For nearly three years, they fought to defend their land from invasion,
and the causality toll is in the millions.
But in the wake of the disastrous April Offensive,
where they were ordered to make suicidal attacks,
the French Army has had enough, and that means mutiny.
♪ Introduction Music ♪
I'm Indy Neidell, Welcome to the Great War.
Last week came the first German Gotha bomber squadron raid on Britain.
While at sea, the British introduced the convoy system to combat German submarines.
The Arab Revolt conducted its own raid on the Hejaz Railway.
The British and French were licking their wounds after their huge offensives on the Western Front.
And the Italians continued their own huge offensive against Austria. [Here is what followed].
The big battles on the Western Front were indeed over for the moment, with staggering results.
We've talked about the enormous allied casualities,
but here is a number that was a more positive result for them.
The Spring Offensives captured 52,000 Germans, including 1,000 officers.
And in May, in direct contrast to April's numbers, 270 allied planes were brought down,
but 440 German ones as well in the west.
Now that the battles were over, and unlike Prime Minister Lloyd George,
British Commander Sir Douglas Haig was not thinking of a future when the Americans would arrive
but Flanders in the summer of 1917.
Yep, he was thinking about making a breakthrough at Ypres.
The High Command of the Royal Navy supported him in this, because they saw it
as the one place where their naval guns could support the land-based infantry.
They had been developing plans for an amphibious invasion for 2 years now,
and by this spring, together with the Army, had begun building huge floating docks
to bring troops and tanks ashore.
Haig saw a real opportunity here, and his staff had come up with a plan
that combined an offensive from the Ypres salient with an amphibious landing.
The Germans, being hit from two directions, would have to give up the coast
and possibly even be driven out of Belgium.
If their flank could be exposed, they might then be driven from the Hindenburg Line.
The bare minimum would give the British the ports of Zeebrugge, Ostend and Blankenberge.
where smaller German subs were based for harassing shipping in the channel.
If you look at the plan, the only thing about it that was new was the amphibious part.
The rest was a standard Western Front attack:
the supposedly overwhelming artillery barrage,
then the supposedly irresistible infantry attack that would cause a breakthrough for the cavalry to exploit.
The same old, same old plan made Lloyd George furious when he heard about it.
To him, it was just another recipe for throwing away thousands of British lives
Now, the landing from the sea couldn't happen safely until after the main breakthrough did.
So, to try and humour Lloyd George, Haig laid down a criterion for the landing.
The breakthrough would count as 'real' and the landing given the green light
when the British took the town of Roulers,
over ten kilometres inside German lines.
Lloyd George thought that Roulers was completely out of reach.
Haig thought it was stupid that Lloyd George even thought he got an opinion.
One thing that was going to be really important here (well, everywhere in battle),
but I mean really, really important here was the weather.
Flanders is flat.
I mean, featureless flat,
with the occasional farmhouse or group of trees.
If you go there now and look for the so-called ridges and hills around Ypres,
you'll be surprised how little they are.
Really just like small wrinkles in the landscape.
It's part of a huge coastal plain,
almost part of the sea itself, and it took centuries
for the natives to put in canals, drains, dikes, and dams
to where it could even be farmed.
So in what passes for dry weather in Flanders,
you only have to dig down a foot or two to hit water,
and when it rains, which it nearly always does in late summer,
it turns to mud,
a bottomless mess.
Now, Haig knew this.
The past two summers had been dry by local standards,
but his men had checked records going back over 80 years and reported that:
British Army Chief of Staff William Robertson was warned:
'Letting out the water' is what the Belgians had done to the Germans in 1914,
opening the Yser canal and stopping them with the floods.
Could the Germans now do the same against the British,
and would heavy artillery barrages wreck the land's drainage system so much that it flooded anyhow?
Haig heard these warnings, but they really just made him impatient
to get going before August while it was still dry.
So as soon as Arras ended, he began building up his forces,
even though French commander Philippe Pétain told him he had no chance of success.
What he wanted was to take a strong point at the edge of the salient that, once reinforced,
would be a sort of anchor for troops moving forward.
Well, one of his generals had a plan to do just that.
He was Sir Herbert Plumer, who had commanded the Second Army
at the south of the salient for two years.
And a big side note here:
during those two years, the day-to-day fighting at Ypres
had accounted for a quarter of all British casualties.
Plumer had a tunnelling program going since 1915,
aimed at the German positions opposite his lines.
By 1916, it was the most ambitious such project of the whole war.
By now, he had 20 shafts in the soggy ground,
some of them nearly one kilometre long,
and many over 30 meters deep to avoid detection.
They were drained by generator-driven pumps and had been extended
to go under Messines Ridge,
where the Germans held the best view of the whole region.
One had been discovered, okay, but by this week, the other 19 were finished
and packed to the gills with explosives. They were ready to blow.
But something did blow this week. The French Army.
Morale had turned so ugly
after the catastrophic losses last month in the field
that this week, it turned to open mutiny.
On the 27th, at the front along the Chemin des Dames,
as many as 30,000 soldiers left their trenches and went to the rear.
In Soisson, Coeuvres, Villers-Cotterets, and Fère-en-Tardenois,
troops behind the lines ignored officers orders
and refused to go to the front and seized buildings.
Actually, from Fère-en-Tardenois, the mutinying troops tried to go to Paris,
but the trains were prevented from leaving.
At the end of the week, at Missie au Bois,
an infantry regiment took over the town and set up an anti-war "government".
What did this mean for the war effort?
The scale of the mutinies made it pretty clear
that the soldiers were unwilling to go over the top in a renewed offensive.
This put a big burden on the British for any new attacks this summer,
not just to defeat the Germans,
but to distract their attention from the French sector.
At least until the Americans could arrive in force,
and on May 26, the first American combat troops landed in France.
There were 1,300 there by the end of the week.
Also this week on May 28,
American General John J. Pershing left New York for Liverpool.
During his voyage, he made plans for an army of at least 500,000 men
to reach France as quickly as possible,
but who really knew just when that would happen?
And that was the week:
Haig making ambitious plans for yet another huge offensive,
this time with amphibious support,
but his ally the French rising in mutiny over the costs of the war.
The Italian offensive continued its meat-grinder, which we'll see more of next week,
and American troops began to slowly arrive in Europe.
But it would take many months for them to get there, trained, and in force.
And those were months the Allies might no longer have.
What would the mutiny mean for the French army?
How would it be put down?
This may look like a golden opportunity for the Germans
to finally defeat one of their Western enemies,
but one thing to consider:
while some of the mutineers were against the war in general,
the majority of them were not mutinying against
being in the army or fighting the war.
They weren't against continuing to defend their land.
They were against more thousands of their comrades
being slaughtered in pointlessly stupid attacks
ordered by callous and idiotic leaders.
When you see it that way, it's not surprising that they mutinied,
it's surprising that everyone else didn't.
If you want to learn more about the Nivelle offensive,
you can click right here for our episode when that began.
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