At any rate, despite Yudenich’s insouciance, the Russians made a series of panic moves in response to the Ottoman mobilization. Vorontsov, afraid for the security of the connections to northern Iran, withdrew half of the troops around Tabriz in May before ordering them back three weeks later, with the effect that they took part in no actions until early July. This left the Russians with a total of two corps with which to fight the Ottomans, and Myshlayevsky ordered their commander, Fourth Army chief Aleksei Evert, to attack Enver’s concentrations in the last week of May (over Yudenich’s protests); Evert’s troops blundered into a Turkish firesack in the Çakir Baba Mountains and only narrowly pulled back before being encircled. Enver followed it up by successfully encircling a Russian division at Sarikamiş, inducing a fresh panic at Myshlayevsky’s headquarters at Yerevan. By July 1, although the Russians had now got two incomplete armies massing between Sarikamiş and Kars, Myshlayevsky was preparing to withdraw the Russian armies to the rail junction at Aleksandropol, and perhaps even out of the Lesser Caucasus Mountains.
Even more precipitate than the retreat in the Caucasus was the Russian pull-out from northern Iran. Russia’s only railroad leading into Qajar territory went through Yerevan and Tabriz. Part and parcel of the Ottoman offensive towards Sarikamiş was an advance partway down the Aras River, which threatened the Tabriz line, playing a role in the Amazing Stampeding Russian Army show Myshlayevsky was staging; his fear that the troops around Tehran would be cut off led him to order even further withdrawals. The net result was that the Constitutionalists, having compromised with the British in exchange for support, overran Luristan and much of central Iran south of the great salt desert before overextension and Myshlayevsky changing his mind brought the Entente advance to a halt. Further east, the Russians
had taken the offensive, under the general direction of the governor of Turkestan, Aleksandr Samsonov, attempting to overrun Afghanistan as the gateway to India. Habibullah, the emir, had expected to be able to negotiate some kind of neutralizing arrangement with the Russians despite having declared war, as part of his policy to try to hold the balance between the two powers; Samsonov’s deployments forced his hand, and the BEF, waiting on the southern frontier, was called in. At Kholm on June 24, the Russians got their first taste of British marksmanship by running into Sir Douglas Haig’s I Corps and were forced to fall back in disarray; Haig immediately pressed French for the authorization to follow up the victory with an attack up the railroad to Bukhara.
It was in China that the Russians received the greatest humiliation of all, though. The rapid Japanese advance in May and June 1915 took almost everybody by surprise. Ruzsky had failed to halt the Japanese at the Yalu, so in the second week of May he organized a counteroffensive motivated not by his military instincts but by his desire to save his job. The Russians attacked the Japanese at the border port of Andong and soon saw for themselves just how much the Japanese had taken the lessons of the Manchurian war to heart. Oku still relied on the value of advanced infantry assault tactics, but unlike in 1905 the Japanese knew the power of the defensive. After three days of hard fighting the Russians were sent reeling back towards Mukden and the Japanese renewed their advance afresh, overrunning several isolated Russian units in the process. Another attempt to stand and fight, at Benxi at the end of the month, went about as well for the Russians, and by the end of June Oku’s troops were besieging Mukden and Port Arthur while Ruzsky’s battered armies fell back further north along the Trans-Siberian Railway to recuperate.
Ruzsky and his defenders quickly leveled complaints at the Germans for not supporting them. Indeed, Germany had an Asiatic squadron stronger than the Russian one, although still far from being able to match Japan. United, Graf Spee’s East Asiatic Squadron and the Russians at Port Arthur might, just might have been able to interfere with the Japanese troop transports to Korea. Spee himself, however, discounted this possibility. Spee preferred the precepts of cruiser warfare, as propounded by Curt von Maltzahn, and his resources were well suited to the task. He had over five million marks at his disposal to buy coal and supplies while at sea, and through Germany’s global wireless network he could coordinate with Berlin. For Maltzahn and Spee, cruiser warfare – attacking British commerce – was not an end in itself; both recognized that the British volume of trade in the Pacific was too low to effectively attack. Instead, Spee’s cruisers would be a means to an end: drawing the British fleet, by driblets, out of home waters so the High Seas Fleet could steam out and crush the remainder.
The United Kingdom was uniquely poorly suited to the task of fighting a global naval war, despite its preponderance in numbers. Rather like Russia, in absolute terms it had the combat resources to overwhelm any single enemy, but in logistical terms, the Admiralty could not hope to coordinate such a fleet. Admiral Sir John Fisher, the apostle of the Dreadnought and the most polarizing single figure in British naval policy before the war, may very well have been, as his defenders claim, a force for modernization and innovation in the Royal Navy. But he was also a man who nonsensically forbade the institution of naval war planning, real naval gunnery exercises, several individual technical improvements to naval gun platforms, and a real naval staff. Britain was thus exceptionally vulnerable to the exact kind of plan Spee proposed. In theory, his seven cruisers could be swamped by a convergence of the Australian and New Zealand fleets, the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the British Far Eastern flotilla. But in practice, those groups could only operate well together if they were fighting alongside each other. The Japanese were preoccupied with security for their transports in Korea and south China, while the British were loathe to leave the Indian Ocean uncovered, and confused by the Admiralty’s attempts to manage from across the globe.
It was not until July that the British finally figured out Spee’s course: towards South America, potentially to break out towards the Atlantic. Australia’s new battlecruiser, aptly named HMAS
Australia, attacked the German wireless stations in their Pacific colonies to cut Spee off from Berlin, but this was arguably a blessing: he was no longer forced to deal with ineffective attempts to command from afar, unlike the British, and moreover, with no one to talk to, Spee’s squadron maintained radio silence, thus blinding the British to his movements. In August, alerted by American newspapers of
Australia’s presence at Samoa, Spee steamed for Apia to try to overwhelm and sink her, lucked out, and managed to catch her unawares, destroying
Australia after a several-hour fight. The Apia battle panicked the Admiralty, but Spee adroitly confused the British and Japanese into thinking he was headed for the Marianas while in fact doubling back for French Polynesia and the Chilean coast. By October, the British finally figured out what was up, and dispatched the Western Atlantic Squadron to sink Spee’s cruisers – but the British commander, Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, made a series of tactical errors that permitted Spee to wipe out the majority of the British squadron off Valparaiso, forcing the remaining vessel, a modern armored cruiser the equal of any single one of Spee’s ships, to flee for the Atlantic.
The fact that Spee was never joined by the Russians at Port Arthur – with whom he could have annihilated virtually any opponent, and even remained in the Pacific for some time – remains a testament to the looseness of the ties of the Three Emperors’ League before the war. But the use that the Germans made of Spee’s cruise was a combination of sound strategy and sheer dumb luck. Churchill and Fisher in London, although their personalities clashed on most issues, were unified in the necessity to dispatch ships to crush Spee, who was then cruising for the Río de la Plata to disrupt trade there. The means by which they did so remain controversial to this day, especially since by doing so the British played right into Spee’s hands: three battle cruisers and several older armored cruisers sailed south under the command of Admiral Sir F. C. D. Sturdee. This weakened the precious Grand Fleet, and gave the High Seas Fleet a decent shot at numerical parity if it were to attack.
Britain’s Grand Fleet, commanded since October 1914 by Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, commanded the North Sea at the outbreak of war. Britain’s naval strategy had gone through twists and turns for several years, but was eventually fixed on a premise with which few – excepting out-of-touch admirals like Sir Arthur Wilson, or enthusiastic daredevils (read: lunatics) like Churchill – disagreed: distant blockade. Despite all of the ink spilled and arguments had in previous years over the other options available to Britain’s fleet – an amphibious landing in the Baltic (rejected by the army in 1909) and a close blockade of the German coast, aided by an attack on Helgoland (rejected by the navy in 1911) – distant blockade, with the Grand Fleet sitting at anchor at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, played to Britain’s strengths. It forced the Germans to attack with numerical inferiority and ensured eventual victory through economic starvation. And all the while, even by not moving, the British fleet ensured command of the sea by virtue of its maritime preponderance. Jellicoe’s temperament was perfect for this strategy: bookish, intellectual, and analytical, he was far from the risk-taking Nelsonic ideal that Fisher and Churchill had in mind for a battle admiral.
Germany, on the other hand, was conferred with several disadvantages. Its High Seas Fleet was numerically inferior, and the pace of naval construction did not seem likely to change that anytime soon. Germany was also stuck, with only two exits from the North Sea, one of which was highly impractical and the other of which was the Grand Fleet’s very lair. The High Seas Fleet, as the naval strategists Friedrich von Baudissin and Wolfgang Wegener recognized, was the prisoner of Britain’s geography. And the defensive advantages that the High Seas Fleet enjoyed – difficult tides in the Jade and Ems estuaries where it moored, Helgoland as an advanced outpost against the British, and a numerical superiority in destroyers well-suited to coastal warfare – were just the ones that warned the British off from an aggressive naval campaign, and which furthermore made taking the offensive logistically difficult. To cap it all off, the Kaiser himself made clear that high casualties for his prized fleet would be unacceptable, and tried to place limits on the authority of his naval commanders to take risks. How he expected to obtain reward without risk remained unclear.
At the outbreak of war, therefore, the advocates of the offensive, like Baudissin and Friedrich von Ingenohl, the commander of the High Seas Fleet, were silenced by the Kaiser and the chief of the naval planning staff, Hugo von Pohl, who argued that risking the fleet in a useless and risky action was pointless, with the army attaining such dramatic victories in Lorraine. A British destroyer and cruiser raid on the Helgoland Bight in May, which severely damaged one German cruiser and sank two light cruisers, failed to convince the Kaiser of the merits of committing the fleet to battle. What it did convince him, and Pohl, of, was the need to find a proper use for Germany’s U-boats. Britain had led the development of the submarine early on, and still had the largest number of underwater vessels, but the Germans’ were more advanced and were being built at a faster rate (despite Fisher’s strident advocacy of the submarine, which he considered to be more valuable than battleships). The German naval staff had expected their U-boats to play a critical role in the defense of the Helgoland Bight, but they were nowhere to be found during the May raid. Ingenohl successfully argued that they needed to be dispersed and sent out to the North Sea to prey on the British blockading vessels and the Grand Fleet. Combined with the use of merchantmen converted to use as minelayers, the U-boats were expected to be the attritional force that they had failed to be in the Helgoland Bight.
The German strategy succeeded beyond Ingenohl’s wildest dreams. For three months, from June through August 1915, the U-boat/minelayer strategy gave the Germans control of the North Sea. Although early on, the Germans still had to try to work out the kinks in their vessels – several mechanical defects were exposed during the first weeks of June – by the end of August, U-boats had sunk some five cruisers and convinced Jellicoe to temporarily move the Grand Fleet to Ireland, whereupon it ran into mine trouble, leaving three vessels, including the brand-new superdreadnought HMS
Queen Elizabeth, at the bottom of the sea. Jellicoe quickly took steps to limit the damage, and at any rate the Germans were running low on their stocks of torpedoes, but the attritional damage was done, and the gap between the Grand Fleet and High Seas Fleet continued to close.
Ingenohl continued to argue that the Germans needed to take the offensive by the very nature of the war, but failed to gain a receptive audience until word arrived in Berlin of the dispatch of Sturdee’s squadron to the South Atlantic in October. Persuaded that this would give the Germans something close enough to parity to potentially be decisive, the Kaiser green-lit a raid on the English coast, to be conducted by Franz von Hipper’s battlecruiser squadron; the British failed to respond in time, and Hipper got away neatly after blowing up several portside facilities near Yarmouth. Buoyed by the success of the Yarmouth raid, the Kaiser gave the go-ahead to sally with the entire High Seas Fleet two nights later, when the tides were right, but limited Ingenohl by prohibiting him from engaging the entire Grand Fleet.
Fisher’s failure to implement a proper naval staff once again impeded the Royal Navy in mounting an effective response. British decryption, run by the office at ‘Room 40’, was top-notch, and the Germans’ predilection for transmitting wireless messages even between neighboring ships meant that they had ample sample material with which to work. Consequently, the Admiralty knew that at least part of the High Seas Fleet had set sail – or, at least, some of the admirals did, but the word failed to get out properly. Confusion limited the reaction force to a single battle squadron, Admiral Sir George Warrender’s Second, and two cruiser squadrons, one of which was Admiral Sir David Beatty’s depleted battlecruiser squadron. Yet luck seemingly smiled on the British. As the High Seas Fleet approached Lowestoft in the dark in the early morning of October 17, Ingenohl’s spotters found Warrender’s destroyers and assumed they belonged to the whole Grand Fleet. Ingenohl, constrained by his orders, gave the word for the High Seas Fleet to turn for the German coast, forfeiting the very chance he had hoped for.
Hipper’s battlecruisers had been farther out, and had attacked traffic on the Wash and at Kingston-upon-Hull. By first light, they had turned around and were near a gap in the minefields at the Outer Dowsing when Beatty, poorly informed by the destroyer escorts, barreled into them. After initial contact, Hipper, sighting Warrender’s Dreadnoughts, broke off, but Beatty’s blood was up and he ordered a pursuit. The British reliance on flag signaling and the lack of signals to cover Beatty’s specific orders meant that HMS
Tiger, one of his battlecruisers, headed the wrong way in the early morning fog, leaving the British with two cruisers to Hipper’s four. The result was a vicious savaging: Beatty’s flagship, HMS
Lion, was circled by three German cruisers, which poured metal into her until she went down, with Beatty himself among the casualties. HMS
Princess Royal, Beatty’s other vessel, managed to effect her escape and rejoin
Tiger under the overall command of Admiral Archibald Moore.
At that point, though, Moore’s battlecruisers were joined by Warrender’s Dreadnoughts, arriving late on the scene. Vastly outgunned, Hipper attempted to pull away, with all of his battlecruisers sustaining heavy damage. It appeared as though the Germans were boxed in, but a false submarine sighting convinced Warrender to turn away, and when he finally managed to get his ships back on track the limitations of the signal book intervened again, confusing most of his vessels into attacking an isolated German cruiser attached to Hipper’s squadron. With the SMS
Magdeburg acting as sacrificial lamb, Hipper managed to bring the rest of his battered squadron out of range and successfully made for the safety of the German coast.
Fisher’s obstinacy inflicted perhaps the unkindest cut of all after the Battle of the Outer Dowsing: without a naval staff, the British learned precisely the wrong lessons from the battle. Moore and Warrender were blamed for not having supported Beatty closely enough; failure to concentrate was held up as the main error. The British never knew that the entire High Seas Fleet had been at sea, and thus never realized the near disaster that had overtaken Warrender’s squadron. Furthermore, technical defects in Fisher’s battlecruiser designs, which made them extremely vulnerable to German gunnery, were not noticed. Instead, Moore focused on the relatively small caliber of many of the German guns, and noted that the British vessels could just shrug them off:
Lion had died not from inferior armament but from overwhelming firepower. To an extent this was true (at least of Hipper’s battlecruisers) but it obscured the improvements the British themselves needed to make. Besides, British shells had shown their own inadequacy against the heavier German armor. Only after sustained fire from an entire Dreadnought squadron and several battlecruisers did even the aging
Magdeburg give up the ghost. Many of these judgments were falsely confirmed after Sturdee’s squadron overwhelmed Spee near the mouth of the Río de la Plata on November 3, sustaining significant damage (and losing one cruiser) in the process; concentration and numbers, it seemed, were key. Nothing was done about the fleet-construction defects or the shell problems, nor about the signal book that impeded communication – much less about the need for a planning staff to coordinate it all.
Postwar British observers were struck by the way the Germans responded to the fight in the Outer Dowsing. During the winter of 1914-5 the High Seas Fleet stayed in drydock, with the Germans focusing on improvements to armor and on the introduction of heavier guns. Hipper also highlighted the weakness of German fire-control arrangements, noting that it took entirely too long for even the badly outnumbered
Lion to be destroyed. And all of the improvements were systematic, nearly fleet-wide, unlike in Britain, where even when modifications were made (and they were mostly not), they were only applied to individual vessels. Even with the remaining doctrinal disagreements between Pohl and Ingenohl – disagreements which were rapidly decreasing as the war went on – the German naval staff organization proved its worth at coordinating the war effort on the high seas…at least, the
German war effort.
The Kaiser was increasingly turning his attention to the high seas because it was clear that no quick decision would eventuate on land. Mackensen’s conscious determination to focus on the rest of the world – with all of the long-term planning that entailed – meant that Western Front offensive operations were left for later, handing Joffre the initiative once again for the remainder of 1915. Aside from the constant low-level pressure necessary to keep the Germans honest and a few more major actions (‘more major’ having the meaning of ‘entailing casualties in excess of 25,000’
towards fall near Belfort, though, Joffre conserved his manpower, wary of the backlash that came after the hemorrhage of late spring and anxious to gain the support of the steadily-mobilizing British Army.
On Russia’s periphery, operations remained limited by logistics. The initial failures on the Caucasus front were more the result of panic than any real threat, but it was too late to do much of anything about them now. The tsar instead contented himself by getting rid of Myshlayevsky and organizing a Caucasus Front independent of the viceroy, with Pavel von Plehve in command and Yudenich heading up the staff. With rapidly growing manpower after August, the Caucasus Front managed to easily parry Enver’s stumbling thrusts at Kars. A counteroffensive was ruled out, however, by the need to divert resources to Iran, where several British corps, rapidly becoming available due to a frenzy of recruitment at home, had joined the Constitutionalists and an Ottoman army under Ahmed Izzet Paşa in launching a general offensive around the shores of Lake Urmia to try to capture Tabriz. The Russians, aided by the worsening weather, managed to successfully grind out the defense and force the Entente powers to halt in early November. Still, Russia’s position in northern Iran was increasingly tenuous, and Stavka, the Russian central command authority (headed up by
velikiy knyaz Nikolai Nikolaievich), prioritized Azerbaijan ahead of everything other than Manchuria for the coming year.
Haig’s planned offensive towards Bukhara had petered out for reasons mostly beyond his control: he couldn’t really even launch it. Habibullah, anxious to retain his leverage over the British, limited the BEF’s size to its original two corps, claiming (spuriously) that Afghanistan lacked the resources to support more than that and that he could not be held responsible for the behavior of his tribesmen were the British presence to become more prevalent. Haig was therefore forced to seethe with his troops in defensive positions while the Russians went on their merry way, offloading troops in Bukhara, and finally launching their own offensive in October. It too stalled, albeit at a high cost in casualties for both sides that further irritated relations between Habibullah and the British.
Finally, fighting obviously intensified in China. The outbreak of war had seen Falkenhayn’s Chinese expeditionary force working up in Shandong, leaving it amply prepared for the Anglo-Japanese invasion that came out of Weihaiwei, upon which the Japanese were driven back with heavy casualties, but those exertions left the Beiyang Army unsupported, and it was on it that the hammerblow fell. Jiang, launching the opening stages of a Napoleonic plan to destroy the Qing and seize control of the Republican government, had planned a vast offensive utilizing large numbers of conscripts organized around Japanese cadres. His primary target was, once again, Zhengzhou, one of the largest and most important Qing bases and the center of several critical rail junctions. But Jiang’s plan was Marlboroughnic in conception: he expected to take Zhengzhou, but even if he failed, the effort would draw the attenuated Qing armies thither, and then he could follow it up by exploiting weakness elsewhere – Chengdu, to cover his western flank, and Jiangsu, to cover Nanjing and potentially link up with the Shandong invasion force. His timing was excellent – striking before the Russians managed to redeploy sufficient forces to hold down Manchuria and reinforce the Qing – and his attacks succeeded perfectly, with both Zhengzhou and Luoyang falling into Republican hands, Qing forces driven back on the Jiangsu coastline, and the Beiyang armies in Chengdu trapped in an urban battle of attrition that they lacked the manpower to win.
The startling success of Jiang’s Spring Offensive drove the Qing back on the Huanghe and the Qinling Mountains, and kick-started a dangerous coup against Yuan in Beijing (which he successfully put down with the aid of newly arrived German troops). It also spawned opponents, both foreign and domestic. Mackensen, with the news of the fall of Zhengzhou coming not long after the failure at the Grand Couronné, decided that China should be moved up to a top priority, and many of the reservists being mobilized were sent east along the Trans-Siberian Railway to augment Falkenhayn’s army. It also spawned enemies within the Republic, for Sun Yat-sen belatedly realized Jiang’s threat to his rule. Worried about a military coup, he made moves to solidify his political support. On one level, he made the flashy move of marrying into the famous Song family, which made him the brother-in-law of Kong Xiangxi, the richest man in China and a key backer for the war effort. (His wife, Song Qingling, also had impeccable credentials with the Left, securing his ideological position as well.) On another, Sun announced the dissolution of his tottering national-unity government in Nanjing in August, forming a new political party, the
Guomindang, or Nationalist Party, incorporating elements of the old
Tongmenghui and backed with the formidable support of the popular Song Jiaoren, to better organize opposition to Jiang. In the midst of these political squabbles which began to consume Jiang’s attention after the summer of 1915, it was inevitable that military efficiency would suffer, and with the influx of fresh Russo-German troops the Republican armies were driven back from the Qinling Mountains, reopening the supply lines to the troops holding out in Chengdu.
Oku made good on his excellent position at the opening of summer 1915 and successfully captured Mukden, along with nearly a hundred thousand Russian soldiers and Ruzsky himself, on July 5. Port Arthur continued to hold out in his rear, however, and the Russians were massing ever more troops in the Hinggan ranges to the north. After halfheartedly attempting a rush down the railroad towards Kuancheng, where the remnants of the Manchurian Front were coalescing under the command of a new leader, Aleksei Brusilov, Oku settled down to establish strong defensive positions, launch irritating cavalry raids, and solidify control of Liaoning. Brusilov, anxious to reestablish control over the critical rail link, began probing attacks in August, but didn’t really commit large numbers of troops to the Mukden operation until September, trying to turn the worsening weather into an advantage. Aided by his attached Cossacks, which seriously threatened Oku’s lines of communication, Brusilov’s troops stepped off on September 20 and soon found themselves in a race to try to prevent Oku’s outnumbered defenders from withdrawing out of the noose Brusilov had so painstakingly constructed. Oku had been preparing to make a fight of things, but received orders from Hasegawa Yoshimichi, the chief of the imperial general staff, to preserve his army, and had already begun making preparations to fight his way out. Ultimately, the Japanese managed to pull back to strong defensive positions forty miles from the Yalu, escaping Brusilov’s planned encirclement, but the breathtaking gains of the spring and summer had been erased, and the Japanese were in for a longer, grinding campaign of attrition.
There was but one theater left: Germany’s African colonies. The defense of these was entrusted to the colonial office, not to the general staff, and so policy revolved around maintaining the colony as a European colony – and ideally a German one, to be used in the peace negotiations – by retaining possession for the entire war. This clashed rather dramatically with the general staff’s inclination to seek battle and annihilate the enemy’s forces. Thus it was that German Togoland was surrendered within a week of the outbreak of war to the forces of the British Gold Coast Regiment. The Cape colony took considerably longer to do much of anything. To Asquith’s terror, Boer representatives threatened civil war in the Cape if they were forced to fight the Germans, and a few isolated units actually made good on that threat, which tied down British forces there for some months. Eventually, Asquith shocked everybody by proposing an old pet project of Campbell-Bannerman’s, a South African dominion to be effectively dominated by an Anglo-Boer partnership. The Tories – who had rather abruptly ceased their harping over Ireland after the outbreak of war – were pushed into hysterical histrionics about the betrayal of British sons who died in the Boer War and so on and so forth, further weakening the Asquith government (more on that later), but ultimately failing to hold Asquith’s South Africa bill up. By the time the whole situation could be resolved it was already November, far too late to think about attacking German South-West Africa. Further north, Kamerun and East Africa, Germany’s other colonies, had been hardly touched (save for a few outposts seized by the French on the Kamerun border areas) by virtue of the British and French having concentrated far more on other theaters with their disposable manpower. It took time to bring Indian, West African, and now South African forces to bear, and by the winter that had not fully been done.
