First World War (1916) | UPSC Mains: World History PDF Download

Major Developments in 1916

The Western Front, 1916

• In 1914 the centre of gravity of World War I had been on the Western Front, in 1915 it shifted to the Eastern, and in 1916 it once more moved back to France. Though the western Allies had dissipated some of their strength in the Dardanelles, Salonika, and Mesopotamia, the rising tide of Britain’s new armies and of its increased munition supplies promised the means for an offensive far larger in scale than any before to break the trench deadlock. Britain’s armies in France had grown to 36 divisions by the end of 1915. By that time voluntary enlistments, though massive, had nevertheless proved to be inadequate to meet Britain’s needs, so in January 1916, by the Military Service Act, voluntary service was replaced by conscription.
• In December 1915 a conference of the leaders of the French, British, Belgian, and Italian armies, with representatives present from the Russian and Japanese armies, was held at Joffre’s headquarters. They adopted the principle of a simultaneous general offensive in 1916 by France, Great Britain, Russia, and Italy. But military action by Germany was to dislocate this scheme, and only the British offensive came fully into operation.
• By the winter of 1915–16, Falkenhayn regarded Russia as paralyzed and Italy as inconsiderable. He considered the time at last ripe for positive action against France, after whose collapse Great Britain would have no effective military ally on the European continent and would be brought to terms rather by submarine warfare than by land operations. For his offensive in the West, however, Falkenhayn clung always to his method of attrition. He believed that a mass breakthrough was unnecessary and that instead the Germans should aim to bleed France of its manpower by choosing a point of attack “for the retention of which the French Command would be compelled to throw in every man they have.” The town of Verdun and its surrounding complex of forts was chosen, because it was a menace to the main German lines of communications, because it was within a French salient and thus cramped the defenders, and because of the certainty that the French would sacrifice any number of men to defend Verdun for reasons of patriotism associated with the town itself.
• The keynote of Falkenhayn’s tactical plan was to place a dense semicircle of German heavy and medium artillery to the north and east of Verdun and its outlying fortresses and then to stage a continuous series of limited infantry advances upon the forts. These advances would draw the French infantry into defending or trying to retake the forts, in the process of which they would be pulverized by German artillery fire. In addition, each German infantry advance would have its way smoothed by a brief but extremely intense artillery bombardment that would clear the targeted ground of defenders.
• Although French Intelligence had given early warnings of the Germans’ offensive preparations, the French high command was so preoccupied with its own projected offensive scheme that the warning fell on deaf ears. At 7:15 AM on Feb. 21, 1916, the heaviest German artillery bombardment yet seen in the war began on a front of eight miles around Verdun, and the French trenches and barbed wire fields there were flattened out or upheaved in a chaos of tumbled earth. At 4:45 PM the German infantry advanced—although for the first day only on a front of two and a half miles. From then until February 24 the French defenders’ lines east of the Meuse River crumbled away. Fort-Douaumont, one of the most important fortresses, was occupied by the Germans on February 25. By March 6, when the Germans began to attack on the west bank of the Meuse as well as on the east bank, the French had come to see that something more than a feint was intended. To relieve the pressure on France, the Russians made a sacrificial attack on the Eastern Front at Lake Naroch (see below The Eastern Front, 1916); the Italians began their fifth offensive on the Isonzo (see above Italy and the Italian front, 1915–16); and the British took over the Arras sector of the Western Front, thus becoming responsible for the whole line from the Yser southward to the Somme. Meanwhile, General Philippe Pétain was entrusted with commanding the defense of Verdun. He organized repeated counterattacks that slowed the German advance, and, more importantly, he worked to keep open the one road leading into Verdun that had not been closed by German shelling. This was the Bar-le-Duc road, which became known as La Voie Sacrée (the “Sacred Way”) because vital supplies and reinforcements continued to be sent to the Verdun front along it despite constant harassment from the German artillery.
  
  French troops passing though the ruins of Verdun, France, 1916
• Slowly but steadily the Germans moved forward on Verdun: they took Fort-Vaux, southeast of Fort-Douaumont, on June 7 and almost reached the Belleville heights, the last stronghold before Verdun itself, on June 23. Pétain was preparing to evacuate the east bank of the Meuse when the Allies’ offensive on the Somme River was at last launched. Thereafter, the Germans assigned no more divisions to the Verdun attack.
• Preceded by a week’s bombardment, which gave ample warning of its advent, the Somme offensive was begun on July 1, 1916, by the 11 British divisions of Rawlinson’s new 4th Army on a 15-mile front between Serre, north of the Ancre, and Curlu, north of the Somme, while five French divisions attacked at the same time on an eight-mile front mainly south of the Somme, between Curlu and Péronne. With incredibly misplaced optimism, Haig had convinced himself that the British infantry would be able to walk forward irresistibly over ground cleared of defenders by the artillery. But the unconcealed preparations for the assault and the long preliminary bombardment had given away any chance of surprise, and the German defenders were well prepared for what was to come. In the event, the 60,000 attacking British infantrymen moving forward in symmetrical alignment at a snail’s pace enforced by each man’s 66 pounds (30 kilograms) of cumbrous equipment were mowed down in masses by the German machine guns, and the day’s casualties were the heaviest ever sustained by a British army. The French participants in the attack had twice as many guns as the British and did better against a weaker system of defenses, but almost nothing could be done to exploit this comparative success.
• Resigning himself now to limited advances, Haig concentrated his next effort on the southern sector of his Somme front. The Germans’ second position there (Longueval, Bazentin, and Ovillers) fell on July 14, but again the opportunity of exploitation was missed. Thenceforward, at great cost in lives, a methodical advance was continued, gaining little ground but straining the German resistance. The first tanks to be used in the war, though in numbers far too small to be effective, were thrown into the battle by the British on September 15. In mid-November early rains halted operations. The four-month Battle of the Somme was a miserable failure except that it diverted German resources from the attack on Verdun. It cost the British 420,000 casualties, the French 195,000, and the Germans 650,000.
• At Verdun, the summer slackening of German pressure enabled the French to organize counterattacks. Surprise attacks directed by General Robert-Georges Nivelle and launched by General Charles Mangin’s army corps recovered Fort-Douaumont on October 24, Fort-Vaux on November 2, and places north of Douaumont in mid-December. Pétain’s adroit defense of Verdun and these counterattacks had deprived Falkenhayn’s offensive of its strategic fulfillment; but France had been so much weakened in the first half of 1916 that it could scarcely satisfy the Allies’ expectations in the second. Verdun was one of the longest, bloodiest, and most ferocious battles of the war; French casualties amounted to about 400,000, German ones to about 350,000.

The Battle of Jutland

• The summer of 1916 saw the long-deferred confrontation of Germany’s High Seas Fleet and Great Britain’s Grand Fleet in the Battle of Jutland—history’s biggest naval battle, which both sides claimed as a victory.
• Admiral Reinhard Scheer, who became commander in chief of the High Seas Fleet in January 1916, planned to contrive an encounter on the open sea between his fleet and some part of the British fleet in separation from the whole, so that the Germans could exploit their momentary superiority in numbers to achieve victory. Scheer’s plan was to ensnare Admiral Beatty’s squadron of battle cruisers at Rosyth, midway up Britain’s eastern coast, by stratagem and destroy it before any reinforcements from the Grand Fleet’s main base at Scapa Flow could reach it.
• To set the trap, five battle cruisers of the German High Seas Fleet, together with four light cruisers, were to sail northward, under Hipper’s command, from Wilhelmshaven, Ger., to a point off the southwestern coast of Norway. Scheer himself, with the battle squadrons of the High Seas Fleet, was to follow, 50 miles behind, to catch Beatty’s forces in the gap once they had been lured eastward across the North Sea in pursuit of Hipper. But the signal for the German operation to begin, made in the afternoon of May 30, was intercepted and partially decoded by the British; and before midnight the whole British Grand Fleet was on its way to a rendezvous off Norway’s southwestern coast and roughly across the planned route of the German fleet.
• At 2:20 PM on May 31, when Admiral John Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet squadrons from Scapa Flow were still 65 miles away to the north, Beatty’s advance guard of light cruisers—five miles ahead of his heavier ships—and Hipper’s scouting group learned quite accidentally of one another’s proximity. An hour later the two lines were drawn up for battle, and in the next 50 minutes the British suffered severely, and the Indefatigable was sunk. When Beatty’s battle cruisers came up, however, the German cruisers, in their turn, sustained such damage that Hipper sent a protective screen of German destroyers in to launch a torpedo attack. The British had lost another battle cruiser, the Queen Mary, before the German High Seas Fleet was sighted by a British patrol to the south, at 4:35 PM. On this report Beatty ordered his ships northward, to lure the Germans toward the Grand Fleet under Jellicoe’s command.
• Not until 6:14 PM, after Jellicoe’s squadrons and Beatty’s had been within sight of one another for nearly a quarter of an hour, was the German fleet precisely located—only just in time for Jellicoe to deploy his ships to the best advantage. Jellicoe arrayed the Grand Fleet end-to-end in a line so that their combined broadsides could be brought to bear on the approaching German ships, who could in turn reply only with the forward guns of their leading ships. The British ships in effect formed the horizontal stroke and the German ships the vertical stroke of the letter “T,” with the British having deployed into line at a right angle to the German ships’ forward progress. This maneuver was in fact known as “crossing the enemy’s T” and was the ideal situation dreamed of by the tacticians of both navies, since by “crossing the T” one’s forces temporarily gained an overwhelming superiority of firepower.
• For the Germans this was a moment of unparalleled risk. Three factors helped prevent the destruction of the German ships in this trap: their own excellent construction, the steadiness and discipline of their crews, and the poor quality of the British shells. The Lützow, the Derfflinger, and the battleship König led the line and were under broadside fire from some 10 British battleships, yet their main guns remained undamaged and they fought back to such effect that one of their salvoes fell full on the Invincible and blew it up. This success, however, did little to relieve the intense bombardment from the other British ships, and the German fleet was still pressing forward into the steel trap of the Grand Fleet.
• Relying on the magnificent seamanship of the German crews, Scheer extricated his fleet from the appalling danger into which it had run by a simple but, in practice, extremely difficult maneuver. At 6:30 PM he ordered a turn of 180° for all his ships at once; it was executed without collision; and the German battleships reversed course in unison and steamed out of the jaws of the trap, while German destroyers spread a smoke screen across their rear. The smoke and worsening visibility left Jellicoe in doubt about what had happened, and the British had lost contact with the Germans by 6:45 PM.
• Yet the British Grand Fleet had maneuvered in such a way that it ended up between the German High Seas Fleet and the German ports, and this was the situation Scheer most dreaded, so at 6:55 PM Scheer ordered another reverse turn, perhaps hoping to pass around the rear of the British fleet. But the result for him was a worse position than that from which he had just escaped: his battle line had become compressed, and his leading ships found themselves again under intense bombardment from the broadside array of the British ships. Jellicoe had succeeded in crossing the Germans’ “T” again. The Lützow now received irreparable damage, and many other German ships were damaged at this point. At 7:15 PM, therefore, to cause a diversion and win time, Scheer ordered his battle cruisers and destroyers ahead to virtually immolate themselves in a massed charge against the British ships.
• This was the crisis of the Battle of Jutland. As the German battle cruisers and destroyers steamed forward, the German battleships astern became confused and disorganized in trying to execute their reverse turn. Had Jellicoe ordered the Grand Fleet forward through the screen of charging German battle cruisers at that moment, the fate of the German High Seas Fleet would likely have been sealed. As it was, fearing and overestimating the danger of torpedo attacks from the approaching destroyers, he ordered his fleet to turn away, and the two lines of battleships steamed apart at a speed of more than 20 knots. They did not meet again, and when darkness fell, Jellicoe could not be sure of the route of the German retreat. By 3:00 AM on June 1 the Germans had safely eluded their pursuers.
• The British had sustained greater losses than the Germans in both ships and men. In all, the British lost three battle cruisers, three cruisers, eight destroyers, and 6,274 officers and men in the Battle of Jutland. The Germans lost one battleship, one battle cruiser, four light cruisers, five destroyers, and 2,545 officers and men. The losses inflicted on the British, however, were not enough to affect the numerical superiority of their fleet over the German in the North Sea, where their domination remained practically unchallengeable during the course of the war. Henceforth, the German High Seas Fleet chose not to venture out from the safety of its home ports.

The Eastern Front, 1916

• In the hope of diverting German strength from the attack at Verdun on the Western Front, the Russians gallantly but prematurely opened an offensive north and south of Lake Naroch (Narocz, east of Vilna) on March 18, 1916, and continued it until March 27, though they won very little ground at great cost and only for a short time. They then reverted to preparations for a major offensive in July. The main blow, it was planned, should be delivered by A.E. Evert’s central group of armies, assisted by an inward movement of A.N. Kuropatkin’s army in the northern sector of the front. But at the same time, A.A. Brusilov’s southwestern army group was authorized to make a supposedly diversionary attack in its own sectors. In the event, Brusilov’s attack became by far the more important operation of the offensive.
• Surprised by the Austrians’ Asiago offensive in May, Italy promptly appealed to the Russians for action to draw the enemy’s reserves away from the Italian fronts, and the Russians responded by advancing their timetable again. Brusilov undertook to start his attack on June 4, on the understanding that Evert’s should be launched 10 days later.
• Thus began an offensive on the Eastern Front that was to be imperial Russia’s last really effective military effort. Popularly known as Brusilov’s offensive, it had such an astonishing initial success as to revive Allied dreams about the irresistible Russian “steamroller.” Instead, its ultimate achievement was to sound the death knell of the Russian monarchy. Brusilov’s four armies were distributed along a very wide front, with Lutsk at the northern end, Tarnopol and Buchach (Buczacz) in the central sector, and Czernowitz at the southern end. Having struck first in the Tarnopol and Czernowitz sectors on June 4, Brusilov on June 5 took the Austrians wholly by surprise when he launched A.M. Kaledin’s army toward Lutsk: the defenses crumbled at once, and the attackers pushed their way between two Austrian armies. As the offensive was developed, the Russians were equally successful in the Buchach sector and in their thrust into Bukovina, which culminated in the capture of Czernowitz. By June 20, Brusilov’s forces had captured 200,000 prisoners.
• Evert and Kuropatkin, however, instead of striking in accordance with the agreed plan, found excuses for procrastination. The Russian chief of general staff, M.V. Alekseyev, therefore tried to transfer this inert couple’s reserves to Brusilov, but the Russians’ lateral communications were so poor that the Germans had time to reinforce the Austrians before Brusilov was strong enough to make the most of his victory. Though his forces in Bukovina advanced as far as the Carpathian Mountains, a counterstroke by Alexander von Linsingen’s Germans in the Lutsk sector checked Russian progress at the decisive point. Further Russian drives from the centre of Brusilov’s front were launched in July; but by early September the opportunity of exploiting the summer’s victory was lost. Brusilov had driven the Austrians from Bukovina and from much of eastern Galicia and had inflicted huge losses of men and equipment on them, but he had depleted Russia’s armies by about 1,000,000 men in doing so. (A large portion of this number consisted of deserters or prisoners.) This loss seriously undermined both the morale and the material strength of Russia. Brusilov’s offensive also had indirect results of great consequence. First, it had compelled the Germans to withdraw at least seven divisions from the Western Front, where they could ill be spared from the Verdun and Somme battles. Second, it hastened Romania’s unfortunate entry into the war.
• Disregarding Romania’s military backwardness, the Romanian government of Ionel Brătianu declared war against Austria-Hungary on Aug. 27, 1916. In entering the war, Romania succumbed to the Allies’ offers of Austro-Hungarian territory and to the belief that the Central Powers would be too much preoccupied with other fronts to mount any serious riposte against a Romanian offensive. Some 12 of Romania’s 23 divisions, in three columns, thus began on August 28 a slow westward advance across Transylvania, where at first there were only five Austro-Hungarian divisions to oppose them.
• The riposte of the Central Powers was swifter than the progress of the invasion: Germany, Turkey, and Bulgaria declared war against Romania on August 28, August 30, and September 1, respectively; and Falkenhayn had plans already prepared. Though the miscarriage of his overall program for the year led to his being replaced by Hindenburg as chief of the German general staff on August 29, Falkenhayn’s recommendation that Mackensen should direct a Bulgarian attack on southern Romania was approved; and Falkenhayn himself went to command on the Transylvanian front, for which five German as well as two more Austrian divisions were found available as reinforcements.
• Mackensen’s forces from Bulgaria stormed the Turtucaia (Tutrakan) bridgehead on the Danube southeast of Bucharest on September 5. His subsequent advance eastward into the Dobruja caused the Romanians to switch their reserves to that quarter instead of reinforcing their Transylvanian enterprise, which thereupon came to a halt. Falkenhayn soon attacked: first at the southern end of the 200-mile front, where he threw one of the Romanian columns back into the Roter Turm (Turnu Roşu) Pass, then in the centre, where by October 9 he had defeated another at Kronstadt (Braşov). For a month, however, the Romanians withstood Falkenhayn’s attempts to drive them out of the Vulcan and Szurduk (Surduc) passes into Walachia. But just before winter snows blocked the way, the Germans took the two passes and advanced southward to Tîrgu Jiu, where they won another victory. Then Mackensen, having turned westward from the Dobruja, crossed the Danube near Bucharest, on which his and Falkenhayn’s armies converged. Bucharest fell on December 6, and the Romanian Army, a crippled force, could only fall back northeastward into Moldavia, where it had the belated support of Russian troops. The Central Powers had access to Romania’s wheat fields and oil wells, and the Russians had 300 more miles of front to defend.

German strategy and the submarine war, 1916–January 1917

• Both Admiral Scheer and General Falkenhayn doubted whether the German submarines could do any decisive damage to Great Britain so long as their warfare was restricted in deference to the protests of the United States; and, after a tentative reopening of the submarine campaign on Feb. 4, 1916, the German naval authorities in March gave the U-boats permission to sink without warning all ships except passenger vessels. The German civilian statesmen, however, who paid due attention to their diplomats’ warnings about U.S. opinion, were soon able to prevail over the generals and the admirals: on May 4 the scope of the submarine campaign was again severely restricted.
• The controversy between the statesmen and the advocates of unrestricted warfare was not dead yet. Hindenburg, chief of the general staff from August 29, had Ludendorff as his quartermaster general, and Ludendorff was quickly won over to supporting the chief of the Admiralty staff, Henning von Holtzendorff, in his arguments against the German chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, and the foreign minister, Gottlieb von Jagow. Whereas Bethmann and some other statesmen were hoping for a negotiated peace (see below), Hindenburg and Ludendorff were committed to a military victory. The British naval blockade, however, threatened to starve Germany into collapse before a military victory could be achieved, and soon Hindenburg and Ludendorff got their way: it was decided that, from Feb. 1, 1917, submarine warfare should be unrestricted and overtly so.

Peace moves and U.S. policy to February 1917

• There were few efforts by any of the Central or Allied Powers to achieve a negotiated peace in the first two years of the war. By 1916 the most promising signs for peace seemed to exist only in the intentions of two statesmen in power—the German chancellor Bethmann and the U.S. president Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, having proclaimed the neutrality of the United States in August 1914, strove for the next two years to maintain it. (See the video.) Early in 1916 he sent his confidant, Colonel Edward M. House, to sound London and Paris about the possibility of U.S. mediation between the belligerents. House’s conversations with the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, resulted in the House–Grey Memorandum (Feb. 22, 1916), declaring that the United States might enter the war if Germany rejected Wilson’s mediation but that Great Britain reserved the right to initiate U.S. mediatory action. By mid-1916, the imminent approach of the presidential election in the United States caused Wilson to suspend his moves for peace.
• In Germany, meanwhile, Bethmann had succeeded, with difficulty, in postponing the declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare. Wilson, though he was reelected president on Nov. 7, 1916, let another month pass without doing anything for peace, and during that period the German victory over Romania was taking place. Thus, while Bethmann lost patience with waiting for Wilson to act, the German military leaders came momentarily to think that Germany, from a position of strength, might now propose a peace acceptable to themselves. Having been constrained to agree with the militarists that, if his proposals were rejected by the Allies, unrestricted submarine warfare should be resumed, Bethmann was allowed to announce, on December 12, the terms of a German offer of peace—terms, however, that were militarily so far-reaching as to preclude the Allies’ acceptance of them. The main stumbling block was Germany’s insistence upon its annexation of Belgium and of the occupied portion of northeastern France.
• On Dec. 18, 1916, Wilson invited both belligerent camps to state their “war aims.” The Allies were secretly encouraged by the U.S. secretary of state to offer terms too sweeping for German acceptance; and the Germans, suspecting collusion between Wilson and the Allies, agreed in principle to the opening of negotiations but left their statement of December 12 practically unchanged and privately decided that Wilson should not actually take part in any negotiation that he might bring about. By mid-January 1917 the December overtures had ended.
• Strangely enough, Wilson’s next appeal, a speech of Jan. 22, 1917, preaching international conciliation and a “peace without victory,” elicited a confidential response from the British expressing readiness to accept his mediation. In the opposite camp, Austria-Hungary would likewise have listened readily to peace proposals, but Germany had already decided, on January 9, to declare unrestricted submarine warfare. Bethmann’s message restating Germany’s peace terms and inviting Wilson to persevere in his efforts was delivered on January 31 but was paradoxically accompanied by the announcement that unrestricted submarine warfare would begin the next day.
• Wilson severed diplomatic relations between the United States and Germany on Feb. 3, 1917, and asked Congress, on February 26, for power to arm merchantmen and to take all other measures to protect U.S. commerce. But American opinion was still not ready for war, and the Germans wisely abstained from attacks on U.S. shipping. What changed the tenor of public feeling was the publication of the Zimmermann Telegram.
• Arthur Zimmermann had succeeded Jagow as Germany’s secretary of state for foreign affairs in November 1916; and in that same month the Mexican president, Venustiano Carranza, whose country’s relations with the United States had been critical since March, had virtually offered bases on the Mexican coast to the Germans for their submarines. Zimmermann on Jan. 16, 1917, sent a coded telegram to his ambassador in Mexico instructing him to propose to the Mexican government that, if the United States should enter the war against Germany, Mexico should become Germany’s ally with a view to recovering Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona from the United States. Intercepted and decoded by the British Admiralty Intelligence, this message was communicated to Wilson on February 24. It was published in the U.S. press on March 1, and it immediately set off a nationwide demand for war against Germany.