The first three months of the war have seen a whole new way of waging war. In addition
to the ever more effective weapons of war that now kill hundreds of thousands of men
in mere weeks, airplanes fly the skies to spot for artillery, submarines prowl beneath
the seas to sink sailors to watery graves, and cars and trucks transport men and equipment
like never before, and just as all wars at some point become a war for vital resources,
all of these new machines require a new one and the Great War had now become a war for
oil.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
When we left off we saw the Germans and Russians fighting the colossal battle of Lodz, which,
though it did not result in German control of the city, did scuttle Russia’s plans
for an invasion of Silesia. With the end of the Battle of Ypres the Western Front had
congealed into a frozen stalemate, and in the Balkans, the Austrian army was pushing
back the Serbs from the Kolubara River.
Now, there were over 100,000 Austrian troops further north under siege by the Russians
in the fortress of Przemysl, but there was still another Austrian army fighting in the
field near Cracow.
The Austrian army had retreated from the battles along the San River a couple of weeks ago
after heavy losses and though much of their army was holed up at Przemysl, they had a
huge force at Cracow which the Russians, after cautiously advancing, had attacked on the
16th. Over the next ten days the Austrian army managed to stop the Russian juggernaut,
but at the cost of 30,000 casualties, and by the 26th they were forced to pull back.
The Russians were now only 8 miles from Cracow, the capital of Austrian Poland.
But the Austrians were making headway in the Balkans at least.
Although they were suffering heavy casualties, they were pushing further and further into
Serbia day after day[g][h]. Actually, General Oskar Potiorek thought that the Serbs were
trying to lure the Austrians deep into the country so they could be encircled, but he
reasoned- correctly- that they were not in a position to do so.
After three days of fighting, the Serbs were driven from Mount Maljen the 24th, but Potiorek
did not follow this up. His casualties had been too heavy, and the terrain had become
too difficult for his exhausted troops, so the Serbs retreated unmolested. Potiorek was
still convinced, though, that the fall of Serbia was only a few days away and even appointed
the country’s future governor, but when his army attempted to cross the junction of
the Kolubara and Sava rivers on November 26th, the Serbs forced them back with 50% casualties
and the Austrian offensive ground to a halt.
As we’ve seen month after month, the Austrian army has had its share of disaster in the
field, but the troubles in the army were also internal.
Chief of Staff Conrad von Hotzendorf was so worried about the national minorities of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire attempting to seize power during moments of Austrian weakness
during the war that he tried to impose military rule in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. Emperor
Franz Josef rejected this plan. Conrad’s worries did have some basis in reality, for
Poles, Croats, Czechs, Slovaks, and other minorities were suspect in their sympathies,
many of those minorities having a stronger affinity for the Russian enemy and occasionally
even deserting and changing sides.
One side note here, Jews were not considered suspect as many of the other minorities were
and actually played a large part in Austrian military affairs. Three of the Empire’s
Field Marshalls were Jewish and eight of her generals.
When you think about it, though unique in many other ways, this war was also unique
that so many of the world’s religions took part in it.
This week saw the end of the Battle of Basra in what is now Iraq, where British and Indian
troops defeated the Ottomans. There’s a bunch of religions fighting right there. Now,
two weeks ago the British had landed troops and taken the Fortress of Fao, the main Ottoman
fortress on the coast of the Persian Gulf. See, when the Ottoman Empire had entered the
war at the beginning of November, Britain had begun to worry about her oil facilities
in the Persian Gulf.
The capture of Fao was the first step in securing them. The London War office, actually, favored
simply defending British oil supplies and not engaging in offensive maneuvers, but the
Indian government, who provided the troops, favored a policy of “forward defense”.
You can guess what that meant. Basra, on the Shatt-al-Arab River, was the next step in
securing the oil.
On the 19th of November, under General Sir Arthur Barrett, the British attacked, but
heavy rainfall that turned the land to mud stalled the attack until the artillery could
finally be brought up. The Ottoman army broke under the bombardment and fled the city, and
Basra was occupied two days later.
The campaign could easily have ended then- the oil supplies and oil flow were secure-
but Basra turned out to be a pretty bad base of operations. It was a minor port, sure,
but it was missing a lot of basic facilities like sanitation. There were no railways, there
were few roads, and the water supply was just the dirty river.
Now, the River itself was a tidal river with many tributary creeks that filled a flood
plain that actually flooded on a daily basis, and for half of the year the entire region
flooded leaving Basra as an island[al], so Barrett decided to follow the retreating Ottomans
upriver to Qurna and try to make his base there, where the Tigris and Euphrates flow
together to form the Shatt-al-Arab.
Of course, oil was not the only raw material in big demand this war, and I’m going to
throw some quick statistics at you right now. If you look at the part of France occupied
by the Germans you see that Germany now held 2/3 of France’s iron production, a quarter
of its steel, and a full half of French coal mining capacity.
Now, these are big numbers when you think of the enormous amounts of machines that need
to be built and operated, but fortunately there was one machine that didn’t run on
oil and didn’t require any coal: the horse.
You needed a horse for almost everything in 1914, and there was no way you were going
to get your heavy artillery into place without a great deal of horsepower.
An estimated two million horses served on the Western Front on both sides during the
war, and while I don’t have numbers for all of the armies, I do have some British
numbers thanks to Max Hastings book “Catastrophe”.
In the first 12 days of the war, the British army bought 165,000 horses. The horses and
mules of the BEF had an annual mortality rate of 29% with 13,000 of them dead by the end
of 1914.
You’d think that since they were such a vital necessity they’d be better treated
in general, but such was not the case. There weren’t enough knowledgeable riders and
grooms, for one thing, food and water was often neglected or withheld, men galloped
on paved roads, saddle sores were ignored, and heavy plough horses were conscripted into
armies to pull heavy artillery even though all the experts said it was a really bad idea.
They required large amounts of provisions, could not make forced marches, and were highly
susceptible to disease, so they died by the thousands and it was only trial and error
by the British and French that finally discovered that American country horses from the plains
and badlands of the Dakotas were far more suitable for war than any horses raised in
barns. By the end of the war, the British army had nearly a half million horses and
the Veterinary Corps personnel had grown from 360 to 28,000 four years later.
So here we are near the end of November, exactly four months into the war, and at the end of
the week the Austrians are stuck in Serbia, surrounded in Przemysl, and in trouble at
Cracow. The British are on the move into Mesopotamia, and in Belgium, France, Poland, and Eastern
Turkey everyone on both sides is frozen and miserable.
Valentine Fleming, MP and father of James Bond creator Ian Fleming, wrote, “It’s
going to be a long war, in spite of the fact that on both sides every single man wants
it stopped at once.” This was absolutely true, from the generals on down. There was
no end in sight; there was no relief in site, and the men on the western front who had a
week relatively free of constant bombardment and furious rushes across no-mans land considered
themselves lucky.
The only way to win this war was to seek new technological advantages and one of the requirements
for them was oil. Both sides now found themselves in a struggle for oil that would last for
four years and kill thousands upon thousands of young men.
Most of these young men lived the last days of their live in a vast network of trenches
that was covering especially the Western Front. From the early improvised days, it didn’t
took long till these trenches were a parallel world with structures that would go way beyond
the inital purpose of pure protection of enemy bullets. If you want to find out more about
the trench system, check out our special episode. And let us know in the comments what other
topics you want to see in future special episodes.
See you next week.