It becomes almost monotonous. Death. In the trenches of the west, the mountains of the
east, in Africa and the Middle East, in the mud, the sand, or the snow, nothing but death,
but it’s not monotonous because it gets worse: for this week we see the beginnings,
the first rumblings of two of the most feared and deadly programs in the entire of history of war.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War
Last week we saw the Emperor Franz Joseph’s army launch a winter offensive against the
Russians who were also cleaning up against the Turks in the Caucasus. The British navy
had scored points over the Germans in the North Sea, while the French had stopped the
Germans once again at the Aisne. And the British and French were now jointly making plans for
a future attack on the Dardanelles.
All right, this week we’re going to focus a bit on the Eastern Front and the Ottoman
Empire, and actually, this year, 1915, a huge chunk of what happened that would determine
the course of the war played out on the Eastern Front or in Ottoman territory.
Now, it’s only been a few weeks since the Turkish Third Army was almost completely destroyed
by the Russians at the battle of Sarikamis. But the Ottomans are on the move again, this
time against the British as Turkish troops advance toward the Suez Canal. This was quite
cleverly done; see, they marched 200km through the Sinai desert using wells that German engineers
had secretly dug in advance so that they could keep the element of surprise.
Little background here: the British had formally declared a Protectorate of Egypt back on December
18th, and had installed Prince Hussein Kamel as Sultan, deposing Almas Hilmi. The Suez
Canal had featured prominently in British affairs since it opened back in 1869 and its
defense was a pretty important thing since it was the main route between Britain and
many of her colonies. The Ottoman Empire had been planning to take the canal since the
beginning of mobilization.
It would be tricky, though, because you’d need artillery and you’d need surprise,
and there was no way to attack the canal by road, so you had to cross the desert to get
to it. But on February 3rd, the Turkish troops, under the leadership of the German Lieutenant
Colonel Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein- really- attacked. The British were protecting
the west bank and the main attack was at Ismailia.
Now, the Canal is about 50 meters wide so the Turkish forces tried to throw pontoon
up bridges in an attempt to get across, but Indian machine gunners, backed by Egyptian
artillery, cut them down and the Turkish forces were forced to retreat, taking well over ten
times the number of casualties as the defenders. See, the Turks had really relied on surprise,
but the British forces knew way in advance that they were coming because of reconnaissance
aircraft. You could really see that planes were becoming more and more important this
war. So this was the very beginning of the Sinai and Palestine campaign.
In other news from the Middle East this week, the Turks suffered another loss, this one
on the Persian Front, as the Russians took Tabriz on January 30th.
You can probably imagine how a successful attempt on the Suez Canal might have affected
the naval war, but there were other events this week that really did affect it.
On January 30th, a German submarine sank four British merchant vessels off the Lancashire
coast. Following this, the British Admiralty advised merchant ships to fly the flags of
neutral countries in future to avoid being sunk by the Germans. A few days later, Kaiser
Wilhelm gave his approval to un restricted submarine warfare, although it would take
a couple of weeks to really get going.
The Germans were making moves on land this week as well, over in Poland as they clashed
with the Russians beginning January 31st at the Battle of Bolimov
This was yet another move by the Germans toward Warsaw but was also intended to draw Russian
troops away from East Prussia. This battle is mainly remembered today because it marked
the first time the Germans used gas on a large scale. It wasn’t the poison gas used later
on, though; it was xylyl bromide, which is a tear gas. The German army launched 18,000
shells loaded with the gas, but it was first blown back at them, and then failed to vaporize,
having frozen in the winter temperatures. When the new secret weapon failed, the German
attack was called off.
The Russians did launch several counter attacks, though, which were stopped by the German artillery
at a cost of 40,000 casualties, twice that of the Germans. And that’s called a minor battle.
But I suppose it is a minor battle in the grand scheme of things, because further to
the southeast there was a major battle going on, as the Austro-Hungarian army continued
its Carpathian offensive.
We saw that army, backed by three German divisions, make some headway in the mountains last week,
but the tables were now starting to turn. On February 1st, the Russians advanced from
the Dukla Pass to the Upper San River. The weather had deteriorated rapidly and the combination
of that and battle losses wrecked the Austrian frontline troop strength. By its second week,
the offensive had all but collapsed. The Russians held the Dukla Pass and Russians troops were
heading through it to threaten important railway junctions. On top of this, a major objective
of the offensive had been to break the siege at Przemysl and free the Austrian army trapped
there. This wasn’t about to happen this week- they were still 100km away. Sure, there
were both gains and losses, back and forth, and by the end of the week the Russians were
even falling back from Bukovina, but-
-I’m going to quote Graydon Tunstall here: “Combat exhaustion under winter mountain
conditions is incomprehensible to anyone who has not suffered through such an experience.
Habsburg troops routinely lacked basic necessities. Food supplies...were usually frozen solid.
Heavy rainfall, blinding snowstorms, and icy river crossings left the soldiers’ uniforms
frozen to their bodies...most suffered lung ailments and frostbite- many froze to death.
What meager equipment the troops did receive proved unsuitable: boots with cardboard soles,
for example, quickly became unusable. The Habsburg Supreme Command displayed a profound
ignorance of these obvious conditions throughout the war- an utter failure to recognize the
realities of mountain warfare in winter...” and he continues:
“...Utterly exhausted, many of the troops became apathetic or committed suicide by shooting
themselves or exposing themselves to enemy fire. Tens of thousands of horses too- critical
to the Habsburg supply chain- succumbed to overexertion and starvation.”
A big problem with the Austrian army that really showed here is that they, alone among
the major powers, did not have a reserve army, so hundreds of thousands of men were forced
to remain at their posts until they were killed, wounded, captured, or missing- which usually
meant they had frozen to death. Everyone else regularly rotated their frontline troops,
which the Russians were doing here. The Russians were also more used to the climate and terrain,
and they were, perhaps surprisingly to some, better led and tactically superior. They also
had superior artillery, so by the end of the first two weeks of this offensive, the official
Austrian casualty toll was 88,900 of an initial force of 175,000. But still, the offensive
continued in full force.
Think back six months when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Who could have even
imagined they would be fighting a winter war in their own mountains to the north losing
45,000 men a week. But much of the Austro-Hungarian elite had wanted a war, a war for glory and
land, and as we know, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip made a
great excuse for that war.
This week, some of that came round full circle, as Veljko Cubrilovic, Misko Jovanovic, and
Danilo Ilic, three of Princip’s accomplices, were hanged February 3rd. Princip himself
was not – he had been sentenced to 20 years of hard labor, having been less than 20 years old at the
time of the crime That was the minimum age for which one could receive the death penalty.
And so the week ends, with the Russians and Austrians fighting intensely in the mountains.
The Germans have stopped the Russians at Bolimov, and the British have stopped the Ottomans
at the Suez, but really, two things happened this week that foreshadow horrors to come,
so I’m going to mention them again.
The Kaiser gave the green light to unrestricted submarine warfare. Traditional prize rules
held that only warships or merchant ships that are a threat to the attacker may be sunk
without warning, and that merchant crews must be put in safety before their ships are sunk.
No more. Freighters and tankers, ships that couldn’t really defend themselves, would
now be sunk without warning. This would lead to thousands upon thousands of civilians drowning
helplessly over the coming years. But the fear of being torpedoed perhaps pales in comparison
to the threat of poison gas- your lungs burning as you cough your life away. The groundwork
for both of these horrors, yes horrors any way you look at it, was laid this week. There
was no more compassion left; just brutality and evil.
Brutality and monotony were also constant companions of soldiers living in the trenches.
We made a special episode about this life, the schematics and plans behind these elaborate
defences. You can check it out right here.
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