pursue a defensive strategy, no matter how effectively it was conducted
Concluding that Russia's "offensive powers" had been shattered and that she was on the verge of revolution and collapse, in a letter to Kaiser Wilhelm on Christmas Day 1915, Chief of the General Staff Erich von Falkenhayn maintained that Great Britain -- the world's dominant industrial and maritime power, and now Germany's archenemy and principal threat -- must be persuaded by a demonstration of brute force that victory was beyond its grasp and that it should lay down its arms. (Meyer, pp. 366-367)
He proposed the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare to deprive Britain of vital foodstuffs and supplies and a concentrated operation designed to remove her "nearest and most important ally, France, from the war." (Meyer, p. 368) While he understood "that the fortified front could not be decisively penetrated," Falkenhayn argued "that France's will could be broken in one great battle of attrition . . . a battle so terrible in its dimensions, so shattering in its impact on both camps," that her people would be convinced that further resistance was futile. (Marshall, pp. 235-236)
Falkenhayn's plan was to lure the French into a German killing machine where they would "bleed to death" -- "to threaten some piece of ground they would do anything to hold," even in the face of overwhelming artillery. Such a "vital point" was the fortress of Verdun -- an isolated spear point jutting into the German line only twelve miles from rail supply. It had been a bone of contention between the two countries for many years, a cherished symbol of nationalism the French would fervently defend. It lay conveniently in the path of the German Fifth Army, which was commanded by Crown Prince Wilhelm, upon whom all accolades for victory would devolve. (Meyer, pp. 368-369)
The preliminary logistics were prodigious, and made even more remarkable in that they remained largely invisible to the French, which in part can be attributed to the hilly, wooded countryside and the cloudy winter weather of the region. Between late December and early February Falkenhayn amassed on the east bank of the Meuse River a hundred and fifty thousand men and over eight hundred guns, some capable of throwing one-ton projectiles. Five new railway lines were constructed across the Fifth Army's occupied zone to deliver weapons and ammunition. Thirteen hundred trains hauled in 2.5 million shells. (Meyer, pp. 372-373)
Falkenhayn's diabolical plan was not to capture Verdun but to bring the French within range of his artillery and then "bleed them white." His perverse logic was dismissive of the quick breakthrough that might compel them to retreat. Thus he would limit the first day's attack to a narrow front of only five to seven miles; he would wait until the end of the day to engage his infantry; and he would advance on the east bank of the Meuse only. He ignored his subordinates' contentions that the French were more vulnerable on the west bank and that his troops would be exposed to enemy artillery situated there. (Meyer, pp.373-374)
"Verdun was no longer an entrenched camp." (Marshall, p. 239) Having seen the speed with which the Germans had destroyed the fortresses at Liege and Namur, French commander Joffre had lost faith in such fortifications and had gradually stripped Verdun of guns and manpower. Only the warnings of aged General Herr, military governor of the region, and the meticulous preparations of Lieutenant Colonel Emile Driant, commander of two battalions in the hilly Bois de Caures, directly opposite the German lines -- both of whom had detected intensified enemy activity -- enabled the French to mount an effective resistance. Herr was able to muster thirty-five thousand men at the anticipated point of attack; Driant's thirteen hundred would bear the brunt of it. (Meyer, pp. 369-372)
Other than nationalistic sentimentality for this architectural landmark and historical anachronism, there was no reason to expend an army to defend Verdun. It had ceased to be "an indispensable anchor of the allied front . . . The north-facing forts would have been useless to the Germans. There were no great stores of materiel present to change hands." (Marshall, p. 242)
In fact, "historians have argued that the French would have wiser to abandon Verdun, fall back on the hill country to the southwest, and oblige the Germans to settle for a symbolic victory of minor strategic value." Meyer, pp. 380-381) Instead both were sucked into a maelstrom that in its length, cost, brutality, and sheer pointlessness became a microcosm of the war itself. (Meyer, p. 380)
Beginning early on the morning of February 21 and continuing into the next day, over a six-mile front, two million shells were thrown at the narrow triangle defined by Brabant, Ornes, and Verdun -- fired at the rate of 100,000 rounds per hour, mixing shrapnel, high explosives, and poison gas, obliterating the French forward trenches. (Marshall, p. 244)
"During the first day's bombardment an estimated eighty thousand shells fell on the Bois des Caures; on the second morning thousands more came screaming down." Finding his position nearly surrounded, Driant ordered a withdrawal, during which he was shot in the forehead. (Meyer, p. 381) Only seven wounded lieutenants and one hundred Chasseurs would survive his command. (Marshall, p. 244)
French deaths exceeded twenty-three thousand in the first five days compared to fewer than two thousand reported by the Germans. It was a rare instance of defenders suffering substantially heavier losses than their attackers. Falkenhayn's tactics seemed to be working. (Meyer, p. 383)
Displaying an astonishing willingness to die rather than surrender or retreat, the French held their ground for three days. Then, on February 24, the Germans stormed their secondary system of trenches, occupied the town of Samogneaux on the right bank of the Meuse, and advanced three-and-a-half miles, stopping only when the bastions of Fort Douaumont and Fort Vaux blocked their way. The next day Douaumont fell to a lone German sergeant who took its fifty-six defenders by surprise and captured them. (Meyer, pp. 384-387)
French reinforcements continued to arrive, but were dispersed into the fray helter-skelter. "They were quickly shot up without accomplishing anything . . . The French were in such disarray, and so demoralized, that they would have been routed if hit with sufficient force." But Falkenhayn stubbornly refused to release his main reserves. An ammunition dump blew up, costing him four hundred and fifty thousand shells. Some of his giant howitzers fell silent under a barrage from French guns left intact on the west bank of the river. (Meyer, pp. 384, 386, 387)
The general whom Joffre sent to inspect the deteriorating situation, Noel-Edouard de Castelnau, was a firm adherent of the doctrine that national territory should never be relinquished. He ordered to Verdun "a man who, more than any other in the French Army, was capable of organizing an effective defense while at the same time protecting his troops from unnecessary destruction," Henri-Phillippe Petain. An infantryman who had made himself an expert in the science of artillery, he was a war leader unique in his willingness to share the dangers of combat and in his unwillingness to sacrifice lives needlessly. (Meyer, p. 388)
Immediately Petain began moving men and guns back into the strongholds Joffre had all but abandoned, positioning them and coordinating their fire to inflict maximum damage on the German assault troops. "He ordered an end to hopeless attacks on lost positions. He installed a 'line of panic' where the French could make a last stand should the Germans break through." (Meyer, p. 388)
"Petain saw that his main task was to establish adequate communications . . . Serving the decisive front were only one branch line and a narrow-guage railway -- this to supply one-half million troops and 150,000 draft animals. It couldn't be done. So Petain rebuilt the road from Bar-le-Duc, later called La Voie Sacree (the Sacred Way), and introduced into warfare the supplying of a fighting front via motor convoys manned and loaded to deliver like a moving belt." (Marshall, p. 247)
"At the peak of the conflict, trucks arrived in Verdun at the rate of one every fourteen seconds . . . at any given time as many as many as fifteen thousand men were at work keeping the roadbed in usable condition. Upon unloading, the trucks would be filled with men -- not with the wounded only, but with soldiers" being sent to the rear for rest and recuperation, part of Petain's plan to maintain a constant rotation of units into and out of the combat zone. "In time more than three-fourths of the entire French army -- 125 divisions -- would move through Verdun." (Meyer, pp. 390-391)
"The actions taken by Petain, coupled with the Germans' lack of reserves, changed the character of the fight. On February 27, barely forty-eight hours after standing on the brink of taking the city, the Germans for the first time captured no new ground." The next day melting ice and snow turned the frozen earth to mud and made the movement of guns and shells nearly impossible; soon forward units of German infantry found themselves under the same withering fire they had inflicted on the enemy only a week earlier. (Meyer, p. 390)
"The German Fifth army hit hard again on March 6. But the line of attack had changed." Since no success had been achieved on the narrow front on the east bank of the Meuse, Falkenhayn bowed to the entreaties of the Crown Prince and his Chief of Staff, Konstantin von Knobelsdorf; he agreed that the offensive must be broadened to the west bank, where, behind the heights of La Mort Homme (the Dead Man) and Cote 304, the French were hiding their lethal artillery. (Marshall, p. 247)
Petain was waiting for him, with sixty thousand fresh and well-provisioned troops. The Germans managed to take possession of a woodland called the Bois des Corbeaux and to overrun two lines of defense directly adjacent to the Meuse, but Le Mort Homme and the high points nearest it remained in French hands. (Meyer, pp. 399-400)
"On the ravaged ground of the east bank, after again throwing masses of infantry against reinforced French defenses and murderous artillery fire, the Germans found themselves reeling under the magnitude of their losses and unable to advance." (Meyer, p. 399) "The ruins of the village of Vaux changed hands thirteen times during the month of March, and yet the fort itself lay tantalisingly beyond German reach." (Keegan, p. 283)
In a struggle that had captured the imagination of the world, the two sides were bleeding each other white in futile efforts to take or defend a few square miles of ground that had no strategic import other than a colossal symbolism. (Meyer, p. 400) In his memoirs, Crown Prince Wilhelm would describe Verdun as "the mill on the Meuse that ground to powder the hearts as well as the bodies of our soldiers." (Meyer, p. 405) By the end of March the Germans had lost 81,000 men, the French 89,000.
Petain's valiant exploits made him a national hero but his defensive posture did not sit well with Joffre. In April he was replaced by Robert Nivelle, the dashing figure who had won fame in 1914 by repulsing a German attack at the gates of Paris. Nivelle and the general he brought with him, Robert Mangin -- labeled the "Butcher" by his own men for his indifference to casualties -- immediately earned Joffre's approbation by taking the offensive and by discontinuing Petain's system of rotating divisions through the front line. (Meyer, pp. 404-405)
In the far South Atlantic, the explorer Ernest Shackleton arrived at a whaling station on South Georgia Island, having miraculously survived a year and a half stranded on the fringes of the Antarctic continent. "When was the war over?" he asked the first man he encountered. "The was is not over," the man answered. "Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad." (Meyer, p. 406)
On April 9 the Germans launched an "enormous, convulsive" assault on both banks simultaneously. "Before sending their infantry into action, they fired off seven trainloads of artillery shells." They reached what they thought was the crest of La Mort Homme, only to discover that the real summit lay just beyond their reach. Twelve days of drenching rain saved the French from surrendering this critical position. By now their casualties had risen to one hundred thirty-three thousand, the Germans' to one hundred twenty thousand. (Meyer, pp. 405, 414)
On May 8 the Germans captured Cote 304 -- whose batteries protected La Mort Homme -- but only after thirty-six hours of bombardment by five hundred guns along a single mile of front and three terrible days of fighting at close quarters.
A vast ammunition detonation inside Fort Douaumont which killed six hundred fifty German soldiers led the French to believe it was in a weakened state. Beginning on May 17, Mangin's three hundred heavy guns fired a thousand tons of explosives onto a quarter of a square mile centered on the fort. The ensuing assault "broke into the fort's inner chambers. The Germans regrouped, however, and after days of hellish underground combat, drove the attackers out. The failure was so complete and the costs so high -- more than fifty-five hundred troops and 130 officers killed out of twelve thousand, another thousand taken prisoner -- that Mangin was relieved of command." (Meyer, p. 420)
The Germans finally took possession of Le Mort Homme at the end of May, and gathered themselves for the climactic east bank offensive that would carry them to Verdun. Fort Vaux fell on June 7 following six days of brutal combat and a defense so heroic that Crown Prince Wilhelm presented the captive French commander, Major Raynal, a sword to replace the one he had lost; Raynal had surrendered only because his men were literally dying of thirst. (Meyer, p. 427)
That left only one small barrier, Fort Souville, between the Germans and their long-sought objective. On June 22 they softened up the fort with a preliminary artillery barrage that was as savage as ever and ended with the release of a new weapon: phosgene gas, which killed every living thing, even insects and plants. "There are clouds of smoke, the air is unbreathable. There's death everywhere," wrote a French lieutenant. (Meyer, p. 428)
The next day Falkenhayn threw his last reserves into the attack: thirty thousand men on a front of just three miles against a stronghold that, if reduced, would leave them only two and a half miles from the central citadel. Indeed they broke through, only to come under murderous fire on both flanks while aircraft strafed them from above. "The forward edge of the advance got to within twelve hundred yards of the crest of the last ridge before Verdun, but that was as far as it could go. At the end of two days of horror for the men on both sides, the Germans had to give up." (Meyer, p. 429)
"Since February 21 about twenty million shells had been fired into the battle zone . . . Forests had been reduced to splinters, villages had disappeared . . . Over two hundred thousand men had been killed and wounded on each side . . . To both armies Verdun had become a place of terror and death that could not yield victory." A final effort by Germans on July 11 again reached Fort Souville but was again beaten back. (Keegan, p. 285)
After three more months of stalemate, on October 19 Nivelle unleashed a merciless five-day bombardment, having assembled six hundred pieces of artillery and fifteen thousand tons of shells for the operation. It was February in reverse, as the demoralized Germans, huddling under an intermittent freezing rain, watched their defenses blown apart around them. (Meyer, p. 465)
In the ensuing assault, led by Mangin, now back in favor, the French -- concealed in mist, shielded by creeping barrage -- retook in one day positions on the east bank of the Meuse that the Germans had spent four and a half months and expended thousands of lives to capture. "When Fort Vaux fell nine days later . . . France was prepared to believe that at Verdun its army had won one of history's great victories." But the hills regained were without strategic value, as was the seizure on December 18 of eleven thousand Germans and 115 guns -- the meaningless last gasp in this marathon of destruction. (Meyer, p. 465-466, 469)
"The fight for Verdun -- a prize that would have cost the French little if they had lost it and gained the Germans little if they had won it -- was finally at an end." (Meyer, p. 429)
On May 31, in the midst of this ongoing holocaust, near Jutland, a peninsula on the Danish coast, the British Grand Fleet and Germany's High Seas Fleet met in history's largest naval encounter -- until the advent of the next world war. "No sea had ever seen such a large concentration of ships or of ships so large, so fast, and so heavily armoured." (Keegan, p. 270)
Storming into the North Sea with an array of one hundred ships, German commander Richard Scheer's plan was to lure a contingent of British cruisers southward away from the protection of its dreadnoughts. Unbeknownst to him, British intelligence had decoded his radio messages, and his counterpart, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, was heading in his direction with one hundred and fifty ships and predominance in every category.
On encountering the weaker German battle cruisers, Vice-Admiral Sir John Beatty made a run to the south. Meeting the main enemy force, he turned back to the north, drawing the German dreadnoughts toward Jellicoe's Grand Fleet. Scheer, pounded by superior British fire, at first ordered a retreat, then reversed course to come to the assistance of a damaged cruiser. "Ten minutes of gunnery, in which the Germans endured twenty-seven hits by large-calibre shells, the British only two, convinced Scheer to turn away again to the darkening eastern horizon . . . Many ships remained to cover his flight, including his squadron of vulnerable pre-Dreadnoughts," and in a series of dusk and night cross-water actions both they and the British cruisers and destroyers engaged suffered severe damage. (Keegan, p. 272-273)
Both sides claimed victory. But the British -- while still in control of the North Sea -- had been outgunned and outmaneuvered, and had lost three more ships and thirty-five hundred more sailors than the Germans. (Meyer, p. 421)
"As a direct result of Verdun, the war in the east flared back into action." Honoring a commitment made to his allies at Chantilly in December 1915, on March 18 Tsar Nicholas ordered an attack at Lake Naroch near the Lithuanian capital of Vilna, where his one million men northern and central army groups outnumbered the enemy two to one. (Meyer, p. 400)
Offsetting their advantage, they were ill-trained and ill-equipped, poorly led by a pair of cautious, jealous, and incompetent commanders -- the two Alexei's, Evert and Kuropatkin -- and hampered by a snow cover that melted into a knee-deep slush and refroze. After overrunning the Germans' first two lines, they broke down in less than a week, eventually sacrificing one hundred thousand men, including twelve thousand who froze to death when the temperature plunged overnight. (Meyer, p. 402)
On April 28 the Germans counterattacked and regained in one day all the territory they had lost. Their astonishing success was due to a new battlefield technique devised by Georg Bruchmuller; days of heavy shelling were replaced with "a shorter, shockingly intense bombardment that, when the infantry advanced, moved ahead of it like a protective wall." Rejecting the conventional artillery tactics of the Western Front, the "creeping barrage" would prove to be one of the war's most important tactical innovations. (Meyer, p. 408)
Not surprisingly, Evert and Kuropatkin were reluctant to resume the offensive; they were overruled by Chief of Staff Alexeyev and the recently-appointed commander of the southern front, General Alexei Brusilov. Heir to a military tradition and of noble descent, Brusilov's resume was nothing short of brilliant. At the start of the war he had driven the Austrians out of Galicia. In May 1915 he had directed a two-hundred-mile fighting retreat through the Carpathian Mountains and saved his army from encirclement. (Meyer, p. 407)
Brusilov seized his new opportunity with imagination and aggressiveness. He would attack along a two-hundred-and-fifty mile front to prevent the enemy from massing at critical points; he would neutralize their artillery and clear away barbed wire with a limited one-day bombardment; and he would advance his reserves to within seventy-five yards of contact so they could exploit openings as soon as they appeared. (Meyer, p. 423)
"The result, on June 4, was a success of almost incredible magnitude. The Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army disintegrated when hit; more than half, seventy-one thousand men, were killed, wounded, or captured. The Seventh was wrecked even more, losing one hundred and thirty-three thousand men. It was the same almost everywhere; after three days Brusilov found himself in possession of three hundred thousand prisoners." (Meyer, p. 423)
"It was the greatest victory seen on any front since the trench lines had hardened on the Aisne two years before." (Keegan, p. 306) The complete destruction of the Austro-Hungarians was in Brusilov's grasp, yet it ultimately eluded him for lack of manpower. When his compatriot to the north, Evert, failed to send his inactive divisions southward in support or to engage the Germans opposite him in a timely manner, the latter were themselves free to move against Brusilov. (Meyer, p. 424) When Evert finally did attack on July 2, even a three-to-one numerical superiority could not prevent a disaster similar to the one at Lake Naroch; he lost eighty thousand men, five times as many as the defenders.
Brusilov resumed his offensive in August; he captured forty thousand prisoners and three hundred thirty guns in four days, and then turned northward to threaten the Austro-Hungarian fortress at Kovel. He had inflicted one million casualties, advanced his front thirty to sixty miles, destroyed half the Austrian army, obliged Falkenhayn to suspend operations at Verdun, and achieved worldwide notoriety, but, inevitably, gutted of supplies, his engine ran out of steam. (Stevenson, p. 136)
His triumph had cost him three hundred thousand men and consumed huge quantities of ammunition and supplies, which his war ministry could not replenish, and which, if it could, he had no means of transporting to the front. (Meyer, pp. 426-427)
Brusilov's success encouraged Romania to enter the war as an ally; unfortunately, he could do nothing to guarantee its security against a German intervention or a Bulgarian attack. Assailed on three sides, the Romanians were driven in full retreat to the remote eastern province of Moldavia, having squandered three hundred thousand men and abandoned half their country and millions of tons of valuable oil and grain to the Germans. Brusilov was compelled to extend his line two hundred miles to the east and south to prevent his ally's total collapse, a dispersion of troops that effectively ended his extraordinary campaign. (Meyer, p. 467)
"If it had been possible to win the war in the west by sheer force, by overpowering the enemy with manpower and firepower, the Battle of the Somme would have been synonymous with victory -- instead of debacle. The British and the French attacked a German army that they outnumbered by a wide margin. They had an equal advantage in artillery and total control of the air." (Meyer, p. 435)
But "the simple truth of 1914-1918 trench warfare was that the massing of large numbers of soldiers unprotected by anything but cloth uniforms, however they were trained, however equipped, against large masses of other soldiers, protected by earthworks and barbed wire and provided with rapid-fire weapons, was bound to result in very heavy casualties among the attackers." (Keegan, p. 293)
Thus, on the morning of July 1, 1916, when "the men of the British Fourth Army, the majority citizen volunteers going into action for the first time, rose from their trenches at zero hour and advanced in steady formation, they were almost everywhere checked by uncut barbed wire and shot down." Only five of seventeen divisions crossed the German line of defense; the rest came to grief in the purgatory of no man's land. (Keegan, p. 294)
It was not for lack of preparation. By the middle of June, the mastermind of the undertaking, General Sir Douglas Haig, had delivered to the site half a million men, three million shells, and fifteen hundred pieces of artillery -- one gun for every seventeen yards of the eighteen miles along which the attack would occur. Behind the Somme, stretching back twenty-five miles, he had fashioned an enormous military encampment. Seven thousand miles of telegraph wire and one hundred twenty of water pipe had been laid underground. Tunnels had been burrowed beneath the German entrenchments and packed with explosives. (Meyer, p. 436)
But the Germans had not been idle. Digging thirty feet into the dry, chalky soil, they had created an underground city, reinforced with concrete and steel, impervious to artillery fire, provisioned to withstand a siege, equipped with electric lighting, running water, and ventilation, and linked to the rear with telephone cable and communication passageways. (Meyer, p. 438)
The British plan for the initial assault was thirty-one pages long. Five days of bombardment (later reduced to three due to a rainstorm) would pour more than a million and a half shells on the German lines, after which, according to Fourth Army commander, General Sir Henry Rawlinson, "nothing could exist."
"British troops were to move forward across no man's land in successive waves . . . each wave would advance in a continuous line 100 yards in front of the next, at a steady pace of 100 yards a minute." (Hochschild, p. 196) "Every unit was told what points it would reach in the first hour and exactly where it would be at the end of the day." (Meyer, p. 438) Ahead of the leading wave, a "creeping barrage" of artillery fire would prevent any Germans still alive from emerging from their shelters to resist the oncoming hordes. (Keegan, p. 291)
So confident were Haig and his subordinates of the destruction their bombardment would wreak that they did not allow their inexperienced infantry to "fire and move," to lay down and cover with rifle volleys those ahead of them, for fear of slowing the advance; instead the recruits were instructed "to keep moving forward upright and in straight lines." (Keegan, pp. 290-291)
The shattering of Haig's and Rawlinson's expectations would be immediate and calamitous. The German position was far stronger than British intelligence had estimated -- indeed almost impregnable. At least twenty-five percent of the British shells failed to detonate. Two-thirds of those that did explode fired shrapnel, which was virtually useless against machine gun emplacements built of concrete, steel, and stone. Nor could shrapnel demolish barbed wire unless the shells burst at the right height above ground -- and the fuses designed to facilitate that proved to be unreliable. (Hoschschild, p. 204) Uncut wire in front of defended trenches was a prescription for massacre. (Keegan, p. 292)
The vaunted "creeping barrage" designed to intimidate enemy machine gunners was another disastrous failure. Firing by a timetable calculated according to the speed at which the infantry was expected to advance, the artillerymen, fearful of killing their own, tended to extend their barrage too quickly and too far ahead of their troops, who were pinned down under fire in tangles of barbed wire. (Keegan, p. 292)
The attack, when it came, at 7:30 in the morning, could hardly have been less of a surprise. Mustering infantry and cavalry were clearly visible through the open, rolling farmland. Ten minutes before zero hour, like a strident call to arms, an underground mine exploded behind the German lines. (Meyer, p. 441)
Those lying in wait were astonished at what they saw. "Instead of coming forward in a rush, instead of ducking and dodging and making use of whatever cover the terrain offered, the British were lined up shoulder to shoulder in plain view. Instead of running, they were walking almost slowly, as if to demonstrate their skill at close-order drill. Rifles and bayonets at the ready, they were like a vision out of the era of flintlock musketry." (Meyer, p. 445)
"Running in any case would have been nearly impossible. Every man in the first wave carried some seventy pounds of weaponry, ammunition, and gear" -- which were needed to sustain him once he reached the enemy dugouts. (Meyer, p. 446)
"The Germans simply pointed their machine guns at these knots of flesh and cut them down in swaths. 'We were surprised to see them walking,' said one. 'We had never seen that before . . . When we started to fire we just had to load and reload. They went down in hundreds. We didn't have to aim, we just fired into them.' " (Meyer, p. 446)
"Of the 120,000 British troops who went into battle on July 1, 1916, more than 57,000 were dead or wounded before the day was over -- nearly two casualties for every yard of front. Nineteen thousand were killed, most of them within the first hour." German losses totaled 8,000. (Hochschild, p. 206) "It was the worst day in the history of British warfare . . . A generation later, at the Normandy invasion, the British and Americans together would fight twenty days before their dead, wounded, and missing reached twenty thousand." (Meyer, p. 447)
Further south, two French corps demonstrated what rational tactics could accomplish. Carrying only what they required for one day's combat, dispersing themselves rather than marching in formation, darting from one shell hole to another, encircling machine guns rather than hurling themselves into their frontal sights, they tore through the opposing defenses, captured several villages, and lost only two thousand men.
The British corps on their immediate left made equal progress, and was poised to plow ahead into open countryside, until foiled by Rawlinson's orders, which he refused to modify: "No serious advance is to be made until preparations have been completed for the next phase of the operations." For him, and Haig, that portended more of the same obtuseness. (Meyer, p. 448)
Rawlinson secured Haig's approval for another large-scale offensive on July 14 -- this time in the early predawn hours. Facing only four battalions, four British divisions quickly overran their first line and broke through the second. But by the time the British cavalry rode into position -- it took nine hours, so far in the rear had they been stationed -- the Germans had rushed forward enough reserves to block the hole, and were able to regain control of the field. (Meyer, p. 457)
This minor victory persuaded Haig that he was winning the manpower contest; he decided that the battle was worth continuing as one of attrition. "Fresh divisions were sent forward in monotonous succession -- forty-two by the Germans in July and August -- only to waste their energy in bloody struggles for tiny patches of ground . . . By July 31 the Germans on the Somme had lost 160,000, the British and the French over 200,000, yet the line had moved scarcely three miles in thirty days. North of the Ancre, or along the original front, it had scarcely moved at all." (Keegan, p. 297)
Trumpeting success in terms of the number of enemy killed and wounded led Haig to the harrowing rationalization that higher British casualties were mandated, even desirable. "After a September attack on Delville Wood by the 49th Division, he was upset enough to deplore, in his diary, that 'the total losses of this division are under a thousand!'" (Hochschild, p. 209)
A September 15 assault by eight British divisions featured the battlefield debut of the tank. (Meyer, p. 463) "Many minds contributed to the innovation but the main credit goes to Winston Churchill." While at the Admiralty he had made funds available for developing the land battleship that had been proposed as early as December 14 by a visionary young officer of the Royal Engineers, Colonel Ernest Swinton. (Marshall, p. 260)
Churchill lamented that the exciting new weapon was not stockpiled to at least brigade strength for the staging of a monster surprise. Instead the bull-headed Haig grabbed the first forty-two available and threw them into service at the first opportunity. (Marshall, p. 261)
Despite their limitations -- an average speed of only two miles per hour, a cramped crew compartment that could quickly heat up to a temperature of 125 degrees, no means of communication -- the initial appearance of these armoured beasts terrified the Germans and enabled the British to advance 3500 yards in short order. Ultimately, however, almost all of them broke down or stalled in deep shell craters. Of course, the French and Germans immediately instituted tank programs of their own. (Hochschild, p. 213)
His revolutionary technology nothing more than another setback, Haig reverted to painfully familiar tactics: massive artillery bombardments followed by infantry attacks. (Hochschild, p. 214) On November 13 the British detonated a mine under a German redoubt on the charred earth of Beaumont-Hamel, and subsequently captured the redoubt and twelve hundred soldiers. The next day, November 19, a blizzard ended the Battle of the Somme. (Meyer, p. 466)
To conquer seven miles of territory, the British had suffered almost five hundred thousand casualties -- including at least one hundred twenty-five thousand deaths -- and the French two hundred thousand. (Hochschild, p. 214) "Official German sources placed their Somme casualties at two hundred and thirty-seven thousand." (Meyer, p. 466)
Haig managed to survive his ill-fated war of attrition, but Falkenhayn did not. Insisting that "not one foot of ground should be lost at the Somme," he ordered three hundred counterattacks during the months-long battle. (Hochschild, p. 214) On August 29 he resigned his position as Chief of the German Army and was replaced by Field Marshal Hindenberg.
Similarly, on December 13, "the political ice cracked under French Marshal Joseph Joffre. Questions about his leadership, above all about his failure to anticipate Verdun, finally generated more pressure than his defenders could withstand." Appointed to succeed him was "the self-styled genius credited with changing Verdun from a tragedy to a national triumph," Robert Nivelle. (Meyer, pp. 468-469)
Like all who had postured before him, Nivelle believed he had a plan that would change the course of the war. But only the most sanguine observer held out any hope that it could stanch the horrific bloodshed.
REFERENCES
Hochschild, Adam. To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion 1914-1918. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.
Marshall, S. L. A. World War I. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964.
Meyer, G. J. A World Undone: The Story of the Great War. New York: Delacorte Press, 2006.
Keegan, John. The First World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.
Stevenson, David. Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
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