The Book of the Poppy (3 page)

And lest we forget, the war on the Eastern Front between Germany and Russia was nothing short of apocalyptic. The Russian Brusilov Offensive, a vast Russian onslaught against German forces in the Ukraine, cost the lives or health of around 2.5 million men in the space of three-and-a-half months of fighting in June–September 1916.

Listing the casualties of battle in the First World War can eventually have a numbing effect, the statistics disconnected from the realities on the ground and the trauma suffered by those left to grieve. But the fact was that the world of warfare had changed. One hundred years previously, the armies met in battle armed with muzzle-loading flintlock muskets, capable of firing just two or three rounds a minute even in the hands of a skilled rifleman. Heavy firepower was delivered by smoothbore cannon, firing solid lumps of shot over ranges of several hundred yards. The men would frequently close up, deciding the battle with bayonets and swords.

By the time the First World War began in 1914, military traditionalism still lingered on in ideas of the nobility of the frontal assault or the grandeur of a cavalry charge. But the tools of war had changed beyond recognition. Now every infantryman had a breech-loading bolt-action rifle capable of firing fifteen rounds a minute, killing out to ranges of well over a mile. More significantly, machine guns were an integrated part of companies, battalions and divisions. A single German MG08 or British Vickers gun could send out streams of lead at around 450rpm. With such tools, the process of killing became virtually industrial – all that was required was to keep the gun fed with ammunition and the barrel cool (or changed when required) to deliver constant streams of death into the ranks of the enemy in no-man’s-land.

Then there was the artillery. Artillery was now rifled and breech-loaded, meaning that it was accurate over great distances and had high rates of fire. Furthermore, the shells that the guns fired were filled with high-explosive, each round delivering enormous destructive effect at the point of impact. In total, some 70 per cent of all casualties in the First World War and the subsequent world war were caused by artillery, and in some armies up to 40 per cent of total military personnel were serving in the artillery arm.

TOTAL MANPOWER MOBILISED IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR

There was also innovation in air and sea warfare. Although the Wright brothers had only made the first controlled, powered flight on 17 December 1903 (for the epic duration of 12 seconds), just over a decade later aircraft were being repurposed for combat. At first, the men of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC), formed in 1912, were mainly tasked with reconnaissance duties (aided by the progressive development of two-way radios and aerial cameras), flying biplane aircraft over the battlefield to provide intelligence on troop movements and artillery fire control. Onboard weaponry consisted of little more than a handgun or a grenade carried for personal defence. From 1915, however, new generations of aircraft were emerging, pure fighter types armed with machine guns, eventually synchronised to fire through the propeller (meaning the pilot could shoot along his direct line of sight), and larger bombers that could deliver bomb payloads of several thousand pounds well behind enemy frontlines. Although pilots gathered a glamorous image amongst the British public, their lives were actually brutal and short – the average life expectancy of a combat pilot on the Western Front between 1915 and 1917 was in the region of eleven days.

At sea, the war was dominated by the big-gun turreted warships. The pre-war international naval arms race had been transformed by the arrival of the Dreadnought class of warship. The type was established with HMS
Dreadnought
, a Royal Navy vessel commissioned on 2 December 1906.
Dreadnought
demonstrated a new vision of the capital warship: heavily armed with multiple large-calibre turreted guns (typically 15in and above), with ranges of many thousands of yards; powerful secondary armament; steam-turbine propulsion that gave speeds of more than 20 knots; armour applied to hulls and decks. Soon every nation was racing to produce larger and more potent versions of the Dreadnought, creating a world of metal monsters vying for control of the waves. In the First World War this led to the epic clash that was the Battle of Jutland (31 May–1 June 1916), which pitted the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet against Germany’s High Seas Fleet in the North Sea off Denmark. (Note that the Grand Fleet included a significant number of Australian and New Zealand vessels and personnel.) In this thunderous engagement, nearly 9,000 men were killed and twenty-five major vessels were sunk, and both sides claimed victory. Although major fleet actions such as this were rare, they were a salutary reminder that naval personnel were far from immune from the horrors of war.

BRITISH SMALL-ARMS FIREPOWER THROUGH THE CENTURIES

Another aspect of the naval war during the First World War was the German U-boat. Sailing from bases on the European coastline, the U-boat campaign against British shipping escalated to a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. (‘Unrestricted’ meant that the U-boats would target and sink merchant vessels without warning, as opposed to operating by ‘prize rules’ where the ship was first stopped and the crew placed into lifeboats before the vessel was sunk.) The U-boat war, conducted primarily in the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Arctic waters, was a serious threat to the British war effort. Between 1914 and 1918, some 5,000 British vessels were sunk, costing the lives of 15,000 mariners.

As we have seen, the First World War was a seismic event on human, technological and political levels. It ended in November 1918, with a German capitulation. Although the war was a victory for the Entente powers over the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, the celebrations would be muted. The war had slaughtered or crippled millions of young men. Those who survived and returned home often found post-war economies virtually ruined by four years of conflict, thus many veterans entered the ranks of the long-term unemployed. Worse still, the peace contained the seeds of another world war.

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

As is often the way following long periods of armed conflict, the British armed services suffered from a lack of investment and interest during the interwar period. By 1930 its regular army was little more than five divisions strong, the weakness in manpower compensated for partially by fourteen Territorial divisions. Britain also started to lag behind in terms of the technological advantages it had forged in the First World War, particularly regarding armoured vehicles. The evident rise of Nazi Germany during the 1930s did spur British rearmament, but when Britain went to war again in September 1939, there was no denying that it was woefully unprepared to face the might of Germany’s new army and air force, which now ranked as the best in the world. (Britain’s one saving grace in these early days of the conflict was the Royal Navy, which still wielded great power on the waves.)

Here is not the place, nor the space, to present a history of those apocalyptic years between 1939 and 1945. Suffice to say that the Second World War evolved into what was a ‘total war’, a conflict in which the combatants aimed to destroy the entire military, civilian and cultural infrastructure of the enemy. The fighting was also truly global. What started as a Northern European war spread through the Mediterranean, the Balkans, North Africa, into the Baltic States and the Soviet Union. Once Japan began its own campaign of conquest in late 1941, bringing the United States into the conflict (and widening the British theatre of operations considerably), the war zones reached out across the Pacific Ocean, from the northern coastline of Australia to the Aleutian Islands, and from humid jungle trails in Burma to sun-bleached atolls thousands of miles from continental Asia. One frequently overlooked aspect of the conflict is the war between Japan and China that had been waged on the Chinese mainland since 1937. By 1945, that aspect of the broader war had cost the lives of 20 million people.

It must also be remembered with solemnity that the estimated Soviet war dead numbered about 25 million. The war on the Eastern Front was conducted with a level of brutality and lack of pity rarely experienced anywhere else. The Soviet Union lost more people in the first weeks of the German invasion than Britain and the United States did in the entire war. German
Einsatzgruppen
(Special Purpose Units) also began to implement the first stages of the Holocaust in 1941 and 1942, conducting the mass executions of 1.1 million Jews in woods, forests, gardens and ravines. The Eastern Front had a voracious appetite for German manpower – more than 70 per cent of Germany’s casualties were taken in this theatre, some 3 million soldiers.

Looking back to Britain, the Second World War was a turning point in the nation’s political and military history. Between 1939 and 1941, it seemed touch and go whether the nation would survive at all. Hitler’s army had conquered virtually the whole of Western Europe by June 1940, the BEF dispatched to France defeated and ejected from Dunkirk. Only the Channel separated German forces and free Britain, which now stood quite alone on the periphery of Europe. In the summer of 1940, Hitler pitted his Luftwaffe (air force) against the Royal Air Force (RAF), attempting to rid the island nation of its air cover in preparation for a planned invasion. The Battle of Britain, as it is now called, was an incredible victory for the British, bought at a heavy cost in both British and German aviators. (Within the category of ‘British’, we here must include the many foreign pilots who flew for the RAF, including those fighting in exile from their own Nazi-occupied countries, such as the Poles and the Czechs.) It rendered (alongside the undiminished power of the Royal Navy) a German invasion impossible, although by the autumn of 1940 Hitler’s strategic focus was swinging to the east rather than the west. Nevertheless, truly awful days were ahead for the beleaguered British. The Luftwaffe unleashed the ‘Blitz’, a campaign of strategic bombing against British cities that ran until May 1941. Sporadic air attacks on the British mainland, plus a vicious V-1 and V-2 missile campaign from 1944, continued until nearly the end of the war. What this meant was that death came as much to Britain’s civilians as it did to its military – more than 60,000 civilians died on the mainland during the war.

Looking at the wider context of the Second World War, what made it especially dreadful was the way that the lines between military and civilian targets at first blurred and then eventually collapsed completely. An estimated total of 60 million people died in the Second World War, triple the fatalities of the First World War, and more than half that figure were civilians. This imbalance was partly due to genocidal policies, none more notorious than Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’, in which 6 million of Europe’s Jews were exterminated with an industrial ruthlessness that defies imagination. Yet also, air power had also reached a destructive ascendancy. Not only had the aircraft types diversified and increased in performance, but long-range strategic bombing could visit destruction on distant cities, raining high-explosives and incendiaries onto industrial targets and civilian housing areas alike. While Germany and Japan never quite developed the aircraft types or strategic focus for such bombing, the Allies unleashed hell upon Axis towns and cities, particularly between 1943 and 1945. The devastation of places such as Hamburg, Cologne and Dresden in Germany was little short of apocalyptic. In Hamburg, for example, an unrelenting pounding by British (at night) and American (by day) bombers between 24 and 28 July 1943 killed an estimated 30,000 people. During the raid a firestorm developed that generated 1,800°F (1,000°C) heat and 120mph (193km/h) windspeeds, immolating all those in its path. Japan also received the full force of strategic bombing in 1945, when US B-29 bombers began to make regular visitations. The Operation Meetinghouse air raid of 9–10 March 1945 on Tokyo has been classified as the single most destructive bombing raid in history – through using incendiaries against the city’s predominantly paper-and-wood houses, the US Air Force destroyed 16 square miles (41km
2
) of city and killed more than 100,000 people. And of course, the ultimate expression of civilians as ‘legitimate’ targets came with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 respectively. Two cities were vaporised in two instants, and the new era of nuclear warfare was inaugurated.