The Making Of The British Army (51 page)

Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of the campaign was its predictability (for all that taking the peninsula was by no means an impossible concept). Its planning took place after a full six months of fighting on the Western Front, by which time there could have been few illusions about the nature of modern warfare. Aircraft would have been particularly useful in reconnaissance and artillery spotting, and
Hamilton’s chief of staff had asked for them early on during the planning; but the request was turned down flat by Kitchener. The navy had aircraft, some of them ship-based, but they were not well integrated with the action ashore. The greatest lesson, however, that amphibious operations were fraught with special dangers and required planning and resources of an exceptional kind, would eventually see a spectacular pay-off, though with another high-priced lesson in between, thirty years later in the Normandy landings.

If several military heads rolled after Gallipoli (though not enough: Hunter-Weston showed no more acumen when in command of a corps at the Somme later in the year), none rolled so famously as that of one politician – Winston Churchill. In November 1915, in characteristic form, he left the government, put on soldier’s uniform and went to France – to command one of Kitchener’s battalions of the Royal Scots Fusiliers.
¹⁵⁹
But if Churchill’s time at the Admiralty had brought about one of the most calamitous and futile campaigns in the army’s history (an experience which did not, however, entirely cure him of strategic gambling) it also did a very great deal to place in its hands a weapon that would do much to help it overcome the stalemate of the trenches.

The tank was neither Churchill’s invention nor his conception, as is sometimes over-enthusiastically claimed, but without him its potential might not have been recognized so early or its development pressed so effectively. And it came about from that same thrusting impatience which had placed him so often in the middle of the action as a young man. As war was declared the first lord of the admiralty had sent Royal Marines and the ad hoc Royal Naval Division
¹⁶⁰
to help defend Antwerp, and in the weeks before the trenches reached the Belgian coast the ‘jollies and bluejackets’ were able to range along the flat roads of west Flanders in a veritable circus of improvised armoured cars and London buses. When Antwerp fell and the division was re-embarked, its buses went to the army as troop transports and many of the surviving
armoured cars were sent to the Middle East. The instinct for mobility remained, though, and Churchill set up the Admiralty Landships Committee out of which emerged the machine whose image the new Tank Corps would wear, and still wears, as its cap badge.

The English-speaking world calls them ‘tanks’ because that is what they were called in the deception measures during their despatch to France: they were shipped as ‘water tanks’. The French, when they were told of the invention and developed machines of their own, called them with Gallic panache
chars
– chariots. The Germans, when they learned of them the hard way and made some of their own, called them with Teutonic pedantry
Panzerkampfwagen
– armoured fighting vehicles (later simply
Panzer
). Much is revealed in military language. And largely for the same reasons of deception, the Tank Corps was originally known as the Heavy Section, Machine Gun Corps, and the first men in tanks wore crossed machine guns as their badge. But before the tank was ready for service the British army would receive its greatest ever shock, whose effects would change the course of the war and are still felt, consciously or otherwise, even today – the Somme.
¹⁶¹

Through 1915, then, the Kitchener battalions had begun to enter the field. By the spring of 1916, K1–5 (Kitchener’s first 500,000) had either seen action or were deployed and ready. But the BEF’s commanders had understandable reservations about their capability, for the Western Front had become largely a business of siege warfare. To some extent its routine of constant labour – digging, repairing, wiring, carrying forward ammunition and stores – was easy enough for the New Army battalions to cope with. In its turn in the line, a battalion would typically spend four days in the fire and support trenches, four in close reserve half a mile or so to the rear, and four resting out of range of field artillery. Out of the line they would be at training and recreation. But in 1916 the training of the New Army battalions was directed more towards individual trench skills and fitness than to battalion and
company battle drills and tactics (and ‘musketry’ occupied nothing like its place in the pre-war army). In short, Kitchener’s men could look after themselves, but they had scant practice in how to advance in the face of the enemy. The techniques of fire and movement seemed to be yesterday’s story – the experience of the few months of 1914 before the trenches reached the coast. Now it was down to the bomb (grenade) and the machine gun, and occasionally the bayonet. The routine of trench warfare seemed to operate as a suppressant even to thinking about mobility. To an extent senior officers had willed this, or at least accepted it, but many of them were all too aware of the limitations it now imposed. The only part of the army still movement-minded (other than, of course, the Royal Flying Corps) was the cavalry, and they could only manœuvre once the infantry had punched a hole in the defences. To the very end, Haig saw the winning of the war in terms of the collapse of a part of the German front line so that mobile troops – horse-borne – could exploit tactical success and restore the war of manœuvre by which the decision would be gained. It was loosely, and often irreverently, referred to as ‘galloping through the “G” in Gap’. Knowing the want of training in the New Army battalions, however, senior officers sought a simpler way of crossing no-man’s-land to break open the German defences; and as the last of the K5 battalions were arriving in France in the spring of 1916, some thought they had found one in the experience of a battle in March the previous year – at Neuve Chapelle.

By 1915 the BEF had grown to such a strength that it had been reorganized into two armies – 1st Army, commanded by the newly promoted General Sir Douglas Haig, and 2nd Army, commanded by Horace Smith-Dorrien (until in May ‘Wully’ Robertson told him he was ‘for ’ome’). Haig’s stock stood particularly high after he had kept his head and held the line at First Ypres, and so Sir John French delegated to him the spring offensive in Artois (Pas de Calais). Although the offensive came to nothing other than a long casualty list, Haig had a measure of success at Neuve Chapelle. Here, after a huge but brief artillery bombardment, the attacking divisions (two regular British and two from the Indian Corps with a number of integrated British units) made progress, though not without cost: 11,200 casualties were taken during the three days’ fighting, including six battalion commanding officers. But if the attack was in the end a disappointment – the Germans were able to recover more quickly than the British could
exploit their own local success – it seemed to show what artillery could do when there was enough of it. In fact, Haig had been able to concentrate 340 guns – as many as the BEF had taken to France the previous August – against the German salient, a ratio of one gun to every six yards of front attacked. It followed, by his reasoning, that as great a concentration of guns firing for longer against the German line elsewhere would achieve even better results.

There were two flaws in this analysis, however, the first cruelly hidden. The bombardment at Neuve Chapelle had been brief – thirty minutes on the fire trenches and then a further thirty on the support lines – because of a shortage of shells (which would soon become the great ‘Shell Scandal’, forcing Asquith to form a coalition government and a separate ministry of munitions under Lloyd George). The brevity of the bombardment was regarded not just as the consequence of weakness but as
the
weakness, though in fact a degree of surprise was achieved by that very brevity, and it was this that made for success more than the actual damage inflicted by the guns. A prolonged bombardment naturally forfeited surprise; it served notice on the defenders that they would have to stand to and repel attack, and to senior commanders that they must move reserves ready to reinforce and counter-attack. The longer, too, that a battery fired, the more likely it was to be detected and put out of action by counter-battery fire. The success at Neuve Chapelle was more the result of surprise and the shock of the hurricane bombardment – what the Germans afterwards described as ‘the first true drum-fire [
Trommelfeuer
] yet heard’ – than of obliteration. If the artillery did not keep German heads down long enough, the assaulting troops would never make it across no-man’s-land. Indeed, this much was obvious from one sector of the Neuve Chapelle attack, where a howitzer battery had been delayed getting into position and failed to fire on its designated target: the Germans in the untouched trench had been so quick to their machine guns when the noise stopped that 1,100 men fell to their fire. The lesson was clear either way, therefore: if the bombardment did not destroy the defenders, when it lifted the battle would be a straight race for the parapet.

The other flaw in the analysis lay in the assumption that the Germans – and their barbed wire – would be as vulnerable to artillery fire in the future as they had been at Neuve Chapelle. But in that part of Artois the water table is high (whence the ‘artesian well’): the German trenches had had to be built up as much as dug down, and in consequence
were more vulnerable to artillery. In the valley of the Somme, however, where Haig, who by 1916 had replaced Sir John French as commander-in-chief, had decided to mount that year’s allied offensive, the Germans had burrowed deep (30 feet in places) into the chalk. And not only were the Germans dug in deep, in the second full year of static warfare the barbed wire defences in no-man’s-land across the whole of the Front were thicker and deeper than ever. In other words, Neuve Chapelle was to the Somme as the English Channel is to the Atlantic.

Haig delegated the planning and execution of the Somme offensive to the man who had commanded IV Corps at Neuve Chapelle, Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Rawlinson (who had briefly been sent to Gallipoli to help plan the evacuation), and who now commanded 4th Army. Rawlinson’s plan of attack would rely on a long obliterating bombardment which would destroy both the Germans in their dugouts and the barbed wire which protected them, enabling Kitchener’s under-trained infantry simply to march the several hundred yards across no-man’s-land and occupy what remained of the enemy trenches. And because they would not advance across no-man’s-land at more than walking pace (the rate at which the artillery barrage would ‘creep’ – a new technique – from the fire trenches to the support trenches) they would be able to carry the extra ammunition, defence stores and rations needed before resupplies could be brought forward – a load per man of some 60 pounds (27 kilograms).

Haig had also hoped that his attack would be able to use the new secret weapon – the tank. He was impressed by what had emerged from the Admiralty Landships Committee – an armoured rhomboid box on caterpillar tracks which did indeed look like the water tank of its cover name. It was armed with either machine guns or quick-firing 6-pounders mounted on sponsons either side, had a crew of eight and moved at walking pace. Haig had at first been sceptical, but began to think the tank might have potential after seeing a demonstration of its barbed-wire crushing and trench-crossing capability, and therefore its potential to help his infantry cross no-man’s-land and punch the hole through which the cavalry could gallop. Unfortunately, technical problems meant that none would be available before September 1916. He had been willing to wait, but the Germans had opened a surprise offensive against the border fortress of Verdun in Lorraine, and Joffre urged him to make the attack no later than the end of June, else ‘the French army would cease to exist’.

*

The seven-day preparatory bombardment on the Somme looked and sounded impressive – 1,500 guns firing 200,000 rounds a day
¹⁶²
– but because of the length of front to be attacked (12 miles), the inadequate number of guns for the task, their varying accuracy and the failure rate of the ammunition (perhaps as many as one in three shells proved either duds or misfires), the weight of fire was proportionately only
half
that at Neuve Chapelle.

John Masefield, poet laureate from 1930 to 1967, had served on the Western Front as a medical orderly before going to the Dardanelles to write propaganda for the Foreign Office. The result,
Gallipoli
, a work of great lyrical beauty, apparently so raised the public spirits in lauding what there was to be proud of in an otherwise inglorious episode, that he was sent to France in October 1916 with a brief to do the same for the Somme.
¹⁶³
He looked at what he could of the old battlefield, spoke to whom he could, including Haig, and read what he could. And of that first morning of the British army’s most debilitating battle ever, 1 July 1916, Masefield would write: