Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (14 page)

It’s also a pity that the military profession is dismissed as hidebound and unimaginative in its conduct of the First World War, when in fact it responded quite quickly to the unprecedented tactical and strategic problem that had been presented to it by the continuous front. It took only three years, from January 1915 to late 1917, for the combatants to come up with the technologies and the techniques that would ultimately break the trench stalemate and restore mobility to the battlefield, although none of them had yet reached maturity when the war ended twelve months later.

In broad terms, only two things were necessary for an attacking army to achieve breakthroughs: surprise, and the ability to move faster than the defenders. The crux of the problem was that the attacker could never get through the lines of enemy trenches and out into open country before the defender brought up his reserves and created new defences behind them. But the defender wouldn’t bring his reserves up before the battle if the attack came as a complete surprise—and he wouldn’t have time to do so during the battle if the attacker could keep up his speed of advance through the enemy’s defences: as little as one kilometre an hour would probably do it. So various professional officers (and civilian engineers) began casting around for ways to achieve both surprise and speed.

No sooner had the obstacle of the trenches suddenly appeared in 1914 than the solution occurred to a British staff officer, Colonel E.D. Swinton of the Royal Engineers. What was needed, obviously, was a vehicle armoured against machine-gun bullets and carrying its own guns, which could roll over shell holes, barbed wire and trenches on caterpillar tracks. Against much opposition from military conservatives, the idea was adopted by Winston Churchill (even though he was then First Lord of the Admiralty, and not in charge of the army at all). The earliest production models of the “landships,” as they were first called, reached the Western Front in the autumn of 1916.

They were huge, primitive and horribly uncomfortable vehicles. The eight-man crew, stripped to their waists in the forty-degree heat, shared the interior with an exposed 105-horsepower Daimler engine. The fumes from the engine and from hot shell cases rolling around on the floor made the atmosphere inside almost unbreathable in combat. There were no springs in the suspension, the noise made voice communications impossible, and it was hard to see hand signals in the semi-darkness, as the only light came through the vision slits.

But the first time the tanks went into battle in really large numbers, at Cambrai in November 1917, where 476 were committed, they enabled the British army to advance ten kilometres in six hours, at a cost of just four thousand dead and wounded. Earlier the same year, at the Second Battle of Ypres, the British had taken three months to advance a similar distance, and they had lost a quarter of a million men doing it. But there was more to the success at Cambrai than just tanks. There was also, for the first time ever on the Western Front, a comprehensive plan for indirect artillery fire to engage the German defences simultaneously through the full depth of the defended zone, all the way back to the furthest reserve positions.

At Cambrai, there was no prolonged bombardment in the old style to destroy the wire and soften the defenders up. Indeed, to preserve secrecy and the possibility of surprise, the one thousand British guns that were deployed on a ten-kilometre front at Cambrai did not open fire, even to observe and adjust the fall of their shells, until the moment of the attack. It was the first large-scale use of “predicted fire,” relying on aerial reconnaissance, accurate mapping of the targets, equally accurate surveying of your own gun positions and ballistic calculations instead of on direct observation. With the help of the tanks, and the 289 aircraft used as artillery spotters, ground-attack aircraft and bombers, the attack almost broke through the German lines completely. Only a very rapid and ferocious German counterattack closed the breach, but that was unlikely to happen every time.

The old trench stalemate was over, for the Germans had just solved the breakthrough problem in the same way, although with less reliance on tanks. (Curiously, the Germans put far less effort into developing tanks than the British and the French, although they did develop the first effective anti-tank rifles.) Beginning with an offensive at Riga on the Russian front in September 1917, a German artillery officer named Colonel Georg Bruchmüller independently came up with the same formula for surprise and rapid penetration: massive amounts of indirect and predicted artillery fire that gave no warning beforehand, and infantry “storm-troops” who were instructed to bypass enemy strongpoints that were still resisting and just keep moving ever deeper into the defended zone, spreading confusion and dismay and ultimately driving the enemy into flight. He gained the nickname “Durchbruchmüller” (“breakthrough”-müller) for his successes, and can claim a significant amount of credit for the offensive that smashed what was left of the Russian army and triggered the Communist coup against the democratic government in St. Petersburg in November 1917.

Three years after the failure of the Schlieffen Plan, the Russian collapse seemed to be giving Germany an unexpected second chance
to win the war, and Bruchmüller was promptly moved to the Western Front. His tactics worked well there, too, in the great German offensives of spring 1918, but not so well that the Allied armies collapsed. After a series of major retreats in the spring, the Allies returned to the offensive in mid-1918, using quite similar tactics. The French and British armies were almost as exhausted as the Germans, but freshly arrived American troops took point in the French part of the line and the Canadian Corps and the Australians spearheaded the attacks in the British sector. Like the Germans, they were now able to gain ground consistently with their attacks.

Tanks never did play a decisive role in these battles, but the plans for 1919, had the war continued, called for a force of several thousand tanks supported by aircraft to smash through the enemy’s front, with infantry following closely in armoured personnel carriers. Confronted with an unprecedented military problem, the soldiers of the First World War had solved the trench stalemate about as fast as you could reasonably ask. This begs the question of why anybody should ever be required to solve such a problem, of course, but from a professional point of view they did quite well.

T
HE ONE ASPECT OF THE WAR THAT STILL RETAINED SOME GLAMOUR
for Canadians by 1917 was the war in the air. Once aerial warfare really got into high gear in 1916 and the British air services began to expand at a breakneck rate, Canadians flocked to join. Many young men already overseas wanted to escape the impersonal slaughter of the trenches, even if it just meant a lonelier death in a burning airplane a few months later, and many in Canada simply joined for the adventure. They were all slightly crazy.

Ten of the top twenty-seven aces in the British forces were Canadians, and they included four of the twelve leading aces in the entire war. This extraordinarily high Canadian quotient was partly a reflection of the Canadians’ remarkable enthusiasm for flying: by the time the various British air services were amalgamated into the Royal Air Force on April 1, 1918, there were 22,000 Canadians serving in them. (Indeed, the main reason that a separate Canadian Air Force was not created until the closing months of the war was the British concern that hiving the Canadians off would decimate their own squadrons. “Thirty-five per cent of our total strength in pilots is Canadian,” remonstrated a British officer, Lieutenant Colonel R.C.M. Pink, in May 1918. “Under the Air Force Act every one of these can walk out of the door tomorrow and return to the Canadian service unless this service is definitely part of the Royal Air Force.”) But the pilots themselves mostly didn’t care what flag they saluted: they lived in an intense, closed world where the only thing that counted was the respect of their peers.

In late 1918 Major William Barker of Dauphin, Manitoba, was already one of the leading aces of the war, with forty-six confirmed victories accumulated in two and a half years of fighting over the Western
Front and in Italy. (The Austrian Air Force sensibly kept its leading aces on the ground during the daily bombing of Godega airfield despite Barker’s generous invitation.) But Barker was also, at the age of twenty-three, a man living on borrowed time, for even very good pilots rarely survived as long as he had in combat.

By late 1918 the Allied authorities well understood the propaganda value of live aces in boosting their populations’ flagging morale, so Barker was eventually posted to command an air-fighting school in England in order to keep him alive. His protests were unsuccessful, but he did manage to get himself appointed to a squadron in France for ten days on the way home, on the grounds that German aerial tactics over the Western Front were now different from those he had become familiar with in his more recent experience against the Austrian Air Force over Italy. He had still seen no enemy aircraft when he took off alone for England on October 27 at the end of his ten days’ stay in France, however, so he decided to take one last peek over the front.

He was in luck, sort of. As his Snipe fighter climbed to 21,000 feet over the Forêt de Mormal he spotted a Rumpler two-seat observation aircraft on a reconnaissance flight high above the British lines. But as he concentrated on the Rumpler he failed to notice the entire “flying circus” of sixty Fokker D-VIIs, the latest and fastest type of German fighter, that was flying beneath him stacked up in three or four echelons. As the Rumpler broke up before Barker’s guns, one of the German fighters, climbing in a near stall, raked his plane from below with machine-gun fire and shattered his right thigh with an explosive bullet. Barker threw the Snipe into a spin and levelled out several thousand feet below, only to find himself in the midst of fifteen more Fokker D-VIIs. He got in quick bursts at three of them, setting one on fire at ten yards’ range, but then he was wounded in the other thigh and fainted.

Barker spun down to fifteen thousand feet before he recovered consciousness and pulled his fighter out of its dive once more—only to
find himself in the middle of a lower echelon of the same German formation. By sheer instinct he got on the tail of one of them, but by the time it burst into flames his own aircraft was being riddled with bullets from behind; one bullet shattered his left elbow and he passed out again, dropping to twelve thousand feet before he came to amidst the lower echelon of the flying circus. As the German fighters milled around his smoking machine, taking turns to attack from every point of the compass, it was clear to the thousands of British and Canadian troops watching from the trenches below that Barker was finished.