The Indian Army in World War I, 1914-1918

Ian Cardozo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000458671
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: History

This volume recounts India's contribution to World War I.

Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

Chapter 1
Causes and Events that Led to World War I: Footfalls of History

Do not go to war without knowing how it ends

ANONYMOUS

FROM THE BEGINNING to the middle of the nineteenth century, countries in Europe maintained a balance of power that helped to keep the peace and to prevent wars involving two or more countries. Despite this effort, the growing rivalry between France and Prussia for the mastery of Europe was moving towards criticality. In July 1870 war broke out between France and Prussia. The war ended in 1871 resulting in a victory for the Prussians and the unification of Germany. By terms of the peace treaty, France had to surrender the eastern state of Alsace and much of Lorraine. This period could be considered as the start of the rise of Germany’s ambition to become a world power. It also resulted in a burning desire by France to avenge its defeat and to recover its lost territories.

Around this time, the Ottoman Empire was breaking up. Turkey was considered to be the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ and became fair game for major and minor European powers to help themselves by armed force during the First and Second Balkan wars to annex large portions of the Ottoman Empire. Egypt and Cyprus went to Britain, Morocco and Tunis went to France, Tripoli (Libya) went to Italy and Bosnia-Herzegovina went to Austria-Hungary. All these events, particularly the last, resulted in putting the Balkan states in turmoil.

The struggle for the Balkans, however, did not end with the cessation of hostilities. Russia, Serbia and the Hapsburgs still contended for control over the Balkans. Russia wanted dominance over the Slavs, Austria-Hungary wanted to be a bridge to the East through the Balkans, and Serbia wanted access to the sea. The Hapsburgs were also considered to be ‘sick’ and European powers also looked covetously at what they could annex from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

German ambition, however, was the catalyst that led to the unrest in Europe and constituted a major cause that led to World War I. United by Otto von Bismark before and after the First and Second Balkan wars, Germany had become a major economic and military power. Her aggressive political and

Military Alliances in 1914 [SOURCE: IAN CARDOZO AND RISHI KUMAR, INDIA IN WORLD WAR I: AN ILLUSTRATED STORY, 2014]

economic policies and her phenomenal military expansion caused apprehension and fear amongst the other European powers. As the balance of power altered, some European powers began to form military alliances to safeguard their own national interests. This resulted in two opposing camps.

Austria-Hungary and Germany signed an agreement in 1879 and were joined by Italy in 1882 to form the ‘Triple Alliance’. In response to the Triple Alliance, Britain and France joined together with an Agreement in 1904 known as the ‘Entente Cordiale’. They were joined by Russia in 1907. Thus by 1914, Europe had become divided into two major power groups.

The threats caused by these political alignments were accentuated by an arms race that began in 1898 and continued till and during the Great War. Germany continued to build a world class navy to rival that of Britain. Britain matched the German naval build-up by introducing the big gun dreadnought class of battleships. These developments powered the rival naval build-up.

Map Showing The Balkan Area [SOURCE: WORLD WARS, MILES KELLY PUBLISHING, ESSEX, 2006]

The Balkans lie between the Black, Adriatic and Aegean seas. In 1912, it was made up of Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania and Montenegro. Both the Ottoman and Austrian empires ruled large areas of the Balkans. All the smaller countries of the Balkans had at one point of time been part of the Ottoman Empire. Some of them wanted to be free from the rule of the Ottomans. Austria felt that these small states wanting to become independent would threaten the security of her own possessions in the Balkans and opposed their expansion, especially Serbia, which was the most powerful of them all. The Ottoman Empire which was passing through a weak phase wanted to hold on to its possessions. However, on 8 October 1912, the tiny country of Montenegro invaded the Ottoman Empire. Within ten days, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece had joined the war and the Ottoman Empire was defeated within a few months.¹

The Balkan wars in fact, were a continuation of the process of various ethnic groups to free themselves from foreign powers. The Austro-Hungarian Empire still ruled over the Slavs. Next door, Russia wanted to rescue the Slav territories from Austria and Hungary and unite them into one Slav state. The Italian-Turkish war of 1911–12 and the two Balkan wars of 1912–13 left Eastern Europe in a state of ferment. Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia had attacked the Turks and pushed them out of Macedonia. Turkey thereby had lost almost all her European possessions and was seething with dissatisfaction.

The Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria [SOURCE: WEBSITE – HISTORICAL FIREARMS]

In May 1913, Russia, Austria, Britain, and France organized a peace conference. In the Treaty of London, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Serbia and Greece were each given parts of the Ottoman Empire which was reduced to the area around Constantinople and a new country Albania was created. On 29 June 1913, Bulgaria was attacked by Greece, Serbia and Rumania and had to give up the areas it had gained under the Treaty of London.²

Webs of distrust and suspicion now prevailed all over Europe, caused primarily by ambitions, fears, and agendas of European states vying with each other for territories that were not theirs. These internecine squabbles between the small Balkan states accentuated the rivalries that already existed between the major European powers. This set the stage for a war that would eventually engulf Europe and the world.

The struggle for Eastern Europe pitted Germany and Austria, the Germanic powers, against Russia, the protector of the Slavs. Germany wanted to have her own empire by creating colonies in Africa and Asia to further her commercial interests. To meet this need, she was arming herself at an alarming pace and building a strong navy. This threatened Great Britain as both nations realized that the route to world domination lay in the control of the seas. France, humiliated by her defeat by Germany in 1870 had also rearmed and was straining at the leash for revenge and the recovery of Alsace and Lorraine, the territories that she had lost in that war. Germany was not only firm in her resolve to hold on to those territories but was also determined to destroy forever France’s power that could hinder her grand designs.

All these rivalries and the distrust and suspicion that they caused, resulted in strengthening the bonds between the countries that had entered into the two main alliances. The situation in Europe by the first decade of the new century was dangerously close to being explosive because of the clash of national interests of all the major and minor powers. ‘Fifty years were spent in the process of making Europe explosive. Five years were enough to detonate it.’³

The rush to the abyss of war now gathered unbreakable speed – driven by the motor of ‘military necessity’. The one thought of the Generals during these critical days was to start their war machines. Desire for war and the fear of being caught at a disadvantage reacted on each other.⁴

Growing economic and colonial rivalry had already clouded the relationship between Britain and Germany, but the single biggest factor was the rapid growth of the German navy. British policy was based on avoiding entangling alliances, and relying on the Royal Navy for its defence. The Royal Navy, in fact, was maintained at twice the combined strength of the two next largest navies (the so-called doctrine of the Two Power Standard). Wilhelm and von Tirpitz, the Secretary of the German Navy were determined to challenge British naval superiority; the German Navy laws of 1898 and 1900 set in motion a dangerous arms race between the two powers. To counter this, the British made a bold move in 1906, which rendered the bulk of its capital ships obsolete at a single stroke. HMS Dreadnought was launched, the first ‘all-big gun’ battleship armed with ten 12-inch guns, heavily armoured and some 4 knots faster than the earlier ships. The arms race spiralled upwards but due mainly to Sir John ‘Jacky’ Fisher, the First Sea Lord from 1904 to 1910 and from 1914 to 1915 and Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty from 1911 to 1915, the Royal Navy retained its lead. Largely due to this naval rivalry, a diplomatic revolution took place. In 1904, Britain and France, enemies for most of the nineteenth century, signed the Entente Cordiale. Three years later, Britain reached a similar agreement with another traditional foe, Russia. The division of Europe into two armed camps now appeared complete.

Notwithstanding the ambitions of Germany to become the dominant power in Europe and her thrust to acquire colonies in Africa and Asia, the spark that ignited World War I was the bullets fired by Gavrilo Princep which killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian Empire and his wife Sophie on 28 June 1914 at Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. These bullets kick-started a war that would result in the death of over 10 million soldiers, the wounding of over 20 million, the devastation of Europe and the demise of four empires.

The annexation of the Balkan state of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary in 1908 placed millions of Slavs under Austria-Hungary rule. They, however, wanted to be under Serbia. This was the primary reason for the assassination of the Archduke of Austria.

Around the same time in 1908, Turkey had developed strong military and commercial interests with Germany. A treaty was later on signed that committed Turkey to the assistance of Austria-Hungary against Russia. On 29 October 1914 the Turkish navy attacked Russian ports. By 5 October 1914, Turkey was at war with France and Britain.

By 1914, Austria-Hungary was in decline as a Great Power. In the previous 60 years, she had been excluded from her traditional spheres of influence in Germany and Italy by the rise of new nation states. Consequently, by the turn of the twentieth century, Austrian attention was focused on the Balkans. There, the small state of Serbia, had under Russian protection, increased in size and power as a result of the Balkan wars of 1912–13, and acted as a stimulus for the growth of nationalism among the ethnic Serbs within the heterogeneous Hapsburg Empire. The assassination in Bosnia was seen by Austria as an insolent challenge which could not go unanswered.

The Austro-Hungarian monarchy wanted to go to war because it did not want to lose its many Slav possessions. Among these were Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, Bukowina, Ruthenia, Slovakia, Transylvania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Croatia and Dalmatia. These accounted for more than half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Germans came into the war to make sure that the Russians didn’t trounce the Austrians, thus bringing Slav power to the centre of Europe. The Turks and the Bulgarians had lost territory in the Balkan wars and wanted them back. The French militarists wanted to avenge their defeat of 1870 and to retake Alsace-Lorraine back from the Germans. Britain came into the war because it had signed an international guarantee of Belgium’s neutrality. Britain did not want Germany controlling Belgium just across the Straits of Dover.⁵

The sequence of events after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand that led to the start of World War I was as follows:

• Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia for the assassination at Sarajevo. Backed by Germany it sent a list of demands to Serbia requiring Serbia to take action against Serb nationalists.
• Serbia agreed to most of the demands after taking advice from Russia; but Austria-Hungary was determined to destroy the Serbs who they considered to be untrustworthy and that a final reckoning with the Serb menace could not be postponed any longer. On 28 July Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.
• Russia who was championing the cause of the Slavs was provoked to mobilize for war. In response, at 7 p.m. on Saturday 1 August 1914, Germany declared war on Russia.
• The next day, Sunday 2 August, German forces invaded Poland and Luxembourg and the same night demanded that Belgium allow German troops to march to France through that neutral state. Belgium refused.
• On Monday 3 August, the British Cabinet reviewed its plans. It indicated that it would intervene to preserve Belgium’s neutrality, that it would defend Belgium and France if attacked and that it would go to war, if Germany failed to stop its offensive in the west.
• This decision was communicated to Germany on 4 August but was rejected by Germany at 11 p.m. Britain declared war against Germany on 4 August 1914 when Germany marched into neutral Belgium. Austria declared war on Serbia, Germany supported Austria, Russia mobilized against Germany, and Germany mobilized against France and Russia.

Germany immediately put into effect the ‘Schlieffen Plan’ which was conceived many years earlier for use in a two front war against France and Russia. It was to hold the Russians in the east with minimum force while the full weight of the German army was to be used to crush France in the west. That having been done, the German armies would then move to the east to destroy the Russians.

The Schlieffen Plan envisaged the use of five German armies which would envelop the entire French Army by a wide outflanking movement that would initially drive through Belgium and the Netherlands and then pass well to the west of Paris. The French, thus attacked from the rear behind their left flank, would be rolled up to destruction against the German fortified positions in Alsace-Lorraine or driven into neutral Switzerland and internment.

If carried out as conceived, this plan would have ended the war in a few weeks. Unfortunately for Germany, Schlieffen’s successor, General von Moltke modified the plan to such an extent that it destroyed the chances of its success. He reduced t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. Causes and Events that Led to World War I: Footfalls of History
• 2. Developments in India
• 3. Induction of the Indian Army
• 4. Strategies of the Opposing Forces and their Outcomes
• 5. Conduct of Campaigns and Battles
• 6. The Air War
• 7. The Maritime Dimension
• 8. Contribution of the Imperial State Forces
• 9. The Indian Labour Corps
• 10. Memorials and Cemeteries
• 11. The Principles of War: Leadership and Lessons Learnt in World War I
• 12. The Spanish Influenza
• 13. Beyond Fear
• 14. Reflections
• ANNEXURES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX