World War I Page 2

  In 1915, the tide turned. Bulgaria joined the war on the side of the Central Powers and Germany sent 300,000 troops to assist its ally. Utterly overwhelmed, the Serbs fought on to the end of year, and some escaped to join Allied forces elsewhere. Nevertheless, by 1916, Serbia was out of the war and Austria-Hungary’s power now reached to the frontiers of Greece and Albania.

  Romania, wooed by both sides, eventually joined the war on the side of the Allies in August 1916. It proved a costly mistake. Russia was by this time exhausted, leaving the 500,000-strong Romanian army exposed to an attack by a combined force of Austro-Hungarians, Bulgarians, Turks, and Germans. By the end of the year, Bucharest, the capital city of Romania, had fallen. Four hundred thousand men and three-quarters of the country’s territory were lost.

  KNOWING THE TERRAIN

  A British journalist describes how the Serbian commander General Mishitch used his local knowledge to defeat the Austro-Hungarian attack of December 1914:

  “He suddenly advanced in a general attack, on the morning of December 3rd, 1914, and completely surprised the Austro-Hungarians. He caught them leisurely moving along the valley paths. Capturing the overlooking hills, the Serbs shot the hostile columns down, while the Austro-Hungarians were still wondering where they should place their artillery. Naturally, the Serbs knew every rise and fall of the ground, for Mishitch himself had been born and bred [there].”

  —Quoted in The Great War, edited by H.W. Wilson and J. A. Hammerton

  British soldiers in a cheerful mood after landing at Salonika in Greece on their way to reinforce their hard-pressed Serbian allies to the north.

  Another area of fighting in the Balkans was at Salonika, a port in neutral Greece. Here, in an attempt to assist Serbia in 1915, the Allies landed a force of British and French troops that moved north toward Serbia. It came too late to help the Serbs, however, and was too small to do much on its own. Relatively secure behind their barbed wire, the Allied troops made no notable advance until September 1918. By then, the war was almost over. Extraordinarily, the maintenance of the Salonika Front cost almost 500,000 casualties—18,000 from the war and the rest from disease.

  Surprising many, Serbia held out against the numerically superior Austro-Hungarians and fell to the Central Powers only when German troops joined the invasion in 1915.

  A Serbian howitzer prepares to fire on the invading Austrians, 1915. With no direct link to the sea, Serbia could not easily receive Allied munitions.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE FIGHTING SPREADS

  Unsuccessfully seeking the Gallipoli break-out: an Allied heavy field gun in action at Helles Bay on the tip of the Gallipoli peninsula, 1915.

  The Gallipoli Campaign, 1915–16. Although daring and original in concept, the Allied plan failed through gross mismanagement on the ground and because of the courage of the Turkish resistance.

  The Turkish Ottoman Empire, a friend of Germany before the war, entered the conflict on the side of the Central Powers in November 1914. This had little immediate impact on the conflict, other than threatening British-held Egypt and forcing Russia to open yet another front to the east of the Black Sea. The following year, however, Turkey was involved in a major campaign that, had it succeeded, might have altered the whole course of the war.

  In February and March 1915, British and French warships tried to force their way through the Dardanelles, the narrow neck of water that links the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. The aim, strongly backed by Britain’s Winston Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty, was to seize Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) and open a sea route to Russia. Had this been achieved, there was a possibility that the Allies would be able to threaten the Central Powers from Russia’s borders on the east.

  LANDING AT GALLIPOLI The Allies’ naval operation was a failure. Three ships were sunk by Turkish mines and the heavy shore guns remained intact. Undaunted, the Allies turned to a different strategy: a landing on the Gallipoli Peninsula than runs up the western side of the Dardanelles. In April, 75,000 British, French, and Anzac (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) men went ashore at different points on the toe of the peninsula. Some met almost no resistance and, had they pressed inland, might have quickly secured a sound base.

  The Allied commanders were too hesitant or simply incompetent, and the advantage was lost. The Turkish resistance, well organized by the German General Liman von Sanders, kept the Allies pinned down on the beaches. A second landing in August was also ineffective.

  Going nowhere—British troops at Gallipoli try to advance beyond the beaches, August 1915. Time and again they were thrown back by the well-organized Turkish defenses.

  “WITHOUT METHOD”

  Major H. Mynors Farmer recalls the poor state of the forces after a few weeks in Gallipoli:

  “When I was there, in every case, attacks were ordered rather light-heartedly and carried out without method. The men on the spot were not listened to when they pointed out the steps to be taken before entering on a special task. The Turks had sited their trenches very cleverly and it was often useless to attack one set before another had been taken.”

  —Quoted in The Imperial War Museum Book of the First World War, edited by Malcolm Brown

  Fighting the enemy – and the weather. Troops of the Italian Alpine Regiment prepare for action in the snowy Alps, 1915.

  In October the decision was made to withdraw, an operation completed by January 1916. So ended one of the major fiascos of the war, a dismal catalog of poor planning and incompetent leadership that produced some 250,000 casualties on either side.

  NORTHERN ITALY Italy’s agreements with Germany and Austria-Hungary did not require it to enter the war on their side in 1914. This was just as well because, at the time, its armed forces were in poor shape—there were only six hundred machine guns in the entire country, for example. Nevertheless, the temptation to join the war proved too great, and the following year (May 1915) Italy sided with the Allies in the hope of gaining territory from Austria-Hungary.

  The war did not go well for the Italians. They remained short of weapons and munitions, both of which were supplied in large quantities by Britain and France. Furthermore, the Austro-Hungarians held the key strategic positions in the mountains overlooking Italian lines (see facing map on page 19 showing Italian positions in relation to Austro-Hungarian movements).

  The American novelist Ernest Hemingway served as a volunteer with an ambulance unit on the Italian Front. He based his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) directly on his experiences. This is how he describes the scene in the first chapter of the book:

  “There were mists over the river and clouds on the mountain and the trucks splashed mud on the road and the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were wet …

  At the start of the winter came permanent rain and with the rain came cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.”

  —From A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

  Austrian troops, armed with flame-throwers, advance along the Isonzo River, 1916.

  Austria-Hungary found it hard enough to manage its long front with Russia, so in the beginning it was content to resist Italian assaults. Between 1915–17, the Italians launched eleven full-scale offensives in the region, none of which managed to seize more than a few miles of ground. After the last offensive, made in the late summer of 1917, the Italian commander General Luigi Cadorna decided to build up his defenses to face an expected attack by German as well as Austro-Hungarian forces.

  The Central Powers’ attack of October 24–November 12, 1917, known as the Battle of Caporetto, was a total disaster for the Italian Army. German forces advanced about 14 miles (23 km) on the first day, and the Italian withdrawal halted only on the River Piave, about 68 miles (110 km) from the Isonzo. Around 275,000 Italians had been captured.

  The front in northeastern Italy. The easy gains that Italy hoped for when it joined the war in 1915 were not forthcoming.

>   The Italians eventually dug in and rebuilt on the Piave. Assisted by Allied reinforcements, Italy’s new commander, General Armando Diaz, launched a final offensive in October 1918 against an enemy that was by now exhausted from sustaining years of fighting on two fronts. The Allies advanced swiftly along a broad front until Austria-Hungary signed an armistice on November 3, 1918, bringing hostilities between that country and the Allies to a close (see also page 50).

  British General Edmund Allenby rides into Jerusalem, Palestine, after driving the Turks from the city, December 1917.

  MIDDLE EAST The war extended into the Middle East when the fleet of the Turkish Ottoman Empire bombarded Russian Black Sea ports without warning on October 29, 1914. Declarations of war soon followed. In alliance with the Central Powers, who provided officers and munitions for the depleted Turkish Army, Turkey fought on four fronts. On only one, Gallipoli (see pages 14-15), did it achieve success.

  In the north, the Turks launched an attack on southern Russia (the Caucasus) in an attempt to seize the region’s oilfields. At the Battle of Sarikamish (December 29, 1914 to January 3, 1915) they were soundly defeated, suffering 30,000 casualties and losing much of their remaining army as prisoners of war. In the eastern corner of their empire, in the region of Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) at the head of the Persian Gulf, the Turks faced an invasion by an Anglo-Indian army sent from British-held India. At first, the invaders made swift progress, taking the region’s oil fields. The Turks regained the initiative in 1916 when they took 8,000 Anglo-Indian prisoners at Kut al Imara. By the time hostilities ended, however, the British had again moved forward, capturing Baghdad (March 1917) and advancing further up the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

  SETTING UP MAJOR CONFLICT

  Eager for support, British politicians made conflicting offers to their allies. They promised the Arabs independence and the Jews a national homeland in Palestine. Foreign Minister Lord Balfour’s letter to Lord Rothschild, the leader of Britain’s Jews, proved to be one of the seeds of the modern Arab-Israeli conflict.

  “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”–November 2, 1917.

  —Quoted in Arab-Israeli Conflict and Conciliation: A Documentary History, edited by

  Bernard Reich

  Fighting in the Near and Middle East, where the Turkish Ottoman Empire fought the Russians and the British and also struggled to hold down a revolt of the Arabs.

  The Suez Canal in Egypt, a key route between Britain and India (then the jewel in Britain’s imperial crown) was an obvious target for the Turks. Knowing this, the British built up strong defenses, resisted Turkish assaults in 1914–15, and pressed on into Sinai in 1916–17. They were assisted by a widespread revolt among the Arab peoples, eager to be rid of their Turkish overlords.

  Battling for the British Empire—Indian gunners defend the British-held Suez Canal against a Turkish attack.

  Held up for a while at Gaza, at the end of 1917 the Allies seized Jerusalem in Palestine. The large Anglo-Arab force, commanded by General Edmund Allenby, then destroyed the remaining Turkish forces in the region at the Battle of Megiddo and moved forward to occupy Damascus in Syria on October 1, 1918.

  AFRICA The Middle East was not the limit of the fighting. The conflict became truly global as early as 1914, when Japan, an ally of Britain, seized German colonies in the Pacific Ocean and in mainland China. There was fighting in Africa, too. Here Allied forces from Britain, France, and their colonies attacked Germany’s four African colonies: Togoland (Togo), the Cameroons (Cameroon), German South-West Africa (Namibia), and German East Africa (Tanzania). They wanted to seize territory and shut down the German radio stations that were monitoring Allied shipping.

  War East African style: A British soldier seated on an ox during the long campaign to hunt down German General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck.

  Togo fell swiftly to French and British troops in 1914. The same two countries gradually occupied the Cameroons, 1914–17. On the outbreak of war, South Africa offered to undertake the capture of German South-West Africa. This was achieved by four columns, totalling 50,000 men, over a period of ten months.

  In contrast, German resistance in East Africa continued throughout the war. This was largely due to the leadership of German General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, a brilliant guerrilla commander. In 1914, he had a mere 2,750 men (of whom 2,500 were Africans) to hold a territory the size of France. Later this rose to 14,000 (including 11,000 Africans). Against him were ranged almost the entire South African Army and many European and local troops and assistants, totalling, at their peak, 350,000 men. This was precisely what Lettow-Vorbeck wanted—to divert as many Allied soldiers as possible from the battles in Europe (see statistics box on page 22), to help Germany achieve victory there.

  Africa during World War I. The continent was dragged into the fighting because, during the previous century, it had been carved into colonies by the imperial European powers, many of which were now fighting for or against one another. The inset shows the campaign in German East Africa.

  After a successful but costly attack early in 1915, Lettow-Vorbeck decided to stick to hit-and-run guerrilla tactics. He used local conditions and speed of movement to great effect. A successful tactic was to build up a strong defensive position, hold it for a while in order to inflict maximum casualties on the attackers, then slip away before the final assault. Only when he heard of the Armistice (see page 49) did the undefeated Lettow-Vorbeck finally surrender on November 23, 1918.

  The foredeck and main guns of the German battleship Braunschweig, pictured here at the start of the war in 1914.

  WAR AT SEA Naval warfare had been revolutionized during the fifty years before 1914. Huge steel battleships, driven by steam turbines and armed with massive shell-firing guns in turrets, had made all other large warships obsolete. However, these remarkable vessels were vulnerable to mines (as we saw in the Dardanelles, pages 16-17) and torpedoes. The latter could now be delivered with great accuracy by submarines. Finally, the use of spotter aircraft and radio enabled commanders to know their enemy’s precise location and movements.

  Essentially, the naval war developed into one of blockades—the Allies sought to cut Germany and Austria-Hungary’s overseas supplies of food and raw materials, while the Germans tried to do the same to Britain and France. In the end, it was the Allied blockade that succeeded, bringing Germany to its knees in the autumn of 1918.

  Germany’s chief hope of breaking the Allied blockade lay in sailing its High Seas Fleet past the British Grand Fleet into the open oceans. After some early naval encounters at Coronel and the Falkland Islands (both 1914), and in the North Sea (1914-15), Admiral Reinhard Scheer decided to attempt this full-scale break-out in May 1916. The German High Seas Fleet met the British Grand Fleet at the Battle of Jutland, the only major naval engagement of World War I. The British suffered greater losses but drove the Germans back to port, where they stayed for the rest of the war. After Jutland, the Germans relied on submarines, known as U-boats, to cut Allied supply lines. For an effective blockade, U-boats needed to attack all shipping—neutral or Allied—destined for Britain and France. This tactic infuriated the United States and helped bring it into the war on the Allied side in April 1917. By 1918, the Allies used convoys and improved antisubmarine weapons (such as the depth charge, 1916) to break the U-boat’s dangerous stranglehold.

  The naval war. Apart from the major engagement between the British and German fleets at Jutland, 1916, conflicts were small scale, involving no more than a handful of vessels on either side.

  A Fairey F.17 seaplane, 1917. The emergence of such aircraft enabled fleet commanders to keep track of
the enemy with much greater accuracy.

  WAR IN THE AIR The wartime development of aircraft technology was dramatic, driven mainly by the need to conduct aerial observation of enemy artillery and to prevent the enemy from doing this themselves. In 1914, warplanes were slow, fairly unreliable, incapable of carrying heavy loads, and used largely for reconnaissance work. By 1918, they had become much more powerful and reliable and were designed with specific tasks in mind. They were also organized into a separate branch of the armed forces, such as the Royal Air Force (1918), and were seen as a vital element in any military or naval operation. Air superiority, which the Allies had achieved by 1918, was key to success on the ground. The major Allied offensive of September 1918, for example, took place under cover provided by over 450 aircraft.

  A German naval Zeppelin airship taking off from its base. Although capable of flying huge distances, Zeppelins were slow and vulnerable to enemy fire.

  Early bombing—a British air crew prepares to drop its aircraft’s lightweight bombs by hand. Inevitably, the accuracy of the bombing was poor.