1916 had seen the three largest battles in human history thus far take place simultaneously.
It had seen the development of the concept of an air FORCE; it had seen a gigantic naval
battle, one of the greatest military humiliations in British history, and the war growing ever
larger as Romania joined the fray.
And now... it’s 1917.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week was Christmas, but there was nothing like a Christmas truce this year.
In Romania, the Germans broke the Russian trenches and took Ramnicu Sarat, and the invasion
of Romania continued.
The British advanced in the Sinai, but the other fronts were fairly quiet.
There was big news at home in Russia, though, as Rasputin was assassinated.
This week marks the beginning of 1917 and here is how the battlefronts of the war looked
as 1916 came to an end.
The Eastern Front, the longest continuous front in history so far, ran from the Black
Sea along the Danube and Sereth Rivers, then along the Eastern edge of the Carpathian Mountains
before heading north.
It passed between Lemberg and Tarnopol, headed to the Pripet Marshes.
The Northeastern part of the front remained mostly immobile, as it had for months on end,
passing west of Dvinsk before reaching the Gulf of Riga west of the city itself.
The Western Front zigged and zagged from the North Sea through Flanders fields, passing
the ruined and blasted landscape where the Battle of the Somme had been fought.
Heading south through France to the Aisne River, then east toward Verdun and the River
Meuse, before taking a more southerly course toward the Vosges and the Swiss Border.
The Italian front stretched from the sea around Gorizia, taken by the Italians in August,
around and through the Carnic Alps, down and around the Trentino before heading north again
toward the Julian Alps and the Swiss border.
The Macedonian front ran across from the Aegean through Greece over to Albania, with the Allies
holding a small corner of Serbia.
In Eastern Anatolia things had remained static since Bitlis and Mus had changed hands several
times in the summer.
In Palestine the British had pushed across the Sinai to El Arish and in Mesopotamia were
up the Tigris as far as the outskirts of Kut-al-Amara.
Both the Persian and Libyan fronts were occasionally active and in flux, and down in German East
Africa the Battle for Lake Tanganyika was over, and the Allies were pushing the Germans
back in the Rufiji valley.
Now that the two Romanian fronts had coalesced into the southern part of the Eastern Front
there were ten active fronts to the war.
And the possible end of the war was being discussed this week.
On the final day of 1916, came an Allied note in response to the German peace note from
earlier in December- “No peace is possible so long as they (we) have not secured reparation
of violated rights and liberties, recognition of the principals of nationalities and of
the free existence of small states, so long as they (we) have not brought about a settlement
calculated to end, once and for all, causes which have so long threatened the nations,
and to afford the only effective guarantees for the future security of the world.”
The note then specifically references Belgium, but no one in the German High Command had
at this point any intention of freeing Belgium under any peace settlement.
And there is no way Britain would allow Germany to have such a strategic base right across
the channel.
So there will be no peace.
A little more detail here: The US was the only one of the Great Powers not at war.
This week on the 4th, President Woodrow Wilson, recently elected to a second term on the strength
of his promise to keep America out of the war, said, “There will be no war, it would
be a crime against civilization for us to go in.”
(Gilbert) He found out two days later that the German peace plan for “withdrawal from
Belgium” wasn’t what it sounded like.
Germany demanded the permanent occupation of Liege, Namur, and other forts, control
of Belgian railways and ports, a German military presence, and Belgium would not be allowed
an army of its own.
American Ambassador to Berlin James Gerard told German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg,
“I do not see that you have left much for the Belgians, excepting that King Albert will
have the right to reside in Brussels...”
The Chancellor replied, “We cannot allow Belgium to be an outpost of Great Britain.”
The Allies were making demands of their own this week, in neutral Greece.
Well, first, on December 30th, Greece asked the Allies to lift the blockade they had imposed
a few weeks ago.
The next day, the Allies said they would if Greece met these conditions as a result of
the Greek resistance to occupation back on December 1st.
The Greek army and all war materiel must be transferred to the Peloponnesus.
Allied control over public services restored.
The Greek government formally apologizes.
Allied flags to be flown, publicly, and formally saluted in Athens.
The blockade will continue until this happens.
And here are some numbers to mark the end of 1916.
On the Western Front, there were now 127 German divisions facing 106 French, 56 British, 6
Belgian, and 1 Russian division - 169 total.
In August 1914, the British Expeditionary Force had numbered 160,000 men, it was now
1,591,745.
If you think that’s a lot, Russia had 9 million men under arms, Germany had seven,
and Austria-Hungary five according to Martin Gilbert.
And a bunch of those men were active this week in Romania.
The Germans, Austrians, Bulgarians, and Turks had been successful in Romania over the past
few months, but by this time German General Erich von Falkenhayn’s corps commanders
told him that his men were beyond the limits of exhaustion.
He proposed to High Command that the campaign end at Ramnicu Sarat, which had fallen last
week.
High Command told him he had to take Focsani, but didn’t say anything one way or another
about ending the campaign.
His logistical support network was totally unraveling, though.
His headquarters were at Buzau, where there a railway terminus, and from there supplies
had to be loaded to trucks or wagons, but weather had seriously disrupted traffic, and
a mountain of supplies was starting to pile up.
He was also, by this time, worried about typhus and cholera, both of which had sprung up in
the POW camps, and could conceivably spread to his hospitals or active troops.
On the night of the 1st, a cavalry division didn’t take proper precaution and were surprised
by the Russians, who took 9 officers and 425 soldiers prisoner, as well as some artillery
pieces.
Now, to the east, German Field Marshall August von Mackensen’s troops had nearly reached
the Sereth River.
And the Russians were abandoning Dobrogea and retreating north of the Sereth and the
Danube, chased by the Bulgarian Third Army.
Thing is, since early December the Bulgarians had threatened Braila, where the Danube and
Sereth met, but they hadn’t been able to take it.
This week, though, Mackensen sent two German divisions to attack it from the unguarded
landside, and it fell on the 4th.
And here are some notes to end the week.
On December 30th, the British and Chinese governments make an agreement for a Chinese
Labor Corps in France.
On the 3rd, the first Portuguese units land in France, and British Commander Sir Douglas
Haig received a “well-earned” promotion to Field Marshall, and at the end of the week,
after months of quiet, the Mesopotamian front comes alive as the battle of Kut begins.
And that was the week.
Central Powers gains in Romania in spite of exhaustion, Allied demands in Greece, and
political posturing from both about a peace that can’t be made.
One of the three enormous battles I mentioned at the beginning was the Battle of Verdun.
Historian Alistair Horne had this to say about it, “Neither side won at Verdun.
It was the indecisive battle in the indecisive war; the unnecessary battle in an unnecessary
war; the battle that had no victors in a war that had no victors.”
It’s a new year, and I’d like to close the last one with thoughts of that battle,
the battle that, in many ways, defined 1916, the year of battles.
Ten months that battle raged, and by the end of it, all the Germans had to show for a third
of a million casualties was destroyed land that was about the size of the London parks
put together.
I got that comparison from Horne in his book “The Price of Glory”, and I’m going
to end today with another quote from him.
“It is probably no exaggeration to call Verdun the worst battle of history, even taking
in account man’s subsequent endeavors in the Second World War.
No battle has ever lasted quite so long; Stalingrad... had a duration of only five months, compared
with Verdun’s ten.
Though the Somme claimed more dead than Verdun, the proportion of casualties suffered to the
numbers engaged was notably higher at Verdun than any other First World War battle; as
indeed were the numbers of dead in relation to the area of the battlefield.
Verdun was the First World War in microcosm; an intensification of all its horrors and
glories, courage and futility.”
The year of battles is over, but the war grows ever more bloody.
Happy New Year.
If you want to know more about the Assassination of Rasputin that also happened last week,
click right here to check that out.
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See you next week.