Last fall the Austrians, Germans, and Bulgarians overran and conquered Serbia, and now that
the dust had settled from that campaign, the Balkans were kicking into high gear again,
as this week, Austria-Hungary invades Montenegro.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War.
Last week the Russians attacked up and down the eastern front, but didn’t do much except
produce corpses. There was scattered action in the west, but the Italian and Balkan fronts
were quiet, and a British relief force heading up the Tigris River lost a third of its men
against the Ottoman defenders.
There was new fighting on the Western Front this week, as the Germans went on the attack.
This week they recovered the trenches they had lost to the French at Hartmannsweilerkopf
New Year’s Eve and captured 20 officers, and on the 9th German troops under General
von Einem attacked on a five-mile front east of Tahure after an artillery barrage. The
French managed to stop the offensive, but at two points the Germans reached the French
front lines. This was actually a three-day battle, and the Germans took several hundred
meters of trenches, 423 prisoners and, 8 machine guns.
At Massiges, after an artillery barrage of 400,000 shells, the Germans charged 40,000
strong on the 10th, but the French machine guns tore huge holes in the attackers and
they were forced back. Few even made it as far as the barbed wire. This sounds pretty
serious, but by the 13th, all of this German activity had pretty much been called off.
Something that was called off weeks ago, but was still not entirely finished, was Gallipoli.
But this week, on January 8th, the total evacuation of the British forces at Gallipoli was complete.
Anzac and Suvla Bay had been evacuated in December, but there were still tens of thousands
of men at Cape Helles and it was a difficult situation. The route to the beach had to be
marked off carefully and then all other avenues of advance for the Turks blocked with barbed
wire. This had to be done under the ever-increasing Turkish artillery, and the ever-increasing
suspicions by the Turks as to what was going on. The Turks even went over the top on January
7th, but were pushed back by British naval support hammering their flanks. At that time
there were only 19,000 men left and only 63 guns at Cape Helles. If the Turks had broken
through it could have been a true massacre.
In the last 11 days, 35,628 troops were removed. They left behind them booby traps, land mines,
and even rifles that operated by clockwork; water would drip through a tin of sand and
when that tin dropped it would set off the trigger and fire the gun. The relief of the
men was palpable, and one Sergeant Mannion, one of the last to leave, had this to say,
“When we were a mile out from the beach, we were all ordered to go below. At this moment
a big magazine on shore was blown up, and we could hear the pieces of scrap-iron falling
on the roof of the lighter. The sea was very rough and our lighter pitched and tossed like
a cork on the waves. We were all very seasick. There was a rumor that we had broken adrift,
and the sailors confirmed this. Our cable had parted and we were drifting, in a rough
sea, off a hostile shore. But nobody seemed to worry much. We had got safely off Gallipoli,
a thing which none of us had expected.” (Gilbert)
The evacuation was carried off brilliantly, there’s no doubt about that, but while it
was a great success, it was a success that grew out of defeat and there were many cynics
about it. Peter Hart quotes Douglas Jerrold, in The Great War, with having this to say:
“The evacuation, the world has repeatedly been informed, was a very skillful operation.
The phrase is just stupid. It does not require intelligence... to withdraw troops quietly
by night instead of noisily by day, or to withdraw them gradually instead of all at
once. Or to hold the front line to the last and so conceal your intentions from the enemy.
There were no casualties because the Turks did not attack... If the Turks had chanced
to launch a powerful attack on the last day no staff work could have prevented the loss
of most of the few troops left behind there. But the risk... was negligible. It was, as
everyone has said, a miracle of organization. We are good at that sort of thing. When we
surrender the last defenses of our Empire, we may be certain that the protocols, like
the graves, will be in perfect order.”
In addition to the men, there were 3,689 horses and mules to be transported, though 508 were
shot, and 1,590 vehicles abandoned (numbers from Gilbert). For the Allies, the campaign
was a huge drain on manpower that could’ve, should’ve been used elsewhere. 410,000 men
from the British Empire participated, with 79,000 more from France and its North African
colonies. The British Imperial forces lost 205,000 men, half their total; 115,000 killed,
wounded, or missing, and 90,000 evacuated sick (Hart). Really, that’s how bad the
disease was there. French losses were proportionally higher- 47,000; 27.000 killed, wounded, or
missing, and 20,000 evacuated sick.
The evacuation of Gallipoli also meant that the Turks could now transfer nearly 40,000
troops to Mesopotamia, where the British were under siege at Kut Al-Amara.
But the relief force under Fenton Aylmer was on the move up the Tigris River, even after
having a third of its men killed or wounded last week. They saw more action this week,
although on a smaller scale, at the Battle of the Wadi on the 13th. 200 British and Indian
troops were killed and another 1,400 wounded. While I guess you could technically call it
a victory for the British, since they did succeed in taking the Wadi River area, they
took three times the casualties of the Ottoman defenders, and theirs were not replaceable
so by most measures it was a win for the Ottomans over the invading forces.
Meanwhile back in Europe, a brand new invasion was taking place.
After the events of the previous months, a period of calm had seemed to settle over the
Balkans, with one real exception- Montenegro. Although you didn’t hear much about it,
the Montenegrin army had fought against the Austrians. It now numbered fewer than 20,000
men and was desperately short of munitions and food, but the allies couldn’t really
offer them any relief. There was no real seaport and the terrain was mountainous and difficult.
Now, during the invasion of Serbia in the fall, Montenegrin forces had given Serbia
their full support and had faced the Austrians, even holding a slice of Bosnia for a little
while. The Austrians had been content then to just hold back the Montenegrins, since
an invasion into the mountainous country would be tricky, but as Serbia fell, the Austrians
were strongly reinforced with men and big guns.
On January 6, 1916, there was a series of violent Austrian attacks on the Rivers Tara,
Lim, and Ibar while Austrian warships bombarded mount Lovcen. On January 8th, over 50,000
Austro-Hungarian Imperial troops invaded Montenegro with a 500-gun barrage, and both air and sea
support. Mount Lovcen was stormed and taken on the 10th and it was just a matter of time
before Cetinje, the capital, fell. It was occupied at the end of the week as more and
more Austrian forces surged into Montenegro.
And it wasn’t just tiny Montenegro that was in chaos this week. Giant Russia was also
in disarray.
On the Black Sea, 10,000 Russian workers went on strike at the naval base at Nikolaev, the
strike would spread to Petrograd, where next week 45,000 dock workers walked off their
jobs. Russia was also fighting, still pretty continuously in Bukovina and Galicia, but
also launching an offensive in Anatolia, occupying Arkhava on the Black Sea on the 14th.
And that was the week, the British losing irreplaceable men in the Middle East, the
Germans trying in the west, strikes in Russia, and the final exit from Gallipoli.
There are 33 Commonwealth cemeteries at Gallipoli on the peninsula, with graves for the bodies
that were found with inscriptions on them covering all spectrums of human emotion. Here
are two I got from Martin Gilbert.
“Brother Bill a sniping fell: We love him still,
We always will.”
And one that I think sums up the thoughts of every parent of every dead soldier from
every warring nation:
“What harm did he do thee, O Lord?”
Albeit Galipolli’s failure, it was the birth hour of Australian and New Zealand national
consciousness. If you want to find out more about the famous ANZACs, check out our special
episode right here.
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See you next week.