The warring armies have air forces, they have armored cars and tanks, they have artillery,
they have gas, they have machine guns, they have endless infantry, but until this week
no one had ever really integrated those all together into one tight battle plan.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week the Battle for Belleau Wood ended with an Allied victory.
It was the first battle of the war that saw heavy American casualties.
In the Middle East a huge contest for control of the Baku oilfields was brewing, and in
a Reichstag speech, the German Foreign Minister Richard von Kühlmann said that Germany was
open to receive peace proposals.
This week saw a meeting of some other German leaders.
On July 2nd, at the Spa Crown Council, Army Chief of Staff Paul von Hindenburg, Quartermaster
General Erich Ludendorff, and Chancellor Georg von Hertling sign a new secret war aims program,
which includes ideas about Poland.
Poland could choose its sovereign, but Germany would command its army, run its railways,
and even annex a border region.
Von Kühlmann was not there, though, he was on the outs with these guys since first a
few weeks ago at a Hague Conference he’s told his rep to let the British know Germany
would accept a status quo peace in the West.
The others were 100% determined that Belgium would at the very least remain under German
economic and political control.
And there was, of course, von Kühlmann’s speech last week saying that the war could
not be won by a military solution.
Yeah, that didn’t sit so well either.
So in a few days, von Kühlmann will “resign” as Foreign Minister.
David Stevenson writes that he was basically muscled out by Ludendorff and Hindenburg,
who re-used an old tactic: telling the Kaiser that unless von Kühlmann went, they would,
and von Kühlmann was out, succeeded by Admiral Paul von Hintze.
I guess they weren’t so open to peace proposals after all.
This was a good time for planning for them, since the Western Front had been relatively
quiet for several weeks now, but, as G.J. Meyer writes in “A World Undone”, “The
quiet was interrupted on July 4th by the Battle of Hamel, one of the most remarkable - if
largely forgotten because comparatively bloodless - operations of the war.”
The idea was just to clear the Germans away from the environs of Amiens, and the operation
was planned and put into action by John Monash, now Lieutenant General and commander of the
Australian Corps.
I haven’t talked much about Monash yet, but he’s a really interesting character.
Coming from a humble background in the Australian outback, Monash had degrees in law, engineering,
and liberal arts, was also a musician, and founded a consulting firm that worked with
bridge and railway construction.
He was also, again according to Meyer, arguably the most effective commander of the war on
either side.
He commanded a brigade from the beginning of the war, was at Gallipoli from start to
finish, and was at Messines Ridge and Passchendaele.
Thing is, a lot of people at tried to prevent his advancement through the ranks, and a lot
of people had a problem promoting him to command of 200,000 troops.
First of all, he had not been a professional soldier, second of all he was a “colonial”,
and to top it off his parents were Jews who came from Germany.
By this time, Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes had even been persuaded to replace
Monash, but after seeing Monash’s planning and execution at Hamel, he totally changed
his mind.
What Monash basically did was integrate artillery, aircraft, tanks, infantry, and machine guns
into one big machine like no one ever had before.
It took a total of 93 minutes for his forces to accomplish all of their objectives.
They took prisoners in the thousands and only took light casualties themselves.
The attack went off at 0310, there was no preliminary bombardment, and the big guns
had been pre-registered.
There were 60 tanks that would play a big role in the battle, and their noise approaching
the lines was covered by low flying planes and general artillery sounds.
When the barrage did commence, it hit the German batteries that had been targeted by
aerial recon and sound ranging.
The creeping barrage ahead of the advancing infantry was 60% shrapnel shells, 30% high
explosive, but also 10% smoke shells to obscure things.
The tanks set off and rolled avenues in the barbed wire for the infantry to follow.
German strongpoints were for the tanks to take out, and the infantry would signal them
with rifle grenades.
There was even a reserve wave of tanks - including supply tanks - to keep the momentum going,
while airplanes kept a lookout for anti-tank guns and strafed the German infantry.
Meyer again, “Hamel has been called the first truly modern battle.
It became the model for later British operations, a brochure describing Monash’s tactics was
distributed to every officer in the BEF.”
It wasn’t just tactically, though that the Allies were improving.
They were beefing up their numbers and their supply lines.
By July 1st (Gilbert) a million American soldiers and military personnel were in France.
20,000 tons a day of supplies were arriving.
On American Independence Day, July 4th, 95 ships were launched from American ports as
a result of a shipbuilding “crusade”.
Of course, American production had really leapt during the war, but you could see a
general supply trend.
This year and last year you had all these new committees set up to deal with all the
different commodities, and they showed a real cooperative spirit, a collective arrangement
that the Central Powers just didn’t have.
They also had more resources in general to start with, but by now, and as we saw earlier
in the year, the problems the Central Powers had with food and arms supplies were out of
control.
Bulgaria had a huge food supply crisis.
They didn’t have that many large estates, and people ran their farms individually, without
things like fertilizer.
They didn’t have a big infrastructure or industry, and they had to import most armaments
more complicated than explosives.
In the Balkans, they had a front of hundreds of kilometers to defend, and supplying it
required requisitioning a quarter of the nation’s agricultural draft animals.
David Stevenson notes in “With our Backs to the Wall” that Bulgarian cereal output
fell from 26 million quintals in 1912 to 12 million this year, with potatoes and fodder
faring even worse.
Close to half of the factories were no longer operating because of labor and material shortages.
Overuse and lack of maintenance of the railways created a transportation crisis, and, “By
this stage Bulgaria, like wide tracts of Eastern Europe, was reverting to a pattern of all
but autarkic local sub-economies.”
Retail prices had gone up like 800% by this year.
Last year, all supply came under the Directorate of Economic and Social Welfare, but it didn’t,
or couldn’t address a further big problem - the illegal exports of goods by German and
Austro-Hungarian soldiers.
They were better paid than the Bulgarians and could easily outbid them for stuff on
the black market.
And last year the Germans stopped the monthly credit Bulgaria was getting and now in April
stopped sending supplies.
The Directorate had the task of not only supplying the Bulgarian troops, but also the German
and Austrians there, and guess what?
Sometimes it supplied them better than its own men.
There was too little seed corn left from last year and the year before and thousands were
already dying of starvation.
Peasants were hoarding; food riots were regular things.
Women’s revolts had begun during the winter when mobs of women had attacked Directorate
offices to demand more food and the return of their husbands and sons from the front.
These continued, and by May the police were firing on the demonstrating women, and by
now, half-starved women protesting was pretty much a daily occurrence.
And the situation was even worse in the Ottoman Empire.
Their economy was in no way set up to fight a modern war, certainly not one of four years,
and the supply chain was often non-existent.
They had no real steel or chemical production capacity, and not even that many telegraph
lines or paved roads.
They had exactly one domestic coalfield at the start of the war, and since the Russians
bombed it, it was producing less than a quarter of its previous output.
Trains without coal burned wood instead, which led to deforestation.
Even the rail network, though, was only one tenth the size of, say, India’s.
Inflation had raised prices by 2,000%, and last winter there were reports of both starvation
and cannibalism.
And yet the war continued.
In the field for the armies, and everywhere for the individuals.
The Italians advanced all week in Piave Delta and on Monte Grappa front, taking three thousand
prisoners.
The first American killed on that front in the war (Gilbert) was ambulance driver Edward
McKey, but the second one hit was none other than Ernest Hemingway, wounded by an Austrian
mortar while he was delivering chocolate to Italian troops.
227 pieces of shrapnel, mostly in his legs, would be removed in hospital.
He would be awarded the Italian Silver Medal of Valor and the War Cross.
And here are some notes to end the week.
On July 1st in Britain, an explosion in a Midlands shell factory kills 100, injures
150.
On July 3rd, Ottoman Sultan Mehmed V dies; he is succeeded by Mehmed VI.
There are also two notes from the skies this week.
June 27th was the date of the first successful parachute jump in action (Gilbert), when Leutnant
Steinbrecher, a German pilot, was shot down by the British over the Somme, but landed
safely, and July 4th was the date of the first airborne supply drop to troops in battle,
as 100,000 rounds of ammo were brought in to Australian machine gunners.
And that was the week; parachutes and airdrops, no confidence in von Kuhlmann, an Italian
advance, hard times in Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, and a beautifully executed battle.
Even though it was small.
And we’ve seen that sort of thing before - testing out some new tactic or strategy
small scale at first.
Like last fall as the French did at La Malmaison, or the Germans at Riga.
And now we have a real integrated battle doctrine for the first time in a little battle.
And what the armies learn from the little battles, like the French and Germans last
fall, they can use to devastating effect in the big battles.
But for the Allies to have a big battle in the west, they’ll have to first regain the
initiative, and Germany still has that for the time being and don’t plan to give it
up.
It’s really exciting, isn’t it?
If you want to learn more about John Monash, one of the generals of World War 1, you can
click right here for our bio episode about him.
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