Throughout October the war was very active, to say the least, with action in the west,
the east, the Italian front, Serbia, and Salonika, but for once it’s about to get a little
bit calmer, as this week three major battles come to an end.
(INTRO) I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
(RECAP) Last week the Italian and French offensives
continued, the Russians used new tactics to stop the Germans, and the three-pronged invasion
of Serbia continued, with desperate fighting often hand to hand.
(SEGUE 0) We also looked a little bit at the situation
at Gallipoli, where Charles Monro had taken charge of the British and ANZAC forces.
(BLOCK 1) On October 30th, Monro visited Cape Helles,
Anzac, and Suvla the same day to get a feel for Gallipoli. This is what he had to say
about it all:
“The positions occupied by our troops presented a military situation unique in history. The
mere fringe of the coastline had been secured. The beaches and piers upon which they depended
for all requirements in personnel and material were exposed to registered and observed artillery
fire. Our entrenchments were dominated almost throughout by the Turks. The possible artillery
positions were insufficient and ineffective. The force, in short, held a line possessing
every possible military defect. The position was without depth, the communications were
insecure and dependent on the weather. No means existed for the concealment and deployment
of fresh troops destined for the offensive- whilst the Turks enjoyed full powers of observation,
abundant artillery positions, and they had been given the time to supplement the natural
advantages which the position presented by all the devices at the disposal of the field
engineer.”
Monro thought that since their continued presence on the peninsula had no purpose he urged evacuation.
But the ground was shifting under everyone’s feet. Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener
was really obsessed with the idea of not hurting British prestige in the Islamic world, which
he thought evacuation would do, so it was decided that Munro’s advice was not to be
trusted and Kitchener would go to Gallipoli himself to check out the situation. Actually,
Kitchener even came up with a plan, on November 4th, for a new landing at Bulair while the
navy would try to break through the straits. He even went so far as to dispatch a telegram
transferring Monro to Salonika and placing his second in command, Lieutenant General
William Birdwood, in charge. Birdwood suppressed that order pending Kitchener’s arrival at
Gallipoli, which was a good thing because within a few hours Kitchener had changed his
mind about the whole thing. Seriously, Gallipoli gets crazier and more depressing all the time.
(SEGUE 1) There were also depressing developments on
the war’s newest fronts this week, those in Serbia.
(BLOCK 2) Here’s a quote from “The Chronology of
the Great War” about the progress in Serbia, “The Austro-Germans in their progress distinguished
themselves by their calculated brutality to the civilian population. It had the direct
military object of causing a wholesale panic in order to encumber the few roads with fleeing
households and thereby to impede the retreat of the Serbian army and guns. The two Serbian
armies were by now hopelessly isolated by the Bulgarian advance from Uskub toward Pristina.
The northern one retired toward Montenegro and the southern into the mountains of central
Albania.”
And on November 5th, a milestone moment happened when Bulgarian troops captured Nis, which
finally gave the Germans a direct railway line from Berlin to Constantinople. The link
would formally be opened by the Kaiser himself in a couple of months.
(SEGUE 2) But I mentioned earlier that three battles
ended this week, so let’s look at them.
(BLOCK 3) On the Italian front, the Third battle of
the Isonzo River ended. 20,000 Italian soldiers had been killed in three weeks and another
60,000 wounded. As I mentioned in an earlier episode, the ratio of wounded to dead was
higher on the Italian front than the others because the terrain was so rocky that bullets
would ricochet and splinter the rock, causing far more injuries than usual, especially to
eyes and faces.
There would be no Italian breakthrough this time; much like the last two tries at the
Isonzo. The Austro-Hungarian forces had controlled the high ground overlooking the river and
had watched the Italian preparations the whole time. Italian Chief of Staff Luigi Cadorna
had spread his forces along the whole line rather than concentrate them against the main
target, Gorizia, going so far as to even attack secure Austrian bridgeheads at Plezzo and
Tolmino.
Austro-Hungarian General Svetozar Borojević von Bojna’s defense was well organized,
though when he counter attacked, his casualty rate was also huge. Hey, here’s a side note-
I read that Borojevic’s troops had a nickname for him: the Croatian Thickhead (firstworldwar.com).
Guess they weren’t his biggest fans. Still, though, he was one of the Empire’s most
capable field commanders, and as we’ve seen over the past year, the Empire needed all
of those it could get.
(SEGUE 3) Well, that’s one battle over, and the other
two that ended this week were both on the Western Front and were both French Offensives.
(BLOCK 4) The third battle of Artois ended November
4th and the second battle of Champagne ended the 6th. French casualties for Champagne were
around 145,000 men, with the Germans taking about half that. If you look at Artois and
Loos- where the British had mounted their own offensive, there were nearly 50,000 more
French casualties there for a total of 200,000 French casualties, around 60,000 British,
so- more than a quarter of a million Allied casualties, against roughly about 120,000
total German casualties in the combined offensives. The French had advanced, at the cost of all
of those casualties, about 4 kilometers. And since they had- on just the Champagne Front-
fired nearly 3 million field artillery and over half a million heavy artillery shells,
they were now basically out of shells.
Joffre claimed that the offensives had resulted in important tactical gains, and achieved
a moral victory over the Germans, whatever that means, but John Keegan, in “The First
World War” points out that Loos and Champagne in strategic terms were pointless, and that
for all of the continuing bravery of the French soldier or the determination of the new British
soldiers to prove their mettle, nobody gained more than a handful of kilometers of territory
and in Champagne the German second line was not penetrated, even with casualties in the
hundreds of thousands.
Keegan writes, “It had been a doleful year for the allies on the western front, much
blood spilt for little gain and any prospect of success postponed until 1916. The Germans
had shown they had learned much about defending an entrenched front, the Allies that they
had learned nothing about means of breaking through. It was a bitter lesson for the French,
all the more so because, in a widening war, their allies seemed bent on seeking solutions
elsewhere, leaving the main body of the enemy implanted in their territory. Yet the defeat
of the enemy through victories outside France looked no closer a prospect than breakthrough
towards the Rhine. In Russia... on the new Italian Front... in the Balkans... on the
Turkish battleground, the course of events favored the enemy.”
It was true. I mean, at sea and in the distant colonies the allies had the advantage, but
how was that going to win them the war when they seemed to be losing everywhere else?
The answer is obvious- it wasn’t.
(SEGUE 4) Sure, there were “bright” spots, like
over in the Eastern Front this week.
(BLOCK 5) Russians took 8,000 prisoners in Galicia on
October 30th, and 5,000 November 3rd there as well, and Russian tactics last week had
stopped the German advance and Riga seemed to be still fairly safely in Russian hands.
And here’s another random note to round up the week- on October 31st- British troops
began to use steel helmets.
(SUMMARY) So that was the week. Some Russian successes
and a bunch of Austro-Hungarian prisoners, more chaos and stupidity at Gallipoli, the
Bulgarians, Germans, and Austrians rampaging through Serbia, menacing the local population,
and major battles ending on the Italian front, in Artois, and in Champagne.
(CONCLUSION) 20,000, 45,000, 200,000. At this point, the
death toll is so mechanical that it almost seems to lose meaning. But I’ll bet a lot
of you live in cities or towns with less than a quarter of a million inhabitants, so imagine
if every single person in your town died. In a matter of weeks- that’s what kind of
death we’re looking at in Champagne. They didn’t disappear; they died. Meaning that
their bodies remained, rotting or freezing as per the season. In this war, this happens
every week, every month, all over Europe, so go outside and look at your town and imagine
every last person there dead, their blackened and torn corpses littering the ground, the
buildings just burnt out shells. Welcome to modern war.
CTA The people who did witness these horrors changed
forever, some of them wrote books to process what they have witnessed. One of them was
Louis Barthas, a French soldier who fought almost the entire war. You can find our biography
episode about him right here.
And if you want to read his diary, check out our Amazon Store where you can buy it and
support our show at the same time.
Our Patreon supporter of the week is Jean-Francois Soucy. Thanks to his and your support we
were able to improve our animations. Consider supporting us on Patreon, too and don’t
forget to subscribe.