In this war, men have attacked the enemy from the front, from behind, from the air, and
from the sea, and this week they attack them from beneath the earth.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week the big news was mutiny in the French army that only grew in size as the days passed.
Italy continued its offensive against the Austrians, and the British High Command prepared
for a huge summer offensive that would see its first act unfold when General Sir Herbert
Plumer detonated his 19 mine tunnels, packed with explosives, under German positions at
Messines Ridge.
That detonation came this week.
It came after a week long artillery barrage with the heaviest concentration of artillery
seen on any front so far, so the heaviest in history.
Plumer had one big gun for every 7 meters of front.
At 3:10 AM on June 7, 1917, the mines were detonated, almost simultaneously.
The entire ridge went straight up into the air.
You could feel tremors from the blast in London, and apparently British Prime Minister David
Lloyd George heard a faint boom while working through the night at 10 Downing Street (World
Undone).
The concussion at the scene was tremendous and one soldier recounted, “... the whole
earth seemed to rock and sway... several of the men and myself being thrown down violently.
It seemed to be several minutes before the earth stood still again...
Flames rose to a great height- silhouetted against the flames I saw huge blocks of earth
that seemed to be as big as houses falling back to the ground....
It was awful, a sort of inferno.”
A man from a tank crew said, “You’d never seen anything like the size of it, you’d
never believe that explosives could do it.
I saw about 150 Germans lying dead there... the mine had killed them all...
The mine had won the battle before it started.”
10,000 German soldiers are believed to have been killed or buried alive right off the
bat (Gilbert), thousands more were totally stunned, and 7,354 prisoners were taken.
The British infantry took possession of a chain of craters over 20m deep where much
of Messines Ridge had been.
This was a spectacular success, achieving its objective with virtually no cost in men,
but it was actually only a limited success.
The British had penetrated the German positions no more than 2 or 3 km and they did not try
to push deeper.
British Commander Sir Douglas Haig wanted this operation only as a contribution to his
main offensive planned for a month from now, and he ordered it stopped once the “ridge”
was taken.
This wasn’t actually foolish - he didn’t want his men to outpace the artillery and
he certainly wanted to dig in before the Germans could counterattack, but some scholars, G.J.
Meyer for example in “A World Undone”, claim that for a few hours there was a real
chance to cut deeply into or maybe even through the German defenses.
“The Great War Generals on the Western Front” echoes this, but lays the blame on General
Hugh Gough for not moving his Fifth Army to attack the Ghevault Plateau when they had
the momentum on their side.
I can’t say one way or another - go read up on it and tell me what you think in the
comments.
Anyhow, the British may have had momentum on their side, but for the Italians, that
moment had passed.
The 10th Battle of the Isonzo River was now over three weeks old, and the Italian attack
had run out of steam and shells just when it seemed like the enemy might collapse.
This week, though, the battle flared to life anew on the 4th with a huge Austro-Hungarian
counterattack north of Hermada, taking back lost territory and inflicting heavy casualties.
The next day the battle came to an end.
It had followed a familiar pattern; masses of Italian infantry attacking and taking huge
casualties for the occasional small gain, followed by Austro-Hungarian counterattacks
that were mostly successful, but there were differences now.
The Austrians were outnumbered in men, sure, but they had doubled their artillery and the
bulk of it was on the Carso Plateau, so General Svetozar Borojevic von Bojna’s guns fired
nearly two millions shells during the battle, a big increase from the earlier ones, though
this put serious pressure on Austro-Hungarian industrial production, which was barely keeping
up anyhow.
Another big difference was in morale.
It had reached an all-time low on both sides, and you saw many cases of infantry refusing
to launch another attack.
Troops were also surrendering a lot more easily.
In fact, 27,000 Italians were taken prisoner.
The battle was an Italian victory, technically, since they had advanced, but it was the deadliest
of the ten battles of the Isonzo.
The official casualty list was 159,000 for the Italians and 80,000 for the Austrians.
There’s no way that sort of fighting can continue, something would have to give.
And crumbling morale in another army had led to open mutiny.
The French army.
And this week in France there was chaos in the war zone, as the mutineers would not go
back into the lines.
They certainly weren’t going to go over the top either.
On June 4th, French Minister of War Paul Painlevé estimated there were only two reliable divisions
between the front line and Paris, a distance of just over 100km.
Tens of thousands of soldiers had joined the mutiny, and in spite of the variety of their
mutinous behavior, the average complaints concerned lack of leave and low pay.
The military authorities under French Commander Philippe Petain now began to crack down and
arrest the mutineers.
But morale was actually on the rise in one rather surprising place- Romania.
Romania, you may remember, was invaded by all four Central Powers simultaneously last
fall, the capital fell, the oil fields fell, and that campaign ended at the beginning of
this year with the Romanian state reduced to about one third its former size.
Gathered there was what was left of the army, with about 20,000 new recruits, refugees from
Wallachia and Transylvania, enemy prisoners, and the Russian army that helped the Romanians
defend the territory they had left.
That was about 1.5 million people in addition to the local population.
The food situation was not as desperate as you might guess, though, since food reserves
had been sent there in late 1916, along with 200,000 cattle and 500,000 sheep.
Every bit of available land was farmed and the army worked the land and cut trees for
firewood.
There had been a really bad period in early 1917 when a typhus epidemic had broken out,
causing an estimated 300,000 deaths (PDF), but things had calmed down.
The Romanian army had been reorganized and trained and there were 400,000 men in fighting
units, equipped with French weapons sent through Russia, and it had some big differences from
the army of a year earlier.
Last year each regiment had from zero to 6 machine guns, now each one had 24.
They had no light machine guns and only 24 grenadiers back then.
Now, each regiment had 96 light machine guns and everyone was trained with grenades.
It was Constantin Prezan, the Chief of Staff, who presided over the reorganization, but
a French military mission under Henri Berthelot made up of 289 officers, 37 pilots, and over
1,000 soldiers opened military schools to give the Romanian troops the French knowledge
of three years of modern war.
Romania also found soldiers from another source.
Around 400,000 ethnic Romanians living in the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been conscripted
into the Imperial Army.
By now, around 120,000 of them were prisoners in Russian POW camps.
A few months ago, for those that wanted it, Russia agreed to organize them into units
to fight for Romania and set up a camp for Romanian POWs near Kiev.
This week on June 8th, the first two battalions of those soldiers arrived and were sworn in
to the Romanian army.
Romania, it seems, was not finished yet.
And far across the sea, the United States was also raising an army.
On June 5th registration began for the draft of all men between 21 and 30.
The New York Times, in a little piece of anti-Semitism (Gilbert), declared that this was “...a
long and sorely needed means of disciplining a certain insolent foreign element.”
They were referring to America’s Jewish community, who were in reality not only NOT
more pacifistic than other Americans, but within two months Jews made up 6% of the American
armed forces, even though they only made up 2% of the general population.
Also in American news, General John J. Pershing arrived in Britain as the week came to an
end.
And it was a busy week of war, with an Italian army offensive coming to an end, the Romanian
army refitting itself from an enemy army, the US beginning to build its own army, mutiny
continuing to plague the French army, and the British blowing up the German army.
What Plumer had done there was one of the most successful attacks of the war, make no
mistake.
The planning was both colossal and meticulous, and the execution near flawless, but imagine
being a soldier there that day.
The gigantic boom assaulting your ears, seeing an area the size of a village blast into the
air, seeing a huge column of flame ignite the sky, seeing thousands of the men die in
an instant.
Just try to imagine being there that day.
You’d been fighting in the trenches in muddy miserable Flanders for years, unquestionably
living in hell, and then today - hell got even worse.
If you want to learn more about mining and tunnel warfare during World War 1, check out
our special episode right here.
Our Patreon supporter of the week is Laurie Jones - thanks for your support on Patreon!
It makes this show possible and we couldn’t do it without it.
Don’t forget to subscribe, see you next time.