World War One: why it was totally terrible

By DAVID MYTON

The renowned 19th century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz declared that war “is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will” - thus the enemy’s military power must be destroyed so it cannot continue to fight. The best strategy, says Clausewitz, is “always to be very strong”, while defeating the enemy requires “the sum of all available means”.

Clausewitz would have had in mind conflicts such as the Napoleonic wars (1799-1814) - terrible and bloody for those involved but nevertheless limited in scale. By the 20th century Clausewitz’s notion that “war is a mere continuation of policy by other means” had acquired a whole new meaning - combat had become far more terrible than he could possibly imagine because politicians and generals could harness the full productive resources of the state to prosecute conflict.

Around now 110 years ago the conflict that became known as World War One was slowly morphing into something humanity had never experienced – a colossal Total War.

It was a war unlike any before it in its scale, complexity, constantly developing technology, new automatic weapons, aircraft, tanks, submarines, and unprecedented large and well-equipped armies.

All military commanders were out of their depth because they were not prepared for the conflict that unfolded. They had to adapt or die, either literally or metaphorically.

Everything they had learned about strategy, operations and tactics became redundant in an unprecedented horrorscape of blood and mud. As historian Professor Gary Sheffield says, the war represented a “clash of 20th century technology with 19th century military science”.

The conditions for this state of affairs were established just weeks into the conflict when German General Helmuth von Moltke’s re-jigging of the Schlieffen Plan proved to be fatally flawed. The German advance through Belgium into France - intended as a massive Bewegungskrieg (war of maneuver) - was blocked by the Allies first at the Battle of the Marne, and later at the Aisne and Ypres.

It was the closest the Germans got to winning the war on the Western Front.

However, they were able to regroup and dig in at Flanders in Belgium … and so was born the nightmare of trench warfare with its mud, machine-guns, gas, barbed wire, and massed artillery – and the relentless, murderous slaughter of the “over the top” infantry advances out of trenches that ran from the Swiss frontier to the North Sea. Defence would win over attack almost every time.

There was war in Eastern Europe too: Russia faced off Germany and Austria- Hungary across a Front that ran from the Baltic in the north to the Black Sea in the south, taking in Romania, Poland, East Prussia, and Bulgaria. By war’s end the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were no more, but new nations would emerge in which the state itself would manage economic, social and ideological functions.

This was a war that, for the first time, was waged in all domains - on land, in the air, and on and under the sea.

Civilians in the cross-hairs

That it would be different to previous conflicts was foreshadowed on December 16 1914 when the German High Seas Fleet bombarded the British east coast towns of Hartlepool, Whitby and Scarborough, killing around 122 civilians and damaging homes and other non-threatening buildings. The message was clear: civilians were fair game.

On February 4 1915 Germany imposed a submarine blockade of Britain (simultaneously laying thousands of mines) and then on February 18 declared the waters around the British Isles a war zone where all ships, enemy or neutral, would be sunk on sight. On May 7 1915 a German submarine torpedoed and sank the liner Lusitania with the loss of 1100 passengers including many Americans. This assault on civilians paved the way for America’s eventual joining the war.

Meanwhile, Britain’s Royal Navy blockaded Germany in the North Sea and Baltic, substantially reducing imports, whilst also interdicting German shipping in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, and capturing many of Germany's overseas colonies. Civilians again would suffer from food shortages.

A new form of combat emerged in 1915-16 that demonstrated the new reality that the war of armies had become the war of peoples - war from the air. It was a deadly innovation that would grow in destructive power over subsequent years,

Beginning in January, German Zeppelin raiders bombed targets along the south and east coasts of England and although they did little material damage and caused fewer than 2000 casualties but about one sixth of the total normal output of munitions was lost.

The new air war intensified over time, moving from visual reconnaissance to target photography and air-to-air combat as well as the bombing of tactical targets. In July 1918 the British bombed a German ammunition train at Thionville behind the Marne battlefield, causing extensive damage to infrastructure and delaying German troop movements “which helped to turn the tide of the war”, according to historian Basil Liddle Hart.

Accelerated ‘moral disintegration’

Also in 1918 the newly-created RAF (formerly the Royal Flying Corps) attacked targets in the Rhineland which “accelerated the moral disintegration” of civilian populations (Liddle Hart). Germany conducted several air raids on civilian targets in England which, although they caused little damage and relatively few casualties, nevertheless inspired much fear.

The war on the sea, under the sea, and in the air grew more deadlier and destructive over the course of the war - for example, Britain’s naval blockade of Germany severely reduced its imports resulting in German civilians experiencing “an absolute shortage of food” and creating much distress.

In World War One the civilian factory producing military arms and equipment became vital to the war effort - without it, the soldiers at the front would have endured an even greater struggle for survival and defeat would have seemed more certain.

This war of the factories was extraordinary - from 1914-1918 Britain’s workers (including many women) produced four million rifles, 250,000 machine guns, 250,000 artillery pieces, some 170 million artillery shells, 2,800 tanks, and 250,000 aircraft.

For the British (and undoubtedly other European nations) this was the first major conflict in which deaths in battle outnumbered deaths caused by disease. Across Europe, millions of citizens, again including many women, also worked in agriculture, planting and gathering the food without which no-one (including soldiers) would survive.

The vast armies of the Western and other Fronts essentially were made up of men who until very recently were civilians: across Europe and the various Colonies some 65 million men volunteered or were conscripted to fight in mass civilian armies - including five million British and 7.5 million French.

This was a global war: more than 30 nations declared war between 1914-1918, most opting to side with the British and French. Volunteers came from across Asia, Australia and New Zealand, while some 2.5 million Africans served as soldiers or labourers.

Fighting occurred not only on the Western Front, but also in Eastern and South East Europe, in Africa and the Middle East. One such conflict took place in the Gallipoli peninsula in 1915, when British, Australian, New Zealand and other allied troops attempted to knock Turkey out of the war, break through to Constantinople and beyond, and so threaten the so-called “soft underbelly” of the Central Powers. Thanks to inept strategy and tactics, and an underestimation of their Turkish opponents, it failed dismally - the Allies withdrawing after several months of fruitless battle.

On most fronts, soldiers faced fighting conditions unlike anything seen in previous conflicts. The Germans employed poison gas - chlorine - on the Western Front at the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915, whilst the British retaliated in kind at Loos in September. Extremely lethal Phosgene was the gas of choice in 1916, fired at the enemy by artillery but countered to an extent by more efficient gas masks.

Tanks (36 of the primitive first versions) were used by the British at the Somme in September 1916 but were largely ineffective. However, they were to have a much bigger impact in November 1917 when 381 of the improved beasts were unleashed to great effect at Cambrai.

In March 1918, following the collapse of Russia and Romania, Germany’s Field Marshal Erich Ludendorff launched a massive offensive which pushed through a 47 mile gap on the Western Front astride the Somme Valley from Arras to Le Fere, forcing the British to hastily retreat.

But in May he bumped into something new - an American army commanded by General John Pershing. Led by numerous tanks American, British and French troops attacked his north-east flank at the Marne salient. To add to the new-look war making, Allied aircraft bombed and strafed the enemy at Amiens - the Germans were at last broken and hostilities ceased at 11am on November 11, 1918. The “war to end all war” was over.

One million British, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian and other allied troops were dead, while 2,289,860 were wounded. Some 2,037,000 German soldiers were killed across all fronts in the war, whilst the Central Powers in total lost around four million. Up to 13 million civilians perished through military action, disease, starvation and genocide.

In the words of Clausewitz, war is a political instrument - “an act of violence to compel the enemy to fulfil our will”. Total war is violence at its most dreadful.

REFERENCES

Roger Chickering and Stig Forster, Great War, Total War. Combat and Mobilisation On The Western Front, 1914-18, German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2000

Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Penguin Books 1968 (first published as Vom Kriege, 1832) - edited by Anatol Rapoport

B H Liddell Hart, History Of The First World War, Book Club Associates, London, 1970

Bernard Montgomery, A History of Warfare, Collins, London, 1968

David Stevenson, The military history of the First World War: an overview and analysis, Gresham College lecture November 18, 2014

John Terraine, White Heat. The New Warfare 1914-18, Leo Cooper, London, 1992

Imperial War Museum, ‘Five Things You Need To Know About The First World War’.