Of this gloomy drama the military historian Liddell Hart said: ‘So fruitless in its results, so depressing in its direction was this 1917 offensive, that “Passchendaele” has come to be … a synonym for military failure – a name black-bordered in the records of the British Army.’1
In the last year of the war the Germans, having knocked Russia out of the war, could turn to the Western Front and stage a ‘Somme battle’ of their own design. It was a massive attack, and some of the ideas employed in it were still in evidence in the blitzkrieg of the Second World War.
General Ludendorff – probably the most expert general on either side in the war – in Notes on Offensive Battles, published in 1918, drew attention to broad differences in the German approach. The British had based their attacks upon artillery schedules, he said. The ‘creeping barrage’ – which fell behind the advancing infantry as well as ahead of it – drove the British infantry forward. Men who lingered, and men immobilized by injuries, came under intense shellfire from their own guns. In such a scheme, said Ludendorff, commanders ceased to have proper control of their men. He condemned such tactics as wasteful and ineffective. Infantry should be used more flexibly, always seeking to get round behind the enemy on the flanks, and thus roll up the enemy and widen the attack.
The Germans did not disdain surprise. It was essential to these new methods. Specially selected men – storm-troops – would lead the assault. They’d use flamethrowers, have large canvas bags crammed full of hand-grenades, and be equipped with a revolutionary development of the machine-gun – the MP 18 machine-pistol. This was a small lightweight automatic, fitted with the barrel and 32-round magazine of the Luger pistol. It sprayed fire at about 400 rounds per minute and by the end of the war the Germans had put into use 35,000 of them.2
The opening of the attack was prepared in great secrecy. The storm-troops moved to jumping-off positions under cover of darkness. Artillery was not brought up to the place of attack until five days before it began; heavy mortars came two days before the attack. Such secrecy should have ensured surprise, but General Haig’s intelligence section described with considerable accuracy the attack that was about to come. Haig made no changes whatever to his dispositions and even confirmed high-level changes of command that came into effect just hours before the attack started.3 He decreed that the British tanks were spread out to be employed as static strong-points, in other words not tanks at all.
The Kaiser’s Battle, as the Germans named it, started on 21 March 1918 and was aided by fog and by Haig’s dispositions in depth. With much of his force too far forward, the unexpected penetration of the front caused a large section of his line to give way. By the 5 April he had lost 1,000 square miles of ground and 160,000 men (killed, wounded and taken prisoner) and many thought Haig’s army was on the verge of collapse.
And then, in May, 42 German divisions struck the French armies with such force that Foch issued preliminary orders to prepare for a final stand before Paris. In London the cabinet panicked and even discussed the time it would take to pull the British army out of France. This too was a harbinger of the blitzkrieg of 1940, the evacuation from Dunkirk, and the bitterness that followed it.
But the worst did not happen and the fighting stabilized. Haig put the British forces under the French commander Foch, and the German advance slowed. This time it was the British machine-guns that did the killing. One man remembered: ‘When I think of all those brave German infantry, walking calmly and with poise, into our murderous machine-gun fire, now, and as then, we had nothing but admiration for them. Unqualified courage! Poor devils.4
Ludendorff had restored mobility to the fighting, but tanks, which might have transformed the chances of success, were in short supply. On the first day he used four German A7 V tanks – clumsy 33-ton machines with 18 men inside – and five captured British Mark IVs. The British Official History says the British line was broken wherever the tanks appeared.’5
Even Ludendorff could not change the fact that, with machine-guns on the battlefield, attacks were costly. The greater resources of the Allies, with America now included, paid off as the Germans became exhausted by their successes. Front-line German troops were demoralized to find so much food and equipment piled up in the Allied rear areas. The Allied generals soon recovered their valour. They were drafting plans for ever more mighty battles to be fought in 1919 and 1920, when suddenly the Germans asked for an armistice.
There were a thousand explanations for the German collapse. The men and material from the United States, the strangulating effects of the naval blockade upon Germany’s food supply, the naval mutineers roaming through the streets of Kiel, the surrender of their Turkish allies, the break-up of Austria-Hungary, and so on. Even today the real reason for the German collapse is not clear and simple. Many Germans believed that they had been tricked. As they saw it, US President Wilson proposed a peace in which Germany kept her colonies and armies intact. Once fighting ceased the Germany army disengaged and could not be sent back to start fighting again. The Allies then dictated terms and divided Germany’s colonies between them. Whatever the reasons, the war came to an end, leaving the historians to continue hostilities by other means.
Throughout the war, troops from Canada, Australia and New Zealand proved to be particularly effective fighting soldiers, and Haig used them, like storm-troops, for most of the toughest attacks. The bloody fiasco at Passchendaele proved too much for the prime ministers of New Zealand and Canada, who had watched General Haig feeding their countrymen into his meat grinder. At a meeting of the imperial war cabinet on 13 June 1918, the New Zealand prime minister, William Massey, complained that his men had been sent against barbed-wire and shot down like rabbits. The Canadian prime minister, Sir Robert Borden, became so enraged that he was said to have grabbed the British prime minister – Lloyd George – by his coat lapels and shaken him vigorously.
Government and bureaucracy conspired to conceal the incompetence of the British commanders. Even three-quarters of a century later, vital documents and statistics of the First World War are still withheld from public scrutiny, and many papers are said to have been lost in the air raids of 1940. ‘Scholars have for long been dissatisfied with the patchy nature of the First World War records in the Public Record Office, which were clearly ruthlessly “weeded” before being made available to the public,’ said the historian Michael Howard.6
The official histories were apt to provide a constructive account of the war. Cyril Falls, who took the chair of Military History at Oxford University, said: ‘Our army was the best disciplined and the least effective in the war, though one can’t say so in the Official History.’7 Haig knew what to say, and it was his account of the war that went into the history books. He rewrote his diary to suit his public image, and the British government instructed the official historian to follow his falsified account. Then the original records were burned, which prevented other historians from discovering the truth. So it remained until Denis Winter pieced together a different account of Haig’s flawed generalship by using the papers stored in overseas archives.8
The public is not so easily fooled. They had seen so many sons go off to war armed with that sense of duty and dedication that is the currency of the young. Wives, sisters and daughters too had scoured the ever-lengthening casualty lists fluttering in the wind outside the town halls. Nearly a million British soldiers never returned home; of these over 700,000 were from Great Britain. About 2.5 million men were wounded. Even, if one includes the men serving in the lines of communication, those on home defence in Britain, and British army garrison troops in India and the Far East, it still means that of ten men joining the army, two were destined to be killed and five injured; only three would survive the war intact. Intact? These figures take no account of the psychological effects of the fighting and the long-term damage done by the various types of war gases. Pensions for the widows and the disabled were minuscule, and the cruelly contrived demands of postwar medical boards persuaded some veterans to