Learning by Fighting: The AEF Experience

Editor's Introduction:  Thanks to our contributor this month, historian Jeffrey LaMonica, we will see that Pershing's forces were needed on the battlefield earlier than anticipated and had no choice but to learn as they were fighting. This process involved making many mistakes, digesting them, and developing new doctrines and tactics on the fly. In this issue, our contributor analyzes the learning curve of the AEF, using a case-study approach with the 5th Division of the First Army, a formation that did not arrive in France until May 1918, had absolutely minimal formal training, and yet on 11 November 1918 found itself in the most advanced position of all the U.S. forces. MH

By Jeffrey LaMonica

Introduction

Most historical treatments of the AEF published before the 1980s do not acknowledge its tactical development. They provide sweeping assessments of American battlefield performance and draw broad conclusions concerning the U.S. Army's general contribution to the defeat of Imperial Germany. More recent scholarship, however, provides a deeper understanding of the United States' impact on the Great War by evaluating all facets of the AEF. The majority of these works dismiss the AEF as tactically stagnant and inept. A few scholars delve deeper into the evidence to reveal and more fairly assess AEF tactical growth, such as Mark E. Grotelueschen's The AEF Way of War: The American Army and Combat in the First World War. This article strives to fit in with this trend by exploring the AEF's aptitude in two specific tactical areas, open warfare—the use of fire and maneuver, championed by General  Pershing from the birth of the AEF—and combined-arms warfare—the coordinated use of infantry and its weapons, artillery, vehicles, aircraft, communications, and logistics—by demonstrating how they were learned and applied by the 5th Division, one of America's most active divisions of the Great War. 

The AEF came to appreciate these techniques by late 1918 but was not able to execute them with greater success. Ultimately, its formal training failed to prepare the AEF for modern industrialized warfare. Survival instinct and combat experience, however, fostered enough tactical learning to enable American divisions to keep gaining ground until the Armistice. The U.S. Army would revisit and build upon the AEF's experimentation with combined arms and open warfare during the interwar period and the Second World War. Furthermore, the AEF's brand of learning by fighting continued to be the Army's method for tactical growth from 1941 to 1945 and still persists in the 21st century.

Pershing's initial open-warfare vision stemmed from his determination to restore mobility to the Western Front and his confidence in the skill and fighting spirit of American officers and enlisted men. He believed open warfare relied on expert marksmen to provide effective suppressing fire and individual bravery to flank the enemy and close with the bayonet. The commander-in-chief's brand of open warfare represented a combination of traditional tactical principles, such as offensive spirit and hand-to-hand combat, and new trends in battlefield survival, such as infiltration and flanking maneuvers. Pershing's tactical ideas, however, contained flaws. Other belligerents learned earlier in the war that élan and the bayonet counted for little on the modern industrialized battlefield. Although the Japanese launched successful bayonet charges as recently as the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the volume of machine guns and artillery on the Western Front in 1914 made it virtually impossible to get close enough to engage the enemy with cold steel. Furthermore, the most effective open-warfare tactics relied on support from advanced weapons, motor vehicles, and aircraft. 

The AEF also proved slow to mix open-warfare infantry tactics with advanced weapons and other arms. The fact that a clear definition of Pershing's open-warfare concept was not published until the fall of 1918 was highly problematic. Despite issuing 54,968 copies of Pershing's Combat Instructions to the AEF before the end of the war, there were not enough weeks left before the Armistice to afford time to learn and implement these new tactics. The fact that Pershing's open-warfare concept remained nebulous until September 1918 had the hidden benefit of allowing AEF divisions several months of combat to improvise, experiment, and engage in the experiential learning typical of the U.S. Army's history. AEF officers and enlisted men devised their own tactical innovations to survive on the Western Front. The resulting incarnations of open warfare and combined arms often proved more effective than those published by the commander-in-chief and the U.S. War Department.

The strategic planning and combat decisions of AEF commanders during the last phase of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive indicated that combined arms and open warfare had permeated the AEF's collective mindset primarily through battlefield experience, not published doctrine or training. 

Divisional Observation Post in the Vosges Sector

The 5th Division's Experience

Although the 5th Division spent the prescribed six months in a stateside training facility, its piecemeal assembly at Fort Logan and fragmented shipment to Europe led to discrepancies in the amount and type of instruction received across the division. Major General John E. McMahon took command of the division in January 1918. 

After arriving in France, the division's infantry brigade began Pershing's three-month training regimen in April 1918 at AEF Training Area Thirteen near Bar-sur-Aube, France. Officers of the advance training detachment rejoined their units as instructors at this time. For approximately one month, the men learned basic trench warfare tactics, such as defensive chemical warfare techniques and trench raiding. The 5th Field Artillery Brigade remained at Le Valdahon for its instruction. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth machine-gun battalions trained around Bar-sur-Aube but did so separately from the infantry. Training divisional elements separately from one another was typical of all U.S. Army divisions during the Great War and greatly detracted from their ability to conduct cohesive combined-arms tactics in combat. For example, American machine-gun crews never provided fire support for live infantrymen during their training exercises.

The first phase of the 5th Division's training in France ended on 31 May, when General Pershing ordered the division to a “quiet” zone on the Western Front near the town of Epinal in the Toul Sector. The Vosges Mountains stretched across much of this area and inhibited large-scale military activity. This sector of the front saw only occasional patrols, raids, and minor exchanges of artillery fire.

The division's Ninth and Tenth infantry brigades joined with two divisions of the XXXIII Corps of the French Seventh Army for this phase of instruction. French officers taught American enlisted men trench construction, defense against poison gas, patrolling, and raiding. These raiding exercises represented the division's first opportunity to handle live grenades. In keeping with General Pershing's emphasis on marksmanship, the 5th Division's brigade commanders insisted that the French training officers include target practice in their trench warfare regimen. The Official History of the 5th Division USA recounted, “The Americans still clung to the idea that the rifle was the main dependence in warfare, and pushed training with that arm to the utmost.” 

5th Division 155mm Howitzer

The third and final stage of the 5th Division's training barely resembled the month of open-warfare instruction General Pershing intended. Instead, the division occupied its own position on the Western Front in the Saint Die Sector near Lorraine on 19 July. Its first independent action took place at 4:00 a.m. on 17 August near Frapelle. After a ten-minute preliminary bombardment, the Third Battalion of the Sixth Regiment from Brigadier General Walter H. Gordon's Tenth Infantry Brigade successfully advanced into the Fave River Valley and captured the town of Frapelle.

Surprisingly, this short operation included some successful combined arms. The infantry moved forward behind an effective creeping barrage provided by batteries from Brigadier General Clement A. Flagler's 5th Field Artillery Brigade. A major in the Sixth Infantry Regiment by this time, described the infantry assault as “strongly supported by artillery, mortars, machine guns and American aviation.” The demands of the modern industrialized battlefield, survival instinct, and experiential learning were already forcing the 5th Division to employ advanced tactics beyond the scope of their formal training. This month spent in the Saint Die Sector cost the 5th Division about 600 casualties.

With its formal training completed, the 5th Division participated in the Saint Mihiel Offensive on 12 September. It was here where the division began tactical learning through combat experience and battlefield survival. General McMahon had several combined-arms components at his disposal during the offensive, including 63 tanks, the Twelfth Aero Squadron, the Second Balloon Company, and  several units from the First Gas Regiment. After a four-hour preliminary bombardment, the Sixth and Eleventh infantry regiments of the Tenth Brigade attacked at 5:00 a.m. under a creeping barrage. First Sergeant Clyde Heldreth of D Company of the Sixtieth Infantry Regiment noted the effectiveness of this creeping barrage: “At 5:00 o'clock came the command `over the top.' The artillery bombardment then changed to a rolling barrage. Our artillery shelling had accomplished the desired results and the enemy was in full retreat.”  This marked the style of operations that the 5th Division would implement, with continuing success in the final and largest offensive of the war for the AEF, the Meuse-Argonne.

The 5th Division Marker at Remoiville on the Meuse Heights
Marks the Farthest Advance of the AEF

Summing Up:

Consistent with the majority of AEF divisions, formal training did little to prepare the soldiers of the 5th Division to conduct combined arms and open warfare in combat. All phases of the “Red Diamond” Division's instruction were rushed, and there were few weapons available for training purposes. Furthermore, the division's various combat arms trained in different locations around France. Based upon the 5th Division's performance during the final phase of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, it was six months of combat experience and survival on the Western Front that allowed it, and the rest of First Army, to conduct combined arms and open warfare to the point of achieving a successful breakthrough of the German Kriemhilde Line. Deficiencies in the areas of supply, logistics, and communications prevented the AEF from exploiting this breach to the point of annihilating the Imperial German Army. These underdeveloped support systems forced First Army and its 5th Division to pause and refit before crossing into Germany. This respite might have allowed the Imperial German Army to establish a strong line of defense along the Rhine River and drag the conflict into 1919.

According to Colonel Lanza, First Army's Chief of Artillery Operations: “The Armistice put an end to what would have been a long wait, possibly extending through the winter into the following spring. In other words, the Allies managed to give the enemy the final blow just before it would have been necessary to stop the offensive to reorganize and reequip.

After the Armistice, the U.S. Army continued to develop the tactical lessons learned by the American Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front. Combined arms and General Pershing's open-warfare concept were persistent themes in army doctrine through the 1920s. Supporting the infantry with close artillery and machine gun fire were standard practice. The Army continued working to define and expand combined arms roles for tanks and aircraft. American military thinkers carried on the conversation over trench warfare versus open-warfare tactics.

5th Division Crossing the Meuse River, 5 November 1918

By the 1930s, however, diplomatic isolationism and the budgetary limitations of the Great Depression interrupted the Army's tactical growth. Under these restraints, U.S. Army weapons and equipment became antiquated and costly large-scale training maneuvers were nonexistent. The lack of funding for either improved weapons or training gradually led to a state of under-preparedness in everything but thought. Combat experience was, once again, the Army's primary method of learning to survive and succeed in battle during the Second World War. The U.S. Army of 1941 was not unlike the AEF in 1917 in this regard. Its greatest advantage resided in the leadership of veteran commanders, who had fought in the earlier war, and possessed the wisdom of the Great War's tactical learning curve. 

This article is excerpted  from American Tactical Advancement in World War I: The New Lessons of Combined Arms and Open Warfare by Jeffrey LaMonica.

Available HERE

 

Instant Death Aboard HMS Defence

HMS Defence

HMS Defence was a Minotaur-class armored cruiser built for the Royal Navy in the first decade of the 20th century, the last armored cruiser built for the Royal Navy. The ship was 519 feet long, with a main armament of four 9.2 inch guns. She was stationed in the Mediterranean when the First World War began and participated in the pursuit of the German battlecruiser SMS Goeben and light cruiser SMS Breslau. The ship was transferred to the Grand Fleet in January 1915 and remained there for the rest of her career.

View of Defence's Stern Main Battery

Defence was sunk on 31 May 1916 during the Battle of Jutland, the largest naval battle of the war. Escorting the main body of the Grand Fleet, the ship was fired upon by one German battlecruiser and four dreadnoughts as she attempted to engage the disabled German light cruiser Wiesbaden. She was sunk by gunfire of German battleship Friedrich der Grosse that detonated her rear magazine. The fire from that explosion spread to the ship's secondary magazines, which exploded in turn. Capt Raymond Poland, a turret commander on battleship HMS Warspite, was impressed by the “very gallant show” Defence  made. His delight instantly turned to horror as she was hit by three German salvoes in quick succession and the cruiser seemingly disintegrated, her crushed bow sticking out of the North Sea at a 60-degree angle before sinking. “I nearly vomited,” Poland wrote to his brother. “God it was an awful sight.”

Computerized 3-D Image of the Wreck of HMS Defence

At the time, it was believed that Defence  had been reduced to fragments by the explosion, but the wreck was discovered in mid-1984 by Clive Cussler and a NUMA survey of the North Sea. It was dived upon in 2001 by a team led by nautical archaeologist Innes McCartney and found to be largely intact, despite the violence of her sinking. Defence , along with the other Jutland wrecks, was belatedly declared a protected place under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986, to discourage further damage to the resting place of approximately 900 men. 

Sources: Royal Navy News, Wikipedia, Wexford.GreatWar, International Journal of Naval Archeology

Käthe Kollwitz—Graphic Artist of War, Revolution, and Human Suffering

Käthe Kollwitz, Self-portrait toward left, 1901

Woman with Dead Child, 1903

German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) is probably best known to our readers as a sculptor because of two notable pieces inspired by the death of her soldier son, Peter, Grieving Parents now located at the Vladslo German Cemetery in Flanders, and  Mother with Her Dead Son, 1937, which sits on Unter den Linden in Berlin. Although she was trained as painter and sculptor, Kollwitz turned exclusively to print making in the early 1890s. She would create 275 prints and posters during her career, many of them of a political character. 

Help Russia, 1921

Vienna is dying! Save its Children!, 1920

Early in her career, she became committed to improving the plight of the working class, women, and children. This was likely based on her family’s left-wing values and her experiences with the poor workers who were patients in her husband’s medical practice.  Some of her postwar work also reflects strong sympathy with the civilian populations of the belligerent nations.

In Memoriam, Karl Liebknecht, 1920

Never Again War, 1924

Strongly antiwar, she seems to have become increasingly radicalized during the revolution of 1919 and the unstable 1920s. By 1932, Kollwitz was celebrating the rise of communism.  This, of course, put her on a collision course with the rising Nazis. She was included in the catalog of "Degenerate Art," and much of her work was confiscated or what is now called "shadow banned." She lost a grandson (also named Peter) during the war and passed away just 16 days before its end. Her burial plot is in Berlin's Friedrichsfelde Cemetery.

Down with the [anti] Abortion Articles, 1923

Solidarity, 1931–1932

This work includes 83 of Kollwitz's  graphic works with extensive background on her life.  

Order HERE

The Great War's Last Successful Cavalry Charge: The Jodhpur Lancers at Haifa, 23 September 1918

 

The Jodhpur Lancers

By James Patton

During the First World War cavalry became largely irrelevant. Quick-firing artillery, machine guns and  even repeating rifles, plus the battlefield obstacles of trench systems, could make traditional mounted attacks disastrous failures. Notwithstanding, in September 1918 the Jodhpur Lancers, an elite cavalry regiment from an Indian "Princely State," captured Haifa in a classic cavalry charge.

Pratap Singh (1845–1922) was born in October 1845, the third son of Maharaja Takhat Singh (1819–73), the ruler of  Marwar, which is located in the area of northwestern India called Rajahstan. In his youth,  Pratap learned to ride and shoot, and was commissioned in the Jodhpur Rissala (armed force). Subsequently, he was seconded to the British Indian Army to fight in the Second Afghan War (1878–80), where he was Mentioned in Dispatches for his service. 

Pratap Singh, 1914

Returning home, Pratap served as Chief Minister of Jodhpur, first under his father, then under his older brother Jaswant Singh (1838–95). Pratap was the Regent for his young nephew Sardar Singh (1880-1911) from 1895 to 1898, then again for his grandnephew  Sumar Singh (1911–1918) and then for another grandnephew Umaid Singh (1918–1922). Once a soldier, always a soldier, so he formed an elite cavalry unit that would rival those professional Indian Army units that he had served with in Afghanistan. Of course, the state already had the Rissala, but it was poorly led, ill-disciplined and barely trained, so Pratap decided to build a new regiment of lancers in the city of Jodhpur. 

With royal consent, he provided horses, weapons, and uniforms for sixty men, and was appointed  Lieutenant-Colonel of Cavalry. Soon thereafter, in 1889 the British Viceregal government requested that each Princely State contribute military units for Imperial Service in actions outside of India.

So Pratap’s small force became a regiment of 300 mounted men, which he named the Sardar Rissala after his nephew, then the heir to the throne. In the Imperial Order of Battle the regiment was called  "The Jodhpur Lancers."

During the late 19th century, the Jodhpur Lancers became one of the most glamorous of the state formations. Their motto was Jo Hokum (“As you command”) and the support of the Maharaja ensured that the unit was smartly disciplined and always superbly uniformed, equipped and mounted.

The Lancers Dismounting in the Field

In particular, the regiment’s polo team was very successful, and even traveled to the United Kingdom to participate in competitions. These occasions gave Pratap the chance to mingle with some of the highest ranking officers in the British Indian Army.  He also hosted members of the British Royal Family, including the future George V, upon their visits to Jodhpur, as it is one of the most scenic cities in the country.

Although the Lancers were involved in occasional skirmishes with rebellious tribes on the Northwest Frontier (bordering on today’s Afghanistan), what Pratap really wanted was to lead his men into action on behalf of the Queen and Empress. In 1900 he got his chance—his Jodhpur Lancers were sent to China to serve as part of the multi-national force that gathered to quell the Boxer Rebellion.

This was a war of sieges, not cavalry charges, and although the Lancers saw relatively little combat, they performed well. As a result, in 1901 Pratap was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB), later upgraded to the GCB, and in 1902 he was appointed an (honorary) Major-General in the  Indian Army. 

Officers of the Jodhpur Lancers

When the First World War began in 1914, Sir Pratap immediately offered to take his Jodhpur Lancers to France, where he hoped to be able to fight the Germans. Although the circumstances there didn’t favor cavalry charges, he reportedly vowed, “I will make an opportunity!”

Thus the Jodhpur Lancers arrived in Flanders in October 1914 and remained on the Western Front for over three years, as Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig stubbornly maintained a cavalry corps that he believed he would need when he achieved the ultimate breakthrough. During this interlude, Sir Pratap was promoted to (honorary) Lieutenant-General in the Indian Army in 1916. The Lancers were finally deployed at the Battle of Cambrai, where they were to follow the tanks, but the tanks were too slow and hard to avoid. Most of the time the Lancers were held in reserve, and Sir Pratap spent a lot of time in London, even working with the Imperial War Cabinet in 1917–18. 

In May of 1918 the Lancers were posted to the 15th Imperial Service Cavalry Brigade in Egypt, which consisted solely of Princely State regiments. This brigade was then forwarded on to Palestine, where British and ANZAC forces were fighting the Ottomans. Here the mounted troops were playing a very large role.

By this time, Sir Pratap was 73 years old and he was urged to slow down. During September 1918, the Lancers were constantly in action, covering more than 500 miles in 30 days. At one point, he spent over 30 hours in the saddle. Before they got to Haifa, Sir Pratap was feverish, so he reluctantly turned  the command over to Major Dalpat Singh Shekhawat, MC (1892–1918).

Major Singh Would Command the Lancers in the Battle
and Be Killed in the Action

On 23 September 1918, the Brigade was ordered to take the strategically important and heavily defended port city of Haifa. Ottoman troops had taken up positions in front of the town and were supported by German advisors and Austro-Hungarian artillery on the hills above.

The battle plan was as follows: a detachment from the Mysore Lancers were to seize the artillery positions, and the Jodhpur Lancers were to storm the city itself. Accordingly, four hundred Lancers drew themselves up in their battle lines east of the city, 4,000 yards from the enemy. They faced almost a thousand dug-in Ottomans, behind barbed wire and covered by at least four machine guns.

Detail of the Jodhpur's Area of Operation

The Lancers advanced at the trot towards the Ottomans, crossing the Acre railway line, where they came into machine gun and artillery range. The B squadron of the Lancers, which solely consisted of Rathores (a Rajput warrior caste) were tasked with taking out the Ottoman machine guns. Obstructed by quicksand on the bank of the Kishon River, the Lancers were forced to wheel to the left towards the lower slope of Mount Carmel. Orders given to the 13th Brigade (one Yeomanry and two Indian Army battalions) and the rest of the 15th  Brigade were to deliver suppressive gunfire while the Jodhpur Lancers were charging. Ignoring constant but poorly aimed artillery fire, the Lancers accelerated to a canter until, as they passed through a narrow valley close to the entrenchments, they reached the ‘break-in point’, where they  accelerated to the gallop. Almost at once, Major Singh Shekhawat fell, mortally wounded by random gun fire, and Captain Aman Singh Jodha (1870–1950) took over.

The Lancers didn’t stop at reducing the defenses. To the Ottoman’s surprise, the Lancers swarmed into the city itself. Historian Charles C. Trench has written: ‘the jo hukums (sic) had to be restrained as they galloped through the streets of Haifa, even after all the machine gun posts had fallen… spearing and butchering unfortunate Turks who crossed their path, civilians even, for the Rathores were crazed with rage’. A German officer reportedly said: ‘We tried to cover the Turks' retreat, but we expected them to do something, if only keep their heads. At last we decided they were not worth fighting for.’

The Jodhpur Lancers Entering Haifa

The Mysore Lancers, who had been dismounted in order to scramble up the slope of Mount Carmel to engage the Austrian gunners, were remounted and followed the Jodhpurs into the town. Together the two regiments captured 1,350 German, Austrian  and Ottoman prisoners, including two German officers and 35 Ottoman officers. They captured  four 4.2-inch guns, eight 77mm guns , four camel guns and a 6-inch naval gun, plus 11 machine guns. Total  15th Brigade casualties amounted to eight dead and 34 wounded. Sixty horses were killed and 83 were injured. 

After more than 400 years of Ottoman rule, Haifa was now under British control. In the 1919 official history of the British campaign in Palestine, it was said of the charge of the Jodhpur Lancers that “No more remarkable cavalry action of its scale was fought in the whole course of the campaign.” Strong praise, for the campaign especially so, alongside the incredible ANZAC light horse attack at Beersheba. The charge at Haifa proved to be the last large-scale cavalry action ever undertaken by British arms  in wartime. 

The Jodhpur Lancers were once again called upon to fight for the British in the Second World War, but  they had to swap their horses for Bren gun carriers. Following the 1947 reorganization of the military and the takeover of all of the Princely States by the government of  Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), in 1953 all of the State Forces were disbanded and the heritage of the Jodhpur Lancers became a part of the Indian Army’s 61st Cavalry  Regiment, which today includes the world’s only operational horse-mounted cavalry unit. The all-Rathore tradition of the Lancer’s B Squadron has been maintained as well.

Regimental Badge of the Jodhpur Lancers

In 1919 Sir Pratap returned to Jodhpur, where he resumed doing royal duties. At his death in 1922, his full title had become Lieutenant-General His Highness Maharajadhiraja Maharaja Shri Sir Pratap Singh Sahib Bahadur, GCB, GCSI, GCVO. Perhaps his memory is best served by the eulogy delivered by Indian Army Brig. Gen. C.R. Harbord CB CMG DSO (1873–1958), a personal friend and the Commander of the Imperial Service Cavalry Brigade in Palestine:

“I have always looked upon him as the finest Indian I have ever had the honor to know–loyal to the core, a sportsman to his finger-tips, a gallant soldier and a real gentleman.” Sounds classically British.

Sources: 

Steve McGregor at War History On Line, "The Last Great Cavalry Charge of WW1: The Jodhpur Lancers"  

Brigadier M.S. Jodha at Fair Observer, "The Story of the Jodhpur Lancers: 1885–1952"    

Richard Head and Tony McClenaghan, The Maharajas Paltans : A History of the Indian State Forces 1888-1948 (2 Vols-Set), Manohar 2013: New Delhi. (Anthony Norman “Tony” McClenaghan was a colleague and friend of mine for many years, during his long service as the General Secretary of The Indian Military Historical Society. JP)

Surprising Things I Found When I Finally Read Wells' The War That Will End War

I just got around to reading this famous work and I found myself surprised by a number of the passages.  MH, Editor/Publisher

H.G. Wells Was Among the 53 British Authors Who Supported
the War in a September 1914 Letter

You keep using that [title]. I do not think it means what 

you think it means.

Paraphrasing Inigo Montoya

1.  Despite His Well-Known Early Support for the War, the 1914 Version of Wells Is Startlingly Blood Thirsty

This Prussian Imperialism has been for forty years an intolerable nuisance in the earth. Ever since the crushing of the French in 1871 the evil thing has grown and cast its spreading shadow over Europe.

So that the harvest of this darkness comes now almost as a relief, and it is a grim satisfaction in our discomforts that we can at last look across the roar and torment of battlefields to the possibility of an organized peace. For this is now a war for peace.

To those who love peace there can be no other hope in the present conflict than the defeat, the utter discrediting of the German legend, the ending for good and all of the blood and iron superstition, of Krupp, flag-wagging Teutonic Kiplingism, and all that criminal, sham efficiency that centers in Berlin.  Never was war so righteous as war against Germany now. Never has any State in the world so clamored for punishment.

I find myself enthusiastic for this war against Prussian militarism. [33]

2.  "Taking the Profit Out of War":  A Strategy for Bringing Socialism?

Do Liberals realize that the individualist capitalist system is helpless now? It may be picked up unresistingly. It is stunned. A new economic order may be improvised and probably will in some manner be improvised in the next two or three years. 

There is no going back now to peace; our men must die, in heaps, in thousands; we cannot delude ourselves with dreams of easy victories; we must all suffer endless miseries and  anxieties; scarcely a human affair is there that will not be marred and darkened by this war. Out of it all must come one universal resolve: that this iniquity must be plucked out by the roots. Whatever follies still lie ahead for mankind this folly at least must end. There must be no more buying and selling of guns and warships and war-machines. There must be no more gain in arms. Kings and Kaisers must cease to be the commercial travelers of monstrous armament concerns.

Let me set out the suggestion very plainly. All the plant for the making of war material throughout the world must be taken over by the Government of the State in which it exists; every gun factory, every rifle factory, every dockyard for the building of warships. [45]

Wells Later in the War

3.  Let's Reshape Europe!

Do Liberals realize that now is the time to plan the confederation and collective disarmament of Europe, now is the time to re-draw the map of Europe so that there may be no more rankling sores or unsatisfied national ambitions? [67]

When the Prussians invaded Luxemburg they tore up the map of Europe. To the redrawing of that map a thousand complex forces will come. . .That means that we have to re-draw the map so that there shall be, for just as far as we can see ahead, as little cause for warfare among us Western nations as possible. That means that we have to redraw it justly. And very extensively. [For example] I suggest that France must recover Lorraine, and that Luxemburg must be linked in closer union with Belgium. Alsace, it seems to me, should be given a choice between France and an entry into the Swiss Confederation. It would possibly choose France. Denmark should have again the distinctly Danish part of her lost provinces restored to her. Trieste and Trent, and perhaps also Pola, should be restored to Italy. . . The break-up of the Austrian Empire has hung over Europe like a curse for forty years. Let us break it up now and have done with it. What is to become of the non-German regions of Austria-Hungary? And what is to happen upon the Polish frontier of Russia? [56]

4.  A Silver Lining—An Opportunity for the Intelligensia?

The character of the new age that must come out of the catastrophes of this epoch will be no mechanical consequence of inanimate forces. Will and ideas will take a larger part in this swirl-ahead than they have even taken in any previous collapse. . . The common man and base men are scared to docility. Rulers, pomposities, obstructives are suddenly apologetic, helpful, asking for help. This is a time of incalculable plasticity. For the men who know what they want, the moment has come. It is the supreme opportunity, the test or condemnation of constructive liberal thought in the world. [66]

5.  An Odd Appeal to the American People

This appeal comes to you from England at war, and it is addressed to you because upon your nation rests the issue of this conflict. The influence of your States upon its nature and duration must needs be enormous, and at its ending you may play a part such as no nation has ever played since the world began.

For it rests with you to establish and secure or to refuse to establish and secure the permanent peace of the world, the final ending of war.

We do not ask you for military help. Keep the peace which it is your unparalleled good fortune to enjoy so securely. But keep it fairly. Remember that we fight now for national existence, and that in the night, even as this is written, within a hundred miles or so of this place, the dark ships [?] feel their way among the floating mines with which the Germans have strewn the North Sea, [81]

6.  Where Are Those Christians?

We look to the Church that takes for its purposes the name of the Prince of Peace. In England, except for the smallest, meekest protest against war, any sort of war, on the part of a handful of Quakers, Christianity is silent. Its universally present organization speaks no coherent counsels. Its workers for the most part are buried in the loyal manufacture of flannel garments and an inordinate quantity of bed-socks for the wounded. [104]

Over the years, we have presented several other articles examining Wells' prophesies, commentary and reflections on the World War.  See our articles examining those ideas HERE

Source: Except for some minor merging of different sections covering similar ideas, the material above is all from the original version of The War That Will End War, which can be found for free on Project Gutenberg.

Tribute to a Batman

 

Capt. Blackadder and His Loyal, but Inept, Batman Baldrick
(Sorry, It Was the Only Photo I Could Find Definitively Identifying a Batman)

Before World War II, when officers were indeed gentlemen, in the British sense of the word, having a soldier-servant was the accepted order of the day. The word batman comes not from cricket bats, as some have suggested, but from the French word bât, which means pack saddle. A batman was, therefore, the man who took care of the luggage carried on the pack-horse or pack-mule. In time, the word also came to mean an officer’s valet, who, among other things, also took care of his officer’s baggage. 

A batman's duties could include:

• acting as a "runner" to convey orders from the officer to subordinates
• maintaining the officer's uniform and personal equipment as a valet
• driving the officer's vehicle, sometimes under combat conditions
• acting as the officer's bodyguard in combat
• digging the officer's foxhole in combat, giving the officer time to direct his unit
• other miscellaneous tasks the officer does not have time or inclination to do

 

The literature of World War I recounts a number of examples of the loyalty and devotion of batmen to the officers they cared for. Lieutenant Colonel Graham Seton Hutchison (1890–1946)—the author of numerous books on World War I—wrote a tribute to his batman, Peter McLintock, who was a piper from the 2nd Battalion of the  Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.

He was a faithful servant, a friend and counselor, an ever-present companion to give me confidence in the darkness of a dangerous night, and good cheer, when fortune favored a visit to battalion headquarters. . .

[Peter’s] friendliness took complete possession of the necessary, though often inconvenient, affairs of life. In such things Peter’s service was priceless. No matter at what hour I would return to the cubby hole for sleep, it was as dry and as warm as human ingenuity could devise. Eggs and small comforts he conjured from behind the lines without any promptings from me. . . . He would . . . prepare a varied menu from interminable bread, plum-and-apple jam, and the sickly meat and vegetable ration. He would clean my limited wardrobe, wash and mend the socks and shirts, keep me supplied with tobacco, dry my boots and stockings. The batman was Multum in parvo to his charge, omnipresent, yet ubiquitous. . . . And he would run when his officer went over the top, and fight by his side. When the officer dropped, the batman was beside him. . 

Peter’s friendship expressed itself in little acts of vigilant kindness. Opportunities for the rendering of trifling services and for the doing of kindness were for ever present, every hour and every day. The batman’s attitude was one of self-subordination, and he tarried neither to consider the worthiness of his charge nor the nature of the service asked. He gave freely, the man of humble origin and pursuit, to one at least temporarily exalted with authority. By his ready service, words and gestures he won affection, by his forethought and unknown sacrifices he penetrated quietly and unobtrusively into the heart of the master of his goings and of his comings.

Peter McLintock died at Hutchison’s side in 1917 and is buried in Ration Farm Military Cemetery, la Chapelle-d’Armentières, France. Postwar, Col. Hutchison first was active in championing the British veterans,  supporting the formation of the Royal British Legion and the Old Contemptibles Association and becoming a successful author. As WWII approached his outspoken sympathy for the Nazis made him highly controversial.

Sources:  Biography of a Batman; "Frodo's Batman" by Mark T. Hooker, Tolkien Studies, Vol. 1, 2004: Wikipedia: "Batman"

Railroads: Strategic Necessity and Vulnerability for First World War Armies

Restored WWI French Train

The First World War began and ended on rails. The mobilizations of the powers were accomplished with thousands of trains moving troops to their jump-off points. The fighting ended with the Armistice signed in Marshal Foch's private rail coach in a clearing in Compiegne Forest. 

In between, the rail networks were essential for sustaining the fronts during the long period of trench warfare, and for assembling the shells, food and stores for launching the great battles like the Somme. The Miracle of the Marne turned on Joffre's superior use of rail to re-array his forces. Verdun was sustained during the great 1916 assault by a light-rail line paralleling the Voie Sacrée. And when the great rollback of the Western Front occurred in 1918, the Allies staged their battles either to protect their own lines such as at Amiens and St. Mihiel or to attack the German network as in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, which successfully closed the strategic Metz-Sedan-Mézières line. 

For all that is written about the tactical excellence of the German Army, it is not an exaggeration to say that the Allied leaders consistently showed a higher appreciation of the importance of railroads for their armies throughout the war.

A Comparable Union Army Train from the Civil War

19th Century Roots

The military use of railways was one of the most influential technological changes in warfare in the second half of the 19th century. Railways made possible rapid movement of large masses of troops and equipment; the correspondingly shortened transit times reduced feeding and billeting requirements; troops and horses arrived in relatively fresh condition; and improved logistical support made possible  the sustainment of mass conscript armies in the field. One of the earliest operational uses of military railways occurred in 1849, when a Russian corps moved from Warsaw to Vienna to protect the city from Hungarian rebels. During the American Civil War, two Union corps—more than 20,000 troops, their equipment, and horses—moved 1,230 miles by rail in just eleven days in September 1864. 

Moltke made a careful study of the lessons of the American Civil War, and in 1870 the Germans made far more effective use of their rail system than the French did of theirs. All the European countries quickly developed dense rail networks, and the general staffs of all nations tirelessly studied how to put this strategic resource to best use, when war came again.

German Troop Depot, Western Front

20th-Century War

From the outbreak of World War I, railroads were the key means of logistical support and it also played a role in what operational mobility was achieved on the Western Front. As the fronts developed both sides developed dense rail network behind their lines. Generally, it is difficult to close down, or even temporarily neutralize a rail network.

While it is relatively easy to destroy signaling and switching equipment, that only slows down but does not stop rail movement. The roadbeds and track are much harder to destroy. The key vulnerabilities in a rail network are its choke points; tunnels, bridges, switching yards, and rail junctions. If a rail network is dense, single choke points generally have little military significance, because the system has ample bypasses and workarounds. For much of the war, planners focused on protecting their lines or, in some cases, driving the opposition away from key lines to prevent interdicting fire.

British Tanks Moving to the Front, 1918

Targeting Railroad Networks

It was not until the Western Front became fluid again in the Spring of  1918 that breaking the enemy's rail network became offensive objectives. The U.S. Meuse-Argonne Offensive, as mentioned above, successfully cut the main German line supplying all its forces along the southern Western Front. However, on the Flanders to Paris stretch of the Western Front the German system had far greater depth, very few if any significant choke points, and it ran straight back to the national base without having to link into seaports. Facing them, the British position in Flanders and the old Somme sector was not robust and had two significant choke points— its two major forward marshaling and switching yards at Amiens and Hazebrouck. Ludendorff's spring offensives failed to secure either of these locations. The British Army survived and was able to resume the offensive in August 1918. We will have more on this particular situation and why it might have constituted one of the great missed opportunities for the German Army in future postings on Roads to the Great War.

Source: Relevance, Fall 2011

A Second Blank Check? When Poincaré Went to St. Petersburg

President Poincaré and Tsar Nicholas II in St. Peterburg

On 20 July 1914 French Presided Raymond Poincaré and Prime Minister/ Foreign Minister  René Viviani  arrived in St. Petersburg on the French Battleship France for a state visit and three days of consultation with Tsar Nicholas II and his government.  The visit was aimed at reinforcing the Franco-Russian Alliance amid rising tensions in Europe following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. For over a century historians have disputed what degree of support the French delegation promised Russia in the evolving crisis before the departure. It had to have been made was the principals were together in Russia.  The Austro-Hungarian government  deliberately timed the delivery of the ultimatum to occur at 6:00 p.m. on 23 July 1914, specifically to ensure it happened after Poincaré and Viviani had departed St. Petersburg, limiting their immediate ability to coordinate a response with Russia. The battleship France would not arrive in its homeport, Dunkirk, until the 29th and given the state of communications in those days, there was little communications between the two governments as war broke out, when Austria-Hungary opened fire on Belgrade on 28 July.

The direction and degree to which the discussions conducted in St. Petersburg might have influenced Russian conduct during this period was addressed in a 2010 article published by the  Jervis International Security Forum, “French Foreign Policy in the July Crisis, 1914: A Review Article.” Here are some of the major insights raised by its author, Professor Marc Trachtenberg of UCLA.

Stefan Schmidt’s new book on French foreign policy in the July Crisis is a good case in point.[1] He begins by arguing that the French government—and above all, Raymond Poincare, President of the Republic, and the key French policy maker at the time—took a hard line during the crisis, and in particular in the important meetings held with the Russian leadership in St. Petersburg from July 20 to July 23. In itself this argument is by no means new. Luigi Albertini, in his great work on origins of the war, took much the same line. But given the limited evidence on that episode that was available when he wrote that book, Albertini’s interpretation was necessarily somewhat speculative. “The St. Petersburg conversations,” he wrote, “must have dealt above all with the Austro-Serbian tension and the eventualities that might result from it.”

But that interpretation was by no means universally accepted, and for years there was a certain tendency in the historical literature to play down the role that France had played during the crisis, and especially to minimize the importance of the St. Petersburg talks. France was often portrayed as caught up in events she was scarcely able to control. . . “There is no evidence,” John Keiger [another respected student of the War's origins] said flatly, “that during his visit to Russia Poincare did anything other than reaffirm the Franco-Russian alliance. He did not offer carte blanche in the event of a Balkan war. . . French policy in the crisis, according to Keiger, was “predicated on the notion of restraining Russia to avoid giving Germany a pretext for war.” 

Stefan Schmidt’s 2009 book France's Foreign Policy in the July Crisis of 1914: A Contribution to the History of the Outbreak of the First World War [takes a contrary position]. He begins by arguing that the French government—and above all, Raymond Poincaré, President of the Republic, and the key French policy maker at the time—took a hard line during the crisis, and in particular in the important meetings held with the Russian leadership in St. Petersburg from July 20 to July 23. 

Schmidt argues, Russia was in fact given the equivalent of a blank check at the St. Petersburg talks and after. France was not “dragged into” the war. As Maurice Paleologue, the French ambassador to Russia at the time, wrote in a 1936 letter to the historian Pierre Renouvin (published in a relatively obscure journal in 1997), what the French were afraid of at the time was not that they would be “dragged in” by Russia, but rather that France would be “poorly supported by Russia, in the event of a German attack.”

Schmidt shows, first of all, that Poincare had come to understand, shortly his arrival in Russia, how serious the Austro-Serbian dispute was, and how in fact Austria was about to present the Serbs with a sort of ultimatum—a “demarche comminatoire,” to use Poincaré’s own term at the time. This implied that in the St. Petersburg talks, Poincaré and the Russian leaders would have had to talk seriously about what Russia would do in such a case and the degree to which France would support those actions. 

And indeed it seems quite clear that this was exactly what happened. As Paleologue pointed out in his 1936 letter to Renouvin:  “‘war’ was certainly discussed in these talks, but only defensive war." M. Poincare, at the time, by no means concealed the fact that in these conversations he was thinking about the possibility of a conflict. Later on, in the context of the campaign about ‘Poincaré-la-guerre,’ he thought it would be better to give a different version.”  Louis de Robien, in 1914 the attaché in the French embassy in St. Petersburg, made the same point:  by 22 July, he wrote, the French and Russian leaders were “talking openly of a war, which no one had even dreamt of a few days earlier. . ."

What to make of the assurances that Paleologue gave the Russians right after the French leaders left St. Petersburg and news of the Austrian ultimatum was received in that city?  The French ambassador gave the Russians a “formal assurance that France placed herself unreservedly on Russia’s side.” But was Paleologue simply acting on his own? That was Keiger’s view:  “it is clear that Paleologue was acting independently of Paris.”

. . . In fact it seems quite likely, given everything that Schmidt was able to show about Poincaré and especially about the line he took in St. Petersburg, that Paleologue was carrying out what he knew to be the French president’s policy—a policy, to be sure, which he was personally in sympathy with. If Paleologue kept Paris in the dark—and he certainly did not give an adequate account of what he had told the Russians and of what he was learning from them—that was not because he was temperamentally inclined to play the lone cowboy. Schmidt thinks that his aim in doing so was to keep Viviani from pursuing a more moderate policy, not to act independently of Poincaré—and that interpretation seems quite plausible.

So the basic argument Schmidt develops in the first part of the book strikes me as very solid. The French government—and that meant essentially Poincare personally—did take a hard line in the crisis:  Russia, in fact, had effectively been given a blank check. . .

It’s in that context that it makes sense to ask some basic questions about French policy in 1914—about whether the hardline policy pursued by Poincaré was rational in power political terms, about whether it was in some sense natural, given the kind of great power political system that existed at the time, for France to pursue the sort of policy she did. . . 

Albertini, after spending years of his life trying to understand the coming of the First World War, concluded that the “utter lack of political horse-sense” was the “main cause of European disorders and upheavals.” The Schmidt book leaves you with much the same impression. These people in 1914 were not the victims of forces they were unable to control. The tragedy did not come because they were reacting in the only way they reasonably could to the situation in which they found themselves. It came because of decisions they made, decisions that could easily have been different—decisions, in fact, that remain deeply puzzling.