For a month a British army has been under siege on the Tigris River at Kut Al-Amara
awaiting relief, and this week that relief expedition encounters the enemy.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
1915 had ended with the beginning of a Russian offensive in East Galicia and Bessarabia,
though it was plagued by supply problems and saw troops nearly starving in the winter cold.
Austria-Hungary was calling up close to a million middle-aged men to join the fight
against both Russia and Italy. Morale in Italy was at an all-time low, and over on the Western
front it was mostly quiet as the Germans beefed up their defenses and the Allies made big
offensive plans for later in the new year.
Compared to the months of October and November, late December and early January were pretty
quiet in the field, but there was action, certainly on the Eastern Front.
On New Year’s Day, the Russian attacked on both the Strypa and Styr rivers, and there
would be scattered attacks throughout the week, with a lot of casualties on both sides,
but without any appreciable gain in territory. Indeed, on the 7th, the Russians stormed with
the result that 11,500 of them were cut down by German machine guns (chronology of the
great war). This was all part of a big move by General Ivanov on a 400-kilometer front
from the Pripet Marshes to the Romanian border. One source says this was to give the allies
time to consolidate forces at Salonika. And in the far north, the Russians were trying
to push the Germans out of their positions between Riga and Dvinsk, and they were being
clever- constant local attacks deprived the Germans of the winter rest that Field Marshal
Hindenburg had promised them.
On the western front the action was much smaller, and people were still reeling from the huge
offensives of last autumn.
The first few days of the year saw artillery fighting in Belgium on the Yser and near Mercken.
The British tried a night attack near Frelinghien, which failed. German artillery blasted Ypres
and Loos and a long-range gun fired into Nancy, killing a couple of civilians, and in the
Vosges it was a week of artillery duels between the French and the Germans. It was basically
business as usual.
But there were big plans afoot, as I briefly mentioned last week.
Although 1915 had certainly on paper looked like a far better year for the Central Powers
than the Allies, the New Year was in many ways looking up for the allies. The Russians
were overcoming their munitions crisis, the British were producing a land army, and they
were also financing tons of imports, which were pretty much essential to the Allied war
effort- much of them from the neutral USA.
As 1916 dawned, the British now had 38 infantry divisions – over one million men – and
were ever expanding. France was still, as it had been the entire war, the dominant ally
on land, with 96 divisions under General Joseph Joffre, and you couldn’t deny that France
had borne the brunt of the war on the Western Front. The battles that the British had been
involved heavily in, like Loos or Neuve-Chapelle, were really only skirmishes when compared
to the gargantuan French battles like Champagne and Artois, but the time was finally coming
for a huge combined Anglo-French Offensive in the west, to be complemented with simultaneous
Italian and Russian offensives in the south and the east. As I said last week, French
General Joseph Joffre had decided that it would be near the River Somme.
Also last week I spoke about the new German defenses on the Western Front, but they too
had big offensive plans.
German army Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn could pretty much see that time was the one
thing that was not on Germany’s side. He also felt that Britain was his main enemy,
but he couldn’t get to them until he disposed of Britain’s “shield”, the French army.
What to do about that? Well, Germany had the advantage in munitions production, and since
artillery, used properly, caused 75% of all casualties, and since German artillery was
substantially superior to French, that’s what he was going to use. Tons and tons of
German artillery. And he was going to use it somewhere where he figured the French would
have to just stay there and be battered, somewhere they wouldn’t retreat from. Falkenhayn’s
choice for that place was Verdun.
A historic place, a fortress commanding the heights of the Meuse River, east of Paris,
with a huge part in the mythology and history of France. He thought the French would have
no choice but to defend it, and he would shell them to pieces.
This did, in some ways, make sense, even though in pre-war France, Verdun had been just about
the strongest part of its defenses, but now, it jutted out in a salient, and was at least
semi-open to attack from three sides, and from the German salient further south at St.
Mihiel Verdun’s communications could be shelled, and if Falkenhayn’s forces could
take the heights east of the river, Verdun itself could be shelled. The German communications
there were better than those of the French, who had a single, uphill, winding road. The
Germans had air superiority, and a winter attack would also give a big advantage of
surprise. Falkenhayn planned to bleed the French army to death at Verdun. Yep, total attrition.
The French positions there were actually unprepared. It had been quiet there and Joffre had even
weakened defenses there a lot after the war began. Funny enough, there was an inspection
there in January, and after that the French Generals would have likely abandoned the position
but French politicians said that the glory of France forbade withdrawal from Verdun.
The German forces was to be the 5th army under the command of Crown Prince Wilhelm, but he
would only have 9 divisions of men. Remember, this was all about artillery, and it would
be sent to the front on 1,300 munitions trains over seven weeks. The date when the attack
would begin was planned for next month: February 12th.
Oddly enough, other Germans in the high command felt differently than Falkenhayn. The Chief
of the German Navy General Staff, Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff – not to be confused
with Austrian Conrad von Hotzendorf, believed that his U-boats could knock Britain out of
the war within the year, and later this month the new Commander in Chief of the Imperial
High Seas Fleet, Admiral Reinhard Scheer, stated that he believed he could bring the
British fleet into the North Sea and he could beat it, opening the way to the islands.
But that was the future, and in the present, the British seeing action far from the North
Sea, in Mesopotamia.
This week saw the Battle of Sheikh-Sa’ad on the Tigris River. Now, Charles Townshend’s
forces were under siege in Kut, the Ottomans had decided to starve them out after several
offensive operations failed, and General Fenton Aylmer was heading upriver trying to relieve
them. The winter rains and mud had rolled in, though, and George Younghusband – great
name – leader of the advance team had this to say, “having no cavalry or aeroplanes...
and the country being flat as a billiard table, the only way of reconnoitering the Ottomans
was to march on, till we bumped into them.”
Which they did on the 6th. Younghusband’s attacks that day failed, but by the next day
Aylmer and the cavalry had caught up with them. The attacks that day began in a heavy
fog, but by the end of the day, British and Indian forces had taken the right bank of
the river and could flank the left bank. The Ottomans were forced to retreat up river.
Thing is, though this was a victory, it was a real costly one for the British- 4,500 dead
and wounded out of a force of 13,000, and they were far from their base at Basra and
could not easily be replaced. And of course each advance took them closer to the Ottoman
base at Baghdad.
And that was the week. Battles in Mesopotamia and on the Eastern Front, and scattered action
in the West as the Germans prepare for a huge winter offensive.
But think about that offensive, the plan was to basically be last man standing. That’s
what they were now reduced to as a battle plan. Just think about that. I got the following
from Martin Gilbert’s the First World War, a quote from the historian Alistair Horne,
“Never through the ages had any great commander or strategist proposed to vanquish an enemy
by gradually bleeding him to death. The macabreness, the unpleasantness of its very imagery could
only have emerged from, and was symptomatic of, that Great War where, in their callousness,
leaders could regard human lives as mere corpuscles.” The total anonymous lack of humanity of Modern War.
The dire situation for the British Indian Army in Mesopotamia started in late November
and if you want to find out more about that, check out our episode right here.
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