We’ve seen disastrous decisions by political and military leaders throughout the war, but
rarely have they been called to account. At least so far, but that changes this week.
This week, Winston Churchill gets fired.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
When we left off, South African forces had captured the German colonial capital Windhoek,
the British and French had jointly tried to break the German lines in Artois, the Germans
were still attacking at Ypres, and at Gallipoli the Allied landings and anticipated victory
had now descended into siege warfare, but the big news was on the Eastern Front, where
the Austro-German Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive had driven the Russians back from the Carpathians
and erased eight months of Russian gains.
Let’s look first to the west, where the Allies were yet again starting something new.
Now, the second battle of Artois was in full swing. Indeed, the Germans were actually slowly
calling a halt to their own offensive, the Second Battle of Ypres, to deal with
the situation in Artois.
This week in Artois, the Battle of Festubert, which lasted for ten days, began May 15th.
This was an attack by British forces and was really the first time they tried to win by
attrition instead of the quick “bite and hold” tactics they had been pursuing the
past couple of months. So the attack began with a three-day artillery barrage of over
100,000 shells, which still failed to do any serious damage to the German defensive lines.
The initial infantry attacks afterward were fairly successful initially, but as the weather
turned bad, the British troops dug in as the Germans reinforced their new positions. So
while the British gained some ground, around 3 kilometers, their losses for the battle
were over three times that of the Germans, around 16,000 to around 5,000 casualties.
Historian Peter Hart put it simply, “it was a disaster.” The British, it seemed,
still had a great deal to learn about artillery support and multi-layered
command and control structures.
I think we all know, though, that the forces that had used artillery most effectively so
far were the Germans and they were bringing it on in full force over in the east.
The battle for Mid-Galicia was over when the Austro-German forces reached the San River,
with the Russians the big losers, and this week saw the beginning of the battle of the
San, which also began a new chapter of the war. German General August von Mackensen was
slowly advancing toward the fortress of Przemysl, near where the Russian center under General
Nikolai Ivanov held east of the river. I say slowly because Mackensen was leading 2,000
pieces of artillery with seemingly limitless ammunition. The Russians had been in full
retreat for two weeks and at this point Ivanov’s main objective was to hold off the enemy long
enough to clear the fortress of supplies and ammunition and withdraw the troops holding it.
On May 14th, German troops occupied Jaroslav, some 40 kilometers from the Fortress, and
that same day the Austro-Hungarian 4th army under Archduke Josef Ferdinand reached the
western banks of the San. By the 16th, the attackers held the left of the river from
Jaroslav to Rudnik, over 60 kilometers. That day they began to take the right bank as well.
A German division further north reached Lubaczovka and half of a circle around Przemysl was complete.
The German goal now was to cut the Przemysl-Lemberg railway and sabotage the Russian
retreat from the fortress.
But while the Germans were planning to take Przemysl from the north, the actual battle
opened to the south on the 15th, when Austro-German forces attacked the Russian lines between
Novemiasto and Sambor. Much like on the western front, this was an area of trenches and barbed
wire and the trenches changed hands back and forth over the next few days. By May 21st,
though, the attackers had broken through the Russian defenses east of Przemysl, threatening
the garrison’s retreat and further closing a circle around the Russians as the Germans
advanced from the north. Actually, by the 20th Mackensen’s forces were bombarding
the fortress itself.
However, on the 21st, Ivanov’s forces counter attacked along the entire line in an attempt
to save, not the fortress itself, but the garrison within. The Russians were actually
trying an enveloping movement of their own, and though they did capture quite a few guns,
a bunch of prisoners and a couple of towns, it was a lost cause. By the 24th, though the
Russians continued to offer effective resistance as their counter offensive petered out, the
eventual fall of Przemysl was a foregone conclusion and that day Mackensen resumed the offensive,
taking Drojohow, Ostrov, Vysocko, Makovisko, and Vietlin in the same day.
When the Austro-Hungarian Imperial army was having its lunch eaten by the Russians in
the Carpathian Mountains some six weeks ago, the Austrian powers that be were considering
some sort of deal with Russia, but Germany now had pretty fair control over Austrian
war policy, and war policy is what we’re going to look at next,
though not German, British.
The British Liberal Party had so far had exclusive control of war policy, but the severe shell
shortage over the past weeks caused Prime Minister Herbert Asquith to be pressed to
establish a Ministry of Munitions and to give some senior places to his conservative opponents.
Both parties now believed the war was above politics- hooray- and it needed long term
planning and production. I mentioned last week that of 6 million artillery shells that
the army should have received by May, they got only around 2 million. This, together
with the British naval failure at the Dardanelles, caused Asquith to finally form a coalition
government May 19th. The Conservatives demanded that First Lord of the Admiralty Winton Churchill
be removed from his post for the failures in the eastern Mediterranean, and so he was;
Arthur Balfour, a former Conservative Prime Minister, because the new first Lord.
That same day, the 19th, at Gallipoli, an assault by 40,000 Turks was repulsed by fewer
than half that number of Australians and New Zealanders, but here’s the thing; last month
when Gallipoli started, it was supposed to be a continuous forward assault, right? But
now it had become a defensive struggle to hang on to a couple of footholds.
The Turks may have been holding their own at Gallipoli, but they were losing ground
further to the east.
This week, the Russian army occupied villages throughout the Van district of Eastern Anatolia
and on May 19th, advance Russian troops reach the city of Van itself. The Armenian population
of the city, 30,000 strong, had been under siege by Ottoman forces for a month, but as
the Russians arrived, the siege was lifted. The Russian troops actually brought congratulations
from the Tsar himself for the city’s defenders, and in the days that followed, as the Russians
began to cremate the dead in the province, 55,000 were identified as Armenians.
This war was no picnic for civilians pretty much anywhere, and in a dark note from the
British Isles, on May 14th; the internment of enemy aliens in Great Britain began.
And that was the week; a pretty busy one everywhere now that spring had really arrived. The Russians
still being pushed back by the Germans, trading positions with the Austrians, and beating
back the Ottomans. The British losing thousands of men in the west for a gain of a few thousands
meters, and losing one more man at home.
Winston Churchill would have a brilliant career, and as Prime Minister of the U.K. during World
War Two is rightly remembered as one of the great wartime leaders of the century and was
an inspiration to millions both during and after the war. Before and during the First
World War he wisely urged modernization of Britain’s forces, insisting that all new
ships be powered by oil and not by coal. He also foresaw the importance of airplanes in
combat and was instrumental in establishing the Landships committee in February 1915 whose
work eventually created the tank, but Churchill had a darker side. Future Prime Minister Lloyd
George would write to Churchill during the war, “You will one day discover that (your)
state of mind revealed... is the reason why you do not win trust even where you command
admiration... national interests are completely overshadowed by your personal concern.”
And Churchill certainly had an ego. In 1904, First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher had determined
that attacking the Dardanelles would be foolhardy, in 1906 War Minister Richard Haldane warned
of the potential for disaster there, and in 1911 Churchill himself said it wasn’t possible
to force the Dardanelles, and yet, four years later, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he
let his thirst for naval glory and involvement in the war to match that of the army lead
him to Gallipoli and the loss of tens of thousands of men in a bloody waste of life. And that
is unforgivable.
One of the people that Churchill was trying help out by forcing the Dardanelles was Czar
Nicholas II and you can find out more about him in our bio of him right here.
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