The Outbreak of the Eurasian War.
The belief that any coming Great War would be short – by necessity, if nothing else – was quite prevalent in the years before the assassination of Sevket. Authors like Norman Angell and Jan Bloch argued that any conflict would be disastrous, nay, impossible, because of the rate at which a state’s resources would be consumed. Financially, no country could afford to fight for more than a few months before fiscal collapse left its armies and fleets at a standstill. If anything, the evidence of the Manchurian war confirmed this: Japan’s army in the field had been defeated, but many analysts claimed it was Japanese financial exhaustion – which sparked a stock market crash in the spring of 1905 – which had forced Japan to make peace.
At the same time, in military terms, it was becoming increasingly apparent to some officers in the armies of both the Entente and the League that a new war was likely to be long and drawn out. The evidence of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War – and indeed even the Russo-Japanese War – made it clear that a modern field army was almost impossible to destroy. And even given a victory on the scale of a Sedan, one’s opponent could almost always raise fresh armies. But the consequences of a long war were clear: devastating attrition, economic and social collapse, and, as in France in 1870-1, revolution.
For some, like the German Chief of the General Staff from 1891 to 1906, Alfred von Schlieffen, the path was clear. A long war would be avoided because it had to be avoided. Schlieffen’s prescription for Germany’s troubles during his tenure (a two-front war against France and Russia) had been a massive attack on France, marching through Belgium and the Netherlands, to destroy the French army as quickly as possible so as to turn on Russia. It was risky, yes, argued Schlieffen, but waiting until a British blockade starved Germany of resources, or until the French and Russians could crush Germany between their massive armies, had a certain success rate of zero.
The war that faced European officers in 1915 was not Schlieffen’s war. Germany had lost one front – the war against Russia – but now saw itself faced with a multiplicity of global hotspots, each individually of lesser magnitude than a war against Russia but in aggregate possibly far greater. Russia no longer had to deal with the Germans on their eastern frontier, but instead with a near-continuous front stretching from the Caucasus across the entire breadth of Asia to Vladivostok. Britain and France had to sustain both a war in Western Europe but one that embraced almost all of their colonial possessions.
With the fronts so widely spaced, with logistics virtually nightmarish, the likelihood of a knockout blow was even lower than it had been before. To mobilize their armies, Russia or the United Kingdom would have to spend months shuttling troops to their various fronts; Japan was only slightly better off, and the Ottoman Empire was far worse. There was only one place where either side could even hope to score a fast, decisive victory: Western Europe, where railroads were denser, troop numbers were higher, and where France and Germany both lay potentially vulnerable to a quick exit. So while the war had started over the Caucasus, the world’s attention initially shifted over to Alsace and Lorraine.
It was clear that the French would be taking the offensive. While Germany had the luxuries of concentrating on the Western Front and of a larger economy, resource base, and manpower base from which to draw, France’s army was front-loaded, designed to work best in the shock of the initial blows of combat. It had been the French, learning from Prussia’s mobilization in 1870, who had developed their rail lines to the Vosges, ensuring that France could get more troops to the frontier faster than could the Germans. France’s three-year law of 1914 had increased the trained manpower theoretically available for the initial campaigns. And most famously – if inaccurately – it was French theorists like Ferdinand Foch and Loyzeaux de Grandmaison who were known as the apostles of the offensive, who claimed that morale, the will to win – élan – was the key to modern war.
This so-called “spirit of the offensive” deserves some mention, for it is often reported that this meant that French – and German, Russian, Chinese, and so forth – soldiers were imbued with the foolish notion that only repeated incessant attacking could erode a defense based on modern firepower. Military tacticians the world over are supposed to have recognized the power of modern weapons like machine guns, high explosives, heavy artillery, and the like and decided that the only solution was to throw warm bodies at them. Only later in the war – with stormtroop and infiltration tactics properly developed – did generals have any idea as to how to fight a modern infantry war. This is used as part of a general indictment of the ostensibly idiotic European military leadership of the war era.
But the basic conception behind modern infantry tactics was already there long before 1915. European generals in France, Germany, and even Russia had already decided that the key to advancing in the teeth of a modern defense was to build up fire support against the enemy, to (if possible) pressure his flanks, advance your infantry by bounds as close as possible, and then to rush forward to drive the enemy out of his positions. So-called stormtroop or infiltration tactics were merely variations on this central theme, making use of specially trained detachments. Correctly applied, these tactics worked just fine for armies in Europe even in 1915. As an example, the French 41st Division, commanded by an officer with a sound understanding of the 1911 field regulations, attacked an German force of equal size in entrenched positions on the Meurthe River on September 9, 1915; within four hours the Germans were driven out of their positions, the French suffering three dead and sixty-two wounded.
Grandmaison, whose 1906 booklet was most castigated by later historians, actually emphasized the role of artillery support. Furthermore, he flatly stated that “a frontal attack across open ground [was] impossible”. In stating such things, Grandmaison was hardly breaking ground; theoreticians around Europe had understood the difficulty of attacking modern entrenched positions for decades. Grandmaison’s point was that, in order to succeed, even with the help of artillery, fire support from other infantry and machine guns, and flanking detachments, the infantry had to deal with immense pressures unlike any other in previous wars: they had to believe they could succeed in order for any of the modern tactics to work.
What the French army’s problem was, was that it failed to distinguish between a specific problem – grunt poilus mustering up the courage to storm the last hundred yards on a modern fire-swept battlefield – and a more generalized one, that of the operational problem of fighting Germany. Grandmaison did an excellent job at resolving the former; he provided no assistance with the latter. Therefore, up to 1914, war planning was left up to Victor Michel, the vice-president of the Conseil Supérieur de Guerre; his Plan XVII, completed in 1911, rested on a short-term defense of the eastern fortress line – Verdun-Toul-Épinal-Belfort – with a sizable mobile reserve in case the Germans invaded Belgium to circumvent the fortresses. Michel’s fall in 1914 brought a new war plan into being, Plan XVIII, which was later associated with the alleged idiotic belief in the spirit of the offensive.
Michel’s fall came not over any issues of defense or offense, but over his management of the army. Part and parcel of Plan XVII was a decision to increase the number of reservists in the front line of the army. With the military still reeling from the Dreyfus affair, graduation from military academies had slumped, while funding was nowhere to be found for reserve training (over a third of reservists did not even report to the colors in 1913). Much of the French military establishment was worried with Michel’s apparent preference for quantity over quality; fearing the dilution of trained men, they opposed the employment of reservists in the front line. Furthermore, Michel did not plan to increase the amount of artillery in the army, over the protests of Auguste Dubail, the munitions chief – again, an issue of quantity over quality. And Michel’s reservist proposals wouldn’t even be able to take full effect for several years; in the midst of the Zabern and Gough crises, with war apparently imminent, CSG was preoccupied with combat readiness. Michel had to go.
His replacement, Joseph Joffre, was the most senior available ‘safe’ general, unassociated as he was with either Michel himself or the scandal of the affaire des fiches in 1904 (which tarred Joseph-Simon Gallieni and Paul-Marie Pau respectively). Joffre, a somewhat enigmatic figure who spoke little and wrote less, may have achieved his initial position based on his republican credentials (always a concern after the Dreyfus affair), but his subsequent actions showed a clear intent to make the French military war-ready, carried out with considerable energy. His part in the passage of the Three-Year Law in the fall of 1914 combined a willingness to increase the size of the mobilized front line army with a commitment to maintaining quality. Adolphe Messimy, the war minister, also improved Joffre’s ability to coordinate policy by abolishing the CSG and placing Joffre at the head of both the general staff and the army’s professional organization.
Joffre’s chief accomplishment, however, was Plan XVIII. Contrary to later belief, the plan’s main goal was not a suicidal attack into German Lorraine but rather a further refinement of France’s mobilization and concentration plans. Its fruit was a large army placed on the border before the tenth day of mobilization, an amazing feat; the central position of the concentration points, in western Lorraine, combined with the multiplicity of French rail lines, meant that the army could be rapidly redeployed further north, to guard against a thrust through Belgium, or east, to attack into Alsace. If the recommendations for the commander put something of a stress on an offensive into Lorraine, it was because that option was seen as the most practicable – placing a premium on at the very least a spoiling attack to mess up German mobilization and exploit France’s superior mobilization speed and numbers. Nevertheless, combined with the Three-Year Law, Plan XVIII was implemented with little time for the army to readjust its thinking before the outbreak of war.
If the French army’s thought processes were in flux, those of Germany were a disorganized mess, courtesy not of some disaster but of the Kaiser’s diplomatic success with the Treaty of Björkö. Schlieffen had reckoned on a two-front war, and had structured German doctrine to match: speed, firepower, and encirclement were his watchwords, and violating Belgian and Dutch neutrality the logical conclusion of his planning. Schlieffen’s successor Moltke inherited his preoccupation with a quick victory, but with Russia’s alignment towards Germany he also gained a multiplicity of other fronts with which to deal. Moltke was also less single-minded than was Schlieffen; he saw the benefits of other options, from tactics (where he recognized the benefits of breakthrough over encirclement, for instance) to strategy (where he believed that Belgium and the Netherlands were more valuable as neutral parties than enemies, especially since a flank march through the Low Countries would be logistically near-impossible to sustain).
The result was confusion on most points, which Moltke failed to resolve; having elected to avoid extremism on all points of doctrine and war planning, what was left was no unifying tendency at all. But at the same time, Moltke did play a key role in preparing the imperial army for war. He insulated the army from political interference, for one, removing the problems that bedeviled France. After 1907, he prevented the Kaiser from participating in the war games to boost his own vanity. And in the Reichstag, Moltke and the war ministers, Karl von Einem, Josias von Heeringen, and Hermann von Eichhorn, regularized funding increases by focusing on technological and equipment investment rather than increases in army size, resulting in a perpetually well-funded, professional, high-quality army which, unfortunately, was far from matching France’s in terms of numbers. But even this was confusion: if Moltke still counted on a quick win over France (which he did, even if he pessimistically claimed that it was increasingly unlikely), it made no sense to focus on a smaller, long-service professional force to serve as a cadre around which to assemble a larger mobilized army.
Germany’s actual war planning similarly attempted to have it both ways. Moltke recognized the importance of Alsace-Lorraine, and deployed most of Germany’s mobilized army there – but he also was under significant pressure to aid Russia against its many Eurasian foes, and so made provision to deploy several army corps further east. Effectively, Moltke’s plan now rested on a defensive-offensive campaign in Alsace-Lorraine, but his expectations from it – vaguely assuming that the Germans could exploit a victory across the Vosges towards Paris, as they had in 1870 – were almost as unrealistic as Schlieffen’s march across the Low Countries.
Joffre’s armies were mostly concentrated in Lorraine by the eighth day of mobilization, April 12. The operational problem he had to solve was not easy, for it was by no means obvious where the French should attack. For one thing, the German cavalry – as part of Schlieffen’s prewar insistence on the superiority of speed and firepower – was superior to the French; Georg von der Marwitz’s troopers successfully blinded the French attempts at reconnaissance into Lorraine, so Joffre was unsure as to where the German points of concentration were. He had to rely on reasoning based on geography and other obstacles, and these were formidable: the rough terrain of Alsace lay directly to the east, while the Metz-Diedenhofen area was covered by a massive modern system of fortifications, the Moselstellung. Reasoning that the Moselstellung was likely to cover the slower German mobilization, Joffre decided that the main mass of German troops lay behind it, and masked the fortifications with one of his five armies while deploying three to attack between Metz and the Rhine. As it happened, though, the Moselstellung had been developed under Schlieffen’s tenure, to guard the pivot of his great wheel into Belgium; on April 13, the only troops there were a single army corps, reinforced by some Landwehr. With an entire army hanging uselessly in the wind, Joffre was sending two-thirds of his field army into the teeth of the Germans’ real concentration.
What resulted, between April 13 and April 17, was an engagement that is sometimes called either the Battle of Duß (after the name of the town close to the center of most of the fighting) or the Battle of Lorraine (by everybody but the Germans). Joffre’s armies, echeloned to the right, slammed into the advance guards of three German armies, dug in to protect the assembling rear echelons. Unable to gain a good picture of the battlefield – with cavalry forced back and air reconnaissance useless due to persistent mist – the French plunged straight into the teeth of coordinated German machine gun and heavy artillery fire. It was the artillery that really ripped apart the French. Germany had invested heavily in large-caliber, long-range, plunging-fire guns before the war, while the French had focused on their 75s, smaller direct-support guns. On the defensive, the prepositioned German artillery could force the 75s out of range and then turn on the unsupported French infantry. The result was carnage. When the German Second Army appeared on the French eastern flank, Joffre decided the battle was unsalvageable, and successfully broke contact over the night of 17-18 April.
This was, essentially, all according to plan as far as the Germans were concerned. Moltke, at the supreme army command (die oberste Heeresleitung, or OHL) in Koblenz, ordered a pursuit, to take advantage of the weakened state of the French armies. This was harder than it sounded. Thanks to having not engaged his largest single army – Charles Lanrezac’s Third – by leaving it in front of Metz, Joffre was covering his retreat with a sizable and well-supplied force. While Lanrezac’s troops prepared their defenses on the favorable terrain of the Grand Couronné de Nancy, backed by the guns of the fortresses at Toul and Épinal, the rest of the French armies would retreat behind the fortresses to reorganize and reinforce (and to purge many of the less desirable officers). A further problem was that Moltke in Koblenz – forced to deal with the imperial court (as the Kaiser was, after all, der oberste Kriegsherr, the Supreme Warlord) and with operations ranging as far away as China – was unable to maintain tight control over his army commanders in Lorraine. And due to the doctrinal confusion that Moltke himself had perpetuated, the army commanders didn’t even mutually agree on the correct course of action to take.
Beginning on 21 April, the German armies of Alexander von Kluck, Karl von Einem, and Rupprecht, crown prince of Bavaria, staged a fighting crossing of the Meurthe and assaulted Lanrezac’s lines. Due to the geographical nature of the land, most of the German troops were canalized into attacking the Trouée de Charmes, from where they were vulnerable to attack from three sides. And the 75s, which had bedeviled the French advance a week prior, now did sterling service in defending the Third Army’s front. On the offensive, they lacked the range to deal with the German heavy howitzers. But with the German advance outdistancing their artillery support, the 75s could fight on their own: and they were the perfect weapon for close infantry support, able to overwhelm German formations with a vast weight of metal. In ground that wasn’t so broken or wooded as German Lorraine, the 75s could employ ricochet fire, the so-called rafale, that enabled a single battery to lock down twelve hectares in a minute.
These advantages enabled Lanrezac’s troops to hold on despite growing weight of numbers on the German side. But by April 25, the French grip on the Grand Couronné was tenuous; if Nancy fell into German hands, the Trouée de Charmes would be left wide open. Alarmed by Lanrezac’s warnings that he would have to withdraw, Joffre ordered the minuscule Fifth Army, designed originally to mask Alsace, to attack the Germans’ southern flank. Michel-Joseph Maunoury, who had been summoned from retirement to command the army a few days earlier, was able to bring just two corps to bear against the Germans at Baccarat. Two corps, however, was enough. Kluck, worried for his southern flank, had already begun to draw it in, and with actual pressure on it he elected to pull back. Within two days, Rupprecht too had been forced to call off his attacks, and the Germans pulled back behind the Meurthe.
Already, the Germans had begun creating prepared positions in Alsace and Lorraine; with their few miles of hard-won French territory now behind them, they began building fresh entrenchments to free up manpower. Moltke, although now suffering from heart problems, was determined to renew an attempt at mobile warfare. This time, the Germans would try to pass north of Verdun, along the Belgian border. With the equivalent of a heavily reinforced army, the Germans struck at the French in the northern part of the Woëvre, near the Briey ore fields. Although initially resistance was light, as Joffre had expected the Germans to try their luck further south again, a French reserve army was quickly deployed to the area and halted the attack in a series of engagements just east of Verdun during the first two weeks of May. Beginning on May 18, a solid line of entrenchments stretched from the Belgian border near Longwy to the Swiss border near Mülhausen, with little immediate prospect of breakthrough for either side.
Moltke himself did not survive the Battle of the Woëvre for very long. In late May he was ordered to “report sick” by the Kaiser’s adjutant (conveniently, he was feeling pretty sick at the time, probably from the stress of campaigning) and was replaced by the man many people felt should have succeeded Schlieffen in 1906, August von Mackensen. Mackensen was almost immediately forced to deal with French attacks on the Meurthe and the Mortagne, battles which slowly petered out into late June. It was these engagements that convinced Mackensen – and ultimately, the rest of OHL – that there was little chance of securing a quick victory in the west anytime soon. Instead, Germany’s mobilized army should be built for the long game, and deployed to exploit victories elsewhere in the world.
Around the same time Mackensen was deploying those arguments to convince the General Staff and the Kaiser, those allies – namely, Russia, were beginning to engage their own enemies. Based on a totally inadequate rail network, the Russian military had attempted to mobilize well over two million men and disperse them on fronts from Manchuria clear to the Caucasus. In many of those places, the Russians’ enemies were able to move faster. For instance, in Korea the Russians were caught completely flat footed by the Japanese, who, blatantly disrespecting the supposedly sacrosanct rights of neutral nations, demanded to cross Korean territory and use the country as a base from which to fight the Russians. The Gwangmu Emperor’s protests were brushed aside, as was the Korean military, in a lightning campaign from April 16 to May 2 conducted by Field Marshal Oku Yasukata, one of the few IJA senior officers to come out of the Manchurian war with a good reputation. (Oku’s path was made all the smoother by Japanese advance work in Korea, which suborned a sizable portion of the officer corps and civilian administrators, many who had Japanese loyalties from Japan’s period of more official influence before 1905.) Russia’s Manchurian armies, under the overall command of Nikolai Ruzsky, were unable to react quickly enough, and at any rate hadn’t fully assembled yet; the Japanese invasion caught them with their collective pants down, and Oku’s troops were able to successfully secure bridgeheads across the Yalu without major fighting.
The problems of Russia’s slow mobilization were exacerbated by – surprise surprise – doctrinal confusion. Unlike France and Germany, Russia’s armies had recent combat experience, in Manchuria, and the Russians had notably won that war. The problem was assimilating the lessons learned from that war, and making good the (considerable) losses incurred in its fighting. Several years of bureaucratic confusion had finally resulted, in 1912, in the appointment of Vladimir Sukhomlinov to head both the general staff and the war ministry, lending a certain direction to Russian policy. Yet Sukhomlinov, a man genuinely interested in reform, rearmament, and war readiness – albeit on his own terms – was unable to fully resolve all of the conflicts in the army, and even if he had, his ‘Great Program’ would have been far from completion in 1915.
Ultimately, what resulted was a disconnect between military and diplomatic policy on the level of strategy. Sukhomlinov and his chief of staff, Miknevich, both recognized the military value of standing on the defensive. It had good standing in the Russian historical tradition, drawing from examples like the victory against Napoleon in 1812 and Kuropatkin’s defensive-offensive campaign in the Manchurian war. Defensive operations made good sense based on Russia’s slow mobilization as well. But politically, an early defense was suicidal: Russia’s credit in Asia depended largely on an assertive posture, and that meant the strategic offensive.
The navy was, if anything, worse off. Port Arthur and Tsushima had seen the virtual annihilation of Russia’s Baltic and Pacific fleets, making a reconstruction effort both desirable (in the face of Britain’s and Germany’s Dreadnought programs, which began around the same time) and necessary. At first blush, this would have seemed easy: both the tsar and his new ally Cousin Willy were ardent navalists, and the Germans would be more than happy to have Russian naval support. But that was where the conveniences ended. Germany wanted the Russians to build in the Baltic Sea, to support the High Seas Fleet, and the Germans wanted cruisers; the tsar and his naval war staff wanted Dreadnoughts, and Russia’s strategic interests lay in the Black Sea and Far East, not the Baltic, which needed no protection now that Germany was allied to Russia. In addition, the considerable finances that the tsar had devoted to the naval budget were mostly spent on plant, as the Russian naval yards were sadly insufficient for Dreadnought construction. To complete the comedy of errors, the Russian naval minister from 1908, I. K. Grigorovich, wanted to cement the German alliance; he shifted the original plan (Dreadnought-based battle fleets in the Black and Yellow Seas) to a plan that focused on construction in the Baltic to appease the Germans. The result was, by 1915, already-scant resources thinly spread. Russia had two Dreadnoughts in the Baltic, and one in the Black Sea (plus four pre-Dreadnoughts); in the Pacific, a battle cruiser built along German lines had to suffice for a flagship for the Port Arthur squadron.
Thus Russia had little hope of stopping the Japanese from entering Korea, as the IJN ruled the Yellow Sea. It had a slightly better – but still not all that good – hope of messing with the Ottoman deployment to Armenia. Enver’s mobilization was hampered by the fact that the Ottomans had no railheads there; the nearest to the Erzurum concentration point were at Ulu Kischla (700 miles from Erzurum) and Tell Ebaid (400 miles from Erzurum and on the wrong side of the Taurus Mountains). Thus the Ottomans had to rely on seaborne transport to get their troops to Trabzon, from where they could march along the one good local road to Erzurum. Had the Russians had a more aggressive Black Sea Fleet commander, perhaps they could have seriously interfered with Enver’s concentration; as it was, Viktor Kanin, the admiral in charge, worried about being drawn into an engagement with the numerically equivalent Ottoman fleet and restricted his ships to guarding Sevastopol and Batumi.
Even without the Russians interfering, it was not until June that Enver had any sort of army concentrated in Armenia. On the urging of Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, his chief of staff, Enver had chosen to launch an offensive against the Russian railhead at Sarikamiş, not far from Kars, to be of a piece with a general Entente offensive against the Russians and Qajars in northern Iran spearheaded by Sir John French’s British Expeditionary Force. Enver’s stumbling offensive was significantly aided by the poor command structure in the Russian Caucasus. The Russian viceroy, knyaz Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, was uninterested in military affairs; his deputy, Aleksandr Myshlayevsky, was widely seen as an idiot and had in fact been ‘banished’ to the Caucasus by Sukhomlinov to keep him from interfering with the latter’s reform program. Neither was up to the challenge of commanding the regular Caucasus forces deployed for internal security (of which there was a considerable need), let alone the avalanche of Russian army forces to be deployed there a few months from the outbreak of war, and even their office only constituted a primus inter pares over the other small Caucasus commands.
Russia’s overall objective for the Caucasus front was even less clear. Although the war had started over the region, the Russians certainly had no interest in annexing Ottoman Armenia, despite Enver’s bleating to the contrary. The region was poor and in economic decline; it best served Russia as a buffer zone, not a controlled territory. Russian prewar expansion thus focused on northern Iran instead, which was seen as much more valuable. The Caucasus itself was also intrinsically valuable, due to rapidly climbing oil exploitation (Baku was in fact Russia’s busiest port in 1915, ahead of even Odessa). It was also one of Russia’s biggest internal security problems. Sukhomlinov, at the war ministry, reckoned that even of the million-man army scheduled to be deployed to the Caucasus, at least two thirds would have to be used to suppress seditious activity. The region was a hotbed of nationalistic sentiment – not just of the ‘bigger’ would-be countries like Georgia or Armenia or Azerbaijan, but practically every individual valley harbored a new language and a yen for self-determination – as well as socialism and pan-Islam. Nikolai Yudenich, the head of Myshlayevsky’s staff and probably the most competent of the Russian Caucasus command, argued that even after the Ottoman declaration of war, the Russians faced a far greater threat from Georgian valley dwellers than from Enver’s armies.
