December 18th, 1914
The British Empire was worldwide in 1914, and the sun truly never set upon it. It had
been built by centuries of war and conquest abroad, but this week something different
happened. For the first time in over 200 years, British civilians at home were killed by enemy
action.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week we saw the Austro-Hungarian army disgraced as it retreated once again from
Serbia, having been badly beaten by the Serbs. Further north, the Austrians were pushing
the Russians back in the mountains while even further north the German-Russian front had
settled into stalemate for the winter. The Western Front was still also in stalemate,
where it would remain for years, and the German Pacific navy had been finally destroyed.
1915 is just around the corner so let’s take a look at how some of the warring nations
now viewed the war.
Britain and France were by this point committed to the destruction of Prussian militarism,
and they meant to ensure that post-war Germany would not have the industrial or military
means to start another war. Thing is, this made the conditions for victory nothing short
of total victory in order to be able to dictate such terms.
The Germans were a little more existential about the whole thing. They realized that
defeat would mean total disgrace. Now, they certainly had no initial plans for world domination,
but as things unfolded the schemes got grander and grander, especially among bankers and
industrialists, who enthusiastically spoke of annexations, and not just economic hegemony
as the result. Army Chief of Staff Falkenhayn, for example, had ideas of permanent conquest
in the west, though not in the east.
The German strategy had been based on a quick war so 1915 was the war year that never should
have been. Germany found itself on a huge two front war against Russia and France with
England slowly pulling her strength together from her worldwide empire that would eventually
see her also fielding millions of soldiers on the western front.
At around this time in Germany there were the suddenly popular catchwords “the war
must be won in the east”, and many people believed that it was actually possible to
defeat Russia by force of arms and this would cause the western allies to change their minds
about the war and sue for peace. This was ludicrous. No decision in the east would spare
them from fighting to the end in the west.
And the French and British really had no option other than to continue to attack and attack
on the western front. Germany’s successes back in August had given her most of Belgium
and a big industrial chunk of France, and the Germans were only around 100km from Paris.
French General Joseph Joffre couldn’t take a passive approach, which would allow the
Germans to either plan a big offensive or transfer troops to the eastern front. Especially
with the patriotic issue of getting the Germans off of French soil. The big question was how?
The answer for the moment was a series of winter offensives that began this week and
continued well into 1915.
One of these was the first battle of Artois, which began on December 17th. The objective
was gaining control of the heights of the Vimy ridge. Interestingly, the French began
to use siege techniques from centuries ago that now once again had a place in warfare.
They sapped trenches across no mans land and connected them to form jumping off points
as close to the German lines as possible. They also began to avoid mass offensives and
instead make series of smaller attacks against points of tactical importance, such as the
ridge.
In addition to the developing action at Artois, the Champagne offensive was just about to
begin all along a 40 kilometer stretch from Auberive to Massiges in an attempt to break
through to the Mezieres railway junction. Over 250,000 troops would be deployed backed
by 700 guns.
That is a huge number of men, but as we’ve seen time and again, it’s often dwarfed
by the amount of men fighting on the Eastern Front.
Now, a couple of weeks ago there we saw the Austro-Hungarian Imperial army pushing the
Russians back at the battle of Limanowa to halt the Russia drive toward Budapest. That
battle finally ended this week with a Russian defeat. The Austrians held the Dukla pass
and the threat of Russian invasion of Hungary was over.
Actually, the Austrians nearly had an opportunity to surround the Russians but the winter weather
and the inadequate railway system ruined that chance. This was not quite the end of the
war of motion on the Eastern Front, which had em phatically ended on the western one,
but it was another big step in ending the possibilities of Russian invasions of Austrian
or German territory.
British territory was not, on the other hand, safe any more.
On December 16th, the German navy bombarded Scarborough, Whitley, and Hartlepool, which
resulted in the first British civilians killed by enemy action since 1690.
You gotta wonder what the Germans were thinking, though. This was a purely terrorist exercise
that didn’t have a military purpose- on the contrary it was to demoralize the British
by highlighting their vulnerability, but it failed. In fact, it had just the opposite
effect and was a huge propaganda victory for the British, certainly increasing popular
hatred of the Germans and steeling British resolve, and in future the Germans would even
be sometimes known as the “baby killers of Scarborough”.
Thing is, German Admiral Franz von Hipper was totally unenthusiastic about bombing British
seaside towns, which he thought completely irrelevant strategically. He was really concerned
with facing the British Fleet, and he actually should have had his chance this very day.
For all the remembrance of Scarborough, the events of December 16th could have gone many
many times worse for the British.
See, British code breakers knew already the 14th that von Hipper was heading out the following
day for a raid but didn’t know his target. So there were 6 British battleships and four
battle cruisers waiting at Dogger Bank in the North Sea with some support to engage
von Hipper when they could find him, but what the code breakers did NOT know was that the
entire German High Seas fleet was heading right for the British ships including 18 dreadnoughts
and 54 destroyers.
Now, during [as]the night and morning of the 16th a few rival destroyers engaged each other
occasionally, but the seas were too heavy for anything decisive and visibility was pretty
terrible, but after a few hours the question became evident- where was the high seas fleet?
Well, Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl had suddenly taken it home. Seriously. At 5:45 in the morning,
after hearing about the clashing destroyers, he had erroneously assumed that he was about
to face the entire Grand Fleet. But his mission was only to support von Hipper’s coastal
raid and he had no orders from the Kaiser to fight a big battle so he turned around
and went home and threw away the German navy’s best strategic opportunity of the entire war.
Both fleets made it back home without the loss of a ship, but while the Germans lost
a great battle opportunity and the British got a PR boost, think how much respect the
British fleet lost when its actions of that day became public: it knew that von Hipper
was coming, but did not try to head him off from the coast, sacrificing dozens of civilian
lives with hundreds more injured, and then failed to intercept him after the attack when
he was heading home, meaning those people were sacrificed for nothing. Not a good day
for the British Navy.
Neither was it a good day for someone we haven’t heard from yet in the war-neutral Portugal.
Specifically, Portuguese Angola.
This week saw the battle of Naulila, which actually has a bit of a back-story. In October,
a German delegation to the fort of Naulila from German Southwest Africa to negotiate
a non-aggression pact had been killed, and the Germans had responded by attacking and
destroying first Fort Cuangar and then some other small forts. Now, on December 18th,
it was Naulila’s turn. The attack was quick and the Portuguese fled after a few hours
of fighting during which they lost about 150 men, roughly five times the German losses.
But Portugal and Germany were still not officially at war, and indeed would not be until 1916,
in spite of skirmishes between their colonial territories. Funny how many people can die
in a war when you’re not “at war”.
So that’s where we stand at the end of the week, with small actions in Africa, small
actions along the British coast that triggered big outrage, a huge action beginning in France,
and a huge action ending in the East.
Think how it must have felt to the people of Scarborough, Whitley, and Hartlepool. Oh
sure, they were at war and knew it, but no one, not even Napoleon, had attacked the ordinary
people of their little island kingdom for hundreds of years. It meant a quick and rude
awakening to the reality of modern war- that this was not a war of honor, not a war of
decency, and not a war conducted by any traditional moral standards. It was a war of brutality
and of death on a scale never before imagined, and it was a war where no one, man, woman,
or child, in any of the warring nations, was safe.
See you next week.
If you missed last weeks Episode where we talked about the Austrian - Hungarien Empire
being badly beaten by the Serbs than click right here.
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