Season 14, Episode 5: The World Goes to War, Part II
Earlier this year, I came across one of the dumbest things I have ever read. Although I am no longer active on twitter, I do run across the occasional viral tweet and this one was so bad that I won’t name either its author nor quote it directly because anyone who posts something like this on a public forum is either dangerously ignorant themselves or believes that their intended audience is. To sum up, the author implied that the horrors of World War I were purposefully exaggerated by people who wanted to defame nationalism for their own nefarious agendas. After reading many firsthand accounts of the experience, especially those found in the Literary Digest History of the World War, I can safely say that, if anything, said horrors might be understated.
Sorry to open with a rant, I just had to get that off my chest. Read accounts for yourself, make up your own mind, and do not believe someone on social media simply because their claims are provocative. Okay, moving on, let’s take a look at the Eastern Front of the first World War to see how the Russians fared against their German opponents.
Before the war broke out, the German Empire was extremely anxious about tangling with their gargantuan eastern neighbor. In the previous episode, we discussed how the Schlieffen Plan, wherein France would be quickly contained and England sequestered to their home island, was partly conceived because Germany saw Russia as the larger, more dangerous threat. Germany shared a long, porous border with Russia, as did her ally Austria. Perhaps it is more correct to say that they both shared a border with Poland, but Poland was dominated by the Russian Empire at the time and firmly under its control, so essentially they shared a border with Russia.
In mid-August, when the German invasion of Belgium was approaching its middle, its troops on the eastern front seized a few outlying rail stations across the border. When they attempted to seize the station at Wierzbołów (Polish), however, they met with heavy resistance from entrenched Russian defenders. Although the 10,000 German attackers outnumbered the 2,500 Russians defending the station, they were forced to withdraw after a fierce defense killed hundreds of their compatriots. A good start for Russia, it would seem, though this was a mere preliminary engagement and not a fully-pressed offensive.
The Germans found themselves quickly on the defensive as the Russian armies arrived in Poland in mid August and began their offensive. The First Army, which is its name, not an arbitrary designation on my part, and the Second Army, again its actual name, prepared to invade the eastern reaches of Germany. The broad plan was to quickly strike into eastern Germany and push the German army beyond the Vistula River, then press south into Austria while holding the line against German counterattack.
At first, it seemed like things were going more or less to plan for the Russians. They earned a victory at the Battle of Stallupönen, though it was not exactly a crushing tactical affair for them. They lost nearly seven thousand of their seventeen thousand soldiers in the fighting while managing to inflict losses of around one thousand five hundred against their foes. The Germans had managed to rout an entire infantry division after systematically isolating it from its comrades, but the Russian army was maneuvering in a way that threatened encirclement, so the Germans managed an orderly withdrawal. The Russians advanced, hoping to capitalize on their costly victory.
While Russia possessed several very large armies, however, it had trouble keeping them all properly organized. The rapid German advance on the Western Front put pressure on Russian high command to mobilize even faster in order to prevent the Schlieffen Plan, or at least the version the Germans had employed, from succeeding. In the previous episode, we discussed how Germany had invested heavily in wartime infrastructure to ensure rapid mobilization. Russia, however, had not. The Russian Empire in 1914 possessed none of the efficiency or forethought of their German counterparts. Three-quarters of Russia’s railways were single-track, which meant that only one train at a time could use them. Also, their trains utilized a different rail gauge than the rest of Europe, so they would be unable to use their own trains on German tracks if they managed to take German territory. Making matters worse, the rapid mobilization which they were attempting to employ was not supported by proper communication infrastructure -- orders were relayed to armies and divisions sometimes long after they had been given and sometimes multiple orders arrived at the same time which contradicted one another. If any of this reminds you of the Russo-Japanese War, well, you are not in for much of a surprise.
Seeking to follow up their victory at Stallupönen, the Russian forces on the eastern front engaged German forces, hoping to press them back to the Vistula River. After several days of fighting - which, remember, means artillery bombardments, infantry charges, machine gun fire, and bayonets - the Russian First and Second Army became separated. Assisted by their railway infrastructure, the Germans pounced on the Second Army with fresh reinforcements under the command of two notable German officers - Paul Von Hindenberg and Erich Ludendorf.
In the ensuing battle, which lasted several days, the Russian Second Army found itself encircled by German enemies, who punished them severely for their blunder with artillery barrages and infantry charges. The result was an absolute disaster for the Russian Second Army and probably the greatest military disaster of the war -- some would argue of the entire twentieth century. Surrounded by their enemies and cut off from their allies, the Russian army fell into complete disarray and rout, only to find that there was nowhere to run. Upon seeing that the situation was hopeless, the Second Army’s commander, General Alexander Samsonov, committed suicide on the battlefield.
As the old saying goes, to the victors go the naming rights. General Hindenberg named this encounter “The Battle of Tannenberg,” invoking the name of the nearby forest as well as another famous encounter five hundred years before. In 1410, the Commonwealth of Poland Lithuania fought a battle near the same place against the Crusading Order of Teutonic Knights, a battle which resulted in a Polish-Lithuanian victory. Giving this battle the same name was meant to signify that the Teutonic Knights’ defeat had now been avenged. Some refer to the World War I battle as the Second Battle of Tannenberg, but many historians have taken to calling the first battle “the Battle of Grunwald” to avoid confusion.
While the Battle of Tannenberg was an absolute disaster for the Russian military, it was far from a fatal blow. The Central Powers had the upper hand in the east at the war’s beginning and pressed their advantage, but the Russian Empire was large, contained many soldiers, and many were already being deployed to face down the Germans and Austrians.
In fact, while the Russian Second Army was being encircled at the Battle of Tannenberg, the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Army were engaging Austro-Hungarian troops in a region called Galicia, which today is part of Ukraine. The 19-day Galician Offensive was incredibly successful for Russian forces, and resulted in crushing about half of the Austro-Hungarian army. Russia occupied territory which had formerly been part of Hungary and besieged a few holdout fortresses, which fell a few months afterward. This victory helped shift public opinion in Russia back toward supporting the war effort, which was critical for the government after the humiliating disaster at Tannenberg.
However, north of Galicia, German forces steadily drove Russian troops back, pushing them out of east Prussia until finally in February of 1915, Russian forces had to evacuate the region entirely. In spite of additional successes against Austria-Hungary, by September of 1915 Russian forces in eastern Europe evacuated from Galicia and Poland in an event known as “The Great Retreat.” The German and Austrian offensive which precipitated this withdrawal was devastating and inflicted massive casualties on their Russian foes.
Throughout the war, the Entente Powers of Britain, France, Italy and Russia held occasional conference with one another to coordinate large-scale actions in hopes of obtaining victory over the Central Powers. In early 1916, it was decided that a fresh set of offensives was needed, beginning with a resurgence from Russia. Two weeks after Russia’s offensive spurred a reaction from the Central Powers, Britain, France, and Italy would launch their own offensives against a Western Front which they hoped would be weakened.
Before we examine exactly how well the 1916 offensives worked, we need to discuss the Ottoman Empire. Because the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire also held the title of Caliph of Islam, the German Empire came to believe that this meant the Sultan enjoyed the religious loyalty of every Muslim on the planet, like some kind of Muslim pope. Therefore, if the Ottomans entered the war on the side of the Central Powers, the many Muslim citizens of British-occupied India would rise up against their colonial overlords out of religious zeal. However, the Germans were greatly mistaken in their assumptions about the Ottoman Sultan’s influence on Muslims who lived outside of his empire, and in spite of his declaration of jihad against the Entente Powers on November 11, 1914, there were no religious uprisings in British India.
For much of the first World War, the focus of the Ottoman Empire was opposing the Russians, who had been openly clamoring to take Constantinople as well as the other Ottoman possessions in the Caucasus and throughout eastern Europe. True to form, the Russians invaded Ottoman-controlled Armenia late in 1914 and the Caucasus campaign began, followed shortly thereafter by the Persian campaign, in which several supporting armies attacked the Ottoman Empire’s eastern front from Persia.
Probably the most famous action taken against the Ottoman Empire during the first World War was the Gallipoli Campaign. Hoping to secure the Dardanelles Strait as a foothold for a larger invasion of Ottoman territory from the west, the British navy made several landings along the Gallipoli Peninsula at which many marines disembarked and assaulted the shore batteries. However, this peninsula had been specially reinforced by the Germans and the Ottomans also possessed highly mobile artillery cannons which could provide cover wherever they were needed. In spite of some early successes, the few British units who managed to fortify their positions were shredded by Turkish counterattacks. The entire campaign took place over the course of nearly a year, from early 1915 to the winter of 1916, but ultimately resulted in a withdrawal of British forces from the Gallipoli peninsula after repeated landings, fortifications, counterattacks, retreats, and ultimately failure. Incidentally, the First Lord of the Admiralty who had planned the Gallipoli Campaign was a man by the name of… Winston Churchill, whose failure was so embarrassing that he was never heard from again.
In February of 1916, another of the first World War’s most famous engagements began, this time on the western front. Seeking to break through the Entente lines and put their enemies on a permanent defensive footing, German troops launched the Battle of Verdun, which technically dragged on until the end of the year. Aggressive assaults, counterattacks, artillery barrages, and brutal hand-to-hand fighting with bayonets in trenches defined this horrible affair, and it provided part of the motivation behind the larger Entente plan for Russia to renew their offensive that spring followed by fresh offensives from Britain and France after the Germans had reacted to renewed Russian aggression.
In May of 1916, Russia launched what came to be called the Brusilov campaign, named for the General who led the effort, Alexei Brusilov. This was hardly an idle namesake: Brusilov himself had devised new tactics which he was certain would lead the Russians to victory and was given permission by Russian high command to try them out.
While Brusilov’s tactics worked impressively well, there were a few additional factors which assisted his success. For one, the German high command was extremely focused on making gains at Verdun and the eastern front was, generally, considered an afterthought. On the Austro-Hungarian section of the eastern front, many experienced soldiers were redeployed for an invasion of northern Italy and their positions in the east filled by raw recruits, many with insufficient training. Still, what Brusilov achieved was remarkable in a war with so few tactical achievements.
The primary tactic which had been employed by both Entente and Central Powers was to amass infantry at a specific point of the enemy’s front and have them charge en masse, seeking to punch through the enemy’s defenses with artillery barrages followed by concentrated infantry charges. These were sometimes successful, though often the soldiers who succeeded in seizing enemy trenches were so thinned that they were especially vulnerable to counterattack, which their enemies usually arranged almost immediately. Aerial reconnaissance also made it difficult to conceal such plans from the enemy, who could prepare a robust defense.
Brusilov’s approach was, broadly, to send up to three waves of infantry each at various points along the enemy front simultaneously. Some of those waves would be beaten back, but the enemy would, theoretically, have difficulty determining which area of their line needed reinforcement in the immediate moment. He also heavily utilized small detachments which were given a relatively free hand to strike whenever they spotted an abandoned line of enemy trench or another weak spot along the line.
Brusilov’s offensive met with great success but, like every other large-scale offensive of the first World War, came with massive casualties. Although the Germans got the worst of those casualties, the Russian count was not far behind and the domestic political situation in the Russian homeland was growing worse by the day. Brusilov’s success was not enough to salvage the war’s stark unpopularity at home and the people were on the verge of full-scale revolution. The following year, 1917, that revolution would begin and would force Russia to withdraw from the war. We will discuss events in Russia in more detail in the next episode.
The Brusilov offensive did successfully take pressure off the Entente Powers’ western front and likely blunted any hope that the German offensive at Verdun would be successful. By the end of 1916, that offensive had been abandoned.
As the war dragged on, many other nations took sides in 1916 through 1918. Many eastern European countries, fearing that the war would imminently spill into their countries and hoping that alliance would afford some protection, sought to ally themselves with the Entente Powers, though Bulgaria had joined the war in 1915 on the side of the Central Powers.
Many Balkan and eastern European nations still nurtured economies which were heavily agrarian - in some cases over 90% of their total economic production was agriculture. As such, many entered the war only after they had completed their harvest for the year in hopes of averting a famine both for themselves and for Europe in general. Many other nations who were latecomers to the war entered because they objected to a specific German foreign policy: unrestricted submarine warfare.
By late 1916, the German Empire was already feeling supply pinches and internal assessments agreed that without some way to shift the balance of power between themselves and their Entente enemies, they would ultimately lose the war. Near the war’s beginning, German submarine commanders were given a relatively free hand at choosing ocean-bound targets and sinking them at will, sometimes with a prior radio warning, sometimes without.
In May of 1915, a German submarine launched a torpedo which sank the RMS Lusitania, a ship which was hauling arms for the British war effort but which also had almost two thousand people on board, over a thousand of whom died as the ship sank. Over a hundred of those lost were US citizens, which caused quite a ruckus in the United States as the public began to pressure isolationist president Woodrow Wilson into joining the war. As a result of this and other high-profile sinkings, the German Empire announced that it would revise its submarine policies and ensure more limited engagements. However, in late 1916, the situation was just desperate enough for Germany to cause their leaders to reconsider whether they could afford such compassion.
In early 1917, Germany resumed engaging in unrestricted submarine warfare, especially targeting ships in British waters in the hopes of cutting their supply. Some German leaders were convinced that if they could isolate that lonely island, the English would beg for a truce within six months. However, the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare really only served to anger the international community who had yet to take a side. The United States entered the war in 1917, sending troops to the Western Front to aid their Entente Allies. Incidentally, one of those US troops was my great-grandfather.
Many other nations declared war after the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, most of whom provided naval support. In nearly every theater of the war, the Central Powers were either barely holding out or actively losing ground. In the eastern and southern reaches of the Ottoman Empire, the Arab Revolt was starting to wreak havoc against Turkish supply lines and threatening their hold on the Middle East. In Italy, the Austro-Hungarian armies were reliant on German supplements just to conserve what little territory they managed to gain and on the Western Front the stalemate continued with neither side able to gain decent ground without immediately losing it to counterattack.
Things on the Eastern Front had proceeded in favor of the German Empire, though they were unable to make further incursions without risking the collapse of their Western Front. In December of 1917, Russia signed an armistice with the Central Powers and officially exited the war, solidifying that peace a few months later in March of 1918. This helped alleviate some of the pressure which the German Empire was under, but it would not be enough. Shortages had become common for both civilians and soldiers, and in spite of launching a successful series of offensives on the Western Front in the spring of 1918, the German army was by now exhausted and demoralized. When the Entente launched the one hundred days offensive in August, the German front lines came close to total collapse. In early November of 1918, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire both signed peace agreements with the Entente Powers, which left Germany standing alone.
On the domestic front, things in the German Empire were likewise going very poorly. The world had been shocked by the successful revolution in Russia and many monarchist powers in Europe feared that they might be next. In late October and stretching well into early November, a national revolution began in Germany which challenged the Kaiser’s rule. On November 9, a republic of Germany was proclaimed and ultimately its champions carried the day. On November 11, 1918 the new leaders of Germany signed an armistice with the Entente Powers, bringing the first World War to an end.
It had been a truly terrible war. At the end of it all, between fifteen and twenty-two million people were dead, roughly accounting for two percent of the global population. This includes not only deaths from combat, which were significant, but also deaths from the famines that set in during the closing years of the war when the nations which usually served as the bread baskets of Europe were forced to spend their energy on self defense.
Incidents which today are defined as war crimes were frequent on every side of the conflict, and the use of poison gas as a weapon was so reviled that it was forbidden by international law in future conflicts. Technically speaking, poison gas had been considered a war crime since 1899. At the end of it, Germany and Russia both had completely different governments and were in a painful process of transformation. Celebrations erupted worldwide at the announcement of the war’s end, but the seeds of future conflict were sewn at its conclusion.
Germany was penalized with a hefty war indemnity which only served as a thorn in the side of the new republican government which was still finding its feet. German soldiers who served on the Eastern Front had the distinct impression that the war had been going well for Germany, considering all their success against the Russians. When they were told to lay down arms and turn themselves in to the nearest government officials of the countries they were occupying, many chose instead to fight their way back to Germany to find out what the hell had just happened. Many of these soldiers would spread rumors that the liberal government which had just taken control was to blame for the loss - that the soldiers and the people of Germany had been stabbed in the back. While this was far from true, that did not stop people from believing it because it made them feel better.
Okay. World War One, officially over now. Next time, I promise we will return to Japan and discuss the concurrent developments there as they sought to increase their influence in East Asia and around the world in the aftermath of the Great War.