What you're about to hear is part four of a multi part series on the First World War. If you like your stories to have some sort of cohesive, linear narrative flow, although I'm not promising that. I probably couldn't deliver on that. But if that's what you like, we're probably better off suggesting you go check out episode number one and work your way to here.
If you don't care about that kind of stuff at all, or you just don't trust me to deliver a cohesive linear narrative flow, and I wouldn't blame you, well then by all means start here at part four and check out this series that we're calling Blueprint for Armageddon. December seventh, nineteen forty one. A date which will live in infamy. It's history. Of one small step for man, one. I am priest who may attack the events.
The figures would have fine enough. Not quite to the noise, massive humanity. From this time and place. I take pride in the words, Ich bin Ein Biolina. Mr. Gorbachev teared down this world. Drama. Marine six. Now it's two has had a major explosion and what appears to be a complete collapse surrounding the entire area. I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their president's.
Well, I'm not a crook. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful misery. It's hardcore history. How do you market war? How do you sell combat to the people who are actually going to have to engage It's not a hypothetical question. Any military
that requires volunteers to decide they want to join the service has to think about how you actually sell the idea to the people who, you know, have to take part in it. An idea that carries with it the potential for some very nasty outcomes in the very worst of circumstances, doesn't it? It's a difficult job, perhaps, to market combat.
It's easier to do in peacetime, though, right? If you have to sell suntan oil to people in Alaska, you might be able to pull that off in the summer. In December, it's a really tough sell. Before the First World War breaks out, if you're trying to market recruitment into the British Army, you can sell the same sort of talking points, the same sort of angles that have worked.
for governments and monarchies and tribes going back to the beginning of civilization. The militaries long had certain selling points. I think we're all familiar with them. You could add regular pay thrown into that as well. The heroism, the adventure, the status. I mean, you know, there's a lot of things. Some people just like to fight. I mean, you never know. The problem is that that's a pre nineteen fourteen.
you know, talking point when it comes to what happens when the First World War breaks out and how that just totally messes with your marketing strategy, unless you're marketing hell as a travel destination. You can't, no matter how much press censorship you have, and the British had plenty in the First World War, just like everyone else. You can't mask.
those kind of casualty numbers. Now you can mask the reality, the sort of stuff that some of these newspaper reporters who were censored during the war, after the war, you know, they would write books telling you the real story, what really happened, because you couldn't have imagined it, and it was all censored by the press.
even with the censorship, you can't hide the death and destruction and dismemberment, and you see the people returning to your hometown with the horrible wounds, and you hear some of the rumors and stories. You know it's not going to be fun. All of a sudden the marketers in Great Britain's recruitment operation have to play hardball.
No more just throwing out carrots, they're gonna use some sticks too. In the US we have a twenty first century volunteer army ourselves, and the US uses just carrots to encourage people to join up. We'll pay you more, we'll pay you for college, you'll make something of your life. I mean there's all these different things that they use to motivate people, but there's not very many sticks in the US system. Once the first couple of weeks of the First World War happened and everybody together
finds out how enormous this is gonna be and in an absolutely stunning group wake up call where the light goes on over everyone's head and they're going, Oh my gosh, we don't have enough resources and oh my gosh, we don't have enough money for a war like this. And oh my gosh, we don't have enough people.
And even some of these larger states where you think to yourself, oh, you know, people shouldn't be a problem. Look at how many people are coming up every generation. Remember, Manpower, in the old, you know, air quotes means manpower across the board, not just the people fighting on the front line, but the people that can still be miners to extract the material you need to carry on the war.
or people working in arms manufacturing plants so that they can build the bombs you need to fight the war. In other words, if you take too much to throw on the fighting line, you won't have enough people back home making the stuff that the people on the fighting line need to win. Manpower becomes a very big deal. All these other countries in the war, Germany, France, Russia, no problem, they've spent decades working out a conscription operation where they draft people.
You know, you come of age, you do a couple of years in the service, and then you become parts of the reserves, and then you become parts of the other reserve and the heavier and older reserve and You know, after a while they've got a whole revolving, self perpetuating system in place, whereas every generation comes up, they're crankin' out new soldiers, except for Great Britain. They're the last volunteer service involved in this conflict when it breaks out. It puts unique pressures on them.
The first thing they do is simply ask people to join up. And remember in nineteen fourteen you didn't quite know what you were in for. You could still sell the old selling points. The uniforms are wonderful, and the women, you'll look dashing, and it'd just be, you know, I mean, war, adventure. Kill the Bosch, you know, all the good methods, the king needs you, king and country, all the things that have always worked and still work, by the way, in a lot of cases.
especially in peacetime, um, worked in more folks in Britain and Scotland and Canada and Australia and all these places signed up than they even could handle. They were looking for a couple hundred thousand, got a lot more than that. But that's before the casualties start happening.
A lot of patriotic Britons sign up, but you don't know how many patriotic Britons you're you're gonna need, and not just in one big lump, but every month to replace the troops you lose. In late nineteen fifteen the British just lose. at Gallipoli, and they walk away after a couple of months with two hundred and fifty thousand casualties. You don't just replace those by playing nice and easy and saying, come and fight for king and country. You're using more hardball methods.
And one of the ones that I've always thought was just indicative of something that if you imagined it in modern times, it boggles the mind. Using a a strategy like this today, but it's absolute gene. It shows exactly the most vulnerable point in a young man's, you know, psyche. I mean, the place where if you're a marketer, you're looking for for, you know, what motivates people, how you can touch these these elements of influence and The order of the feather, the white feather movement.
is absolutely brilliant in that regard. I mean it's almost devious. You try to imagine our government doing something like this today with modern twenty-first century technology. It's interesting to think about But basically, you know, when August, early September nineteen fourteen rolls around, there's an admiral in the British Admiralty who's who's working like everyone else to think about how can we encourage more people to sign up for this horrible war?
And comes up with an attack on a motivation, a marketing strategy. He's going to enlist patriotic young British women. to walk the streets of all these towns in Britain, their hometowns, you know, where there are people they know. And if they see men not in uniform who look like they could be or should be, they're gonna go up surround this person and start saying the most horrible thing. You you're a coward and all these terrible things to them.
you know, pretty women in public dressing you down if you're eighteen years old, that's a pretty good marketing, you know, chink in someone's armor to exploit. Not just that, you're probably and usually were on the street of your hometown, where the passers by know you or your family.
This is a profoundly embarrassing moment, you know, for for everyone around you, everyone connected with you. God forbid if you have a girlfriend, she's gonna think this looks pretty bad for her too. I mean, the effect was was huge. And then before this little group of women um were done with you, they would put a white feather signifying cowardice on your lapel or somewhere very visible, you know, on you.
This was not an unusual occurrence. There are accounts for people that say they were afraid to go outside the house sometimes. Because these patriotic and zealous women who were really just trying to help. That's the funny part. This is the society motivating patriotism, all these things, right? It's it's all the right virtues. But I've got an account from a sixteen year old boy. Who had to go through this?
And then he signed up for the service'cause he was so deathly embarrassed and afraid and ashamed, and the service person laughed him out of the room, but then said he looked so downtrodden he exaggerated his height, exaggerated his age, exaggerated his weight, and he was in. At sixteen under a hundred and ten pounds on the Western Front. It's absolutely deviously clever. Wonder I mean I again I try to imagine us using it today.
You know, these ideas could backfire though, these creative marketing recruitment ideas. For example, the government felt the need to put out symbols that people could wear.
who had already done their service overseas and had been wounded and honorably discharged, or who worked for some really important armaments or war related industry and couldn't be spared, because apparently enough of those people were being mistakenly given the order of the white feather treatment to make that an important thing for the government to do.
There were other creative marketing plans, not sticks but carrots, and one of them, another brilliant one when you think about it on the surface, involved the British government explaining to recruits that if you sign up with your pals, your buddies, you could all serve together. And so people joined up from the same street, or the same pub, or the same community, or the same fraternity, or the same profession.
And they all served together and they had wonderful names. These are like military unit names that they're still known by. I mean there were the Liverpool PA. Or the Grimsby Chums. And these friends all went to the service. You figure if you gotta serve, you might as well do it with your friends. But then you get to watch your friends die. It's the part we didn't really consider when we signed up and it sounded kinda fun. Not just that.
When these units would get decimated in some of these terrible encounters, for example, you could be walking down a road with your pals in the open and all of a sudden get caught by artillery fire. suffer eighty percent casualties, and then, instead of the losses and the suffering and the grief being spread out, sort of diluted across the width and breadth of the entire British Isles, or British Empire for that matter, Some local community or some fraternity or some profession just gets pounded.
And there are villages and towns in Britain now that had these terrible days just happen to the whole community, and pretty much everybody suffers a major loss one way or the other. That's the downside of that clever marketing plan. By nineteen sixteen, there's nothing clever enough to get enough people in uniform. The losses are so high that the British finally do what the British really don't do, and they started conscripting their people.
It's hard to blame the British too for starting the same sort of draft that the continental great powers use. All you have to do, as we said, the casualties are so high. Look at them. By the end of nineteen fifteen, the British have suffered half a million casualties. two hundred thousand of those are dead, by the way. For a traditionally naval power who has traditionally a rather small army by continental standards, those are huge numbers.
Now, you want to see what continental standards look like? Look at the British ally, the French, who've had a huge army in the meat grinder since the first minute of this whole affair, and by the end of 1915, their casualties are over two million. More than seven hundred thousand of those are dead. And all these great powers are looking at their principal enemies and trying to figure out how close they are to the throwing in the towel moment.
The Germans are looking at the French and all the casualties they've suffered, and they're looking and they're thinking they must be close to the end of their rope. The Germans have suffered more casualties by the end of nineteen fifteen than the French, but they're fighting on more fronts, right? They're fighting the French and the British in the west, the gigantic Russian forces in the east, and they're involved in the Balkans a lot in nineteen fifteen.
Their casualties by the end of nineteen fifteen are over two and a half million. About 750,000 of those are dead. Hard to know. The Germans list 250,000 missing. In this war, people got blown to bits. They got covered up by, you know, giant mountains of earth that shells had blown up in the air, falling back on the ground. A lot of missing people, probably between seven hundred and fifty and eight hundred thousand dead.
for the Germans at this point in the war. The Russians have suffered Titanic losses from minute one. They lost a huge battle in nineteen fifteen called um Gorlies Tarnov. Or Kalisa Tarnov, and that battle all by itself, they lost one hundred and fifty thousand dead, almost seven hundred thousand wounded, and basically a million prisoners.
Those are Titanic losses. Maybe it's easier to understand their monthly burn rate. By October nineteen fifteen, the Russians are losing two hundred and thirty-five thousand men a month. How sustainable is that? You again you gotta be looking at the Russians thinking They're almost done, and the German High Command kind of is.
Now the Germans can't be too happy though, because their main ally, the Austro-Hungarians, are suffering casualties that are every bit as momentous as the Russians, but they don't have the manpower to back that up. Mean in one four month period in nineteen fifteen, one four month period, the Austrians suffer seven hundred and fifty thousand casualties. Boom.
That's in addition to the already astounding casualties they took in the few months right after the war started. The Germans several times will have to prop up the Austrians just to keep them able to continue in the con And the Austrians are a pain in the rear to their German allies, a lot of them. I mean for Eric von Falkenheim, the German commander in charge in january nineteen sixteen, he can't stand that. They're always getting into some sort of disaster.
that they then go to Falkenhayn and ask for help getting out of. And to make matters worse, it's usually a disaster that von Falkenhayn warned them about in advance. Don't do that. It'll be a disaster. And then they do it. against his wishes and then come and ask to be bailed out multiple times.
They can always play their their trump card though against von Falkenhayn, legitimately considering the huge casualties they've suffered, they can kinda go there and say, Well, listen, I mean, you know, if you don't help us, uh We're not that far from dropping out of the war. I don't know I can't guarantee we'll be here and, you know, you have to help'em or it's a strategic disaster if the Austro Hungarians drop out of the war, right?
But von Falkenhayn doesn't want to pay any attention to any of these other fronts. He doesn't want to worry about the Russians. There are German generals and whatnot that keep saying we need to focus on the Russians. That's how we win the war. Falkenhayn doesn't want to hear about it. Doesn't want to focus in the Balkans, although in nineteen fifteen they destroy Serbia. Just get that out of the way.
Falkenhayn doesn't want to hear about the Middle East and the Turks, he doesn't want to talk about Austria and her problems, doesn't want to know what Italy's doing. He wants to focus on this. Maybe war-winning or war-losing Gordian knot, that is the puzzle that must be solved if you are a general tasked with winning this war, it's the Western Front.
How do you deal with that? And it's an unprecedented problem. You know, there's a famous German saying that may or may not have happened, but it's it's infused this whole period. Where one German general is supposed to have commented about how amazingly the British troops fought. And he said they're lying. And the subcommander with him is supposed to have said something to the effect of, Yes, lucky for us they're led by Donk.
Nineteen fifteen's Western Front battles are where the donkeys first get labeled with that sort of reputation. At the same time, when you realize that they have no metrics for what they're doing in 1915. This has never been done before. Nobody's ever had this kind of firepower. Nobody's ever put these kind of defenses up. I mean, we're playing with all sorts of new military toys, and they've never been tested in a situation like this. How much slack do you cut the generals
and give them what is sometimes called by historians in this case a learning curve. When you're playing with people's lives, how slowly are you allowed to figure things out? We didn't go into any of the nineteen fifteen battles. Winston Churchill is just one of many people who objects to the whole idea of calling those battles in the nineteen fifteen year or nineteen sixteen year or nineteen seventeen year battles.
He says it's a disservice to what the name means. He said there were battles in nineteen fourteen at the start of the war, and there were battles in nineteen eighteen at the end of the war, but that stuff in the middle was a sea. These sanguinary, prodigious struggles extending over many months are often loosely described as battles.
Judging by the number of men who took their turn in the fighting at different times, by the immense quantities of guns and shells employed, and by the hideous casualty total They certainly rank, taken as a whole, among the largest events in military history. But we must not be misled by terminology. If to call them battles was merely a method of presenting a general view of an otherwise confusing picture, it might well pass unchallenged.
But an attempt has been made by military commanders and by a whole school of writers to represent these prolonged operations as events comparable to the decisive battles of the past, only larger and more important. To yield to this specious argument is to be drawn into a wholly wrong impression, both of military science and of what actually took place in the Great War. End quote.
These battles on the Western Front for a full three years in the conflict look pretty much like this, as described by historian Holger Hervig. The fighting on the Western Front had taken on a deadly regularity. Attackers stormed enemy trenches in waves, only to be mowed down by hostile machine gun fire and artillery as they tried to cut the wire entanglements that protected the earthworks.
There's a repetitiveness to the fighting on the Western Front. It's a repetitiveness that actually is associated with World War I and the Western Front specifically. It's part of the tragedy. It adds to the pain. Because after all. If you've seen this same event over and over and over again, doesn't it become a different kind of tragic?
If you watch the first wave of those young soldiers leave the safety of their trench, go over the top at the, you know, whistle of their officer, get mowed down by machine gun fire before they've even gone ten feet, that's tragic. Another level of tragedy when the next wave gets up right behind them to follow in their footsteps, having already seen what happened to them. That's what we wanted to capture.
in our discussions of the Western Front, because it became an issue early on, how we were going to deal with all these battles that were roughly the same, equally tragic, and for the soldiers on the ground eerily simple. When trying to figure out the What we wanted to highlight, a Shakespeare quote kept popping into my head when I was working on this. And it was his line that all the world's a stage, and all the people merely players. And I thought to myself, Well, that's what we have here.
we have one of the most extreme stages in human history. We've created with these Western Front battles in nineteen fifteen, nineteen sixteen, nineteen seventeen, a hell-like environment. And then we force millions of people to act in it. With some of the most extreme situations people have been put into ever in history, and watching how they endure.
is sometimes soul crushing, but at other times it's absolutely life-enhancing. You know, sometimes you can benefit quite a bit from the suffering of other people. As we sat down. when we started this series and tried to figure out a creative approach to dealing with all these battles, one thing becomes very clear. We did some creative experiments and you quickly find out that the battles in an emotional sense
reach a point of diminishing returns very quickly. You just become benumbed by them all the scale, the intensity, the sheer horrific, repetitive pounding eventually makes you stop feeling And so rather than go from um indecisive and horrific battle to the next indecisive and horrific battle, we thought we would focus on a few what we would consider to be almost signature battles, if you will, but they provide a very similar backdrop for the poor individuals who have to live in that environment.
and allow us to sort of examine at a human level what's going on here a little bit as best we can. And to explore some of the questions that are very intriguing about this story and not just about the human suffering, but about command decisions and some of the technology and some other things. Um hopefully interspersed with a little bit of
you know, comment about what's going on in the rest of the world while this is happening. And part of what makes nineteen sixteen so difficult is there's a lot of overlapping stuff. So if you tell it in a he said, then she said, then he said fashion, it becomes very confusing very quickly. The first thing to understand though is that nineteen sixteen comes about obviously because of plans made in late nineteen fifteen.
We had said to you earlier that this was a real question for the generals about how you solve this Gordian knot that is the Western Front. Well in late nineteen fifteen the Allied commands got together at a place called Chantilly in France to deal with this question. Their plan was going to be to continue to pound and pound harder. But the new aspect was they were going to make sure that everybody, all the different Allied powers, pounded the Central Powers, Germany and Friends at the same time.
They were going to coordinate their efforts. This was going to nullify what the Germans had been doing so far. The Germans have a great army, but they can't be everywhere at once. Luckily for them, up until nineteen sixteen, they weren't attacked everywhere at once. so they would use something called interior lines. It's a little like taking the center square in a game of tic tac toe. The Germans were able to use their wonderful railway system.
To transfer troops from less threatened sectors to more hot spots. and thereby frustrate Allied efforts. So the Allied plan for knocking down German fortifications in nineteen sixteen is that they're all going to attack at basically the same time, frustrating the Germans' ability to move troops to hot spots. The Germans had a different plan entire
You see, the people at Chantilly in nineteen fifteen who get together and decide to attack the Germans from multiple, you know, locations at the same time are still for the most part envisioning the classic military end to this war.
they see the chances increased by attacking at multiple locations, that you're going to crack the Germans somewhere. And when you crack'em you're gonna send your forces through the breach and you're gonna send the cavalry through, and now the Germans are gonna break and they're gonna be on the run and they're gonna be routing toward Berlin and You know, that's how these things end in the minds of people who have a very especially old fashioned view of war.
There are dissidents to this idea who say, even on the Allied side, you got it all wrong. It's not gonna happen that way. The technology, the specific circumstances, the fact that there are no flanks on the Western Front, you're dreaming.
And because you're dreaming your plans aren't gonna work right. On the German side, the people who have this attitude that that old fashioned viewpoint is just that, old fashioned, happen to be in positions of higher authority than the dissident generals on the other side. They've looked at the way the war is going and figured out that the casualties are the difference.
And that all these countries are suffering because of the numbers of people that are dying, you need to increase the numbers of people who are dying. Not only does it become hard to replace them, but it puts huge stresses and strains on the societies that are losing these people.
their families, their governments. Um some of these societies are fragile enough to simply, you know, fall apart like a house of cards. Others could have the entire population turn on the government and say, you know, we've had enough. That becomes the best path to end the war in the minds of some of these
A guy like the leader in Germany, Eric von Falkenhayn, is looking at what these 1915 battles taught him. And they taught him that modern warfare on the Western Front turns into a meat grinder, no matter what you do. And he comes up with the brilliant idea. Again, most historians still think.
Uh some people say it's, you know, shooting an arrow and painting a bullseye around it afterwards, but he comes up with the brilliant idea that if these meat grinders are happening no matter what you design the battle to be like, what if you design the battle to be like a meat grinder? What if you create
a meat grinder and then entice the enemy to come into it. If that's what's so effective on the battlefield, what if you planned to grind meat instead of having it be a byproduct of other activities and plans?
And Falkenhayn in late nineteen fifteen determines that the French are already, you know, near their breaking point in terms of the casualties they've suffered. And he goes to the rest of the military command and he starts talking about what he'd like to do in nineteen sixteen to try to win the war. He wants to set a trap. for the French army.
The idea is to create one of these, you know, modern twentieth century attrition amplifiers, one of these meat grinders, and then lure the French army into For that you need bait. And the determination on where this awful battle's going to happen is dependent on what site can be chosen that would best play the role of
And I should point out that historians from different countries disagree on this. Americans and British historians often point out that this site chosen has no real military value at all, that it was solely chosen'cause it's the perfect emotional bait to lure the French army into the meat grinder,
German and French historians, though, often assert that this site did have military importance and that that, you know, did create a real military need to do what the French ended up doing. Nonetheless, the German plan is to use all this artillery first to pulverize the defenses around this important site that the French, you know, have an emotional and political and everything else attachment to. Blow the French off of these hills that overlook this city.
this city called Verdun, and then fortify the hills, bring your guns up there, start shooting at the city of Verdun, and wait for the French army to show up and try to knock you off those hills. And knowing the superiority of prepared defenses, the French are just going to bash themselves up against your barbed wire, your trenches, your machine guns, your cannon, and everything else in a place that was specifically designed to be a killing field.
It's a thoroughly attritional, bloody twentieth century way to conduct warfare, but it's not a bad idea. It also should be no surprise that a battle that was designed to act like a meat grinder turns into one of the most horrible battles of all time. Even the name when I hear it, Verdun. It's like Stalingrad, it really is. It's one of those names that just conjures up a specific image and and and level of horror that puts it in a special place in military history.
You know, it's it's sort of like if you said, you know, where's the worst place in the world to ever be in military history? It's like a tie between a million different spots, right? Mankind's had a long enough past. so that there are recurring examples of horrific places to end up on any given day. We like to cite the famous
battle between the Romans and the Carthaginians thousands of years ago, Kenny, where all those Romans were surrounded and trapped and killed over the whole long day. I mean it's terrible, but probably about as bad as a lot of other terrible situations. There's a few. where you just go, okay, that's as bad as the Battle of Kenny, sort of, but add artillery. I mean Verdun is like nothing
that has ever happened, really, on a large scale. I mean, I'm sure again, mankind's a long history, everything's kinda tried. Nothing's new under the sun, as they say. But Verdun is special. Verdun is so special, in fact, and so different and so outside the box for the thinking of the time period that when Falkenhayn comes up with the idea that he's going to bleed France white, his word.
It so runs against the grain of the nineteenth century sort of morality of warfare. Remember, we started this war a mere year and a half ago wearing white gloves with people who dueled when they were in school together, and who thought of this in an almost especially on the Western Front, gallant kind of sense, right? We exchange swords when we surrender and all this stuff.
And now we have generals thinking, okay, how can I lure millions of men into a confined space and just pound them into marmalade? To quote one French soldier's way of explaining what happened. One of the things I love, by the way, about this period, just like I love it about the Second World War, is that we have a lot of the actual words of the generals themselves.
They all wrote memoirs, as we said, after the war, most of the time trying to defend their reputation against their critics,'cause after this war everyone's pointing fingers at everybody. You know, because it was so terrible and people were so angry and and so mad at generals amongst other people that they were looking to blame, that all these generals would write pieces defending their ideas.
We have Falkenheims, we have Ludendorff, we have all these guys' memoirs. Now you can't take'em, you know, at face value. Remember they're trying to stake out a historical position here in defense of their own historical reputation, nonetheless, Falkenhayn, you know, and you either love Falkenhayn or hate him. He has his fans and he has his detractors.
I'm one of his fans. I I like the way his mind works and the way he writes. And in his book where he's you know, written right after the war, where he's trying to explain his thinking on this, he runs down in logical fashion, you know, where he sees the war in nineteen fifteen. And it's not that bad for the Central Powers. You'll hear a lot of people that will say after the Germans failed with that initial knockout blow in 1914, it was all a hard slog downhill for them. Not necessarily.
nineteen fifteen was a good year for the Central Powers. They'll have some other attempts where they'll almost win the war later in the war. So this is like as we've said all along, a heavyweight fight, and there are times when both sides have the other side in trouble.
A quick look at Falkenhayn's memoir shows that he thinks France is in trouble, that it's not that far from the breaking point. Here's what Falkenhayn writes about his thinking leading up to his planning for this battle that he's most known for at Verdun. Falkenhayn writes, quote. As I've already insisted, the strain on France has almost reached the breaking point.
though it is certainly born with the most remarkable devotion, if we succeeded in opening the eyes of her people to the fact that in a military sense they have nothing more to hope for, that breaking point would be reached, and England's best sword knocked out of her hand. To achieve that object, the uncertain method of a mass breakthrough, in any case beyond our means, is unnecessary. We can probably do enough for our purposes with limited resources.
Within our reach, behind the French sector of the Western Front, there are objectives for the retention of which the French general staff would be compelled to throw in every man they had. If they do so, the forces of France will bleed to death, as there can be no question of a voluntary withdrawal, whether we reach our goal or not. End quote. British military historian John Keegan put it this way, quote. Falkenhayn's plan was brutally simple.
The French, forced to fight in a crucial but narrowly constricted corner of the Western Front, would be compelled to feed reinforcements into a battle of attrition, where the material circumstances so favored the Germans that defeat was inevitable. If the French gave up the struggle, they would lose Verdun. If they persisted, they would lose their army. End quote. This plan of Falkenhayn was given the sinister sounding name of Operation Guerilla.
Which I've seen translated multiple different ways. Usually it's called Operation Judgment. which implies a sort of finality that is the high hope of Falkenhayn going into this campaign, right? Maybe this will decide the war. Another translation you sometimes run into is Court of Justice. Same sort of an idea, a decision point. The third translation though that you'll sometimes run into is more indicative of the tactics and approach that Falkenhayn's gonna take to win this battle.
It's operation place of execution. And while the Kaiser and Falkenhayn and all these generals are coming up with this plan in late nineteen fifteen, the Allies, the Entente forces, are doing the same thing. And the Allies are a little bit laxidaisical about the whole thing. Not the Russians, not the people in the Balkans. They've been feeling German attacks over the last year. But the British and the French, who haven't seen the German army on the offensive since way back in nineteen fourteen.
They're kind of leisurely planning what they think will probably be their war winning giant offensive. slated for late spring or early summer, nineteen sixteen, over on the River Somme. An enormous joint British and French effort with months of planning and and just sweeping everything in front of them, that kind of, you know, rosy outlook.
and the Germans instead, in late February nineteen sixteen, go on the offensive on the Western Front for the first time in more than a year and catch everyone off guard. It's ridiculous that they could
The amount of effort that was required to put together a modern offensive is something we modern people take for granted. But when you hear how much Planning and stockpiling and engineering feats are required to pull off something like the Battle of Verdun, you begin to see why it was so different than anything these people had ever known in the past.
As we said, a hundred years before a Napoleonic battle was considered extraordinary if it went on for three days. Throughout most of human history, battles take hours. These battles that these Allied and Central Power planners are conducting require months of preparation. They'll go on for months too. How do you get enough stuff there to make sure your soldiers don't starve or run out of ammunition? Well, for the Battle of Verdun.
It was more than seven weeks of actual unloading of supplies. Here's the way writer G. J. Meyer describes the planning and stockpiling before the February nineteen sixteen battle. Quote. The Germans, meanwhile, were accomplishing prodigious feats in getting everything in place.
Helped by the hilly wooden countryside and the cloudy winter weather of the Verdun region, they were doing an astonishingly good job of keeping the French from learning what they intended to do, or when, or even exactly where. No fewer than five new railway lines were constructed across the German held portion of the plateau immediately to the east of the Verdun Hill.
In a seven week period, between late December and early February, thirteen hundred trains, not railway cars, but entire trains, hauled in two point five million shells. earth moving equipment, construction machinery, and everything required to prepare the offensive and support three hundred thousand troops in winter came rolling up to Verdun. The guns were positioned in the woods and covered with camouflage. A new development in warfare made necessary by aerial reconnaissance.
Underground chambers capable of holding as many as five hundred men each were excavated opposite the French lines, and lined with steel and concrete. In the sky above all this was the greatest concentration of aircraft yet seen on any front. One hundred and fifty aircraft, a German umbrella so impenetrable that even on the rare days when visibility was good, the French pilots were unable to get a close look at what was happening.
By the second week of February, everything was in place for an offensive with the potential to change the course of the war. End quote. The German plan was complicated, and it was complicated because this was one of the great defensive spots in French history. Verdun wasn't just a fortress, it was a fortress zone. Multiple fortresses all working together. Ground that had been fought over since the days of Julius Caesar and the Romans.
Fortifications that have been upgraded even as recently as 1914, when the lessons of what happened to those Belgian forts were incorporated. And then when the war started, the French High Command decided that fortresses were old fashioned due to the limits of new technology, or rather the lack of limits. They decided that those Belgian forts being pounded by that artillery signaled that these forts were nothing but a death trap.
And it would be better to take the weapons on them and the troops that man them, and put them to where the hot spots were in the fighting. After all, if France is in a life or death struggle, what are we putting? A hundred thousand or more troops in the Verdun region to man a bunch of fortresses that are just gonna trap em and get'em killed by artillery. Let's put'em where they're needed. Oh yeah, make sure they bring the guns and the ammunition and everything else. So they did.
Verdun was a relatively, relatively quiet sector in nineteen sixteen before the big German buildup. Nonetheless, you can't hide preparations as extensive as the German preparations forever. The French become aware of it a couple of weeks before the Germans launch their attack and are quickly trying to make up for lost ground and get stuff together.
You know, to these areas because they can sense a buildup. And the Germans are launching um distracting attacks elsewhere to sort of, you know, confuse the French on where everything's coming from. And on February twenty first, after a couple of postponements due to bad weather, the storm breaks.
Whose nickname, by the way, is Long Max, just like naming swords, gotta name the guns too, apparently, and Long Max fires a shell that travels somewhere between fifteen and twenty miles. These are enormous weapons. And um that becomes the first shell to drop as part of the giant barrage that kicks off the Battle of Verdun.
And right after Long Max's barrage kicks off, all these enormous weapons open up. See, it's not just between twelve hundred to fifteen hundred guns, it's that half of them are huge. You have all those guns that pounded the forts in Belgium, those giant four hundred twenty millimeter gamma mortars, you have the three hundred eighty millimeter Skoda pieces from Austria, and you have more of each of them, and then you have a chance.
enormous number of two hundred and ten millimeters and and one seventies and one fifty fives and I mean my goodness. And they open up all at once and begin pounding this relatively small area of the front. What makes this so incredibly damaging is you have these huge weapons pounding this t relatively tiny area on a map, and you fire an enormous number of shells by any standard of the First World War in a short period of time.
So if you're on the ground at some of those 1915 battles and they're firing 1.7 million shells, but they're doing it over two or three or four weeks, the intensity on the ground is very different than if they're firing two million shells in six days. Over a tiny area, one little wood on the battlefield, a thousand yards by five hundred yards, took eighty thousand shells in the first week. ¿Qué es eso?
There's no human reference for this. I mean I try to picture, I close my eyes and I try to picture for. disappearing in front of my eyes. This is heavily wooded and forested hilly terrain in Verdun. And right after the bombardment, you know, twenty four hours, there's no forest left.
I've watched forests be logged over weeks and months, and it's still appalling to wake up and more forest is gone. What if you got to watch the entire thing churned up in front of you in a matter of hours like a giant celestial weed weapon? You're chewing up grass.
There are accounts that say that, you know, you'd have s the shelling is so intense that a a giant tree would get blown up in the air and before it lands on the ground again another shell hits it and blows it right back up in the air. A veteran said that the battlefield quickly looked like an asparagus farm with giant shoots. Shooting up all over the soil everywhere which are the tree stumps, and wood everywhere, needless to say.
To me, this is something I would have to have some sort of video of to imagine. When I was a kid, I used to wonder what a tsunami looked like. And, um, Now of course we have video. It was unimaginable when I was young. Now it's something anyone who wants to see it can go look up on YouTube.
Something that was a very rare sight, natural phenomenon or a man made phenomenon for people to see. Shelling is the same way. And by the way, there's a lot fewer accounts than you might imagine of the first day's shelling at the Battle of Verdun. And um that's in English. There I'm sure there must be more
German and French, but it's important to point out that there aren't a lot of people that probably survived the war intact after those battles, and the ones who did were probably not all that excited to relive the experience. We do have some Even though it's forty years old, Alistair Horne's The Price of Glory um has some of the best accounts in English.
of what it was like on the ground when the shelling started. He tells one story of a corporal who is with his buddies and they're just grinding some coffee when the first shells start dropping. He writes, quote, Suddenly the whole world seemed to disintegrate around him. With the conditioned alacrity of old soldiers, the two men with the coffee grinder disappeared below ground, cursing in unprintable French. Why couldn't the bastards wait till I'd finished my coffee?
The air in the Bois de Care, that little forested area they are, seemed solid with whirling material. To Corporal Stefan, it was as if it were swept by a quote storm. A hurricane, a tempest growing ever stronger where it was raining nothing but paving stone. End quote. Horne continues Upon the terrible din of the explosions were superimposed the splintering crashes of rending wood as the great two hundred ten millimeter shells lopped off branches or uprooted the trees themselves.
Barely had the tree trunks fallen than they were spewed up into the air again by fresh eruptions. From his own position, still relatively immune to the shelling, Stefan watched its methodical progress with a certain macabre fascination. It was like a garden hose, he thought. End quote. And then he describes the how the shells would move like a wave from One location to another, pounding everything in between.
and then methodically go back in the direction it just came from, as though it's continually mowing the same piece of ground over and over again. It shows you what the plan had been before the shelling started to Make sure every inch of ground was covered. German aircraft are flying over the battlefield, having knocked the French Air Force out of the sky, and are spotting for their guns and keeping the French planes from locating the German guns so the French guns could shoot at them.
This leads to a very one-sided initial encounter. Historian Paul Jankowski compares the initial bombardment here to the nineteen fifteen Battle of Champagne, which at the time seemed momentously titanic.
That was a year ago. Now a year later, it seems like chump change compared to what the first day at Verdun is sort of presaging. Jankowski writes, quote, It was partly because of such air cover, partly because it enjoyed such free rain that morning, that the German shelling could exceed in intensity anything the French or anyone else had ever endured.
This was the Battle of Champagne multiplied ten times over, but with a difference in kind as well. The German artillerists were blanketing entire zones with their shells. They directed their fire not merely onto positions they wished to take, or onto lines they wished to obliterate, but into all that nature had grown and that man had erected as well, making up in density for what they lacked in precision.
That day they saturated successive zones within a twenty five mile arc between Avacor on the left bank and Atane on the right bank of the Meuse with a million high explosive shells of the heaviest caliber known to man. two hundred eighty, three hundred and five.
Three hundred and eighty, even four hundred and twenty millimeters wide, and with lesser shells bearing toxic gases as well. Method rather than rage, the system of the power hammer, rather than the obstinacy of the battering ram, drove the destruction. The morbid calculus presaged the carpet bombing of later wars that would raise entire cities and ignite entire landscapes, but for now the thought was purely tactical, to devastate, so that the infantry could infiltrate.
Now, as Jenkowski says, the difference in this artillery barrage is not just in the amount of stuff but the way they do it. I mean they're employing every little trick that they've learned in the last year, year and a half of warfare, including one that they probably think was a clever enhancement. I'm sure the British and the French must have thought it another example of deviousness on the German part.
But the Germans start this artillery barrage, you know, a little after seven in the morning, and they pound these French positions all morning and into the lunchtime hour, and then they stop at midday. They stop on queue all at once. Now, even to the punch-drunk French survivors on the receiving end of the worst artillery barrage in human history, know what this means. It always means the same thing. It means the German ground troops are coming.
In an offensive, that's why you stop shooting so that you don't blow your own men up now that they're on the way, right? So the French run up to their positions, they man their defensive spots. They uncover any guns they've got hidden, they get ready to push back the German assault now that it's coming. Except that it isn't coming. It's a trick.
And all of a sudden all the guns open up again and start smashing the now exposed French survivors who show those planes up in the air, among other observers. Oh yeah, that guy survived. Oh, there's a machine gun nest we didn't see. It was an intermission to get the French to expose themselves.
And the shelling goes for the rest of the day until the late afternoon, so from seven something in the morning to four something in the afternoon, and then the French survivors see the first signs of German infantry activity approaching. what they see looks like something out of a time. From the hitlarus. Gone are the Iconic pickle how
pointed helmets that the German troops wear that harken back to the greatness of Prussia and Europe at the height of its nineteenth century sort of colonial dominance. It's it's symbolic and it's been replaced with something that looks like a miner should wear it. Thoroughly working class. Nothing romantic, gentlemanly, officer, or aristocratic about it.
These tip of the spear troops here are wearing the German Stahlhelm, which with a minor modification or two is the exact same helmet the German troops will wear in the Second World War. These stormtroopers, as they're called, and have been known to history, look like the Wehrmacht, and they're carrying flame among other nasty surprises for anyone they might run into. They got machine guns with them. They got
men who are wearing clothes that have big bags sort of as part of them where they can stuff hand grenades,'cause you just can't carry enough hand grenades when you need'em. They've even got, and this, you know, shows you what they think they're up against, melee weapons.
Mean they're famous. All these stormtroop type units are famous for the clubs they carry or the hatchets or the long knives or even things like brass knuckles and stuff. These are people who expect to get into physical combat at very close range. They are using what at the time seemed like very newfangled, very modern techniques on the battlefield. They're known as infiltration tactics. They pretty much are the same small unit tactics every military in the world uses today.
They've been in development for a while too. It's a myth to suggest that the first time anybody sees them is with these stormtroops. But these stormtroops are the first to integrate everything into their system here.
not only are they gonna use these infiltration tactics, but look at the weapons that they've armed themselves with and they've trained with all this. In other words, they've integrated all the various ideas and theories from all the militaries around the world for the last fifteen years and are the first to put these troops out on the field whose job it is
To look for weak spots. And they comb the field, and when they run into, you know, significant opposition, they stop or move around it. And in places where everyone's been killed by the artillery barrage, they punch right through there. Their goal is to capture bait. Remember? This is a trap. The cheese in the trap has to be captured by the Germans before it can play the role of cheese.
That's what this is all about. That is if you believe, you know, the standard historical approach, there's quite a few historians who believe this whole idea of let's create this meat grinder is BS. propaganda at the time and um you know mia culpa avoidance later on, right? Um if you believe that, they're not trying to capture Bait, they're trying to capture Verdun. Either way, the point of this initial attack is to get the hype.
The problem is the Germans find out to a degree exactly what the French and the British had found out the whole year before. which is that no matter how good the artillery barrage, there are just units that survive. And then when they strike back at you, it's amazing, and the casualties mount up unbelievably fast. on the very first day, as the German troops pour into an area, and begin to coalesce and sort of muster in a s in a in a specific area.
French artillery opens up on him, and this is an account by a French staff officer with the artillery, who first describes what the German artillery attack on his positions is like, and then describes responding in kind. His was one of the few batteries that did, by the way. He writes quote.
Thousands of projectiles are flying in all directions, some whistling, others howling, others moaning low, and all uniting into one infernal roar. From time to time an aerial torpedo passes, making a noise like a giant motor car. With a tremendous thud, a giant shell bursts quite close to our observation post, breaking the telephone wire and interrupting all communication with our battery.
A man gets out at once for repairs, crawling along his stomach through all this place of bursting mines and shells. It seems quite impossible, he writes, that he should escape the rain of shells, which exceeds anything imaginable. There has never been such a bombardment in war. Our man seems to be enveloped in explosions and shelters himself from time to time in the shell craters which honeycomb the ground.
Finally, he reaches a less stormy spot, mends his wires, and then, as it would be madness to try to return, settles down in a big crater and waits for the storm to pass. Now he looks up and said. The German assaults approaching, quote. Beyond, in the valley, dark masses are moving over the snow covered ground. It is German infantry advancing in packed formation along the valley to the attack.
They look like a big gray carpet being unrolled over the country. We telephone through to the batteries, and the ball begins. The sight is hellish. In the distance, in the valley, and upon the slopes, regiments spread out, and as they deploy, fresh troops come pouring in. There's a whistle over our heads. It's our first shell. It falls right in the middle of the enemy infantry. We telephone through, telling our batteries of their hit, and a deluge of heavy shells is poured on the enemy.
Their position becomes critical. Through glasses we can see men maddened, men covered with earth and blood falling one upon the other. When the first wave of the assault is decimated, the ground is dotted with heaps of corpses, but the second wave is already pressing on. Once more our shells carve awful gaps in their ranks. Nevertheless, like an army of rats, the Boches continue to advance in spite of our marmite.
A term the French use for their shells. He says, quote, Then our heavy artillery burst forth in fury, the whole valley is turned into a volcano, and its exit is stopped by the barrier of the slain. That's a foretaste of what's to come right there. The Germans have to be on the offensive for a little while in this battle, a battle that is probably built upon the presumption that the defense has a huge advantage on the offense.
This artillery was meant to make up for some of that, but the Germans are taking higher than expected losses from minute one. This is a problem too,'cause remember. Regardless of which historical school you adhere to on the point of this battle, it was always part of the plan to lose as few people as possible. So the Germans are concerned with losses, and part of the reason they're suffering so many is the French are resisting Heroically on these first few days.
There are units that surrender. There are units that are just gone. from the artillery barrage, but there are units, including elite ones, but also rather pedestrian ones, sitting there and dying to the last man to delay this German advance. These infiltration troops are looking for places to push through. They find a couple.
But they find a bunch with these decimated defenders resisting heroically to buy the country time to get fresh troops reinforcing that area to that area. Verdun is actually supplied on the French side by one little teeny road. The Germans have built multiple railway lines on their side to supply the battlefield, right? So as French reinforcements are coming up, these heroic defenders are holding the Germans off as long as they can.
There are more big bombardments. The Germans push more troops in with more tenacity. On February twenty-fifth. the Germans in an almost Indiana like Jones movie kind of drama capture the big fort in this region that sort of overlooks the whole battlefield. Now we told you that the French High Command had kind of lost interest in forts after the Germans had smashed the ones in Belgium and smashed the early ones in France.
But they still had people in them, and there were still guns in them, and slowly but surely they were starting to realize that sometimes, and in some places, they were worth having, Didn't matter. These troops were in this fort, which is mostly below ground, when a German soldier gets blown into it somehow
due to a shell exploding nearby. Lands down on the ground, has a pistol with him, and eventually will let in some friends, but by and large is walking around this underground giant fort, And as he opens doors into rooms, there's a couple of French soldiers playing cards or whatever and he captures them and locks them in a room and he does this over and over and over again.
finally has everybody kind of captured, nobody dies on either side, and this major feature in the early part of the battle falls to the Germans. It's one of those situations that sort of rocks the French morale, and they start to fall apart. They've been through a ton.
And now there's this crisis moment where all of a sudden it looks like the Germans are gonna break through and the French are just gonna fall apart before any reinforcements can stiffen the line. This is where things get really wiggy in this battle, by the way. It gets right down to what the hell the point of it is. If you're Falkenhayn and the historians who think he's trying to create a meat grinder, for all that's true, you don't want to break through.
You don't want Verdun. It's not really what you want. It's the cheese in your trap. If you take it, then you're just gonna get counterattacked and you're gonna lose a lot of troops again, and that then that's nineteen fifteen all over again. What did we do differently, right? If you're from the other school of thought, though. The idea of breaking through to Verdun at this point is to nearly achieve what the whole battle was designed to do unexpectedly quickly.
The crown prince who's commanding this army is really excited and there's all sorts of messages where they say, Ha, we'll take it. I mean, did expect it this fast, but we'll take it and then They get within two miles of the city at one point, and then the French put a new commander in charge, a guy who will be famous, by the way, in both world wars for different reasons, a guy named Peton.
And Paton becomes you know, it's so hard to to separate the myth from the man when with with his connection to Verdun. But a the narrative is that Paton gets in there and changes the French morale
by himself practically. There's all these and you know, generals travel with their own press corps. So there's gonna be this guy's gonna have a bunch of people helping to to pump up the myth, but he's famous for coming to the battlefield and, you know, in these situations where the French just look desperate
You know, looking at troops and going, Now we have them, you know, we got'em right where we want'em, that kind of thing, and you know, maybe it's the nineteenth century mentality, but that seems to work. thing he famously says or somebody says for him and then he stands behind it, they shall not pass.
And this becomes the big narrative of Verdun and it turns into like a French thermopylae. But the French aren't gonna die to the last man. They're gonna win in the end, right? It's again part of this this overriding narrative. Now, morale is kind of a hard to quantify sort of thing, hard to measure, hard to look back in history and prove anything. You don't have to prove the real world terra firma things that Patan did. Patin's an artillery guy.
He's a defensive specialist, and the first thing he does is is bring in his own artillery and consolidate it and ask for more and slowly but surely begins to build up his own meat grinder. Two can play at that game, and Paton starts stocking up the French side with artillery too. And all this artillery turns this entire area into the moon. But weirder.
these shell holes in your head you think of something symmetrical, like a a meteorite crater. But it doesn't happen that way because you get these shell holes, which can be thirty feet deep with absolutely straight up and down edges. But then they get hit with another shell at some weird angle or on an edge, and then they get hit with another one and another one and another one and it turns it into super weird formation.
It still looks weird today. If you go look at modern pictures of the Verdun battlefield, it looks totally a weird. And it creates a battlefield. There's a painting by a Frenchman, LaRue, I think is his name, called Hell, and it shows a couple of French soldiers in one of these craters. and a dead body near them and they're wearing gas masks and the barrage is going on and giant timbers are part of this enormous crater and craters everywhere in the distance as far as you look.
We said this is like making war work. And these craters are the grossest thing you can imagine. I mean, really just awful. They fill with water very quickly, every one of them practically with a dead body or two in them. They fill with water. There's tons of trash, tons of stuff. Um, all kinds of I mean, they're mostly used as latrines if it's close enough to where you can get to them.
the water is fetid and horrible and greasy from the bloated bodies that float in it, and interestingly enough, poisonous, because the gas that's used on these battlefields, I know it's tempting to think of it as vapor but it's really almost a solid, where when a gas shell explodes, it covers an entire area with like a pollen like coating, and that pollen like coating is deadly.
So it's like putting insecticide on a given area to keep you out of it for a while and eventually the rain will come and dissolve that, but the dissolve runoff just goes into all these shell holes that are filled with water and makes them just poison.
There will be uh writers who will talk about how at first in in the spring the Verdun battlefield will try to recover a little of its life and they will see little green shoots pop up for a minute before the poisonous air and soil and water and everything just kills them right away. It's a giant burnt-out insecticide zone. That's what Verdun is. And the landscape itself. is horrifying to a degree that's hard to describe unless you want to say that this is Mordor.
This is J.R.R. Tolkien's conception of the Dark Land. I mean, he was in the First World War. Maybe he got it from The match is perfect though. I mean, once this artillery's been going for not even that long at this levels of intensity, you have around you on this battlefield, you know, we talked about stage and all the people merely players. Well look at the stage these people are playing on. you know, very shortly into the battle. It's a lunar landscape. It's the moon, okay?
And these trenches are places where people meet their end very often. I mean, lots of stories about soldiers with big heavy packs in the night losing their way, falling into one of these terrible craters and just drowning. The worst stories are these people who, you know, you hear stories by people drinking, kneeling down and drinking out of these green-colored poisonous waters with bodies floating in it.
Because the water isn't making it up to the front. The people whose job it is to bring food and water to the people on the front edge of the meat grinder are getting killed trying to bring it up. This is a terrible battle. It's the battles of nineteen fifteen taken to the next level, which is what this war is gonna be about. Every time the world thinks they've come to the limits of their endurance, surely this is the worst battle there will ever be.
the the standard gets upped again, and this happens continually. It's a pressure cooker. It's who's going to break first. And you know, you thought last year was bad. Welcome to next year. And while next year is deadlier, and while the scale is more and perhaps unsustainably titanic, the pattern is, unfortunately for the troops on the ground, horrifically familiar. About a week into the assault, the German attack at Verdun stalked.
Just like all these other battles we've seen and a lot more we will see, the initial assault is the most tense nail biting up in the air kind of time. Once it's stopped, there may be ebbs and flows and scary moments, but by and large, we have descended into what Churchill called, did he say prolonged operations or extended operations? We're now into combat. And for the troops on the ground. It's the most horrifying environment when we want to study the idea of what human beings can do.
It seems to me you want to see them in some of the most you know you want to see just like a product tested, you want it to put it under the most extreme stress and see how it behaves. Look at what Verdun becomes. over the next many months for the people on the ground who have to live How do they endure? And when you hear the stories from this place, I mean Start with the approach mark. The French, as we've said.
spend a lot of trouble to rotate their troops in and out of this battle because they get worn down like a pencil in a pencil sharpener. So you have to, you know, rotate them. When the soldiers approach Verdun, they can see it a long way away. I mean the guns of the opening barrage were said to be audible a hundred miles away, so when they're approaching Verdun, it looks like a giant forest fire in the distance.
One French soldier on the way to it said that it reminded him, quote, of a gigantic forge that ceased neither day or night, end quote. It's the fires are Mordor, like I said. And then all of a sudden the air becomes smoky and hazy, and you don't see the sun clearly anymore, and all the vegetation disappears. One artist said the only color in the landscape after a while'cause it's just overturned dirt.
and bodies and debris and ever I mean churned up concrete. It's a hellish environment, but there is a smear of red here or there where the horses have just been splattered by artillery. Have I mentioned that it sounds like hell yet? We mentioned earlier how hard it was to get food and water to the troops fighting at the front line, but it was hard to get anything to the troops fighting at the front line. For example, to get new troops to the front line could kill off half your troops.
in his book The Price of Glory, Alistair Horn, um Takes a couple of different accounts. and puts them together and quotes a few uh people who were there about what it was like simply trying to get to the front of the meat grinder at Verdun. Imagine suffering, you know, forty or fifty percent casualties trying to get to the meat grinder. Here's what he writes.
A mile or two from the front line, troops entered the first communication trenches, though to call them this was generally both an exaggeration and an anachronism. Parapets gradually grew lower and lower until the trench became little deeper than a roadside ditch. Shells now began to fall with increasing regularity among closely packed men. In the darkness, he says for obvious reasons approach marches were usually made at night, the columns trampled over the howling wounded that lay underfoot.
Suddenly the trench became nothing more than a trap. Hardly traced out amid the shell hole. In the mud, which the shelling had now turned to a consistency of sticky butter, troops stumbled and fell repeatedly, cursing in low undertones, as if fearful of being overheard by the enemy, who relentlessly pursued them with his shells at every step.
Sometimes there were ductboards around the lips of the huge shell craters, but more often there were not, and heavily laden men falling into the water-filled holes remained there until they drowned, unable to crawl up the greasy side. If a comrade paused to lend a hand, he writes, it often meant that two would drown instead of one. In the chaos of the battlefield, where all reference points had long since been obliterated, relieving detachments often got lost.
And wandered hopelessly all night, only to be massacred by an enemy machine gunner as dawn betrayed them. It was not unusual for reliefs to reach the front line with only half the numbers that set out, nor for this nightmare approach march to last ten hours or longer. End quote. Seems to me Maybe I can speak for some of my generation. If I just spent ten hours struggling through that and lost half our people while doing so
Just so I got to take my turn on the front lines, I'm going to be severely destabilized. Let's put it that way. Is that a good way to describe it? And even though these French units would be rotated and maybe only spent five or six or seven days up at the front. I mean that was designed to keep them from just being decimated and being shattered. But judging from some of the witness accounts, uh it didn't work very well.
British historian John Keegan, the late John Keegan, uh writes that uh a French officer named Augustine Cochin spent from the ninth to the fourteenth of April on one of these uh important hills, and Keegan writes, quoting this. Officer quote. The last two days, soaked in icy mud, under terrible bombardment, without any shelter other than the narrowness of the trench,
The Bosch did not attack, naturally, it would have been too stupid. Result? I arrived there with one hundred seventy five men, I returned with thirty four, several half mad, not replying anymore when I spoke to them. End quote. A French lieutenant described watching a unit, his own unit actually, coming down and back from Verdun after being relieved, and he says, quote, First came the skeletons of companies, occasionally led by a wounded officer leaning on a stick.
All marched, or rather advanced, in small steps, zigzagging as if intoxicated. It was hard to tell the color of their faces from that of their tunics. Mud had covered everything, dried off, and then another layer had been reapplied. But they said nothing. They'd even lost the strength to complain. It seemed as if these mute faces were crying something terrible, the unbelievable horror of their martyrdom.
Some territorials who were standing near me became pensive. They had that air of sadness that comes over one when a funeral passes by, and I overheard one say, It's no longer an army. Those are corpses. Two of the territorials wept in silence like women. End quote.
So what's going on to those guys that they go in one way and they come out so shattered and sometimes it only takes a couple of days to go from one reality to the other. That's where you know these first hand accounts from these people are so Moving. First of all, from the perspective of these men on the ground, everything seems so pointless. They only know this little world of this big battlefield they're operating on, and a perfect example is how
You know, these generals were now fighting over the same terrain features over and over and over, month after month after month they take'em and then they're retaken and then they take them again and they're all fighting over the same carnage stained ground over and over again. And they develop names. I mean Uh one of these hills is Hill Three O Four. Becomes a famous hill with a lot of people paying with their lives to take it and retake it again.
There's another one known as the Dead Man, or Dead Man's Hill is another way to translate it. And that's another one of these hills. Um I mean, they've had the tops blasted off off them by both sides artillery. They're smoking like volcanoes pretty much at all times, we're told. Sort of a dual mount doom if we want to keep our Mordor analogy going. And when a unit retakes a position on, for example, one of those long fought over terrain features Then you have that around you.
I mean, for example, um, Ian Passingham has several quotes where he talks about soldiers having to retake this ground that are nothing more than sort of open cemeteries combined with butcher shops. And he writes quote. On the ground, soldier and writer Jacques Meyer describes the real frightfulness when he noted, quote, everywhere there were distended bodies that your feet sank into. The stench of death hung over the jumble of decaying corpses like some hellish perfume.
End quote. Passingham continues, quote, When the Germans captured Hill 304 in May, one of the first demands of the assault troops was for a double ration of tobacco to mask the overwhelming reek of corpses rotting around them. Like Jacques Meyer, a fellow French soldier, wrote at this time that quote quoting this French soldier now.
We all had on us the stench of dead bodies, the bread we ate, the stagnant water we drank, everything we touched had a rotten smell, owing to the fact that the earth around us was literally stuffed with corpses. End quote. How do you not lose your mind? French barrel maker and corporal Louis Bartas. arrives at the famous Hill 304 at one point in this battle and looks up and contemplates this piece of ground that has cost so many people on both sides their earthly existence. He writes quote
I looked out upon this famous nameless hill. Our trench lay at the foot of it. For several months the hill had been disputed as if it had diamond mines on its slope. Alas, all it contained now were thousands of shredded pulverized corpses. Nothing distinguished it from neighboring hills. It seemed to have been partly wooded at one time, but no trace of vegetation remained. The convulsed, overturned earth offered nothing but a spectacle of devastation.
Now eventually, and for reasons that we'll get into in a minute, the situation changes at Verdan, and the Germans go from essentially a sort of an offensive position to a defensive one as they transfer forces to another part of their front for something else that's going on, taking their attention. And so the French use this as an opportunity to retake ground.
And now we get the same kind of battles we had when the Germans were moving forward in this, now that the French are, and now the Germans have taken a bunch of their artillery away, so now the French have the artillery dominance, and now the Germans get to experience what the French experienced on the other side.
And you know, nine or ten months into this battle, we have human beings living on the edge of what human beings can tolerate. There's an extended uh pair of quotes from the same guy, a German soldier who is in one of these forts. And these forts, they're all over this area. This is a fortified zone. They have several forts covering one another. And a lot of the most terrible battles happen over these forts.
and they're battered down so that they're just shells of what they were, but they could still hold hundreds of men and protect them from shrapnel. So oftentimes you had tons of men in these underground blown up forts with blood everywhere and everything else. And here's the way the environment is described by this German soldier. Quote. His name is Private William Hermons, by the way, of the sixty seventh Infantry Regiment, and I get this from Peter Hart's book, The Great War.
The entrance was a mere hole in the scarred battlefield, and the silhouettes of cowering men constantly crawling in or out looked like huge ants in the dark. I descended an iron ladder some forty feet into the concrete cavern. It was an enormous place, crowded with many hundreds of soldiers. Some lay on bunks sleeping, snoring, and moaning. Some cluttered the passages between the bunks, chatting or writing letters, others sat or knelt in corners, packing or unpacking their belongings.
Here a flashlight, there a candle, match or cigarette dotted the dark, with flickering islands of light, continually shifting in brightness. From this subterranean stronghold, a small patch of sky could be seen when one stood close to the iron ladder or looked through the shaft which contained the ventilator fan. A current of warm, stale air from forty feet beneath brought to my nostrils the sickening smell of first aid medication.
Every one of the chicken wire berths were filled with mutilated, muddy, torn, and befouled uniforms, a dismal sight. There was a man with closed eyes. a blood soaked bandage around his head. Another beside him lay twisting in pain. I saw some lice ridden men who had scratched their bandages off to ease the itching. The passages between the bunks were crowded. There must have been a thousand men there.
Some had been relieved, but could not withdraw to the rear, and some who had come to relieve the others could not proceed to the front lines, all were imprisoned deep within the concrete and rock entrals. Now that's a scene that up till that point could have happened in a lot of wars. What happens next in that underground environment that that soldier's writing from is something that on a large scale between great powers only happened in this war.
He says quote I heard the cry poison gas and I saw people around me putting on their gas masks. I adjusted mine which still hung over my shoulder. There it was, a yellowish gas glimmering near the iron ladder. A gas bomb must have been thrown into the entrance shaft. The cry, Gas masks on electrified the whole shelter. Soldiers ran to get their masks, which they had hung on the walls, and in the corners, were laid on their
Many who had lost theirs on the battlefield began to cough. The wounded in the bunks tried to climb into the upper berths, while beneath the gas crept forward along its way, extinguishing one candle after another. Soon many were dying, and the bunks and floors were filled with bodies over which the living stepped and stumbled in search of air. The alarm surged like a wave from bunk to bunk.
Before long it had reached the farthest man a hundred yards away. The panic was so great that I saw badly wounded men throw themselves onto the floor as though they wanted to drink in the gas. while others tore the masks from their neighbors' faces, some had a reddish foam oozing from their mouths. End quote. I always try to remind myself when we're talking about these big, grand battles, that what this really is is a million stories like that.
the pain of that incident magnified over the entire scope of the war. And while I'm sure there's some people who are harder than I am in terms of, you know, saying that that's life or that's what history's filled with and all those kinds of things, it's hard not to sit there And feel a sense of awe, I think, for the people who faced this.
And not out of any sort of patriotic, you know, glorification of war or anything else, as I said, just sort of the unexpectedly strong limits of human endurance. How did they sustain this effort? How did they, when told they had to advance into this or just not run away at top speed, how did they do it? And let's acknowledge that not all of them did.
There were a lot of people shot in this war for running away, but the large majority of them did not. And you sit there and go, How did they not rebel? How did they not revolt? What would we do today? There's a great quote from a F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.
It's fictional. But he puts words into the mouth of a man who's showing one of these nineteen sixteen battlefields to his compatriots. They're touring the battlefield and he has a discussion with them and he tries to explain to them The almost Soup that was required in to bring up a generation of people who could do this. In other words, it's not just yours truly wondering how people sustained this effort. Even right after the war, people were trying to figure out how people could do this.
And here's the section from the F Scott Fitzgerald Number. Where Fitzgerald's character explains it. And he points in the distance to a little body of water and says, quote, See that little stream? We could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it, a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind.
and another empire walked very slowly backward, a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation. Then the other character says, Why they've only just quit over in Turkey, and in Morocco. Response. Quote. That's different. This Western front business couldn't be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it, but they couldn't. They could fight the first Marn again, but not this.
This took religion, and years of plenty, and tremendous sureties, and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren't good on this front. You had to have a whole souled, sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas.
and postcards of the crown prince and his fiancee, and little cafes in Valence, and beer gardens in Unter Den Linden, and weddings at the Marie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather's whiskey. General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty five, came the reply, meaning General Grant in the Civil War in eighteen sixty five.
The main character says, quote, No he didn't. He just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne, and whoever wrote Undyne. And country deacons bowling, and Marianne's in Marseille, and girls seduced in the back lanes of Vurtenburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle. There was a century of middle class love spent here. End quote.
A century of middle-class love spent here. That is profound, and that's how the generation that lived through this war saw. So basically Fitzgerald's answer to that question of, you know, how did these people endure? Is that you had to have grown up the way they did? With the same cultural influences and expectations including societal and class based ones. You'd have had to have seen the world the way they did, had similar concepts of, you know, duty and expectations and even manhood.
And you'd have to have in some ways the same illusions, too. Because in certain circumstances, having illusions could help you carry out military operations that people who were more cynical and realistic would never do. And you know, when you think about the endurance too, I mean, it's so normal to focus on the horrific war side of this, but the simple
You know, life part of this is sometimes what pushes people over the edge. You know, you'll hear stories sometimes where they will say, well, they were able to adapt to the shelling. They just couldn't handle the rats or something. Something gets to them sometimes. um above and beyond what you might think. I mean, a perfect example is start looking at what day to day life was like for these people who
Any of us would think we're focused on staying alive, but sometimes it got down to an even more um base level than that. Louis Bartos. Fighting in the Verdun Inferno writes about at night being in one of these trenches when the rain just comes pouring down. He says, quote, We were crouching down so as not to catch a stray bullet or shell fragment passing by. And if this weren't bad enough, a heavy rain started to fall.
It didn't take long for the water to fill in the ditch and to submerge our shoes. Our helmets were transformed into drain spouts, little waterfalls ran down our packs, onto our hips, off our shoulders, and along our arms. We didn't know what or whom we were waiting for. The night was pitch black. Were they just going to leave us stuck in the sewer? End quote.
Sewer is such an apt name too, besides the bodies and the poison and the decay and the lice and the rats have not even dealt with them. They're both absolutely beyond imagination, living with the lice, living with the rats. You also have the problems of men fighting in an inferno, where getting out of your trench meant a pretty good chance of dying when you have to go to the bathroom, Louis Bartos writes, quote.
And to make it worse, as I've already described, all of us, one after the other, suffered from an epidemic of intestinal disorders. The resulting diarrhea sure cleaned us out, but inopportunely, as soon as one of us got over it, his next door neighbor was afflicted with it and had the bad luck to have to climb out of the trench and head for the shell hole which served as our latrine.
Of course we did this only in the last resort, at the last moment of agony, stretching our guts until they were about to burst. One of us was surprised in the latrine by one of these sudden fusillades and collapsed into his own excrement. So as not to expose oneself to similar incidents, some used sardine or monkey meat cans as chamber pots, so as not to have to leave one's hole in the ground. One even sacrificed his cast iron dinner plate. End quote. How do you keep your sanity?
You have to risk your life to g I mean th the whole thing again on an ancient battlefield there might have been one horrible day where if you're unlucky enough to have dysentery that day, it's a horrible day in the ranks. It isn't a day after day after day thing. These people are putting up with a pounding on their psyche. But understanding what they went through?
is in large part what makes this story so incredibly compelling. The extremes of human experience, right? I talk about it all the time. There's a wonderful Paragraph by historian Eric Dornbrose, who tries to describe why this isn't gratuitous to talk about this, why it's part of being astounded by your ancestors. Here's what brose says, quote. Most historians today depart from the traditional practice of omitting casualty figures.
What was once left out for respect of the dead and to avoid any indecent hint of criticizing or questioning the sacrifices they made, is now included in order to illuminate the magnitude of the horror men face. By citing numbers, in other words, historians begin the process of turning back toward describing what war was really like, and they do this despite the understandable loathing of the veterans themselves.
to remember or speak about traumatic experiences they have tried, usually unsuccessfully, to suppress. The problems historians encounter with casualty figures, however, especially the astronomical numbers of dead and wounded in twentieth century wars, is that numbers have a numbing quality to them. Although shocking to read initially, they quickly lose descriptive effectiveness, as minds fail to grasp horror in the abstract.
In order to do historical justice to combat on the ground, therefore, it is necessary to go beyond the numbers, to the gruesome eyewitness account. Shaking off criticism that to go there is gratuitous. The Great War can only be fully understood if all its aspects are exposed.
dimensions of the front experience that not only affected soldiers' morale, and eventually the outcome of the war, but also home fronts and their critically important willingness to continue shouldering the war effort. All wars are horrible, Brose writes. Tragedies for the dead, their relatives and friends, hobbling, sometimes disfiguring injuries for others.
turning wives, children, and parents into caregivers for life, and psychological minefields for veterans who may have escaped death and injury, but not the terrible memories with which loved ones too are then forced to live. The Great War was especially hellacious, however, because it was the first to unleash the full mechanized fury of sophisticated industrial technology. End quote. Men had never been asked to endure anything quite like this.
Some of these French soldiers had to go back to Verdun more than one time. What does that do to you? I I read somewhere where one of'em said the first time you can kind of handle'cause you don't know what you're in for, it's particularly hard when you're going back to Mordor after you've been to Mordor. So happy to have survived, and now you get to take your chances all over again? So the majority of the French army gets a chance to rotate through this area at least once and they never get over.
Tatan himself will say about the Verdun experience to the French army, quote, The constant visions of death had penetrated the French soldier with a resignation that bordered on fatalism. End quote. The fighting wouldn't end for ten months.
About half that time the Germans were on the attack, the other half the time the French were on the attack, and by the time it was over, this is disputed, but about a million total casualties. Both sides added up together, give or take two hundred thousand either. At the end of the war.
It will be mandated in the treaty that that when this battlefield is cleared, and it will take decades just to get the bodies off of it, the shells are still there, and many of these areas are cordoned off until, well, probably a good hundred, two hundred years from now, um,
The treaty stipulated that when French bodies were dug up and buried they needed to be buried singularly and with white crosses for purity. The Germans, the Didn't have to be in a single grave, and their graves were to carry black crosses signifying shame. The depth of emotion that Verdun created in the immediate post-war generation, but even in France today, is unlike quite any other military endeavor French arms have participated in.
And the mythmaking about this crazy battle starts before the fighting's even done. And there's a whole group of revisionist historians who've been trying ever since the battle happened to poke holes in the myth. that obscure the reality of Verdun. It's got such a sacred hold on both France and Germany, it's hard to separate the facts from the fiction, and there's a huge amount of heroism and sacrifice connected to this event. It's understandable that you would get
you know, some mythmaking. And the revisionist historians often portray Falkenhayn, the German commander and the one behind this plant, as an idiot. It was a dumb plan, executed incompetently, and after the war when people went to Falkenhayn and said, What were you thinking there? He said, Well, I was trying to kill a lot of people. That was my goal. Mission accomplished. Lot of these revisionist historians, um Paul Jankowski's a perfect example will say something like
to make Verdun out to be any worse than any number of terrible World War One battles is to play into the myth. I mean he says if if being in a trench with the rain falling on you, with your feet up to your knees in mud, under shell fire and sniper fire day after day. is terrible, well, there's plenty of First World War battles whereas a soldier you would have found yourself in that situation with bodies all around. I mean, that's not that abnormal in the First World War.
And they're right about that too. But you know, maybe it's fairer to say that there are several really unbelievably horrible and unprecedented battles in the First World War. That are equally hellacious and you would not want to be at any of them. They each have their own awful, unique flavor to them that makes them different.
and nothing smells quite like Verdun. And if you said to me you have to be at one of these horrible battlefields, Verdun is the lowest on my list. Verdun is the last place out of all If you ask what Verdun achieved, again, there's a wide variety of opinions on this. The most popular is that it achieved nothing. One of the broad symbols of the general wastefulness of this war.
about a million people either are killed or wounded or, you know, have never returned from that battlefield, and nothing of huge importance was gained because One thing that certainly did happen is it moved up the timetable
for several other battles that were going to happen a little bit later, but when the French got pressed by the Germans at Verdun, they said to the British and they said to the Russians, You know those battles you were planning on starting? Could you move up the timetable and start'em sooner? We could use the help over here. And finally, the one thing in 1916 you're beginning to see, and we've alluded to this before.
is that these people have put up already with a lot more pounding than we would probably put up with today, but there's a breaking point for all human beings. In my mind, the breaking point that's coming was quickened. by the experience at Verdun, and we'd mentioned that the French had a policy of rotating troops during the battle to keep them fresh at Verdun, but what that meant was virtually the entire French army at one time or another was rotated through that sector.
Verdun took the French and ratcheted up the discontent levels in ways that were probably out of proportion to what you could have expected from a more normal battle. It got you closer to the breaking point. The idea of pushing your adversary to the point where their society literally implodes is a thoroughly modern idea.
By nineteen sixteen, most of the military leaders in this conflict see that as the end game in this conflict. The reason it's a thoroughly modern concept isn't because people of the past didn't understand it. It was because they could never take enough damage to get to that point. As we said throughout this series, nations in the past, for the most part, couldn't take a punch.
The ones who could stand out like sore thumbs. The Roman Republic, for example, what makes it so unusual in a military history sense? They could sustain defeat after defeat after defeat and not capitulate. They could lose a battle of Cannee, they could lose a battle of Lake Trasamine in the same war, and keep coming back for more. Very unusual.
You know, a generation before those defeats, Alexander the Great defeats the massive and the greatest empire the world has ever seen, the Achaemenid Persian Empire, with a couple of big shots. There's never enough time for the society to implode. A society collapsing at the foundations requires that they be able to stand there and exchange enough punches to get to that point.
By nineteen sixteen, the grinding down of nations is well underway. As author David Fromkin says, the real war had become an economic and social survival contest. And the generals are beginning to organize their strategies to quicken and hasten this outcome. For example, when Falkenhayn talks about
you know, the idea of using attrition to bleed the French white. He explains that you don't have to worry about the Russians anymore, because they're well on their way to having their entire society collapse. He says quote, According to all reports, the domestic difficulties of the giant empire are multiplying rapidly.
Even if we cannot perhaps expect a revolution in the grand style, we're entitled to believe that Russia's internal troubles will compel her to give in within a relatively short period. In this connection, it may be taken for granted that she will not revive her military reputation, meanwhile. We need not be anxious about that. On the contrary, it is probable, he writes, that any such attempt and the losses it must involve would only hasten the process of disintegration. End quote.
I should also point out that in the nineteenth century, for example, that kind of disintegration not only wasn't the goal, it would have been seen as a negative byproduct. In the era where a military defeat meant that one general gave his sword to the other general and we exchanged some provinces or some colonies or whatnot, the goal wasn't for the society to collapse. It was now.
And military leaders began to employ strategies designed to make that outcome a reality. For example, when the war starts, the British use their navy to clamp down a blockade on Germany. Now the French are not Don't look at that as a very useful strategy because after all.
Something like that's gonna take a long time and no one when this war starts, or you know, a very small minority who turn out to be Cassandras and prophetic, no one thinks the war's gonna go long enough for something like a blockade to actually take effect. But by 1916, everyone is starting to understand that those long-term anaconda-like strangling strategies are very viable.
And the British are not the only ones who can do this. After all, the Germans have a fleet too, right? And this is the point in the story where it becomes worth talking about again for a moment. You see? This German fleet was a key reason the tensions, especially with Britain, increased in the pre-war years, right? It's called the Anglo-German naval tension.
but it was considered to be worth it by a Kaiser and a government that thought it was important to be able to hold your own at sea. So these ships were built and they cost an amazing amount of money. A huge amount of industrial capacity is sucked up into this. As we said, you you you turn a a p a basically friendly Britain into an enemy. And now that you got what you wanted, it's sitting in port continually.
And here you got your country straining every fiber, you know, to sacrifice for the war effort. Heck, the civilians are starting to cut back on their caloric intake, and here's this fleet. So expensive to build and every month sucking up resources and sitting in port. This is the time in the story where because the Germans get a new admiral, things start to happen on the surface naval front for really the only time in this war.
And if you are a nut for this period like I am, I I like to call it the Battleship era. somewhere between eighteen ninety-ish and nineteen forty-ish, about fifty years, the era where you get these armored Leviathan. That are just, to me, they're fascinating, right? And they're such incredible vehicles that you may have to fast-forward the show when I start going off on some detailed tangent that, you know, only I find interesting. Um, but I I think these vehicles are incredible.
And there is so little evidence of them actually being used that on the few occasions, you know, where it happens, I I tend to look at them rather deeply. There's only one occasion in history. I I don't think I count the Russo Japanese war pre dreadnought thing, only one occasion in history where These armored ships from this era. The fifty years battleship era, actually fought the way these admirals had envisioned they would.
in long lines, miles long lines, stretching off to the horizon, you know, Lord Nelson style, Pirates of the Caribbean style, and facing a fleet similarly arrayed and shooting, you know, in the distance between them. That only happened once. in this whole fifty-year battleship era, and only happened once in this war, obviously. It's a battle in nineteen sixteen called the Battle of Jutland. To kooks like yours truly, this is a fantastically interesting encounter.
When we were thinking about organizing this story, you know, you you try to carve out places to take a little uh direction change and a momentum change. You know, you go from the carnage at Verdun, and those of you who know this story know what's coming up in the future of it.
and you take a little interlude to talk about other elements, not just the naval, you know, side of this, but also the fact that the Navy really is a wonderful canvas on which to represent the technology of this era, and how big of a deal that is to the people here. And that's a perpetual problem, isn't it? I mean going back in time and seeing what looks to be ancient technology to us, looking at it the way the people back then are looking at it, to whom it's cutting edge stuff.
I mean, first of all, I was trying to think about the best way to sort of explain, create an analogy for how these people see the fleets that they have. And the fleets and the navies. along with this new thing, these aircraft, um, are the real cutting edge technology out there. And
The reason why is because it's just death to be too far behind. And as I said, the best Navy from 1900 would lose to several navies from nineteen fourteen. That's a mere fourteen years. I don't think those nineteen fourteen navies lose a shit. That's how quickly things are changing. Robert Massey in his book Dreadnought has a great line where he says in nineteen hundred, and that's a mere fourteen years before the First World War breaks out.
Every single British admiral commanding a British battleship had been trained when they came up in the Navy in the age of sail. So that's an example of how cutting-edge this is. Um if you want a mental image, think of the Titanic, the ship that struck the iceberg and went down and everything. That's from this era.
It's sort of a steampunky, Sherlock, Holmesy kind of feel. I always think about it as I mean, if you y if you were up in the command center, one of these battleships, it's like Star Trek meets. you know, Sherlock Holmes or steampunk and you instead of having a digital display, you'd have one of those, you know, round dials with one of those
arrows that looks like the elevator arrow in a nice New York hotel that goes around on a gold background. I mean, you know, very, very beautiful actually. These ships were beautiful. Polished wood, the whole thing. They were just gorgeous. and they were the cutting edge technology of their day. And I had to resist comparing them to spaceships.
as a way to try to have us feel like the people back then felt.'Cause you know me, that would be just be so mean to say it's just like a starship. But it's a little like one, but not enough for the comparison, right? As I thought to myself, I thought, you know Those people saw battleships uh as as really cutting edge, but not as much as we would spaceships with an equal number of, you know, crew members on board. That would be a bigger deal. But then I remembered the submarine.
For the people again, hard for us to get all wild about them, but to the people back then, that is science fiction, the very definition of the word, right out of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and all of a sudden we have ships that go underwater. Like they have cloaking devices. They become invisible. And worse, if you're you know a naval official back then, is that they now carry new weapons that threaten everything you have.
This is what really accounts for the cautious nature of naval warfare in this period, right? Why didn't the ships just all come out blazing and everything? Well, there's all these uncertainties. Part of this period's attraction is that you begin to see a showdown In naval warfare, when you haven't had any test of any of this technology in a long time, no one knows what's gonna happen when you get whole fleets out here blazing away with this modern technology. It hasn't happened before.
One of the things everyone's kind of scared about is, you know, these torpedoes, for example, and these mines, you know, these floating mines that that lay in the water and then a ship runs into them and boom, they explode. Because these weapons are very, very cheap, right? You can make a lot of them. And they can sink these massively expensive, you know, ships that take years to build and whose loss is catastrophic. They can sink those.
That's a huge change'cause in most of naval warfare, generally, there are exceptions, but when you want to sink a massive, expensive, first class ship, you generally need either another massive first class ship or a lot of other ones. They have huge survival. Right? They they can justify their cost and the investment. Now, all of a sudden, for example, Churchill talks about the British Admiralty just being petrified by.
that you would turn around one day and these great huge expensive ships that took forever to build and that you only had the limited number of were just disappearing in the blink of an eye. Boom, quick explosion, another ship gone. And then when the war starts, in like the first couple of months that happens. They lose a super dreadnought, the creme de la creme of the British battleship forces.
Oh, the HMS audacious strikes a mine, like you know, a month or two after the war starts, and that's a that's a pretty brand new ship almost, and boom, goes down. One mine, one battleship. Wow.
Again, if you're in the Admiralty you're going, Okay, what does this mean? And then a submarine, like, sinks a couple of old British cruisers, boom, boom, boom. I mean one right after another. And now all of a sudden You know, these people who've got these big expensive ships are kind of petrified about using them.
And military historians like Martin Van Cravel have spoken about this, where you just have this strange dichotomy where you you spend so much money on these vessels'cause they're very important, but then because you spend so much money on them you don't want to risk them. And so you have the German Navy and the British Navy Dealing with each other as maybe two snipers hunting each other would deal with each other. Waiting for the other side to make a mistake, and then when they do, pounce.
The problem is is that when the war starts the British clamp down that blockade, and that's all they need to do. The pressure's on the Germans to do something about it. And as we said, Winston Churchill, who was the civilian uh head of the Navy for a while in this conflict, wrote down that really, while there would have been a lot of advantages to ha sending the, you know, numerically superior British fleet to go in there and just kick German tail.
the downside if you failed to do that was so bad it wasn't worth it. He said, Yeah, you know, we could get all these good things if we decisively defeated the Germans. But he goes, But if we lost and remember This is all untried technology and naval combat's weird and unpredictable anyway. You could bring the superior fleet in there and somehow lose or just lose enough.
So that you don't have the numerical advantage anymore, you've got parity with the enemy, and that was unthinkable, and Churchill said the chances of that happening might not be great, but if it happens, it could cost us the whole war. I remember reading that and thinking to myself, I don't know if I buy it, but a whole lot of interesting thoughts come to mind. If you believe what Churchill said,
about it basically having the potential to end the war. Now here's how he explains it. In his book he said if the German Navy were even to have a nice victory against the British and cut down the numerical superiority so that they both have the same number of big ships then the German Navy would be able to interdict the stuff heading for Britain. And Churchill says that that would result in, quote, The trade and food supply of the British Isles would have been paralyzed.
Our armies on the continent would have been cut off from their base by superior naval force. All the transportation of the Allies would have been jeopardized and hampered. The United States could not have intervened in the war. Starvation and invasion would have descended upon the British people. Ruin, utter and final, would have overwhelmed the Allied cause.
He says the great disparity of the results at stake in a battle between the British and German navies can never be excluded from our thoughts. End of court. So if you buy Churchill's theory, that means instead of being The most secure of the great powers that I think most of us assume Britain is. After all, you're talking about an island nation. It's a country with a motor.
And then you add the greatest Navy in the world. Looks pretty secure to me. But Churchill's idea here is that, yeah, but we're one lucky punch away from that situation changing. to stay with our boxing analogy. And if that's true, the Germans maybe are justified in keeping that fleet safe in port in case you need a lucky punch. Maybe you're losing the war elsewhere and you decide
you'll send your, you know, ships on a death run and take your chances. Maybe you get lucky, right? Maybe you get a knockout blow. If again you buy into what Churchill's saying, it means that the Germans will, as long as they still have a fleet somewhere, maintain the ability to win the war with a lucky punch at any time. I find that fascinating. Don't know if I believe it, but find it fascinating. Now the only time in this war
that the attempt at a lucky punch happens. It wasn't thrown that way, but the only time that this decisive encounter that could be potentially horrifying if it totally went the wrong way for Britain, the only time this happens
nineteen sixteen. And it happens because of that Admiral we mentioned earlier. His name is Reinhardt Scheer, and he takes over in early nineteen sixteen. And he feels about the German fleet pretty much the same way everyone else does. It's time to earn your keep and let's start acting more aggressively. And so he'll start trying to um the best way to put it is trap the bricks.
The British have more big ships than the Germans, so Schear's idea is, well, let's see if we can ambush small numbers of those big ships, overwhelm them, and slowly but surely whittle down the advantage in numbers that the British have. And it's one of these attempted traps that results in this really only time for enthusiasts like yours truly to see what these fleets could do in an all-out encounter.
with both sides hurling steel at the horizon, and with all these weapons that, you know, from a spectator's standpoint, you're just dying to see what the heck they can do. I mean let's start with the gun. The guns on these ships are the same kind of guns you saw leveling the Belgian forts and that the Germans were using at
Verdun, those are the big naval guns being used on land. Well, why do you think they call'em naval guns, right? These new battleships, I mean, for example, the British are are are bringing in four or five brand new ones that will fight in the second world war two that have fifteen inch guns.
And multiple I mean, like eight to twelve fifteen inch guns. That's incredible. Thirteen inches of armor, they weigh like thirty thousand tons. The new Queen Elizabeth class they're called. They can do like twenty five knots if they're really smoking.
These are incredible, incredible modern warships, and when you realize that they can hurl a shell the size of a small Volkswagen, eighteen miles across the horizon, at a target that's a hundred feet wide, while both shooter and target are moving, and hope to hit it reasonably well, Uh that's shocking. I mean the Spanish American War, uh less than twenty years before this time period, they would fire hundreds of shots.
at about just less than three miles distance, and every now and then they'd score a hit, you know, hundreds to get a few. In the Russo-Japanese War they broke all records when they opened fire at each other at eight miles distance. That's eleven years before the Battle of Jutland. Eight miles, breaking all records. The Battle of Jutland has ships that can fire 18 miles.
How do you even hit anything on the horizon? Well both sides, British and German, are incorporating again, it's like steampunk technology, maybe a rudimentary fire control computer, you might call it, and both sides have different versions and the Germans have superior optics, and so they'll score the early hits in in in in this encounter that happens in large part Because the British are reading the naval communications of the Germans.
See, I love the Battle of Jutland for a couple of reasons. Not just because it's the battleship encounter of the war, but also because it's a rubber meets the road moment, a put-up or shut-up historical acid test. where all of the military theories and the debates and the the philosophical differences amongst experts over the proper way to build these ships and what naval battle's gonna be like in the next war and all that stuff leaves the realm of the theoretical and gets
You know, laboratory tested on the naval battlefield. The land powers already saw this happen to them right at the start of the war. Their military land theories and all that that people had speculated about for decades, got their acid test in the first month. Places like the Battles of the Frontiers, where those sort of high-minded uh academic debates at military war colleges about whether or not
Charging cavalry will have any sort of a role on a modern battlefield with machine guns and everything. I mean that kind of stuff gets tested in the first month of the war, and the results are of course bloody and decisive, even if they won't be absorbed, right?
The naval side of this war hasn't had this kind of an acid test yet. There have been little encounters, one at the Falkland Islands, another one at Dogger Bank between a few cruisers here and a battle cruiser or two there, but nothing like what's gonna happen at J. And when you realize how careful these admirals are being
Because of the nature of naval combat. I mean, you could provide an opportunity for someone to get a lucky punch if you're not careful. So none of these admirals wants to go out unless they have an edge, unless they have an advantage on their side. Favorable conditions, it would be called. The British don't have to do anything.
Because they've got this blockade going. So, worst case scenario, if things just stay as they are, they're wearing the Germans down with this blockade. They're going to create The disintegration Of a state, just like we told you.
you know, was the goal now of these leaders. You know, if the Germans begin to starve at home and the caloric intake is already being reduced for their civilians, you will see revolution in the streets, so this British strategy of blockade will eventually bring Germany to its knees. So it's incumbent upon the Germans to do something about that situation. When they get their new admiral, Reinhard Scheer, in nineteen sixteen, who wants to be more aggressive, he decides to create his own air.
you know, the conditions for his own advantage on the naval battle. So he sets traps. And in late May 1916, he sets one for what he hopes will be a detachment of big British warships. You know, get five or six battle cruisers and entice them past your submarines or into your minefields. or into an area where they think they can feast on some of your light forces and then pounce on them with your big fleet.
And that's what Sheer plans to do, and so he sets out all these forces and prepares this little ambush. And what he doesn't know is that the British, as we said, are reading all these naval communications. Are the British the greatest cryptographers on the planet? Or is that just the twentieth century sort of colouring my view?
Because boy were they great in the twentieth century. In the Second World War they will famously be reading all the German Enigma traffic, among other things. In this war, in the first couple of months, the German naval codes fall into their hands. And while they may not be deciphering every single message, when the entire
German High Seas fleet, as it's called, hundred ships about, decides to weigh anchor and go out, you know, looking to play in the North Sea. The British know about that. There'll be big communication spikes and everything. So when Scheer decides to set this ambush,
The British reading the naval codes tell the fleet, guess what? The uh Germans are out there, and they don't know that we know they're out there, and so the British Grand Fleet thinks, okay, now we have the advantage. We will trap the trapper. And so the British Grand Fleet, which is like twenty eight
you know, super dreadnoughts and dreadnoughts. I mean it's the biggest fleet in the world. It's the most powerful fleet in world history up to this point. And in terms of size and tonnage, it may be the biggest fleet ever. It weighs anchor, it starts making its way to where this ambush point is. And it leaves so early, by the way, because it's got all this advanced information that it totally screws up a lot of Admiral Shear's ambush'cause his forces.
You know, he had these submarines that were gonna be outside the British ports and that they could shoot at the British ships as they left the harbour. None of that stuff's ready. And so the the British ships make their way to the rendezvous point with with the Germans, and you're setting up another Trafalgar here. I mean, if the British fleet emerges into view and catches the German fleet there, you could sink half of it before they get away.
And then Murphy's Law joins the battle. Murphy's Law takes center stage in this encounter, by the way, which would have made a great dress rehearsal. for early twentieth century naval warfare. Unfortunately it's opening night.
And you know, you have troubles on opening night with all of the loose ends that haven't been fixed yet. Imagine instead of opening night you're doing the dress rehearsal, and yet you have two hundred and fifty ships in about fifteen square miles when these things come together. I mean the things that can go wrong and do go wrong affect this battle mightily, and it's a good argument for why these admirals are so cautious. They know this.
So Murphy's Law intervenes while the British are about to pounce on the Germans because the British send a message back to their intelligence service wanting a confirmation of this or that, and the intelligence people reading the German naval codes tell them that they made a mistake early. They said, Oh yeah, the German fleet's not at sea like we thought. They're still safely in port. Don't worry about it.
So now these admirals who five minutes ago knew where the German fleet was and were ready to pounce on it, don't know they're there anymore. But of course they are. And so now we have both main fleets. Close to each other in the North Sea, none of them aware of the other's existence. So the rhythm of this Battle of Jutlin is wonderful. It starts off as a trap, flips into a counter trap, and now it is serendipitously morphed into an encounter battle. And that's how it gets started.
German light forces on one side of the horizon, British light forces on the other side of the horizon, Spot a civilian trawler between the two of them. They can't see each other because they're so far away, the curvature of the earth limits their sight, but they can both see the trawler.
So these light units, you know, converge on the trawler to investigate it, discover each other, start shooting, and send messages back to the main fleet saying, Guess what I found over here on the other side of the horizon? The enemy fleet, right? And so this creates like a war vortex where all these naval forces start converging on this area. The ships that arrive first are the battle crews. This is an interesting side of the story because the battle cruisers are experiencing a test right now.
And it's the test of whether or not the admirals that backed this entire design in the decades before this period were correct about it. This is a theoretical argument until there's data. There hasn't been a chance to have any data. Now we're gonna have data. Are these ships viable? Now first of all you need to know what they are. A battle cruiser is a hybrid design. It's supposed to combine the punching power of a battleship with the speed of a cruiser.
So if a battleship is like some giant lion, for example, or tiger, these battle cruisers are more like panthers. Now this is going to be confusing because they are all named after like giant cats, and so the flagship of this battle cruiser squadron on the British side is the Lion, so don't get confused if I start talking about the Lion. Um
But that describes him pretty well. The hypothetical problem here though is that you had to give up to get the speed of a cruiser. You had to give up the armor of the battleship. So what we have here is a ship with all the striking power of a battleship, but one that can't take a punch by a battleship, or its counterparts, another battle cruiser.
When this was pointed out before the war, the admirals who liked the battlecruiser concept waved off this worry by saying, Don't worry, speed will be their armor. And that's where the argument ends, because nobody knows if speed will be their armor.
These battle cruisers approach this battle at twenty-six or twenty-seven knots, which is amazingly fast for a ship their size. There are six of them on the British side and five of them on the German side. And when they meet, they begin to open fire at only about like eight miles, which is short.
And the British have the longer range guns, by the way, but don't open fire first. This becomes the first of many things that the British admiral of these battle cruisers, a guy named Beatty, will be critiqued about, you know, after this battle. The battle opens up at about 3 45 in the afternoon. Visually, it is hard to see. if you actually see a picture of them at full tilt are smoking like they're on fire, and when you have a bunch of them they're putting tons of this dark soot into the air.
Add to that the fact that we're over by Denmark in the North Sea. There's fog, there's squalls, there's mist, there's rain, there's all kinds of things that inhibit. the ability to see very well. And sometimes one fleet will be in a position where they see the other fleet really well.
But the other fleet doesn't see them, and vice versa. So the part of being a good admiral is trying to arrange your fleet so that the other fleet is highlighted against the horizon or in some way that makes them an easier target, and your fleet is kind of obscured and hard to hit. But ships had not tried to shoot at each other at some of the ranges they're gonna try to shoot at each other here.
When these battle cruisers start shooting at about 345, the British shoot long initially over the heads of the German ships. The German ships are disconcertingly accurate. They strike the battlecruiser tiger like six times in quick succession with eleven inch shells. And at four o'clock, they strike the flagship, the Lion with Admiral Batey on board. the shells penetrate the turret, which is the sort of armored bubble that that contains the big gun.
The turret either explodes or catches on fire, and there are photographs, by the way, of moments in the Battle of Juntlin. They're not great, and I always imagine them zoomed in and colorized, but you can see the lion burning. And it looks bad. And Admiral Beatty didn't realize at the time how closely he came to being blown to Kingdom Come. They'll find out later that a guy who was dying and who had lost both his legs
um on the lion, saved the ship by flooding the magazine. The last order he gave was to to flood the whole area where the um explosives were to keep them from blowing the ship up. Now, if Beatty was wondering what it would be like to see one of these modern, amazing ships explode, he only had to wait about two minutes. If you actually look at the moment by moment rundown of this battle, and that's part of the fun of naval battle.
All these ships kept uh very descriptive and detailed logs about their movements moment by moment by moment. They've reconstructed this entire battle from almost each individual ship's viewpoint. And the part that strikes you when you read a rundown is how quickly everything is happening. So Beatty suffers this hit on his own turret at like four o'clock. Two minutes later, the HMS indefigatable, a somewhere in the twenty thousand tons of battle cruiser explode.
just explodes in a moment. It's Churchill and the Admiralty's nightmare come true. I mean, in a blink of an eye, you have a towering cloud reaching up like fifteen hundred feet. Witnesses say you could see, you know, Funnels and guns and everything shooting up into the horizon. And both sides, German and British, watch this happen together. Out of the more than 1,000 sailors on board the Indefigitable, two survived.
It's hard not to include an account by one of them. How do you not include an account of a survivor of a ship whose magazine gets penetrated and explodes with him on it. I guess he was way up high in the top observational area. Do you still call that a crow's nest? He said he was a hundred and eighty feet high. His name is C. Falmer, and here's how he describes the explosion of the HMS Indefigable while he was on board. Quote.
There was a terrific explosion aboard the ship. The magazines went. I saw the guns go up in the air just like match sticks, twelve inch guns they were, bodies and everything. She was beginning to settle down. Within half a minute the ship turned right over and she was gone. I was 180 feet up and I was thrown well clear of the ship. Otherwise, I would have been sucked under.
I was practically unconscious, turning over, really. At last I came on top of the water. When I came up there was another fellow named Jimmy Green, and we got a piece of wood. He was on one end and I was on the other end. A couple of minutes afterwards some shells came over, and Jim was minus his head, so I was left on my lonesome. End quote. Now About twenty minutes after that.
The HMS Queen Mary, another one of these battle cruisers, explodes. Same way. I mean a little bit different. I mean she gets hit and then there's this pause and sailors are jumping into the water and then she explodes. We have accounts from sailors who were in the water who said that the sky was all of a sudden just filled with all this massively heavy debris that was now falling down on them in the water, and they're all diving under the water trying to
escaped giant funnels and big metal objects falling on them, and probably a lot of them didn't escape. Again, more than a thousand uh of these sailors on board, a small handful rescued afterwards, less than less than twenty. And at one point, Admiral Beatty turns to his subordinate and says there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.
And he's right. They're not passing the acid test. The hypothesis that, you know, was the philosophical underpinnings of this entire class of warships, at least on the British side, is proving to be flawed. They don't have enough armor. Speed is not turning out to be their armor. And when their armor gets pierced,
You know, the way they're handling this ammunition and the lack of flash protectors and some other things means that the magazine is catching on fire and exploding way too easily. And you can tell that it's happening too easily because on the German side, it's not happening. They sacrificed in some other areas. Their guns are smaller, for example. They're a little slower in order to, you know, slab some more armor over some of these vulnerable points. And they're not blowing up.
Again, these Germans build ships like Mercedes, and they're taking a pounding while they are running away. Now that's that's what you have to notice in what's happening at these battles. You know, these ships are not stationary. They're not anchored and staying in the same spot. They're all moved. And they're all moving in a specific direction. The British are chasing the Germans, and the Germans are moving away.
Now, if you're the British Admiral, this makes perfect sense to you. You've got the bigger ships, right? And until they start exploding around you, you have more of Besides that, you have a bunch of big brand new the newest.
most awesome battleships in the world, their Queen Elizabeth class, I've already mentioned, War Spite, Malaya, Valiant, all these famous ships that will all fight in the Second World War, they're Fresh off the docks, fifteen inch guns, thirty thousand tons, thirteen inches of armor, and Beatty's got them with him. So you darn right these Germans are gonna run away. Never mind that, you know, I tried to communicate with those battleships using flags.
When you talk about Murphy's Law interposing its will on this battle, part of it has to do with things that just look so silly in hindsight. You know, these ships have radio. Sometimes these admirals are not that cool about using it. Sometimes it has problems, by the way, so sometimes they're blameless. But a lot of times these admirals are like the old guy trying to use the computer.
And they're so much more comfortable with the way they were brought up and and the things that they did in the maneuvers in peacetime and one of the ways these these ships communicate.
is by running the orders of the Admiral up on a flagpole. They have all these different flags, and each one means something different. So when the Admiral wants to communicate, You know, to the fleet, his orders they run a flag up the flagpole on his ship, the flagship, and then every other ship is supposed to, as they see it, run up the same one and you get the message across. But this is a method that was used a hundred years before, in Lord Nelson's time when they're fighting Napoleon.
at ranges that are exponentially shorter. Does that make sense? Exponentially shorter than the distances in this spot. without the smoke and all these other things, and in the peacetime training it seemed to work fine. In the rigors of combat it's not working fine, and the big battleships don't see the flag change. when Beatty tells them to do things and um they're not here when this
battle first happens. They've been playing ketchup the whole battle, but now, you know, they're arriving on the scene and their shells are falling sort of by the Germans. And now the British think they've got these German battle cruisers pinned down, even if, you know, you're losing a few of your battle cruisers while you chase them.
But what they don't know is that those battle cruisers are leading them into the maw of the entire German Navy, which is coming up from about forty miles away moving towards them. what started off as the German trap, flipped into the British counter trap, evolved and morphed into the encounter battle, has now, by almost improvisational luck, become a German ambush again. If successful,
the German fleet could wipe out four or five battle cruisers and four of the newest ships in the British Navy. It would be, I'm sure Winston Churchill would say, I'm sure I could speak for him here, a catastrophe. And the Germans are on the verge of making it happen. And then a light cruiser Scouting for the British
Sees the entire German fleet on the horizon, and radios the message back to Admiral Beatty and the Grand Fleet under Admiral Jellico farther away. And Beatty sees those Germans very quickly too with the naked eye. The first thing he does when he realizes he's been baited into this trap is turn his battle cruisers 180 degrees in the other direction and start booking out of there. Once again, Murphy's Law I'll say that many times in this battle
go too deeply into it. Um once again he runs up the flag saying, Turn around and the big battleships, the brand new ones, don't see it. and they will end up exposed out there to the entire German fleet for a while, taking a pounding and dishing one out, too, it should be pointed out. Nonetheless, what Admiral Beatty has done by turning a hundred and eighty degrees away, is turn himself into bait, and the Germans are following.
And Beatty is running back towards his big fleet, which is coming up from also about forty miles away, so now he's flipping. The ambush once again, and now the Germans are heading toward the only fleet that is still invisible on this naval battlefield to anyone. The Germans don't know that the British Grand Fleet is up ahead of them. But now the British Grand Fleet knows that the Germans are coming. An Amerald Jellico.
in in a in a very brave move. I mean, he's operating without enough information. Once again, Admiral Beatty gets blamed for not giving him, you know, good positional information or whatnot. But a lot of this falls into the category of It's a dress rehearsal to these guys. A lot of their errors are the kind of things they would have corrected if they'd had a chance to practice it in, you know, combat situations.
Unfortunately, these are a lot of you know you wouldn't call them rookie mistakes, but but you would correct these before the next battle. Nonetheless, Jellicoe takes a chance, deploys The entire British Grand Fleet, which, you know, is is h more than a hundred ships over fifteen, twenty square miles of ocean. It takes fifteen to twenty minutes. That's how well trained this fleet is. And he deploys the whole thing, and he's waiting for the Germans to arrive. And the Germans are now in the midst.
Right, this battlefield's very misty and you'll you'll run through fog banks and you won't see things for a while. And the Germans can't see what's going on. And famously Admiral Hipper, who's the German Admiral in charge of the battle cruisers, radios Admiral Scheer, the head of the entire German Navy, who's with the German fleet here, and he famously looks off into the mist and tells Scheer Something lurks in that soup. We would do well not to thrust into it too deeply. Too late.
The first thing that happens is is the Germans start taking some fire and they don't know from where, big guns, and then all of a sudden the mist parts for a second, and it's another British battle cruiser. The invincible. And as soon as the mist parts and the invincible becomes clear, you know, it doesn't take ninety seconds before big German guns are opening fire, the shells pouring down on the invincible, and like the other two battle cruisers, the invincible explodes.
So if anybody has forgotten in the intervening you know, hour or two since the earlier battle cruisers exploded, that this design is proving to be somewhat flawed. The explosion of the Invincible before the two main fleets collide is a historical reminder. Nonetheless, it's only soon after that that the Germans emerge from the mist.
to find the entire deployed British fleet waiting for them in like a crescent around the horizon, and Shears says, The minute that they can see what's happening, the entire horizon erupts in a sheet of flame. You know, these ships are a long way from each other, almost invisible to the naked eye, smudges up against the horizon. You see like the smoke of all these ships.
And then you see like the flash of the guns and just like lightning and thunder where you see the lightning and then there's this delay and then the thunder arrives, same thing. You see this flash and it's silent and then boom, the boom hits you after the shells have already passed over.
And, you know, there are destroyers in these battles. We haven't even talked about all the lightships running around, you know, sort of parrying and like like a bunch of little gnats between the battle fleet. And these destroyers sometimes describe what it's like when these giant shells pass over their heads and they say they sound like locomotives when they screech over your little ship's head.
But when they fall in front of your little ship, your like your little destroyer, they raise geysers of water sometimes a hundred, sometimes two hundred feet up into the air, and it's composed of tons of liquid, which then falls back down to Earth, and these destroyers, these little ships, are sometimes beaten up pretty severely by all this water smashing back down into them. Some people are, you know, splashed overboard and all these kinds of things.
Nonetheless, Admiral Jellicoe has performed a famous naval maneuver that you never want to be on the receiving end of, called crossing the T, where he's formed the top crossbar of the T, and poor Scheer and the Germans form the um
can fire on the German ships individually as they come to the front of the line. It's a disaster. Very quickly Scheer gets hit with more than twenty two heavy shells fast, and within ten minutes Scheer has quite tactically uh adroitly, by the way, turned his fleet around and disappeared back into the mist.
And once again, without radar and all that kind of stuff, uh hard to you know know where he is at that point. And he sends out a bunch of light units and destroyers and whatnot to cover his escape so the the British can't just run after them. They might run into a bunch of torpedoes and mines and stuff. And then inexplicably not too uh long after the sheer arrives back into visual range and you know the people fire again.
And then Sheer escapes again'cause he got his T crossed for a second time in one battle, which is almost unheard of. It shows you Jellico's a pretty darn good admiral. And then there's a little night action between the light units. But about this time Admiral Scheer's had enough. You get your T crossed twice in one day. It's time to call it a battle, and Scheer and the Germans manage to limp home.
When all is said and done, the British lose three battlecruisers, three armoured cruisers, and eight destroyers, while one German battlecruiser, one pre-Dreadnought battleship, four light cruisers, and five destroyers are sent to the bottom. The casualties at Jutland are not significant. They don't hurt either Navy badly. Uh the British learn their lesson about the battlecruiser design, but the Germans are humble.
You know, they don't come out again in strength. I mean, there's there'll be a little encounter here and a little try there, but but this is it. They gave it an attempt and they seemed permanently shaken because German surface fleet will not perform another militarily significant move in the war. The only part of the German Navy that's going to be relevant for the rest of the war is the part that uses torpedoes to go after not military targets, but economic ones.
By nineteen sixteen, the economic side of this war is coming to the fore. what war on this scale is like when it becomes part of the normal life of all of these countries, you know. This isn't a new phenomenon anymore by nineteen sixteen. By the middle of nineteen sixteen, we've been doing this for two years. and it's been sucking up more and more of the energy of these nation states that are involved in the conflict. It's very unlike the way most wars
by these powers had been fought, where the civilian population might not even know a war is happening. If it was happening, they certainly weren't directly or importantly impacted. This war's different. First of all, it's life or death. The stakes are so high that everybody's involved, and the armies are requiring such immense amounts of stuff.
you know, the Germans will call this material schlacht, a war of material, that the entire civilian population and the production capacity of all these countries gets warped trying to provide it. As historian Gwendyer said, Quote, it is significant that the phrase home front came into use during World War I, when the role of munitions workers and of civilian production more generally was becoming as important to victory as the soldiers in the trenches.
Without a constant flow of supplies equal to the vast consumption at the front, the soldiers would soon be helpless. And since the mobilization of so huge a number of men left vast gaps in the normal workforce, France had put twenty percent of its entire population into uniform, Germany eighteen percent, and the other major powers not much less, the remaining adult civilians had to be directed by government into whatever jobs were needed to keep production going.
In effect, the civilian economy, he writes, was conscripted too. The governments of Europe quickly took control over labor and raw materials, imposed rationing on all scarce goods, and created true war economies. Women flooded into factories to replace the men at the front, and most production beyond the basic needs of subsistence was diverted into the war effort. End quote. Dyer's also the one that said by this time, quote, battles had become an industrial operation in reverse.
in which the rates of destruction at the front match the rates of production in the industries at home. End quote. I think of guys like The British military leader Hay. or even the German military leader, General Eric von Falkenhayn, and I think about all these skills that they're required to have now, above and beyond what you would think of as a normal general's skill.
And you saw this in earlier wars. There's famous stories of General Sherman in the Civil War in the United States being extra qualified for modern warfare because of all these failed jobs in private industry he'd had that taught him all these lessons that no one knew a general would need in modern warfare, things about logistics and stuff like that. But by nineteen sixteen, y a guy like Haig, a cavalry commander, looks like he would be totally out of his element.
uh dealing with the modern production needs of warfare, as indeed he was. Falkenhayn's a bit more scientific of a guy and he's you know, I always try to think if I were General Falkenhayn, if this were a war game, and you know I played a lot of those in my time,
And I and and I got assigned because I don't think I would take Germany, uh, if I had a choice of of which side of the war game I wanted to play. But let's say I get assigned Germany and I command and play Germany in this war game and I'm Falkenhayn You know, the estimates are, especially during this time period, that if you include the colonial subjects of the of the powers in Europe during this time period, my enemies in this war, if I'm Falkenhayn, have 750 million people.
they can call on, you know, for their value and their effort and in some cases their lives. My side of the alliance has about a hundred and fifty million. My enemies have the greatest fleet in the world, and I just learned at the Battle of Jutland that my navy can't come anywhere near touching em. And they've shut down all of my overseas trade. So if I'm General Falkenhayn already, I'm sitting here going, Wow.
Now you look at the lineup in terms of the kind of countries in each alliance, right? You have the British and the French and the Russians as the three big guys. in the Allied Entente alliance. These are all first rate powers. Best sea power, best land power, n biggest power. All three together. Wow. And then they have a bunch of other countries like Italy and and smaller powers. That's a very powerful force. Who do I have on my side? Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey based.
None of those powers are first rate. At least the Turks aren't asking me for help all the time if I'm Falkenheim though. They're putting on a pretty brave fight. They've managed to kick the British, French, South Africans, Indians, New Zealanders, and Australians out of Gallipoli in January nineteen sixteen. That's unexpected.
They've managed to beat the British uh forces, mostly Indian troops, in a place called Kut in modern day Iraq, trapped them in a fortress there, forced them to surrender, and took them on a death march, but it really doesn't impact Falkenhayn very much one way or the other. It's just nice for him to know that the Turks are winning as opposed to losing, because they are losing against the Russians, but it's a mixed bag. Remember, the Turks are tough.
But they are not quite a twentieth century army, so those are all that's gravy to Falkenhayn. The bigger problem if you're Falkenhayn is your your close allies, the Austro Hungarian. They're a pain in the rear. They don't listen to you to begin with. You're having fights with their main military leaders. And then they go do what they want anyway, and then they screw up because they didn't follow your advice. And then they come to you and say, Will you bail us out?
If you're Falkenhayn, they're a pain in the rear, and he's continually having to take scarce troops from places like Verdun, and instead, you know, taking the train, sending them over east and and saving the Austro Hungarians bacon. Can't really blame them though. They're in big trouble anyway. They may not have been a country in nineteen twenty, even if there hadn't been a First World War. They're made up of eleven major ethnic groups in that state.
some of whom don't want to be there, and their army is a microcosm of their state, And you've got troops who don't even wanna be in your empire at times on the front line that you're asking to die for your empire. It's not a good situation. They're constantly getting into trouble and as One German diplomat famously says about Germany's situation with Austria-Hungary. We are fettered to a core.
We're tied to a dead guy, and that's the Austro-Hungarian force. Now, in your favor, if you're Falkenhayn, you probably have the best army in the world. The 1916 German army is fantastic. It's a combination of the best aspects of the nineteen fourteen force that Germany went to war with, but battle-hardened by experience. Here's the way writer Ian Passingham describes it. Quote.
It is true that the German army on the Western Front by early nineteen sixteen was more skilled and better equipped for trench warfare than either the British or the French. This is not too surprising, he says, as the British Expeditionary Force had only just expanded its army from around two hundred and fifty thousand in nineteen fourteen to just over a million largely inexperienced men.
And the French, he writes, had always been uncomfortable with the notion of defensive operations rather than the offensive spirit. He then says Many of the German veterans of the inconclusive though bitter fighting at Ypres, Neuv Chapelle, Artois Champagne, and Luce in nineteen fifteen had survived. And stiffened an army that had been well led at the sharp end, and remained resolute against Allied efforts in the West.
It had come close to beating the Russian armies on the Eastern Front in that year also. In short, as John Terrain has noted, it must never be forgotten that the German army of that period was very good indeed. End quote. So that's what you bring to the table. Is that enough? Is having the best army in the world enough? And by the way, that's something you traditionally think of when you think of the French.
But it's safe to say I think that since about eighteen seventy the Germans have the best army in the world. Will that compensate for all the downsides the Central Powers have? Hard to know.
One of the worst is the fact that the left hand and the right hand don't know what each other are doing in the Central Powers. The Austrians go off the reservation all the time, don't tell anybody what they're doing, don't get any approval, don't work together with anyone, And it's a handicap, especially when the Allies slash Entente forces are pretty darn good at this.
They have an agreement that they made in 1915 to come to the aid of each other when hard pressed. When the Germans launch Verdun, within a month, the Russians come riding to the rescue in Lithuania trying to help. They launch an offensive that they are clearly not ready for, and how could you be? That would be a very short time in this period to have planned and stocked up for and carried out an offensive.
In March nineteen sixteen, the Russians throw human wave attacks at the Germans and predictably get mowed down. The Germans, you know, looking at the corpses, thought these people totally untrained, cannon followers. As though the Russians were willing to throw tons of human meat at the Germans, simply to scare them enough so that they would pull some units out of Verdun and take some pressure off the French.
It was so inept that some of the casualties the Russian soldiers suffered were because of being shelled by their own side's artillery, which is always a tragedy. and twelve thousand Russian soldiers froze in one night. A lot of these were wounded, but a bunch were people that just, you know, were out there in the cold without the proper stuff. I mean the Russian logistics are traditionally pretty horrible, especially in this period. It shows you the nature of
you know, operations there. The Russians are not generally thought of as handling these sorts of things well, and in March nineteen sixteen they don't handle it well again. The worst part probably from the Russian perspective though is they went to all that trouble and it didn't take any pressure off the French at Verdun. Follow-up effort though by the Russians.
On june fourth, nineteen sixteen, will be handled much better, surprisingly well, if you're a guy like Falkenhayn, and you've written off with a lot of your other generals any chance the Russians have of doing anything significant in nineteen sixteen. On june fourth, nineteen sixteen, the Russians do something very significant, led by their unquestionably best general in the First World War, a guy named Brussel. We had mentioned in an earlier episode that the Russians
simply couldn't attack. I mean they were they were okay sometimes on the defense, but they couldn't attack. And the problem is always the same. They just have such an old fashioned, not up to date logistics system that the farther you moved away from where you started, the harder it was to get the supplies necessary for a modern army to run. But Brusilov is the most modern commander the Russians have. He's been learning from fighting the best army in the world, the Germans, all this time.
And even though he's a cavalry commander and they have a reputation for always being sort of old fashioned, Brusilov embraces the new systems out there and the new technology. For example, he does something almost no Russian army ever does in the first world war. He uses aircraft. to help as spotters and to locate positions behind the lines and for reconnaissance. Right there he's acting in a much more modern way than Russian armies do. Remember, we're talking about an army
that for the entire length of the First World War we'll still be wearing cloth caps. They never get metal helmets. During the duration of the First World War. So, this is a very old-fresh-fashioned army. Brusilov takes what he can do that's modern and uses it. He launches his famous offensive named after him on June 4th, and he does so with a very modern artillery barrage, intense but short.
He's used all sorts of camouflage to hide his intentions. He went as far as painting fake trenches on the ground behind his lines to confuse the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians on the other side. And when he launches his attack He does so along an enormous front.
The Eastern Front's very different than the Western Front. Instead of being this really constrained, small area which they can build a wall from side to side real easily, it's a huge area. So it's much more thinly defended. And what Brusilov does is he attacks across this giant front with a half million men, intending to break upon the defenses of the Central Powers like a wave breaks on a breakwall.
and knowing that in many places his forces will get pushed backwards, but where he meets weakness, they should burst through. Here's the way writer G. J. Meyer explains what happens On june fifth, when hours after the artillery bombardment starts, the half million Russian forces step out of their trenches and move toward the mostly Austro Hungarian lines, but there are German troops too, quote.
His infantry, when it attacked on june fifth, found the Austrians in confusion. Its advance stunned them with its scope, extending as it did along a line of more than two hundred and fifty miles. Brusilov's idea was that by attacking everywhere, he was sure to find holes somewhere, and he had moved his reserves, scant though they were, close enough to the front so that they could exploit opportunities as soon as any appeared. End quote. He continues quote.
And the result was, from the first hour, a success of almost incredible magnitude. The Austro Hungarian Fourth Army disintegrated when hit. Seventy-one thousand of its men, more than half the army were killed, wounded, or captured. The seventh was wrecked even more completely, losing one hundred and thirty three thousand men. It was the same almost everywhere.
After three days, Brusilov found himself in possession of three hundred thousand prisoners. Before the end of the week, more than half of the Austrian defenders had become casualties. End quote. Versilov shattered the offer. And then he ran into the typical problem any Russian commander runs into, the inability of the Russian army and government to get him enough stuff fast enough for him to not slow down and have his offensive peter out. But this maneuver had a domino like effect.
on the war, because at Verdun Falkenhayn now had a crisis on his hands in the east, where he was going to have to pull troops out of Verdun to go save the Austro-Hungarian army, which was disintegrated. And let's understand. The Austro Hungarian forces, we told you about those those troops who were a microcasm of the empire as a whole who didn't want to be there, you had whole units, and I mean battalions, regiments of Slavs.
throw down their weapons and surrender to the Russians, who by the way are Slavs too. Let us not forget that this war began when a Slavic national assassinated the Austro Hungarian heir to the throne, right? And now we're asking Slavs to fight for that empire? Many of them threw down their weapons. They didn't want to die, and they certainly didn't want to die fighting for that empire. And they certainly didn't want to die fighting for that empire against their Slavic brethren.
In fact, some of these units are said to have jumped into the trenches with the Russians turned around and trained their guns back on the side they had just defected from. The Germans will manage to contain with their wonderful army the Russian threat, and they will halt Brusilov's advance and even deal a defeat to the Russians. But already the single minded focus of the
of Falkenhayn on Verdun has been shattered. The Russians, who put in such a wonderful effort in the Brusilov offensive and did such terrible damage to the Austrians, suffered immensely, though, while doing so. well over a million casualties suffered in the Brusilov offensive. Which once again takes the Russians. and begins to ratchet up the level of dissatisfaction
getting them closer and closer to the breaking point. You can almost feel it in the air in nineteen sixteen. A couple of these major powers are within one good punch of going down. In the spring of nineteen sixteen, French military leader Joseph Joffre tells his British counterpart that France is one of those nations. Within a good shot of going down. Remember, you know, by this time they've had a month or two at Verdun. The French have suffered like 200,000 casualties.
And at least this early, two months into ten, but nobody knows it yet, at the Battle of Verdun, it looks like the German leader Falkenhayn's plan to bleed the French army white is working.
It's why you can't take your eyes off the First World War. They're like two prize fighters, and just when you think one guy's taking over the fight, the other guy lands a good shot in somebody's knees buckle, and in the spring of nineteen sixteen, Joffrey tells Sir Douglas Haig, the current commander of British Forces.
that it's France whose knees have been buckled. And he urges Haig to start that summer offensive that he's been planning for a long time on the River Somme early. He says if you don't start it early, the French army will cease to exist. He gets so worked up, we're told, that he can only be consoled and calmed down with lots of eighteen forty brandy, you know, from the year eighteen forty. Jaffra needed good brandy to calm down.
Haig speeds up the big offensive planned for the summer of nineteen sixteen, discussed with all the other allies in late nineteen fifteen. This is a long-term plan, and Hague's gonna launch it early. This long-term plan results in the most controversial piece from the British standpoint of this whole war, maybe of British military history in its entirety. First of all, Douglas Haig, you have to understand that the field marshal that Joffre's talking to is the new guy.
Just like most of the great powers in the First World War, by 1916, they've fired the person that got them into this mess, right? the war's terrible. Everybody's, you know, predictions were wrong. Nobody's fighting it well. So one by one all these countries are sacking the people that got them into this mess. The Russians dropped theirs. The Germans have Falkenhayn'cause they got rid of von Moltke while the war was, you know, in its early phases.
The French still have Jaffre, crazily enough, but um you know, that reputation of the miracle of the Marne in nineteen fourteen will only carry you so far. He doesn't have long to go either. And the British in late nineteen fifteen sax or John French, like we told you in the last episode, the guy who gets his gig is a guy named Douglas Haig.
He'll be a field marshal. He's another one of these cavalry commanders. It's always weird we have a war where cavalry becomes something that you keep off to the side and don't use because it just gets killed, and the horses are more important to move stuff. Because crazily enough, and we haven't talked enough about this and we'll get to it, horses are everywhere. There's millions of them in this war. And they're casualties too, by the way.
But all these cavalry commanders, French, Haig, all these guys have these visions that we're gonna break the German line somewhere and then the cavalry's gonna go rushing in the hole we create and go into the back and it's it's the pre You know, Wehrmacht Armor Blitzkrieg version of that. That's a strategy that's been used throughout history, right? Um
Goes back to you know, pre Alexander time, smash the cavalry into the hole and roll up the lines. It's Blitzkrieg before you have motor vehicles, and that's what these cavalry commanders are still dreaming of. two years into the war, that puts the final nail into the coffin to the idea that this cavalry has any offensive role to play.
Although you have to remember, it still is the fastest moving thing on the battlefield in large numbers. You're starting to get motor vehicles, but you know, tough for the motor vehicles to handle terrain and they're very unreliable. Horses are still the fastest mobility you have, so they're valuable just for that. point alone. They're very vulnerable, though, and the stories of of of dead horses and the suffering of of animals in this story is under discuss.
Nonetheless, Douglas Haig, the new British cavalry commander, has at his disposal some of the largest, really the largest armies that Britain has ever had ready to go to war. Because those volunteers that started joining when Lord Horatio Kitchener, you'll remember, the British military leader from the beginning of the war, the guy who when you see his picture screams nineteenth century man.
I mean, you know, with the giant mustache from another era, you could almost see him in a British red coat and he's the big face on the recruiting poster telling Britons, patriotic Britons to sign up for King and Country and a shilling. And Kitchener's another one of these pre war, early war generals and military leaders who's been tarred by
you know, their conduct in the war. They don't they don't end up looking so genius like when the first world war gets done with you, right? So as Kitchener's reputation is starting to wane, he still got You know, one real feather in his cap, and that's that those armies that he helped recruit in nineteen fourteen and nineteen fifteen and that he has
Protected like a proud parent. You know, don't send them to Gallipoli. Don't send them to the Western Front early. Don't throw them in the meat grinder like everything else. Save'em and really make use of their patriotic contribution. These people want to win the war. Let's put them in a position where they can do that.
He's done an admirable job of that. And about three weeks before those soldiers, known sometimes as the Kitchener armies or the Kitchener Divisions after him, are gonna lose the guy That was probably most responsible for seeing that they weren't used up already in the first place. Kitchener dies about three weeks before his legions are thrown into the fray. It's a crazy story. uh I'm told that it is the same as any one of those big modern deaths, so so the same as a
Princess or Lady Diana dying, or Winston Churchill dying, or J F K dying in the United States, you say to yourself, Do you remember when that happened in Britons of the period? Remember where they were when they heard that Lord Horatio Kitchener, British military leader and almost demigod, at least at the beginning of the war, has gone down at sea, While on a warship on the way to Russia on some military mission, and it the boat goes down at night in a force nine gale after hitting a mine.
And there are survivors who say, take this with a grain of salt, that they saw Kitchener on the deck as the ship went down, impassively sort of accepting his fate, and just standing on the deck as the ship goes, you know, beneath the waves. That really works with that whole nineteenth century military leader reputation, doesn't it? Nonetheless, there have been conspiracy theories ever since about this.
Believe it or not, it's one of the great conspiracy, you know, fountain heads to come out of the First World War. Nonetheless, it meant that three weeks later, when Kitchener's, you know, parentally preserved armies are finally thrown into the fray, he's not there to have any saying. The guy who is is Douglas Haig, the new guy, now known to some in history as the Butcher. So that should give you an idea of what we're about to get into here on a wide variety of fronts.
This battle is one that Sir Douglas Haig has been preparing for since the year before. When the French told him that they were in danger of disintegrating, he's moving up something he's been working on for a while now, and everyone knows. The big nineteen sixteen offensive is no secret. Heck it's in newspapers, baby.
I mean the the when you find out all the ways that everybody knew this was coming, it makes you wonder right again how intelligent it is to be launching something that everybody knows is coming. But it couldn't really be helped. If you're gonna fight At this spot on the Somme River with a British
and the French forces meet on the Western Front, where the where the British line ends and the French line begins, that's where they're gonna hold this joint offensive, maybe for the sole reason that that's where both armies are. That would be a really silly reason to attack.
the greatest defenses on the Western Front, which are the greatest defenses ever in the world right now. These are defenses that make the old Roman um, you know, lines that you would cross Europe with these giant wall I mean, i minor. There's never been defenses like this. The Germans are at the point now where they're building creature comforts into their
uh a fortified line. I mean they're putting wallpaper on and they've got electric lights and ventilation and you know running water. I mean it's crazy. The the trenches are in some cases all lined with wood boards. Done with about as much thoroughness as the Germans are known for.
These are huge, modern fortifications in some sense, and these Germans on the other side of this line, where the French and the British are thinking about launching this big nineteen sixteen offensive, have bunkers that are thirty and forty feet underground. Cut into the chalk of these hills that the Germans occupy. They're looking down for months.
As the British load up all the stuff you now need for a modern offensive. All that stuff we said that the Germans needed at Verdun, the British need at the Somme, right? The French tube. They've laid five railroad lines, you know, new tracks to the battlefield, because that's how often and how many trains are going to be running, just unloading stuff for months.
Three million shells, millions of tons of food. I mean crazy amount engineering corps that are building things, you know, full-on permanent structures, while the Germans watch the whole thing and plan for it and train for it. They're having drills every day. How quickly can we get up from our underground bunker and get up to the trench and man the machine guns before the British soldiers are on top of us, right? Everybody knows this is coming, and everybody knows how it's going to be fought.
The British take these armies with many, many, many green troops that have never been in a battle, puts them in the trenches opposite these German lines. Again, a a position so strong that Winston Churchill says it was quote undoubtedly the strongest and most perfectly defended position in the world, end quote. And starts bombarding it with artillery. Starts June 24th, 1916, early. A lot of our own. As a matter of fact, the psalm becomes one of about four or five first world war battles.
They compete for like the Guinness Book of World Records for the biggest, largest, worst, more intense, most numerous, you know, pick your category, artillery bombardment of the war. There are you know, as a history geek I would be arguing it with my other history geek friends and and it's always about criteria, right? Are we talking about the largest number of shells fought throughout an entire battle? Or are we talking about the most number of shells used in the initial part of the
or the most number of shells dropped in the shortest period of time, or the smallest space. I mean, there's literally a measurement of how many tons of shells fell on each square meter of these battlefields. And by the way, if you use that as your
You know, criterion, for done is the worst artillery bombardment um in history. Nonetheless, the fact that the Psalm is in this argument shows you the level of artillery we're talking about here, and when it opens up on the twenty fourth It's it's incredible in its volume, but the Germans laugh a little. I mean it's a huge bombardment.
But the Germans are mostly underground and undercover, and most of the bombardment is once again shrapnel shells. Sounds like a little teeny point, doesn't it, for ba a battle to turn on. But had those shells been high explosive instead, or maybe even gas, this battle may go another direction, and every historian brings up that the shrapnel was pretty much pointless.
It's remember, it's like a giant hand grenade or shotgun shell exploding in the air and all these little pellets hit the ground. It's devastating to infantry out in the open, but the Germans aren't in the open, right? In addition, the artillery is meant to do more than just kill Germans. The artillery has to clear the battlefield of all this stuff that's there as defenses so that the troops on the British side can actually get to the German trench. It's full of barbed wire.
No man's land, another trench, then another no man's land, then another trench. The trenches are all going uphill, and these no man's land areas, besides being filled with concrete bunkers and everything we told you about before the killing zones. They have yards of barbed wire, as thick as your finger. It's a physical impediment. It has to be overcome by the generals. The generals have figured out in their minds that an artillery barrage of this
you know, caliber, the amounts we're talking about here. The barbed wire will just explode into pieces. It will not be an impediment when the artillery barrage is over, except that shrapnel shells don't really affect it. There was a benefit to the artillery ball.
Though, as we've quoted before, Napoleon has this great line that comes in handy all the time, that quantity has a quality all its own. And the sheer intensity of this barrage began to have an effect on the Germans, even though they were physically protected from being, you know, injured. it began to play on them. First of all, they know they've got something really nasty awaiting them in their future. You have to try to put yourself in their shoes, okay?
They know that when this artillery barrage is over, the British are going to be on them. They've been training for this moment for months, right? Run up the stairs. How quickly can you get, you know, in front of the machine gun in time to stop the British from taking over your trench? So they're gonna either be killed, be grievously wounded, see a friend killed or wounded, or have to kill somebody and they're gonna have a really nasty day in their very near future.
In the meantime, you're going to have one of the greatest artillery barrages in history going on around you, Ernst Junger, who will be at this battlefield in about a month, and see an artillery barrage that is not as bad as this one, He will compare it to the roar of the ocean. He will say that y there there are no individual sounds. And he says it will it will achieve at times and last for hours a demented intensity that he says when it eventually calms down, calms down to mere drum fire.
which is, you know, the sound of of a drum roll. That's how fast the artillery shells are dropping. And he says, even when it's the drum roll, you can't pick out any individual explosions. It's just one big loud sound. But the demented fury that it reaches sometimes blows that away, literally, and that's the kind of intensity these soldiers are living with, knowing that they've got this h horrible moment in their future.
And it goes on for days. And we're told that the German soldiers who were kinda laughing at the fact that the British were using like seventy percent shrapnel shells on them aren't laughing anymore. They're getting tired and stressed, and you know, put yourself in the position of just not sleeping for five days, and now, you know, add all the other things on top. So there is an effect that this artillery is having and the Germans all right about it.
Um the British commanders, this is part of the controversy. We're told that there were lots of people saying that this artillery barrage was gonna make this a cakewalk, and you've heard that before, right? Don't all these battles begin to sound alike? Isn't there a repetitiveness to this story? If there is, you're getting the right feeling out of it because that's how
You know, it's always been played and and it seems like the people at the time felt too, oh no, not again. Haven't we seen this movie before? The generals seem to always just want more stuff. Give us more artillery, give us more men, give us deeper defenses, you know, we'll fix this situation. So here's the biggest artillery barrage the British have ever launched. They shoot off two million shells in no time.
And just for comparison purposes, a hundred years before this time, at the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon is estimated to have had about twenty thousand cannonballs with the French army. So, you know, two million shells in a week or two versus twenty thousand. It's crazy the level of artillery we're going to see here. And it it lulls the commanders into this sense that it's going to accomplish so much more than it does.
It's the soldiers on the ground though that produce the, you know, historical reminders of the that most of them were too realistic and too savvy and too cynical to buy into any of that rosy thinking. The generals could afford to be rosy. The guys on the ground going in, for example, the first wave of this assault that the Germans have been waiting for you for months, they know better. And you can tell because there are absolutely Heartbreaking last letters home.
Peter Hart's wonderful on the Great War, um, has one of these letters from a Captain Charles May, who fights in the twenty second Manchester Regiment, and he's writing to his wife right before he goes over the top in this battle. And and and again, imagine imagine how it affects you to be in the position of writing a letter.
I always think that that's that's a permanent scar on your soul, even if you get the proverbial reprieve from the governor, right? From Captain Charles May of the twenty second Manchester Regiment. who's about to go over the top on the first day of the psalm, and writes his wife I must not allow myself to dwell on the personal. There's no room for it here. Also, it is demoralizing. But I do not want to.
Not that I mind for myself. If it be that I am to go, I am ready, but the thought that I may never see you or our darling baby again turns my bowels to water. I cannot think of it with even the semblance of equanimity. My one consolation is the happiness that's been ours. Also, my conscience is clear that I've always tried to make life a joy to you. I know at least that if I go you will not want. That is something.
But it is the thought that we may be cut off from one another which is so terrible, and that our babe may grow up without my knowing her and without her knowing me, it's difficult to face. And I know your life without me would be a dull blank, yet you must never let it become wholly so, for to you will be left the greatest charge in all the world, the upbringing of our baby.
God bless that child, she's the hope of life to me. My darling, au revoir, it may be that you will only have to read these lines as ones of passing interest. On the other hand, they may well be my last message to you. If they are, know through all your life that I loved you and baby with all my heart and soul, and that you two sweet things were just all the world to me. I pray God I may do my duty, for I know that whatever that may entail, you would not have it otherwise.
End quote. And Peter Hart with remarkable sensitivity. adds a postcript and says quote Charles May, the loving husband of Bessie May and father to his baby Pauline, would indeed be killed the next day. He is buried in the Danzig Alley British Cemetery. Small scale tragedies litter the history of war, sad reminders that the necessities of war ruin the lives of millions. End quote. It's as we said.
All this pain from this war is l are like pebbles dropped in water and the ripples outward affect the rest of these societies. When you have millions of people impacted like this, the ripple effect affects tens or maybe even hundreds of millions of people. For a while the Psalm becomes one of these pebbles that's like ground zero for a huge ripple effect that will affect Britain to this day. I try to think about what mental state I would be in after writing.
And when you think about millions of people, young people mostly, being in situations where they're writing a letter like that, how does that change? I mean there are going to be noticeable changes in this generation of people in the four years during this First World War. I've been comparing this period to a historical estuary, right? Where one generation and another generation sort of mingle the the old world and the new world. But maybe it's more of a wormhole through time.
And when this nineteenth century group of people you know, transitions through to the twentieth century, it's not gonna make it intact. It's gonna suffer damage on the way through. It's like a birthing process to the modern era, and that can be bloody and painful and potentially fatal too. The British have thought throughout this war that they've taken large capital.
The battles of nineteen fifteen, places like Gallipoli, those are large casualties for the British, which are a traditionally naval power and employ relatively by continental standards small armies. This is the first time they've had a large enough army to suffer the kind of casualties that some nations like the French or the Germans or the Russians have been suffering this whole time.
on July first, nineteen sixteen The shelling subsides, the whistles blow, and these troops in the morning are told to get out of their trenches and head across into no man's land, and continue to take the German defenses. And this is where they find out that the assumptions made in the planning stages of this conflict haven't come to pass the way the military experts assumed they would.
And because of that, British forces on the very first day of the Battle of the Somme will suffer sixty thousand kills. 20,000. There's never been a day like it in British history. And now all of a sudden they can understand how the French felt. You know, on that August day in nineteen fourteen, when they suffered twenty two thousand dead in an afternoon.
These are thoroughly modern casualties, and to people not accustomed to them, they are stunning. And the fingers start pointing immediately. What the heck happened? A generation of people who've felt this viscerably have kept this debate going and it continues between historians even today. What the hell happened? Who's responsible?
What happened to the troops? Well they got out of the trenches only to find that in most areas, the assumption that this artillery would smash up the wire wasn't true, and the wire was there. It was a physical impediment. in no man's land, trapping troops in the open so they could be raked by machine gun fire, artillery fire too, but mainly machine gun fire, from those Germans who were not as badly affected by the artillery either, as the planners had assumed they would be.
Tens of thousands of British soldiers are being mowed down all the time. One German on the other side of this human tragedy at the Battle of the Psalm on the first day is quoted in Ian Passingham's book All the Kaiser's Men. And he says quote The leading wave of British troops was now halfway across no man's land. Get ready was passed along our front, and heads appeared over each shell crater edge as final positions were taken up for the best view, and machine guns mounted firmly in place.
A moment later, when the first British line was within a hundred yards, the rattle of machine gun and rifle fire broke out along our whole line of shell holes, followed soon after by deadly accurate shellfire. The advance rapidly crumpled under this hail of shell and bullets. All along the line men could be seen throwing up their arms and collapsing, never to move again,
The extended lines, though badly shaken and with many gaps, now came on all the faster. Instead of a leisurely walk, they covered the ground in short rushes at the double, and within a few minutes the leading troops had advanced to within a stone's throw of our front trench.
Again and again the extended lines of British infantry broke against the German defense like waves against a cliff, only to be beaten back. It was an amazing spectacle of unexampled gallantry, courage, and bulldog determination on both sides. End quote. Now those are the troops who made it through the wire and
There were places where gaps had been blown in the wire. The problem was as the troops would congregate at those gaps, because they're the only way to the other side, and then get stuck in giant backups as as a small stream of troops made it through the corridor and those Those backups and those globs of soldiers just waiting for their chance to get through the corridor of the wire would be mowed down by shellfire and machine guns. This day.
has so affected the British. In fact, it's their version of Verdun. What what Verdun is to the French soul, the psalm is to the British one, and it has divided historians ever since. And you can see normally calm and sedate rather cold sometimes, British historians lose their head over this subject. mean John Keegan, who um I've I've said is not my favorite, but but the the two world wars I think are are his strong point. And you can tell he's a guy who's hung out.
with some of the enlisted troops that were trapped that day at the Psalm because their Continued anger and incredulity about this whole thing has rubbed off on him. And by the way, if you were trapped there, like a sitting duck on You know, an open plane in no man's land, watching your buddies get blown to bits and you're freaking out, you would be thinking, too, who the hell put me here? Who's responsible for this? If I ever get out of this heads will roll And of course most of these
um, British troops at this battle are not of a class in British society that could have made much of a fuss, but they've got loyal defenders who will when this is over. Keegan's one of them, by the way. You can you can just feel the anger when he writes quote. In all, the British had lost about 60,000, of whom 21,000 had been killed, most in the first hour of the attack, perhaps the first minute.
The trenches, wrote Robert Key fifty years later, now he's quoting Robert Key, quote, were the concentration camps of the First World War. Now Keegan talks again. And though the analogy is what an academic reviewer would call unhistorical, there is something treblinka like about almost all accounts of the first of July. about these long, docile lines of young men, shoddily uniformed, heavily burdened, numbered about their necks, to identify after they were killed.
Plodding forward across a featureless landscape to their own extermination inside the barbed wire. Accounts of the psalm, he writes, produce in readers and audiences much the same range of emotions as do descriptions of the running of Auschwitz.
guilty fascination, incredulity, horror, disgust, pity, and anger, And then he goes on to say that this is not just from the peacenics and tender hearted out there, not just from the military historians where you get it from either but he goes, but from the professional troops too. He says, quote, Anger is the response which the story of the psalm most commonly evokes among professionals, meaning soldiers.
Why did the commanders not do something about it? Why did they let the attack go on? Why did they not stop one battalion following the wake of another to join it in death? End quote. He then goes on to say that some battalions were stopped. But that's one of the things that so many people got angry about is that once you saw, for example, that the wire was still there, why did you let more lines of troops get up out of the trenches and follow the people who just got destroyed in front of them?
This is how someone like Haig gets a reputation for a butcher. Now I've gone out of my way in this program, I think you probably notice, to, in nineteen fifteen, cut these general slacks. Because they're learning, right? This is all new stuff. And until you experiment a little, you don't know how to use it. You don't know, you know, what it can do. But at what point can you start holding these people accountable for not learning?
There was a great line from um the civilian political leader Germany. a guy named Bethmann Holvig, and he was telling the Kaiser by the end of nineteen sixteen, he's talking about Falconine here, the German military leader, but it could equally apply to a lot of military leaders In this war, especially at this time, he asked the Kaiser, quote, Where does incompetency end and criminality begin?
How many lives are you allowed to lose experimenting before you learn your lessons? But there are a great many military historians today who are trying once again to say, listen, that's what they're doing. we're still holding them to too high a standard, too much hindsight going on here. Here's what Peter Hart writes. For many people, the Som and the equally ugly Verdun have come to symbolize the Great War, futile battles fought with other people's lives by incompetent and uncaring generals.
In particular for the British, he says, the disaster of the first of July on the Somme has become the sole prism through which the conduct of the whole of the Great War has been viewed. There is no light and shade here, just a dark despair at the numbing horror of the teeming casualties. Explanations of what went wrong and why are thrust aside. Indeed, in the past, subdued references to a quote end quote learning curve for the generals have been seen as an insult to the dead.
There remains a widespread belief, he writes, that there must have been a better way. Something else could or should have been done. Someone must be blamed. Much of this approprium has fallen on the head of Douglas Haig, who has at times been reviled as a mass murderer. yet this was the inevitable price of engaging in continental warfare on the main field of battle against the primary enemy. France was well accustomed to the pain of continental warfare, but for Britain it was a new experience.
Germany had no exposed flanks, just the imposing fortifications of the Western Front, defending their nineteen fourteen gains wrested from France and Belgium. Unfortunately, for all their tactical improvement and technical innovations, the British were just simply not able to breach those defenses or kill sufficient Germans, even in concert with the French at Verdun, to bring Germany to its knees. End quote. It also makes you wonder a little about the quality of the human being.
who are commanding these endeavors, who are making these plans, and who are watching all these people die and be wounded because of these plans. In other words, how bad does the general feel the next day? Well, it's not something you can easily figure out. Again, John Keegan seems to be so angry at the field marshal here, um, still for this conflict that he he he writes.
an answer to that question, kinda. What kind of man do you have to be to suffer those kind of casualties and the next day think about continuing? Keegan writes quote. Haig, whom his contemporaries found difficult to know, has become today an enigma. The successful generals of the First World War, those who did not crack outright or decline gradually into pessimism, were a hard lot. As they had to be with the casualty figures accumulating on their death.
Some nonetheless manage to combine toughness of mind with some striking human characteristic. Jaffre, he says, imperturbability. Hindenburg, gravity. Camal Certainty. Hague, he says, in whose public manner and private diaries no concern for human suffering was or is discernible, compensated for his aloofness with nothing whatsoever of the common touch. He seemed to move through the horrors of the First World War as if guided by some inner voice.
Speaking of a higher purpose and a personal destiny, that, we now know, he says, was not just appearance. Haig was a devotee both of spiritualist practices and of fundamentalist religion. As a young officer, he had taken to attending seance. where the medium put him in touch with Napoleon.
As commander in chief he fell under the influence of a Presbyterian chaplain, whose sermons confirmed him in his belief that he was in direct communication with God and had a major part to play in a divine plan for the world. His own simple religion, Keegan says, he was convinced, was shared by his soldiers, who were inspired thereby to bear the dangers and sufferings which were their part of the war he was directing. End quote.
Wow. Welcome to the controversy and the heat that the Battle of the Psalm has generated amongst those who write about it, but justifiably so, I think. And truthfully, I think there were military people who were certainly willing to forgive Douglas Haig for suffering 60,000 casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, if he'd inflicted something like 60,000 on the Germans.
Instead, the British suffered those kind of casualties, and the German casualties may have been as low as six thousand. Twelve thousand's the high number you sometimes see. Split the difference, say eight thousand, so take sixty, give eight, you get your face ripped off.
Not exactly the position you want. Your brand new general, the new blood, the person who's gonna bring a new sense of success to the war on the Western Front, all of a sudden Douglas Haig doesn't look a whole lot better than the people who came before him. Heck, John French could have had you suffered sixty thousand casualties on the first day of the psalm, right? The previous commander. Now to put those numbers in perspective, because I always have to do this.
Sixty thousand, that's an amorphous number. What what does that compare to? You have to understand that the British for one hundred and one years by the Battle of the Psalms time had been talking about what a horrible day they'd suffered. You know, finishing off Napoleon at Waterloo, right, in eighteen fifteen. Well Napoleon killed eight thousand four hundred British soldiers, eighty four hundred compared to twenty or twenty one or nineteen thousand. That's
Huge difference, right? But how about the Second World War? You always think of the Second World War as being worse than the first. When the British and Americans land the On the beaches of Normandy on june sixth, nineteen forty four, for the famous D Day landings, and then pushed inland.
a not enough attention paid to key part of that whole thing, you know, widening out the bridgehead. It was hard combat. It was historically hard combat. But it took the British and the Americans combined 20 days to reach 20,000 casual. So it took them 20 days combined, British and Americans, to reach one-third the amount of casualties the British alone suffered on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. That's wild. That's crazy.
And it sounds like Verdun, doesn't it? Those numbers start to sound like what the French are suffering in that horrible, you know, battle to bleed their army. Why?
Well, David Fromkin in his book A Peace to End All Peace quotes Norman Stone about, you know, how large these battles were compared to what the people in Europe were used to, and he says quote It has been estimated that the total of military and civilian casualties in all of Europe's domestic and international conflicts in the hundred years between eighteen fifteen and nineteen fifteen Was no greater than a single day's combat losses in any of the great battles of 1916. End quote.
That's an incredible statistic when you think of all of the battles that Europeans fought in Europe and in colonies and all those exactly. All of it put together, and all the European countries, for a hundred years, doesn't equal one of the bad days at Verdun or the Psalm. The societies that could handle these kind of casualties were remarkable, but they took their toll, as you might imagine. By the time five months of the Psalm is over, you have another million cats.
in five months. So Verdun gives you roughly about a million, and the Somme gives you roughly about a million all at the same time. The burn rate on the Western Front is horrifying in 1916. And remember, all of these battles are like a lot of littler battles sort of lumped together. I mean, at the Somme, for example, the Germans will counterattack in that five month period more than three hundred times. A ton of those counterattacks in ancient times would have been a battle all by itself, right?
Part of the reason why it's so hard to follow the nature of these battles. Churchill has an overall description that is just horrifying of a conceptual view of this that makes you understand what was really going on if you could view it sort of from space. And he writes about both the Psalm and Verdun, quote. The anatomy of the battles of Verdun and the Somme was the same. A battlefield had been selected. Around this battlefield walls were built, double, triple, quadruple of enormous cannon.
Behind these, railways were constructed to feed them, and mountains of shells were built up. All this was the work of months. Thus the battlefield was completely encircled by thousands of guns of all sizes, and a wide oval space prepared in their midst. Through this awful arena, all the divisions of each army, battered ceaselessly by the enveloping artillery, were made to pass in succession, as if they were in the teeth of interlocking cog wheels grinding each other.
For month after month, he writes, the ceaseless cannonade continued at its utmost intensity, and month after month the gallant divisions of heroic human beings were torn to pieces in this terrible rotation. Then came the winter, pouring down rain from the sky to clog the feet of men, and drawing veils of mist. mouth before the hawk eyes of their artillery. The arena, as used to happen in the Colosseum in those miniature Roman days, was flooded with water.
A vast sea of insanguine mud churned by thousands of vehicles, by hundreds of thousands of men, and millions of shells, replaced the blasted duck. Still, the struggle continued. Still, the remorseless wheels revolved. Still, the auditorium of artillery roared. At last the legs of men could no longer move. They wallowed and floundered helplessly in the slime. Their food and ammunition lagged behind them along the smashed and choked roadway. End quote.
I keep quoting Churchill because wasn't that positively Tolkien esque? And by the way, there are people who You know, say that Tolkien's experiences with the First World War influenced, you know, his way of writing and thinking. But if it did, he would have been just one of millions of other people that had their outlook transformed by this conflict. And how could you not?
As we said, you imagine writing that last letter home where it's essentially a goodbye letter. That can change you, can't it? I know a lot of people who've had terminal illness. had months to know that death was in their near future. It often changed. It often creates this introspective mood where all of a sudden they're focusing on subjects that people don't usually spend hour after hour, day after day focusing on. But it's right in front of them, right? If you have terminal Cancer.
It's going to be on your mind. And the thinking about it changes you. What if you had a terminal disease and all of a sudden at the last minute the doctors figured out a way to cure you and you were dragged back from the brink, but you'd spent a couple of months thinking intensely?
about life and death and the meaning of things and what you would have done differently and all these really heavy duty thoughts that most people can only stand to think about in short little bursts. Usually there are exceptions. Now imagine millions of people during this 1914-1918 period who would have found themselves in a similar sort of a situation.
pretty much sure they were going to die in the near future or be horribly disfigured, thinking about the heaviest of subjects, writing letters home to loved ones saying, you know, I'm gonna miss not knowing my baby daughter, and then some of them getting a reprieve. and getting a chance to live this life they were all but writing off during the worst of these war experiences.
That is a searing personal experience that millions of individual persons went through. How does that not change the society when they go home? And you know, one of the things about battles.
Especially these First World War battles, is they're so dark, aren't they? And they're so industrial and they're so unbelievably horrifying. The charnel house zombie graveyard feel of the battlefields in the First World War make that particularly you know, mind bending, you'll see a lot of art around the First World War that shows corporate
decaying. And it's not so you feel sympathy with the dead figure. It's so that you understand what it was like for those people living amongst all those decaying corpses to deal with that reality. Mindbending. Battle's mind-bending enough, right? You add all the incredible artillery, which is disorienting as as all get out, and then throw in bodies and pieces of bodies everywhere when you're living, as we've said, it's a unique experience. It's a form of hell.
And yet to someone like yours truly, that creates the circumstances where human brotherly love. appears so like a light in the dark Part of why battles are interesting to study is because as you've probably figured out, you can see the worst of human behavior and man's inhumanity to man in them, but you can also see these Pieces of humanity slip through and when they do they are all the more bright.
and noticeable because they're happening in hell as opposed to, you know, something that happens in your neighborhood, right? A little piece of humanity not that surprising in your neighborhood. Probably makes your day a little brighter. A piece of humanity in the hell of these battlefields. has a rejuvenating effect for one's feel about man. Take for example the These no man's land
in between the fighting lines of the two sides on the Western Front created something that that battles have had forever. I mean in the Second World War you'd have these crossroads, for example, where some machine gunner had set up and now all of a sudden, you know, it was death to cross this crossroads, but the Western Front is hundreds of miles of trench lines, all of them with this dead zone in between, and on the really big fronts where a lot was happening,
There was tons of drama in those dead zones. Things would happen that would challenge men's morality and what you're willing to do. A perfect example is in the Battle of the Song. When the sixty thousand casualties and a lot of other casualties over the course of that battle are happening, the Germans are often taking pity on their fellow human beings, and the British write about it. I mean when these British
attacks would break against the German defenses and and the wounded would start back toward the safety of their own trenches, grabbing even worse wounded people with them and trying to, under machine gun and and artillery fire, get back to their own trenches. A lot of times these Germans would just stop shooting. On the first terrible day, there were oftentimes where the machine gunners and the officers would just say stop, let him get away. It's the human thing to do, right?
On the other hand, if they had just machine gunned them, that wouldn't have surprised anybody either. But what do you do now? about those people who are stuck out there in no man's land after the attack is over. There are all sorts of stories about people who will simply, if they can, drag themselves to the nearest shell hole, wrap themselves up in the tarp they keep to keep the rain out, you know, open up a Bible and just die in those shell holes.
But when they don't, they can often have a terrible effect on the men in the trenches on both sides. The Apaches uh in the American Southwest used to be able to make such good use of um hostages. And if you threatened to torture a hostage or you did torture a hostage, you could get all kinds of concessions from the other side.
Well there are hostages that fate is holding in the middle of those no man's land areas. And what do you do when one of'em starts asking for help? And they're basically calling to you and your buddies from no man's land. You want to see the heroism and the sacrifice that human beings can show in in these hellish situations. Read the accounts over and over about how men dealt with screams for help from no man's land.
you know, create is the story that Robert Graves tells in Goodbye All That, when he was serving at the Psalm on the Western Front and a soldier named Samson gets hit. In the wave before Graves' wave goes over the top. So Graves is just getting ready for this intense experience himself of going over the top of the trench with other human beings right into the teeth of machine gun fire, and all of a sudden you hear the sound of somebody from the last attack
from no man's land, you know, where it's death to stand up and move around asking for help or screaming out. And here's what Graves writes. Remember he's he's in this state himself of thinking, Okay, I've got to walk into machine gun fire and I've just seen all these other people die in front of me. Quote. My mouth was dry, my eyes out of focus, and my legs quaking under me. I found a water bottle full of rum and drank about half a pint. It quieted me, and my head remained clear.
Samson lay groaning about twenty yards beyond the front trench. Several attempts were made to rescue him. He'd been very badly hit. Three men got killed in those attempts. Two officers and two men wounded. In the end, his own orderly managed to crawl out to him. Samson waved him back, saying he was riddled through and not worth rescuing. He sent his apologies to the company for making such a noise. End quote.
In other words, this guy's out there screaming, and it's so driving his own comrades crazy that they keep running out there to do something, and everyone who runs out there to do something gets killed. At what point if you're the wounded person?
Do you try to just stop making noise so that they don't keep trying to help you out of sympathy when you probably are dying anyway and now you've lost three people or more, simply trying to, you know, prevent the inevitable you're going through. So At night, when we're told the no man's land area comes to light. and you know, where it appears deserted during the daytime at night the trench patrols go out
The people who, you know, fix the barbed wire, the intelligence folks, the people conducting trench raids. I mean, supposedly there's a lot of activity in the dark, even though star shells light up the sky all the time. At dark Graves and his unit. moves out to go clear any wounded in front of their trenches, and he writes, quote, At dusk we all went out to get the wounded, leaving only sentries in the line. The first dead body I came upon was Samson's, hid in seventeen places.
I found that he'd forced his knuckles into his mouth to stop himself crying out and attracting any more men to their death. End quote. So this poor man out there hit seventeen times. suffering horribly, unable to keep from crying out, can't stand the thought of attracting any more men to rescue him, and dies with his hand in his mouth to keep from crying out. I mean it it It's it's the beauty that that that finds its way into the horrificness of this war.
If you're that person's parent, there's nothing that consoles you. That doesn't make you feel any better. But as a human being, you look at that and say, there's something about that man's sacrifice that's beautiful. Now Graves tells another story which not only shows the heroism and the beauty of one of his compatriots, But the same sort of an attitude on the part of the people the British thought were the bad guys. The Germans. As we said, the Germans have been holding their fire quite a bit.
you know, during this battle, and you see it on the French side and the British side too. I mean, this is not abnormal. It's a little bit like that Christmas truce we talked about in the nineteen fourteen uh era of this war where spontaneously troops got up and sort of gave each other a
Little Christmas love in between the shellings, right? You see this humanity appear even in this hell. Graves talks about Another soldier in no man's land who wakes up, you know, seemingly dead, and then all of a sudden is crying for help. And when this happens, every man in his trench feels like he's going through some sort of a moral test, and one man passes it with flying colors. Graves writes quote.
On the morning of the 27th, a cry arose from no man's land. A wounded soldier of the Middlesex unit had recovered consciousness after two days. He lay close to the German wire. Our men heard it and looked at each other. We had a tender hearted Lance corporal named Baxter. He was the man to boil up a special Dixie for the sentries of his section when they came off duty, made him a little soup or tea.
As soon as he heard the wounded Middlesex man, he ran along the trench calling for a volunteer to help fetch him in. Of course, no one would go. It was death to put one's head over the parapet. When he came running to ask me, I excused myself as being the only officer in the company. I would come out with him at dusk, I said, not now. So he went alone.
He jumped quickly over the parapet and then strolled across no man's land, waving a handkerchief. The Germans fired to frighten him, but since he persisted, they let him come close. Baxter continued toward them, and when he got to the middle sex man, stopped, and pointed to show the Germans what he was at, meaning what he was up to. Then he dressed the man's wounds, gave him a drink of rum and some biscuit that he had with him, and promised to be back again at nightfall.
He did come back, Graves writes, with a stretcher party, and the man eventually recovered. I recommended Baxter for the Victoria Cross, being the only officer who had witnessed the action, but the authorities thought it worth no more than a distinguished conduct message. End quote. Sounds worthy of a Victoria Cross to me. And that's one of those incidents where you see the opposite of man's inhumanity to man in an environment designed to foster the former.
It stands out all the more, doesn't it? That Baxter could have easily been mowed down, and if you don't think it happens, remember three people were mowed down trying to save that wounded Samson character in the first Graves story. I can't help but wonder. How my generation would handle what these people were forced to do. You think of the first day on the Battle of the Psalm, think of yourself in the second wave, or the third wave.
And you hear all this stuff from the officers about all the artillery will destroy everybody, that nobody will be left alive, and then the first wave in front of you, units that you know go over the top and don't even get near their objective before they're cut to ribs.
It's an absolute catastrophe and screw up and everybody can see it happening. And then they turn into the next wave. Maybe that's not you, maybe you're in the third, and tell them to go do the same thing, and they do when the same thing happens, right? It's suicide. Now they turn to you and they say, okay, it's your unit's turn.
What do you do? Forget cowardice for a second, because there are people who simply ran away or whose nerves failed them or whatever. This is not a question of, you know, what could you do physically? This is a question of what would you? See, I think a lot of us would think to ourselves, there's no way I'm surviving going out onto that battlefield.
But if this officer wasn't here telling me to do this, and my buddies and I just sort of decided all together we're not doing this, maybe something would change. You know, one of the first war novels to come out of the First World War actually came out during the First World War.
something where he as a soldier had served already. He was a disabled veteran. He wrote this piece while the war was still going on. And it's surprisingly anti war for the government to have put up with it during the conflict. And he implied that the soldiers on both sides, the common soldiers. should just agree with each other that they're not gonna fight any
You know, what if they gave a war and no one came, right? What if the soldiers on both sides say, Well, the governments can tell us to fight, but we're not fighting anymore? And Barbuz said that in the book that truthfully the only people who really understood what the French soldier and the British soldier were going through in these hellish conditions were the German soldiers on the other side of the no man's land, living under the exact same hellish conditions.
When the Germans don't fire on the British who are getting their wounded? But a lot of times it's because there's this unwritten deal that says, I'm gonna leave you alone right now to get your wounded people out of there in the hopes that when it's my wounded people in no man's land and I'm trying to get them out of there, you'll let me. One of the real phenomena. is the fact that when left alone, a lot of soldiers on both sides
decided to adopt what's what's officially known as a live and let live attitude in this war. And it was it was common everywhere, but the Western Front more than any other, where for example, Soldiers would be required, and they hated this job.
to go out at night and put more barbed wire up in the middle of no man's land. So you sneak out'cause it's dark and you bring wire with you and wire cutters and all these things and you have to go hang new wire. It's an extremely dangerous job and both sides hated it, right? So a lot of times they just wouldn't shoot at the other people who were putting wire up. Now the officers hated.
And one of the big Scandals was after the Christmas truce, the so called Christmas truce in nineteen fourteen when both sides sort of fraternized, the officers had to make all these you know, arrangements so that next Christmas nothing like this happened again, and the men preserved a proper fighting spirit would be the way most of these militaries would phrase it. But the troops often found a lot more to like about each other than their own officers.
Corporal Louis Bartos in the French army writes about this incident. where a flood occurs and all of a sudden the trenches on both sides of no man's land have to clear and how you have one of those moments where you just look at your enemy and he looks at you and you realize, this sucks.
And who put us into this mess and why are we doing this? And he almost writes, you know, Bartas is a socialist, like a lot of these troops in the trenches are. So he has a worldview that kind of sees the upper classes, the corporate groups and all that as the problem. And that the average soldiers in the trenches were all just kind of common workers being exploited by the man. And he writes about this famous
a flood that he experiences and what it does and how it freaks out, you know, in his mind, the upper classes in the officer corps, that all of a sudden, you know, both sides in this combat are starting to have some sympathy for each other. And he writes, quote, But one night when the rain came down in torrents, the tide invaded our dugout and cascaded down both sets of steps.
At the height of the storm, some of the men had to devote all their efforts to building a dam, which the water then broke through in three or four places. We spent the rest of the night battling the floodwater. The next day, December tenth, at many places along the front line, the soldiers had to come out of their trenches so as not to drown.
The Germans had to do the same. We therefore had the singular spectacle of the two enemy armies facing each other without firing a shot. Our common sufferings brought our hearts together, melted the hatred of the Nurtured sympathy between strangers and adversaries. Those who deny it are ignoring human psychology. Frenchmen and Germans, he writes, looked at each other and saw that they were all men, no different from one another. They smiled, exchanged comments, hands reached out and grasped.
We shared tobacco, a canteen of coffee, or wine. If only we spoke the same language. One day, he writes that A huge devil of a German stood up on a mound and gave a speech. Which only the Germans could understand word for word, but everyone knew what it meant. because he smashed his rifle on a tree stump, breaking it in two in a gesture of anger. Applause broke out on both sides, and the International was sung, he says. That's the national anthem of the socialist cause, I guess you could say.
He says, quote, Well, if only you'd been there, mad kings, bloody generals, fanatical ministers, jingoistic journalists, rear echelon patriots, to contemplate this sublime spectacle. But it wasn't enough, he says, that the soldiers refused to fight one another. What was needed was for them to turn back on the monsters who were pushing them, one against the other, and to cut them down like wild beasts. For not having done so, how much longer would the killing go on?
Meanwhile, he says, our big shot leaders were in a furor. What in the Lord's name would happen if the soldiers refused to kill each other? Our artillerymen received orders to fire on any assemblies of men which were pointed out to them, and to mow down indiscriminately both Frenchmen and German. Just like when in ancient circuses they slaughtered wild beasts who were too intelligent to tear each other's throats out and devour each other.
Furthermore, he says, once the front line was established again for better or worse, it was forbidden under penalty of death to leave the trench. Any act of familiarity with the Germans had to cease. It was over. What was really needed was a second biblical flood, a universal deluge to stop the war, to appease all the anger and the bloody madness of our leaders.
Who knows, he says, maybe one day in this corner of Artois they will raise a monument to commemorate this spirit of fraternity among men who shared a horror of war and who were forced to kill each other against their wills. End quote. There are multiple accounts from socialist soldiers that sound like that.
But it's more complex than that, and Philip Gibbs tries to make this statement in Now It Can Be Told, where he talks about this horrible life these poor soldiers are forced to endure But then about the complexity involved in trying to make some statement that the soldiers are all of one mind or viewpoint about anything.
We told you Ernst Junger, the German, goes through all this terrible stuff and kind of finds it uplifting. Gibbs writes these horror stories and then says this about the Psalm and the soldiers there, quote. But however deep the knowledge of tragedy, a man would be a liar if he refused to admit the heroism, the gallantry of youth, even the gay of men in these infernal months.
Psychology on the psalm was not simple and straightforward. Men were afraid, but fear was not their dominating emotion except in the worst hours. Men hated this fighting, but found excitement in it, often exultation, sometimes an intense stimulus of all their senses and passions before reaction and exhaustion. Men became gibbering idiots with shell shock, as I saw some of them. But others rejoiced when they saw our shells ploughing into the enemy's earthworks.
laughed at their own narrow escapes, and at grotesque comicalities of this monstrous deviltry. The officers, he writes, were proud of their men, eager for their honor and achievement. The men themselves were in rivalries with other bodies of troops and proud of their own prowess.
They were scornful of all that the enemy might do to them, yet acknowledged his courage and power. They were quick to kill him, and yet also quick to give him a chance of life by surrender, and after that were, nine times out of ten, chivalrous and kindly.
but incredibly brutal on the rare occasions when passion overcame them at some tale of treachery, They had the pride of a skilled laborer, he writes, in his own craft, as machine gunners, bombers, raider, trench mortar, men, and were all keen to show their skill whatever the risk. They were healthy animals. And they had, some of them, a spiritual and moral fervor which bade them risk death to save a comrade.
men or to save a position, or to kill the fear that tried to fetter them, or lead men with greater fear than theirs. They lived from hour to hour, and forgot the peril or the misery that had passed, and did not forestall the future by apprehension, unless they were of sensitive mind, with the worst quality men might have in modern warfare. Imagination. End quote. Well, imagination I can see being a downside if you're in the trenches under fire.
you know, looking at your watch, as some of these troops in the trenches did, saying, I have fifteen minutes left to live. Now I have ten minutes left to live. Now I have five minutes left to live is the countdown to going over the top happened. Yes, I can see how that would drive you crazy. On the other hand, we're getting to the part of the war where the really imaginative minds can begin to
you know, start to have an impact on these brand new twentieth century problems that only became apparent about two years ago when this war started. Some of the solutions to the problems the First World War you know, brings into play, debut during the Battle of the Psalm. And they look once again, this is gonna maybe be a sub-theme of this show, unintentionally.
They look like something out of science fiction. In this case, H. G. Wells, or if you want to believe some people, go all the way back to Leonardo da Vinci, people who first Come up with the concept of, if you will, a land ship. Churchill and the Navy called them land battleships sometimes. We know them by the term tanks. And tank is supposedly simply something that caught on it was supposed to be a cover weapon.
so that no one knew what was being worked on in secret in the, you know, laboratories of the Allies. They would suggest that this giant armored Fractor was intended to bring up supplies, you know, like water to the frontline troops under fire. So a tank, if you will, a water tank. on a battle, one of these little battles that make up all these giant battles, a part of the Battle of the Psalm on September fifteenth,
An offensive to take a particular part of the battlefield is launched and debuting are a bunch of these tanks, you know, thirty or forty, something like that. A bunch of them broke down on the way. you can instantly see, you know, that this is the solution to the problem, right? If you go to your engineers when the war starts and say, listen, we've got this barbed wire machine gun artillery situation with no man's land and these big trenches you gotta get past.
Uh put your mind to it, come back with a design. They did. They've got a giant trap. and it's so long that it can span most of these trenches. So It can go in and not get trapped most of the time. It only goes about the speed of a walking human being, but the point isn't to
you know, drive around real fast everywhere. The point is to not get killed while you're crossing no man's land, and not get held up by barbed wire. These things are designed to simply run over barbed wire. Machine gun bullets won't be a little bit Hurt them, Shrapnel won't hurt them, and they'll get to the other side and they'll wipe out strong points. And when they debut, nobody has any idea what that's gonna be like.
It's another one of those moments where you kind of bite your nails and now you watch the new technology. In this case, not stuff developed in the last hundred years that never had a chance to be tested. In this case, stuff developed specifically in response to problems the first World War. know, brings up like no man's land. And they perform astoundingly well.
Now they break down a lot, and uh they're terribly uncomfortable for the people inside. These are large too. There's like 15 people in these things. I mean, they're like almost a butt. And they don't have a turret. They have either a machine gun coming out of the side or a couple of six pounder guns, which are about fifty-seven millimeter.
And yet the Germans don't know what they're dealing with here. And we have stories of them surrendering to tanks and uh the reaction on the part of the British troops is either really excited and happy or they are almost laughing because it looks kind of comical. But in a sense, this is what we talked about earlier. This is the Star Wars steampunk Imperial Walker thing for real.
Now Churchill and the people who had backed this idea, from the time trench warfare got started, that's when the the first plans were drawn up and the ideas brainstormed for something like this, and the French were working on it too, by the way. Churchill was mad and forever afterwards yelled and screamed that this concept could have really done a ton if they had just waited till there were enough of these land battleships to unleash and have have it make a difference.
The counter argument, which we also understand right, is that what if they don't work? What if we don't know how they work? How do we do this if we don't have a dress rehearsal before opening night? So Churchill and the people on his side are saying, No, you wasted it. It should have been one big opening night that You know, broke the Western Front, and the other side saying, Are you kidding me? There's an open invitation to Murphy's Law.
But if you were looking to try to decide how you liked your land battleship concept in practice after it was debuted at the Battle of the Somme, well, all you have to know is Cavalry Commander Douglas Haig. radioed back to, you know, corporate headquarters at uh the British Army and said, uh, we want more of those tanks. Now Other things happened because of the battle of the Psalm two. And one was
It was just it for poor Eric von Falkenhayn, the head of the German military. Remember, he's a guy who took over after they sacked von Moltke, the guy who they started the war with. And now, like a bunch of leaders who own a football team and continually like to change coaches, Falkenhayn's going to lose his gig.
He's got Verdun on his scorecard, now he's got the Psalm, and then there's this Brusilov offensive, and then the last straw is everybody's whispering that Romania's gonna get in the war, which doesn't sound like a big deal to us now. But if you actually look at the literature, especially German, Austro Hungarian, the stuff from that side of Europe, oh, they're really like biting their nails.
Oh, Romania could get in the war. Half a million bayonets. Oh my goodness. And everybody's really worried. And apparently Kaiser Wilhelm, the German emperor, is really worried. And Falkenhayn said, nah, don't worry about it. They're not gonna come in anytime soon. Maybe later, but but no time soon. And then boom, almost right after he issues the they won't be coming in. They come in. August twenty seventh. Uh and that's it. Falkenhayn gets sacked. Um
The last card, by the way, I love how he knows his emperor, William, and all William's little quirks about power. And Falkenhayn's last card that he plays is. You know, if you replace me with the people everyone knew they were gonna replace him with, if you replace me with Hindenburg and Ludendorff, that's it. They're not gonna listen to you.
I'm the last chance you have of having an influence, my words. But that's basically what he said to the Kaiser. You want to have any role in this at all? You better stick with me,'cause if you put Hindenburg and Ludendorff in charge, they're gonna tell you to go play with your toys in the corner. Apparently the Kaiser felt like he had no choice.
von Falkenhain, who asks for a military command, is given, some people think almost as an insult, the command to go attack Romania which he didn't foresee them coming into the war, he takes over a military command and conducts a brilliant campaign against Romania, conquering them quickly. Which makes you turn around and go, Now why were we so scared of those Romanian bayonets? It's not the Romanians' fault, by the way, folks. I mean, think about
how that's like a minor league team jumping into the middle of a game against the perhaps best army in the 20th century. So far, I mean, Romania is so unequipped for this without a ramp up period. And they just got smashed. And the worst part about the whole thing from the Allied standpoint, again the Allies work so hard to get Romania in the conflict, is that once Germany takes over Romania, they're gonna loot that country of every bit of wheat and oil and anything they can take to offset.
The damage that the British blockade is doing. So in a sense, it's like they come upon this Romanian storeroom and they loot the whole thing. So it sort of backfires on the Allied cause. Hindenburg and Ludendorff, this new command team, the people who had been in charge on the Eastern Front for so long and sort of being the armchair quarterbacks from over there telling the rest of the German command what they were doing wrong on the Western Front are now in charge of, among other things.
the Western Front. And they're gonna bring a new perspective and a different way of looking at things, and they will essentially command this German army for the rest of the war. Now, how long the rest of the war is going to be able to go is an open question. As nineteen sixteen begins to wind up, you begin to see the discontent. ramping up everywhere and on many different fronts. I mean you begin to see, for example, hunger really bite. There'll be a winter
the famous winter of nineteen sixteen in Germany that's called the turnip winter, which tells you right there what's going on. All the all the exports from Romania you can get aren't going to, you know, make up for the overseas import needs of Germany. The Russians. are in terrible trouble. Remember, this is a a regime that almost got overthrown ten years before this time period. They didn't have exactly the the greatest, most solid foundation anyway.
These million casualties they suffer in nineteen sixteen at the Brusselov offensive, among other things, are taking its toll. French soldiers and are beginning to bleat like sheep when they pass by their officers. These replacements will come up marching by and they'll just hear bleating sounds like sheep and lamb being led to the slaughter, a sort of as one author puts it,
um way that the troops can silently protest what they feel is being done to them. And on the home front, you can you know, the tragedy is beginning to really seep in as more and more people are personally affected for life. by this conflict. And obviously while this isn't the textbook example, I don't think most people find themselves in in the same situation as this German couple. But there's a story from the time period from a British observer in Germany.
during the war, who was describing a train trip where she saw a couple, man and a woman, on the train, and the story's absolutely heartbreaking, but in so many ways shows where we are by the end of nineteen sixteen in this conflict. The observer says quote. A poor woman the other day on the train was holding up her hand and counting the fingers on it slowly. One, two, three, four. Over and over again.
The passengers gradually began to smile at her, until at last the man sitting next to her said simply, Don't laugh at my wife, ladies and gentlemen. I'm taking her to the asylum. Her wits are gone. She's lost her five sons, all killed in action. End quote. When you really examine what's already happened since August 1914, you come away with the feeling that if you had bet on a short war like so many did.
You are amazed at the staying power of all these states, many of whom didn't look that particularly stable when the war broke out. Nonetheless, as we've been saying throughout this whole program, there's a limit to the endurance of anyone. And we're about to enter the point where nations crack and break, and in the not too distant future get knocked out. If you think the show you just heard is worth a dollar, Dan and Ben would love to have it. A buck a show. It's all we ask.
Go to dancarland.com for information on how to donate to the show. One of the justifiable criticisms you can level at the show we just did was that it focuses inordinately on the Western front. I did that on purpose. Because to me, when you're talking about the extremes of human experience, the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of the First World War is the situation on the Western Front and the trench war and all that.
And in that sense, I'm not that different than most British, French, and German historians who have focused inordinately on the Western Front. But I think we all know that there's a lot of other things going on in this conflict in a bunch of other theaters. And in the same way, I was able to avoid talking about those other theaters for a while. My goodness, the jumping around we would do if
if we try to get everything in there would be more confusing than what we're already giving you, which is more confusing than I like already. Nonetheless, you could ignore just like most people in Britain, France, or heck, even in New York City in the United States, when you open up your newspaper and in the far corner of like page eight, there's a little blurb about maybe some
obscure Arab tribe uprising in some out-of-the-way Ottoman district or something doesn't mean that much to you. You're not thinking that much about it. After all, the Western Front is grinding up a whole generation of Europeans And then in nineteen seventeen, events in faraway peripheral places, is the way a lot of people in the West might see them, rise up and demand to be taken seriously.
Whether it's the Middle East in 1917 and events that we are still shaking out to this day that are in your headlines daily, or whether it's the collapse of an ancient European regime. Which opens the door to the 20th century's most radical regime taking over in a major country. It's also in nineteen seventeen that the vortex of the First World War manages to suck in an outside major power.
that for almost a hundred and fifty years has managed to stay out of direct involvement in European affairs as one of their early Presidents had said, the United States of America doesn't go abroad in search of foreign monsters to slay. And in nineteen seventeen they decide, well maybe just this one. You know, to make the world safe for democracy. Yes, indeed, many of our modern situations had the seeds for them planted.
in nineteen seventeen, and we'll get to all that and more in part five of Blueprint for Armageddon.