Fighting the Somme

German Challenges, Dilemmas and Solutions

Jack Sheldon

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473882010
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: History

This book will provide an entirely fresh way of looking at the Battle of the Somme 1916. It will not be a rehashed narrative history of the battle. Instead, drawing heavily on examples that can be illustrated through exploitation of the primary sources still available in abundance in the archives at Stuttgart and Munich and anecdotal accounts, it will explain how and why the German defence was designed and conducted as it was. There will be descriptions of the reasons for the dominance of the Great General Staff, the tensions between commanders and staff, the disagreements between the commanders of First and Second Army and the replacement of General von Falkenhayn with the duumvirate of Hindenburg and Ludendorff.Specific case studies will include the loss and recapture of Schwaben Redoubt on 1 July, the British assault on the Second Position of 14 July, the tank attack at Flers 15 September and the autumn battles for Sailly Saissisel and St Pierre Vaast Wood. This will ensure that there is plenty to interest the general reader as well as showing how the various levels of command from regiment to army group operated and responded to emergencies and crises. Space will be devoted to changes in command philosophy, the introduction of new weapons and equipment and the evolution of tactics to counter the massive Allied superiority in manpower and materiel.

CHAPTER 1

In the Beginning were the Prussian Reformers

It may seem strange to begin an account of the methods employed by the German army to fight a battle in 1916 by starting with the work of the Prussian reformers at the beginning of the 19th Century, but there is logic and a sound reason for it. In the wake of defeat in the field by the armies of Napoleon and the harsh terms of the 1808 Treaty of Paris, which was designed to emasculate Prussia by limiting the size of its army to 42,000 long service volunteers and banning all reserve forces or militias, five men nevertheless created something new and potent from the ashes. Those particularly involved were Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Grolman, Boyen and Clausewitz. Of these Scharnhorst was the most important, until his untimely demise as a result of a minor wound sustained at the Battle of Lützen in 1813 that led to septicaemia and his death. Initially frustrated by their inability to introduce a systematic approach to conscription or to develop detailed mobilisation plans, nevertheless the reformers were determined to change the entire relationship between army, the state of Prussia and its king.

They had, it must be said, mixed success. Officer training was opened to nonnoble applicants and they created the Landwehr, effectively local militias, that played a useful role in the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon. With the coming of peace, however, the reformers found themselves sidelined and, by 1820, many of the old ways were reintroduced, fortunately not before the Defence Law of 1814 and the Landwehr Law of 1815 had been enacted. Under the first, the principle of conscription of all able bodied men from the age of twenty was introduced and the second made possible the creation of a great many reservists without the necessity to maintain an expensive large-scale standing army. The other institution whose origins can be traced back to the original reformers is the Great General Staff, so although the Prussian army largely stagnated for forty years from 1820, it contained within itself the foundations of the mechanisms which would see it expand and improve so as to become the most powerfully effective military force in Europe.

All armies require guiding principles and it was Clausewitz through his unfinished book On War who provided the philosophical underpinning, not only of the work of the reformers but also their successors right up to the present day. According to him, the critical matter in war was – and remains – to determine what he called the centra gravitatis [centre of gravity].1 Just as important today to campaign planners as it was in the mid nineteenth century, definition of the enemy’s centre of gravity enables staffs to work out a line of operations which will lead up to that point and victory. What did Clausewitz mean by this term? In essence, for him it was that element of the entire make up of an enemy which, once defeated or neutralised, will lead inevitably to fatal weakness and collapse.

Fundamentally, he equated this with total destruction of an opponent’s army. In order to prevail, the winning side had, ‘To conquer and destroy the armed power of the enemy’. For him war was an arena where acts of extreme violence were to be brought to bear with total ruthlessness to produce a swift effect on the enemy’s armed forces and so achieve a victory of annihilation. Not for him a slow, attritional, approach to operations. The decisive battle was of key importance. ‘The military forces of the enemy must be destroyed, that is reduced to such a state as not to be able to prosecute the war.’2 Of course it must be borne in mind that during the Napoleonic era there were plenty of ‘decisive battles’ to provide examples from history. Matters became much less clear cut as armies increased in size and outcomes less than total destruction of the enemy became thinkable.

Nevertheless, it was an outcome engineered by Helmuth von Moltke (Moltke the Elder) when he sealed the fate of the French armies at Sedan on 1–2 September 1870. Having outmanoeuvered Marshal de MacMahon’s men and trapped them against the frontier with Belgium, Moltke, during a visit to Third Army on 31 August, stated, accurately, ‘Now we have them in a mousetrap’. In resigned agreement with this assessment, General Ducrot who, briefly, was to succeed to the command on 1 September after the wounding of MacMahon, on observing the fires of the encircling German troops, marked up his map and remarked sardonically, Nous sommes dans un pot de chambre, et nous y serons emmerdés. Pulling his cloak tightly around him, he sat by a fire of one of his Zouave regiments awaiting the morning and the French army’s inevitable fate.3 By nightfall on 1 September the French had lost almost 40,000 men killed, wounded or captured, against total Prussian losses of around 9,000; and the following day Napoleon III surrendered the entire army.

This was a Clausewitzian victory of annihilation in the truest sense of the word. ‘The best strategy is always to be very strong, above all in an absolute sense, but at least at the decisive point … There is no higher or simpler rule of strategy than concentrating force. Absolutely nothing should be taken away from the main force unless it is absolutely essential to serve a most urgent purpose.’4 This was precisely what Moltke had done. Ignoring all other calls for men, he assembled half a million troops and launched them against the 300,000 the French could muster. It was a classic case of achieving total numerical superiority in support of his operational Schwerpunkt [point of main effort]. Moltke summarised what he had done in this way. ‘The concentration of all our forces in the Pfalz protected both the lower as well as the upper Rhine and allowed an offensive into enemy territory which, timed carefully, meant that it forestalled any attempt by the French to set foot on German territory.’5 This culminated in Sedan and opened the way to Paris, the centra gravitatis of the French.

By achieving this stunning victory, Moltke had demonstrated that it was still possible in an era of large scale armies and increasingly sophisticated weaponry to pursue a Niederwerfungstrategie [strategy of annihilation] via swift, decisive, military action. This suited Germany, whose unfavourable geographical location and shortage of resources militated against long drawn out wars of attrition (which could take many forms, including economic warfare and blockade). As a result, this thread runs through German military thinking throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. The adoption of universal conscription to facilitate the development of mass armies with plentiful reserves served to make one of Clausewitz’s principal points a reality, but Germany’s potential opponents were also moving forward.

By the early years of the twentieth century the French, for example, were conscripting almost every single available man for military service. In contrast the Germans, limited until 1912 to an active army that did not exceed one per cent of the population, never called up more than about thirty five percent of each year group (including the Ersatz Reserve), so never again would Germany be able to muster an absolute numerical superiority over its French neighbours, despite the fact that the 1905 change in the period of conscription in France from three years to two meant that the fourth battalions of sixty infantry regiments had to be disbanded and there were serious consequences for the French technical troops, cavalry and horse artillery.6 In any case the change was short-lived and was reversed in 1912.

At the outbreak of the Great War, of the 67.8 million German citizens, the German mobilised army comprised a total of about 120,000 officers and 3.7 million other ranks, but there were also almost 5.5 million untrained, but fit, men still in Germany. Almost 10.5 million men were liable for conscription in Germany but in 1914 only 36.5% were serving so, in addition to the untrained group, a further 1.2 million trained men were not called up for duty.7 If Germany had called up the same percentage of conscripts as France did, its army would have numbered well over six million men when hostilities began, though quite how an army of that size would have been paid for remains an open question. As an aside, it was this initially untapped potential which carried the German army through the first two years of war. It was not until summer 1916 that manpower began to become critical.

The challenge for Moltke the Elder’s successors, however, was to attempt, in a clear extension of this line of thought, to make a Niederwerfungstrategie possible despite the changed circumstances and, especially, in the face of the two front risk created as a result of the disastrous failure in 1890 by Germany to renew the ‘Reinsurance Treaty’ with Russia. The closest Germany came to solving the problem was primarily through the work of Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, Chief of the General Staff from 1891 – 1906. All his war planning and preparation was marked by a clear inclination towards a campaign of annihilation. Repeatedly, echoes of the Clausewitzian preference for the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces as ‘the superior and more effectual means to which all others must give way’8 appear in his writings. As a follower of Clausewitz he was well aware of the need to develop a wide, if sceptical, knowledge of military history, subscribing to the view that, ‘military principles could only be derived, second hand as it were, from a critical analysis of history [because] historians exaggerated and manipulated the history of military affairs in order to glorify their own countries or provide factual support for their theories.’9 As Clausewitz put it, his principles, ‘should educate the mind of the future leader in war, or rather guide him in his self-instruction, but not accompany him to the field of battle’.10

In pursuit of this approach, Schlieffen laid great stress on the study of military history and he himself when in high office and despite his enormous workload found time to research and then write about the Battle of Cannae, at which Hannibal prevailed by means of a bold double envelopment. This became his inspiration as he wrestled with the problem of bringing about the swift defeat of France by annihilating its armies in decisive battle. In his introduction to a post war English edition of Cannae, General Hugo Freiherr von Freytag-Loringhoven, who had served under Schlieffen as a major on the Great General Staff, wrote,

“Strictly, the Cannae studies of Count Schlieffen are not presentations from military history. They comprise, rather, a conversational document of instruction. Just as the field marshal, in his activity as chief of the general staff of the army, always endeavoured during the long period of peace to keep alive in the General Staff, and thus in the army at large, the idea of a war of annihilation, so, likewise, is this expressed in his writings. Germany’s situation demanded a quick decision. Though the Count set great store on the efficiency of the German army he was, nevertheless, always preoccupied with thoughts of how our leaders would acquit themselves when the time came. Hence, in his writings he often attributes his own ideas to the leaders of the past – ...