Verdun IV (and final!): Brusilov Offensive, the Somme, and Goodbye to All That

Falkenhayn realized by mid-March 1916 that Verdun was not the perfectly choreographed and one-sided battle he envisioned. He contemplated ending offensive operations and shutting down the Verdun front. However, he was overruled by the commanders of the IV and V Armies. They believed the heights and the fortresses commanding Verdun could still be seized and a stalemate transformed into a decisive victory. From March to early July, the Germans continued the offensive. German attacks in turn were met by French counterattacks as Petain received sufficient reinforcements to try and re-take some of the terrain lost in the first weeks. The result, despite some German gains in June, was a prolonged stalemate and mounting casualties. Formerly nondescript, neglected locales – Cote 304, The Dead Man [Dead Man’s Hill), Forts Vaux and Douamount – assumed a tantamount significance. They changed hands more than a dozen times in ferocious hand-to-hand fighting, transforming into magnetic epicenters of carnage. French and Germans alike suffered casualties of many hundreds, if not thousands, even on ‘quiet’ days.

Aleksei Brusilov, Russia’s most competent WWI commander whose intense loyalty to the troops fighting under him later prevented him from taking up arms against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution and Civil War.

The French government pleaded with her allies to launch an offensive to distract the Germans and relieve pressure on Verdun. This was in accordance with the strategic scheme agreed upon by the Entente Powers in late 1915, calling for simultaneous assaults along multiple fronts. The Russians, in accordance with their pledge of support, complied and launched an offensive in Lithuania-Latvia in March. The operation was rushed and bungled – logistics were never the Imperial Army’s forte. Thousands more Russian soldiers died in futile assaults or simply froze to death in the still-frigid Baltic climate and, worst of all, the offensive did not compel Falkenhayn to shift any reinforcements east. The lessons of the disastrous March offensive were [miraculously] taken to heart by the Russian General Staff. On June 4^th, the Russian army launched its greatest and for a time, seemingly successful, operation of the war. In command was Aleksei Brusilov, unquestionably the most competent Russian commander. He studied German infiltration tactics and understood the importance of massed firepower in modern war. On the appointed hour, Russian troops crashed against Austro-Hungarian defenders along a front several hundred miles long in southern Ukraine following a short but intense bombardment. Brusilov’s logic was that if he attacked everywhere, the Austrians would bulge somewhere, and his shock troops- who were encouraged to avoid prepared defensive positions to minimize loss of life and maximize depth penetration – could roll up the Austrian army. The two Austrian armies opposite Brusilov were shattered. In less than a week, the Russians took over 200,000 prisoners; Austrian losses approached half a million men by mid-June. Entire battalions of Austrian soldiers hailingfrom Slavic-speaking countries enthusiastically defected to the Russians. The first week of June was the darkest day thus far in the history of the Habsburg monarchy.

Russian soldiers and officers – note their awesome long beards! – in the early stages of the Brusilov Offensive, still flush with success and optimism.

Although Falkenhayn always believed that the Austrians were poor soldiers led by even poorer commanders (The Brusilov offensive vindicated his contempt of the Habsburg monarchy), he knew that a Habsburg collapse would be a complete disaster for Germany. The Germans were already hard pressed to find more troops to continue the attacks at Verdun; now, troops had to be ferried east – and quickly! – to prevent the entire eastern front from caving in. Not for the first time, the Germans made expert use of interior lines and their fine railroad system and by late-June, the fleeing Austro-Hungarian armies were reinforced and hardened by German veterans. The spectacular successes of the Brusilov offensive dissipated quickly. Logistics remained the Russian bugbear and Brusilov was soon in a position where he had too many men, too few guns, and too little ammunition for the guns he did have to maintain his initial momentum.

Falkenhayn’s command was by then untenable. Falkenhayn assured the Kaiser in late June that Romania would under no circumstances join the Entente. Unhappily, in July the Romanian government declared war on the Central Powers and threw its 500,000 strong army in support of Russia in the Carpathian-Ukrainian front. Up until then, Romania had been neutral and both sides attempted to more or less buy Romania’s support. Her German-born king wanted to support the Central Powers while the Francophile industrial and landholding magnates backed the Entente. The Romanian government was misled by Brusilov’s initial success and decided to enter the war before the Central Powers collapsed so that it might profit at the peace table. With Romania’s entry, Falkenhayn was wholly discredited. His scheme of winning the war in the west failed at Verdun. In contrast, in the east his rivals Ludendorff and Hindenburg preceded from triumph to triumph against the Russians. To pour salt into the wound, Falkenhayn was assigned the command of German-Austrian troops in the Carpathian front and assigned the task of defeating the Romanians. He was immensely successful against the Romanians, whose large but ill-equipped and poorly trained army was a paper tiger- and he soon overran the country. Germany benefited immensely by stripping Romania of its rich oil and wheat resources which helped negate for a time the effect of the British blockade. But he was no longer in charge of the war. Ludendorff and Hindenburg were now entrusted by the Kaiser to win the war in the West on the Eastern Front.

The situation in the Eastern Front, beginning in early Autumn 1916.

The Brusilov offense ground to a halt by mid-September. The Russian and Austrian armies were exhausted beyond compare. The ‘victorious’ Russian casualties exceeded a million; the Austrians 800,000. However, as so often the case in the First World War, events on the east were overshadowed by those on the west. On July 1^st, the British Fourth Army under the command of Sir Douglas Haig and the French Fourth Army under Ferdinand Foch launched the Battle of the Somme. Somme is to British historiography, mythology, and national memory what Verdun is to France and Germany: synonymous with the image of the war of “mud, blood, and futility” in the West.

The BEF at Mons in August 1914, its first operation in the Great War and a sobering lesson for its men.

The Battle of the Somme was the first major offensive spearheaded by the British Army in the Western Front. The BEF fought in the Battles of the Frontiers, Marne, and Ypres under overall French operational schemes. Quite simply, Britain in 1914 and 1915 did not have enough troops in the Continent to assume sole responsibility for a considerable part of the lines or conduct individual operations. The British 1914 army was a professional force; man for man it was in-arguably the finest army in the world when the war broke out. But it was simply too small and inadequately supported by artillery and logistics to conduct continental war on the scale practiced by Germany and France. By the end of the Race to the Sea in late fall 1914, the BEF existed in name only. Its veteran cadres were badly mauled, many units were at below 50 percent strength, and its ranks filled not with career soldiers but by civilians many of whom had never before handled a gun. The British army in 1915 and the first half of 1916 suffered an acute shortage of trained men. Because it did not practice conscription in the 19^th century, Britain lacked the massive reserve formations which France, Russia, Germany and smaller states like Serbia and Italy relied on from the start of the war.

The legendary recruiting poster with Field Marshal Kitchener’s likeness.

Lord Kitchener, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, oversaw a massive propaganda and recruiting campaign in Britain at the beginning of the war. Young men by the millions rushed to join the army; Kitchener’s famous slogan “your country needs you” obviously struck a powerful chord with young and middle-aged Britons. Patriotism alone did not compel young men to join the army. Fear of public shame and dishonor played a crucial role: In many towns and villages, local women would go out in packs hunting for men who, in their opinion, had not done their patriotic duty. When they found such a man, they would harangue and humiliate him in public. As a final gesture of his cowardice, they pinned a white feather – as in the Kipling tale – to the man’s lapel so all passers-by could attest to his shame. Men would sometimes hide in their homes all day when they saw a flock of their patriotic sisters descend into town. Others, who were employed in critical war-related industries and therefore were considered indispensable workers on the home front, requested special dispensations from the government attesting to the fact that they were more useful at home than on the front lines to protect themselves from public shaming.

The Bradford Pals – the Addingham company of 20th West Riding Volunteers- before departing for the Somme in early 1916.

Incentives were offered to enlist. Friends from a particular town or country could sign up for service together and then serve in the same unit, forming so-called “Pals” battalions. Towns around the British countryside today are littered with monuments to those that died in the war. If you were to examine them closely, you would find that on many monuments the departed share the same, or similar, final day. When Pals battalions went into battle, it was wholly possible for the bulk of the young, healthy, male population of a whole village or town to be decimated in an afternoon, either left dead on the battlefield or ferried back home as invalids. British soldiers In 1916 fought with, and died with, their kin, friends, and neighbors.

This army of raw, fresh-faced recruits assembled in 1914 and 1915. It is remembered as “Kitchener’s army” and its troopers as “Kitchener’s boys” in honor of the man who oversaw and organized their recruitment. By mid-1916, the British government was forced to institute conscription for the first time in its modern history to make up for the losses suffered in the Dardenelles, the Western Front, and the Middle Eastern campaigns against the Ottomans. As a result, the British army of 1917 and 1918 began to resemble its Continental counterparts. But in 1916 these conscripts were still not in Europe. The Somme would be fought by Kitchener’s boys, the last all-volunteer army left in the war.

Field Marshal Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig, KT, GCB, OM, GCVO, KCIE, ADC…. advertising cigarettes… which were dispensed to the soldiers on the Front as part of their rations.

An apocryphal quote by a German general described the British army as “lions led by donkeys.” Few generals in world history, rightly or wrongly, have been derided as a donkey more often than Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British Army in the West. Haig was like his predecessor Sir John French a cavalryman. It might seem odd that a cavalry officer would assume command of the largest infantry force fighting in the largest infantry and artillery based war in British history. However, Haig’s steadfastness and sangfroid at the Battle of the First Ypres were much admired and he earned a reputation as a fighting general. Ironically, Haig’s formerly admirable sangfroid would later be dismissed as indifference to human suffering and he is remembered as a careless picture, personifying the alienation between the common fighting man in the trenches and the officer sipping champagne in a chateau miles behind the front.

Haig chose to attack at the Somme because it was the point in the Entente line where the French and British contingents met. An offensive at the Somme offered the greatest chance of mutual cooperation and support between the two armies. Like virtually all WWI operations, planning and preparation required months. When he launched the attack on Verdun, Falkenhayn expected the British would eventually launch an offensive to the north to relieve pressure and draw reinforcements away from Verdun. Although German defenses at the Somme were not in peak condition – men and guns had both been transferred to Verdun earlier – they still posed a daunting obstacle to an attacker. Haig hoped to begin the attack in August 1916, but incessant pleadings from his French allies moved the attack forward to July 1^st. This illustrates just how inter-connected the battles of Verdun and the Somme were operationally and strategically.

The sheer quantity of material WWI armies required made it impossible to conceal the attacker’s intention. Like Falkenhayn at Verdun, Haig ordered the construction of multiple railroad lines to ferry troops and munition to the front. Beginning in May, troops and guns were shifted from other sectors to the Somme’s bank, deployments which the Germans observed from their prepared positions. The sector of the Somme assigned to the British was garrisoned by German soldiers who for more than a month knew an attack was imminent and who trained for it incessantly. German defensive techniques practiced in 1916 were much improved from their 1914 variant. New drills included measuring to the second how long it took infantry to jump from the artillery trench and take their positions by the machine guns of the front trench. Germans perfected the art of trench building: Many had their walls supported entirely with wood, decorated with wallpaper, and blessed with interior plumbing. A few might even be described as comfortable. They provided a superb defensive against shrapnel fire in particular and, tragically for the British Fourth Army, the bombardment plan for the Somme armed most artillery with shrapnel rather than explosive shells.

Haig’s troops going ‘over the top’ at the First Day of the Somme.

British soldiers going over the top on July 1^st and their commanders had to know that they were unprotected by any element of surprise. They knew that the Germans knew what was coming. But Haig gambled on the assumption that artillery fire might destroy the first lines of German defenses and leave the infantry with a simple mopping up operation. The preparatory bombardment was certainly the most impressive in the history of the British army. British artillery fired almost 1.5 million shells in the five days before the battle to soften up the Germans; this was more shells than the BEF artillery fired off in the WHOLE of 1914 in the West. Unfortunately, as stated earlier, British artillery fired primarily shrapnel which is terribly deadly to infantry in the open but almost useless against prepared, subterranean defenses. The bombardment must have been terrible to behold – it was so loud that witnesses in Hampstead 300 miles away from the battle could hear it – but it failed in its primary goal of tearing up the German trenches and the massive clumps of barbed wire separating the two armies.

British casualties at the first day of the Somme were frightful, even by exacting WWI standards.

Corporal W.H. Shaw of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers took part in the first wave of the assault on the Somme: “Our artillery hadn’t made any impact on those barbed-wire entanglements.   The result was we never got anywhere near the Germans.   Our lads were mown down.   They were just simply slaughtered.   You were either tied down by the shelling or the machine-guns and yet we kept at it, making no impact on the Germans at all. And those young officers, going ahead, they were picked off like flies. We tried to go over and it was just impossible. We were mown down” Lord Kitchener’s dictum that those who ‘joined together should fight together’ ensured that they would also die together. Communities were devastated within hours, if not minutes on July 1^st. As Sergeant David S. Morton of the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion wrote back home: “ Up till now, I have made it a rule to write to the next of kin of any of our men who have fallen out here, but in the present circumstances it is beyond me to continue this practice.   I have no course open to me but to ask you to send this letter to the Glasgow papers for publication.   I should like to express to all the relatives of those who have died, my sincerest sympathy with them in their present sorrow. It may be some consolation to know that the battalion walked into action as steadily as if it had been on the Parade ground, and I cannot adequately express my feeling of admiration for the spirit, gallantry, and daring with which all faced their terrible task.”

British order of battle on July 1 at the Somme.

On July 1^st, the largest, most enthusiastic, patriotic, and most inexperienced army in the history of the British Empire paid the price for its commanders’ failure to learn the lessons the French and Germans internalized in 1914. General Edward Spears, the British military liaison to the French army in both world wars, remembered: “My memory was seared with the picture of the French and British attacking together on the Somme on July 1st 1916, the British rigid and slow, advancing as at a military parade in lines which were torn and ripped by the German guns, while the French tactical formations, quick and elastic, secured their objectives with trifling loss. It had been a terrible spectacle. As a display of bravery it was magnificent. As an example of tactics its very memory made me shudder.” At the first battle of the Ypres, divisions of untrained and sublimely patriotic German university students and youths marched arm-in-arm against the most elite formations of the British army: The Blackwatch, the Blues and Royals, the Coldstream Guards, the Irish Guards, the Howards…That day at Ypres was dubbed by contemporaries as the “Massacre of the Innocents.” It is a testament to the carnage suffered by the BEF on July 1^st that the Massacre of the Innocents is almost entirely forgotten today.

The BEF suffered between 57 and 65 thousand casualties on July 1^st; 20,000 killed and 40,000 wounded is a commonly accepted estimate. Sixty percent of British officers involved on the first day were killed as they led their troops from the front, sabers in hand. When the macabre game of trying to locate the bloodiest day and place in the history of warfare, July 1^st on the Somme is frequently cited as a candidate.

Results of the first month’s fighting at the Somme: Note the greater penetration on the French sector.

Haig cannot be solely blame for the supposed debacle of the First Day of the Somme. The British and French armies attacked in concert on July 1^st and Foch’s troops claimed almost all their Day-1 objectives with comparatively light casualties. Most of the ~10,000 German casualties on July 1^st were sustained at the hands of the French. The southern sector assigned to the French VI army was poorly defended and inadequately manned in comparison to the positions facing the British army. Moreover, Foch and his subordinates by mid-1916 had two years of experience at trench warfare. French artillery fire was more effective because its gunners had the advantage of two years of trial-and-error to fine tune tactics against prepared positions. French infantry had also grown crafty; like the Germans, the French developed advanced small unit tactics, NCOs and junior officers learned how to avoid strong-points, and individual soldiers used cover and suppressing fire more effectively.

Kitchener’s army was still a parade army. As one of its veterans later remembered, British soldiers had been “taught everything except what to do when we failed.” British artillery was especially inexperienced. Even units with combat experience in the late-Victorian ‘little’ Imperial wars were accustomed to fighting against poorly armed natives who were frequently overawed by the dim and loudness of modern artillery. Therefore, British counter-artillery doctrine was rudimentary and its gunners made the mistake of not using high explosive shells against dug in infantry. Finally, Haig and Rowlinson in overall command were still inexperienced at coordinating artillery and infantry at the extent required at the Somme and the challenge of attacking on a broad 13-division front challenged the logistical competence of the BEF.

British troopers cheering the MK 1 battle tank, first used at the Somme. By the end of the year, the French, Germans, and Russians would all introduce their own tank models to the fighting.

The monotony of daily killing at Somme should not however be confused with a tactical, intellectual, or technological atrophy. Most importantly, the Somme witnessed the battlefield debut of the tank. The tank had been in development since 1915. It was intended as the ‘miracle’ weapon that could negate the defensive strengths of trench warfare and reintroduce mobility and maneuver to the Western front. On September 15^th, the British used tanks for the first time in history. Fifty tanks, fifteen of which broke down before they reached the front line, were used as the spearhead of an assault on German defensive positions. These early tanks were not the lightning quick, sleek fighting machines we associate with blitzkrieg and WWII. They were hulking, unwieldy contraptions, weighing in at 30 tons each. Mounted on caterpillar tracks, they were manned by a crew of four to eight. The Mark I tank used at the Somme had no interior ventilation system; tank crews suffered 100+ degree heat and were exposed to a litany of potentially deadly fumes such as engine exhaust. It was not uncommon for tank crews to suffocate or pass out from such extreme conditions. Their caterpillar treads allowed tanks to drive over trenches but did not prevent them from getting stuck in seemingly benign terrain. Tank-to-tank communication was a shambles. Their top speed was 4 miles per hour which coupled with their unreliability in rough terrain made them ideal targets for shellfire. The first German defenders to face the tank on the 15^th were terrified and fled the trenches. However, the attacking tanks soon got stuck in the mud and explosive craters and the attack petered out.As in so many WWI assaults, momentum could not be maintained and counter-attacks reversed earlier gains. Nevertheless, the tank marked a way forward, a way out of the trap of trench warfare. Douglas Haig wrote to the War Office after witnessing the entry of the tank into war and requested he be supplied with 1000 more tanks for the following year. Winston Churchill, one of the prime advocates of tank development during his time as Naval Minister, only regretted that the BEF jumped the gun by unleashing tanks on the Germans before there were enough for them to have a decisive effect. Churchill believed that had Haig only waited to attack until he had several hundred tanks, the war could have been decided in an afternoon.

The rain and mud posed potentially lethal dangers to soldiers at the Somme. Here we see British troops helping carry a wounded comrade out of dank, muddy trench.

Fighting on the Somme continued until mid-November. Pitiable and heroic acts were commonplace. British author Robert Graves volunteered in August, 1914 because he was so outraged- like many Britons – by the German invasion of Belgium. Graves was seriously wounded at the Somme when a piece of shrapnel pieced his chest and thighs. He was so grievously injured that the Army mistakenly published his obituary and sent a condolence letter to his father. Graves recuperated from his injuries and returned to the front lines. In his memoirs Goodbye to All That, he described a scene which must have occurred many times at places like Verdun and the Somme which deeply traumatized the young and sensitive poet: “Sampson lay groaning about twenty yards beyond the front trench. Several attempts were made to rescue him. He was badly hit. Three men got killed in these attempts: two officers and two men, wounded. In the end his own orderly managed to crawl out to him. Sampson waved him back, saying he was riddled through and not worth rescuing; he sent his apologies to the company for making such a noise. At dusk we all went out to get the wounded, leaving only sentries in the line. The first dead body I came across was Sampson. He had been hit in seventeen places. I found that he had forced his knuckles into his mouth to stop himself crying out and attracting any more men to their death.”

German troops getting some much needed and deserved respite from the horrors of Verdun and Somme.

Like other WWI battles, the Somme consisted of smaller, simultaneous engagements at obscure places like Bazentin Ridge, Delville Wood, Guillemont, Ginchy, and Ancre. Overall casualty numbers are debated to this day: The French and British took a minimum of 600,000 casualties while estimates of German casualties vary dramatically from 250,000 to 500,000. The British exchanged approximately 1000 men for each 100 yards of ground. How could European nations withstand such losses? More importantly, how could soldiers at the front, witnessing their friends bleed out or be decapitated by shrapnel day after day after day keep sane, much less keep fighting? Consider the mental anguish of fighting in the First World War. The night before an assault, soldiers of a particular battalion or regiment would be informed that they were to attack the next day. These soldiers for weeks beforehand witnessed or participated in a dozen such attacks; after all, 80 percent of the French Army witnessed Verdun and almost the whole of the 1916 BEF fought at the Somme. Think of how many ‘farewell’ letters must have been written in 1916 alone. Most of these letters were written to their mothers, which should give us a sense of the age of their authors. What must it have felt like going to bed the night before with the expectation that you would well not see the next evening? Or that you might see it but never be able to walk again? Or worst of all, that you would have to witness it lying wounded, bleeding out, and crying out helpless in No Man’s Land? F. Scott Fitzgerald offered an oft-cited explanation Tender is the Night:

“This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers… This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurttemberg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle—there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”

Post-war commemorations of the First World War in Britain and France, and especially commemorations of the battles of Verdun and the Somme, recapitulated the theme ‘never again.’ Verdun and the Somme are marked as Entente victories in most history books. The German strategy for 1916 was foiled; at Verdun, territory lost in February and March had been recaptured by December and at the Somme, the BEF advanced approximately 10 miles. As a matter of fact, the BEF as a fighting force improved immeasurably during the Somme campaign. Without the ‘training’ at modern, industrial warfare gained there, the British army could never have fought and won the pivotal battles of 1918. The learning curve was steep for the BEF, just as it had been for France, Germany, and Russia earlier in the war. Surprisingly, even the bloodiest months of Verdun and the Somme were not as bloody as the first months of the war. On a day-by-day basis, the Battles of the Frontiers, the Marne, and the Race to the Sea were bloodier than the 1916 battles. But the difference was that the 1914 battles were fought in the expectation that the war would be over soon. In 1916, this optimism was gone and the casualties became predictable. Men continued to die in thousands even when no offensive was underway. The randomness of death, coupled with its predictably, resigned many soldiers to their fates and strengthened the pacifistic inclinations of many who prior to 1914 considered war a noble and patriotic endeavor and a fine way to solve international problems and engender national renewal.

Fragment of the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme battlefields bears the names of 72,194 officers and men of the United Kingdom, Canadian, and South African forces killed at the Somme Sector that have no known graves.

Duringthe years between the World Wars, Franco-British commemorations of the 1916 battles displayed an unresolved tension between the narrative of hard-won triumph and sacrifice and the counter-narrative of futility and muddy death. Thanks to the epic battles of 1916, war in the Western world changed in how it was fought and how it was fundamentally understood. The ways in which politicians and masses in Germany, France, and Britain remembered the battles of 1916 ultimately played a pivotal role in their politics in the years leading up to the Second World War and also the manner in which they fought Europe’s second 20^th century cataclysm.