Every episode I begin with some sort of a hook, like poison gas is first used, or Italy
joins the war, or something like that.
The one this week is painfully obvious.
Here it is: The war is exactly two years old.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week Australian troops launched a diversion at Fromelles to prevent German troops from
heading south to the Somme.
It was a disaster, partly because German troops were NOT leaving for the Somme.
At the Somme itself was a successful British night attack but no big follow up, while on
the Eastern Front the Russians were still steamrolling the Austrians.
Here’s what followed.
Well, more attacks at the Somme followed.
A French and British combined attack was to go off on the 23rd, but the French corps commander
Maurice Balfourier said he wouldn’t be ready until the 24th, so British General Sir Henry
Rawlinson decided to go it alone, though in the end he did get a small French component
on his right flank.
Preliminary bombardment began at 7 PM on July 22nd.
The main part of the attack was to begin at 1:30 AM, July 23rd.
But the joint action with the French on the right - Congreve’s XIII Corps and Fayolle’s
Frenchmen - decided, lord knows why, that they would begin their attack at 3:40 AM.
Then it turned out the French still wouldn’t be ready by then, but Congreve’s men were
still not going to attack with the main attack.
(shrug)
Then aerial recon showed a newly dug German trench in the left center of the advance so
the two divisions facing that, the 19th and 51st, would attack it already at 1230.
So now there were three different starting times.
That soon became four as the 5th Division in the center also found a newly dug trench
line opposing it and decided - without talking to corps or army command - that they would
attack it at 10 PM the previous night, three and a half hours before the supposed starting
time.
So an operation that was supposed to be a concerted offensive is now a series of distinct
and uncoordinated minor attacks.
And you can well imagine that the first attack would alert the Germans along the whole line,
so forget about any possibility of surprise.
I think this was reason enough to re-think the whole thing, or wait until the French
were ready to also attack, but that didn’t happen.
Oh, and poor weather had also prevented proper artillery spotting for days before the attack,
and much of the Germans positions were on reverse slopes so you’d need good spotting
to take them out, since you couldn’t see them.
What I’m trying to say is that the attacks that night were dismal failures.
Colossal, needless, and dismal failures, except maybe...
...on the right in the sector around Guillemont, the British artillery could see the German
trench defenses and could bomb the living daylight out of them, which they did.
But the Germans did something new there.
Their machine gunners, knowing the bombardment would inevitably come, had relocated to shell
holes clear of the trenches, so now a series of trenches became a whole combat zone, with
units moving around within it as the situation demanded.
So now the British artillery couldn’t just bomb a trench line, but would have to bombard
a whole area of land, using a huge quantity of shells that they didn’t have had they
even known this new tactic.
Until after the British infantry advanced and made good progress, entering the village
and reaching the far side.
That’s when the shell hole machine guns opened up on them from the flanks.
Next day, neither Rawlinson nor British Commander in Chief Sir Douglas Haig commented on the
staggered starting times as a contributing factor in the failure, but Rawlinson did think
about the lack of decent artillery support, so for the next assault he mandated that the
attack was not to go through unless there had been 24 hours of clear weather to give
the spotters a chance to do their job.
And he brought in guns.
A LOT of guns.
368 of them, actually, to support the attack of a single division.
That division went in on July 27th after a bombardment of 125,000 shells weighing 4.5
million pounds.
Nothing in the wood or village could survive that.
Within two hours of the infantry advance the British were in possession of Longueval and
Delville Wood, as well as most of the objectives that they had failed to take for the past
two weeks at an enormous cost in men.
And the enormous cost in men was continuing on the southeastern front.
Alexei Brusilov’s colossal offensive was still pushing back the Austrians.
On July 28th the Russians entered Brody, having taken 40,000 more prisoners in 12 days.
The entire second Austrian army was in full retreat.
Thing is, the commanders of the attacking Russian 11th army said that their own forces
only deserved limited credit for their success, the shortcomings of the Habsburg troops was
why Brody fell.
By now, Austrian military leadership was under incredible criticism; many thought Chief of
Staff Conrad von Hotzendorf would even be removed from command.
The Austrian High Command concluded that the troops were fine, it was indeed the leaders
that were the problem; they were too far from the front and too out of touch with their
troops.
Even Conrad’s assistant Rudolf Kundmann admitted that the only answer was to mix German
and Austrian troops within units, since German troops performed better in the field and so
did Austrian ones under German command.
And so German Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff took over a large
section of the Austrian front this week, and Austrian General Karl von Pflanzer-Baltin
was forced to accept Generalmajor Hans von Seeckt, a German, as his chief of staff.
There were now 18 German divisions south of the Pripet and German officers directed most
of the front, either directly or indirectly.
German army Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn of course wanted the whole eastern front under
unified German control.
But Falkenhayn was having serious issues now.
The lack of success at Verdun, the Allied successes on the Somme, and Romania seemingly
ready to join the war with the Allies had severely damaged his cred.
Austro-Hungarian foreign minister Istvan von Burian said that both German and Austrian
emperors now approved of the plan to put Hindenburg in sole charge of the eastern front, and Burian
was working behind the scenes to replace Conrad, much as politicians in Germany were trying
to get rid of Falkenhayn, so from this week on, Falkenhayn was virtually powerless on
the Eastern front, and if Hindenburg and Ludendorff could stop Brusilov, it was they who would
be hailed as saviors.
And they were doing damn well further north this week.
The Battle of Baranovichi, after fighting off and on all month, finally came to an end.
Russian General Alexei Evert had had 400,000 men; the Germans under Prince Leopold only
a sixth of that.
Yet the Russians took, as I said a couple weeks ago, 80,000 casualties all told, the
Germans only 16,000.
A humiliating defeat for the Russians.
Yet the Russians were also successful in Anatolia, where this week they took Erzingan, the advance
base for Turkish operations on that front.
And here are some notes to end the week.
On the 27th, Yanbo, the port of Medina, was captured by the Arab Revolt.
Also that day Captain Charles Fryatt of the ship “Brussels” was court-martialed and
shot by German authorities in Belgium for attempting to ram a German submarine.
He had been captured when the Brussels was making its twice-weekly run from Harwich to
the Hook of Holland.
At his court martial, he was accused of being a pirate for attempting to attack a vessel
that was in the process of attacking him.
And this week, the reconstituted Serbian army is in Salonika, and once again ready to fight.
And another week of the war ends, with Russian disaster in the north, but success in the
south and Anatolia, a coordinated attack that was anything but that, but still British success
at the Somme, and the Serbian army joining the allies at Salonika.
We’ve certainly come a long way in two years.
From Austria-Hungary declaring war on little Serbia, it’s a long way.
It’s pretty impressive that after repeated invasions, after the winter death march through
Albania, that the Serbian army is still intact and ready to fight, but you know what’s
really impressive?
That exactly two years on from that declaration of war the three largest battles in human
history are being fought simultaneously.
Verdun, the Somme, Brusilov.
They would have a total casualty cost of four million men.
The apocalypse had truly come.
Two years of World War 1 of course mean that our show is also two years old this week.
We want to thank everyone who supported us from the beginning and of course all of the
fans who joined us along this incredible journey.
If you want to refresh your knowledge about the past 2 years, I recommend watching our
recap playlist right here.
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