Originally presented in the British Journal for Military History, February 2016
Winning the total war of 1914 to 1918 required the total mobilization of societies. While scholars of the war often treat that statement as axiomatic, William Philpott has given us the best-detailed analysis of that process to date. He identifies attrition as involving five factors: the land battlefield; the maritime battlespace; the home front; the diplomatic front; and the alliance front. In order to win the war, the Allies had to defeat the Central Powers on all five. More importantly, they had to do so over time, husbanding resources, reorienting their societies, and suffering casualties at levels equal to or less than those of their enemies.
Attrition has ever since carried a negative connotation, and well it should. As a strategy it counts on winning a war by killing men at “acceptable” ratios rather than seeking territory or some other carefully defined objective that could produce victory. It is anything but Clausewitzian, as it does not set political goals; killing precedes war aims rather than following logically from them. Attrition could become, as one wag quipped, a way of winning the war by having the last two soldiers of your army bayonet the last two soldiers of the enemy’s army, then toast their success with prune juice. On the more intellectual level, attrition proved that modern warfare had come a long way from the period of the German Wars of Unification. Casualties had become not an unpleasant adjunct of military campaigns, but their goal. Instead of close, carefully managed battles like Königgratz/Sadowa, World War I featured months long campaigns designed to (as the euphemism went) wear out the enemy’s reserves.
Philpott argues that the generals (if not always the politicians) of the World War I era understood this transformation of war quite well. They recognized in 1914 that winning would require years of bloody, murderous attrition on a number of levels. The gruesomeness of a strategy intended to kill millions failed to appeal to the politicians, for obvious reasons. They often reacted by looking for quick fixes like (in the Allied case) Gallipoli and the Nivelle Offensive or (in the German case) unrestricted submarine warfare. These fixes, Philpott argues, seemed to promise an alternative to mass murder, but never yielded anything close to victory, as indeed the attritional generals knew all along.
Most scholars have identified Lord Kitchener as the prophet of this type of warfare, building up Great Britain’s New Armies in anticipation of using them in 1916 or 1917. Philpott argues that he was far from alone. Both French General Joseph Joffre and (perhaps more controversially) British Field Marshal Douglas Haig saw attrition as the way to victory, notwithstanding the latter’s hope for breakthroughs on the Somme and at Passchendaele. Philpott thus argues (correctly) that Erich von Falkenhayn’s murderous plan for the battle of Verdun was not the novel approach to war that readers of Alistair Horne’s The Price of Glory have taken it to be. Rather, it was simply another in a long, gruesome line of attritional battles designed to kill men in unprecedented numbers.
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That attrition became the route to victory should not blind us to its enormous human and social costs. The soldiers of the war understood full well how they were being used, leading to events like the mutiny on the Chemin des Dames, the Revolution in Russia, and the disillusion of men like Rudolph Binding, whom Philpott quotes extensively. Attrition also meant that the warring powers had to adapt their domestic and imperial systems to find the resources they needed in enormous numbers. It further meant that they had to tolerate the moralizing of Woodrow Wilson, the leader of the one country whose resources could tip the balance. Attrition: Fighting the First World War thus stands out as a major contribution, even in this period of renewed scholarly attention to the war.
MICHAEL NEIBERG, US Army War College
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