Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II

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PASSCHENDAELE AND AFTER (#ulink_6d931e69-d36b-5cdf-b656-f3c6e1b73cc7)

The past is a foreign country:

they do things differently there.

L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between

Douglas Haig was not a man to be deterred by failure, or even to learn from it. One year later the Somme battle was staged all over again in the sloppy clay of the north. Men drowned in a quagmire made worse by bombardment. Even artillery pieces were swallowed up into the morass. It was the ultimate nightmare of the war, and many soldiers who were there – such as my father – would not speak of it. Like the Somme fighting of the previous year, it lasted from July until November and secured only a tiny strip of land.

Of this gloomy drama the military historian Liddell Hart said: ‘So fruitless in its results, so depressing in its direction was this 1917 offensive, that “Passchendaele” has come to be … a synonym for military failure – a name black-bordered in the records of the British Army.’

In the last year of the war the Germans, having knocked Russia out of the war, could turn to the Western Front and stage a ‘Somme battle’ of their own design. It was a massive attack, and some of the ideas employed in it were still in evidence in the blitzkrieg of the Second World War.

General Ludendorff – probably the most expert general on either side in the war – in Notes on Offensive Battles, published in 1918, drew attention to broad differences in the German approach. The British had based their attacks upon artillery schedules, he said. The ‘creeping barrage’ – which fell behind the advancing infantry as well as ahead of it – drove the British infantry forward. Men who lingered, and men immobilized by injuries, came under intense shellfire from their own guns. In such a scheme, said Ludendorff, commanders ceased to have proper control of their men. He condemned such tactics as wasteful and ineffective. Infantry should be used more flexibly, always seeking to get round behind the enemy on the flanks, and thus roll up the enemy and widen the attack.

The Germans did not disdain surprise. It was essential to these new methods. Specially selected men – storm-troops – would lead the assault. They’d use flamethrowers, have large canvas bags crammed full of hand-grenades, and be equipped with a revolutionary development of the machine-gun – the MP 18 machine-pistol. This was a small lightweight automatic, fitted with the barrel and 32-round magazine of the Luger pistol. It sprayed fire at about 400 rounds per minute and by the end of the war the Germans had put into use 35,000 of them.

The opening of the attack was prepared in great secrecy. The storm-troops moved to jumping-off positions under cover of darkness. Artillery was not brought up to the place of attack until five days before it began; heavy mortars came two days before the attack. Such secrecy should have ensured surprise, but General Haig’s intelligence section described with considerable accuracy the attack that was about to come. Haig made no changes whatever to his dispositions and even confirmed high-level changes of command that came into effect just hours before the attack started.

He decreed that the British tanks were spread out to be employed as static strong-points, in other words not tanks at all.

The Kaiser’s Battle, as the Germans named it, started on 21 March 1918 and was aided by fog and by Haig’s dispositions in depth. With much of his force too far forward, the unexpected penetration of the front caused a large section of his line to give way. By the 5 April he had lost 1,000 square miles of ground and 160,000 men (killed, wounded and taken prisoner) and many thought Haig’s army was on the verge of collapse.

And then, in May, 42 German divisions struck the French armies with such force that Foch issued preliminary orders to prepare for a final stand before Paris. In London the cabinet panicked and even discussed the time it would take to pull the British army out of France. This too was a harbinger of the blitzkrieg of 1940, the evacuation from Dunkirk, and the bitterness that followed it.

But the worst did not happen and the fighting stabilized. Haig put the British forces under the French commander Foch, and the German advance slowed. This time it was the British machine-guns that did the killing. One man remembered: ‘When I think of all those brave German infantry, walking calmly and with poise, into our murderous machine-gun fire, now, and as then, we had nothing but admiration for them. Unqualified courage! Poor devils.

Ludendorff had restored mobility to the fighting, but tanks, which might have transformed the chances of success, were in short supply. On the first day he used four German A7 V tanks – clumsy 33-ton machines with 18 men inside – and five captured British Mark IVs. The British Official History says the British line was broken wherever the tanks appeared.’

Even Ludendorff could not change the fact that, with machine-guns on the battlefield, attacks were costly. The greater resources of the Allies, with America now included, paid off as the Germans became exhausted by their successes. Front-line German troops were demoralized to find so much food and equipment piled up in the Allied rear areas. The Allied generals soon recovered their valour. They were drafting plans for ever more mighty battles to be fought in 1919 and 1920, when suddenly the Germans asked for an armistice.

There were a thousand explanations for the German collapse. The men and material from the United States, the strangulating effects of the naval blockade upon Germany’s food supply, the naval mutineers roaming through the streets of Kiel, the surrender of their Turkish allies, the break-up of Austria-Hungary, and so on. Even today the real reason for the German collapse is not clear and simple. Many Germans believed that they had been tricked. As they saw it, US President Wilson proposed a peace in which Germany kept her colonies and armies intact. Once fighting ceased the Germany army disengaged and could not be sent back to start fighting again. The Allies then dictated terms and divided Germany’s colonies between them. Whatever the reasons, the war came to an end, leaving the historians to continue hostilities by other means.

Throughout the war, troops from Canada, Australia and New Zealand proved to be particularly effective fighting soldiers, and Haig used them, like storm-troops, for most of the toughest attacks. The bloody fiasco at Passchendaele proved too much for the prime ministers of New Zealand and Canada, who had watched General Haig feeding their countrymen into his meat grinder. At a meeting of the imperial war cabinet on 13 June 1918, the New Zealand prime minister, William Massey, complained that his men had been sent against barbed-wire and shot down like rabbits. The Canadian prime minister, Sir Robert Borden, became so enraged that he was said to have grabbed the British prime minister – Lloyd George – by his coat lapels and shaken him vigorously.

Government and bureaucracy conspired to conceal the incompetence of the British commanders. Even three-quarters of a century later, vital documents and statistics of the First World War are still withheld from public scrutiny, and many papers are said to have been lost in the air raids of 1940. ‘Scholars have for long been dissatisfied with the patchy nature of the First World War records in the Public Record Office, which were clearly ruthlessly “weeded” before being made available to the public,’ said the historian Michael Howard.

The official histories were apt to provide a constructive account of the war. Cyril Falls, who took the chair of Military History at Oxford University, said: ‘Our army was the best disciplined and the least effective in the war, though one can’t say so in the Official History.’

Haig knew what to say, and it was his account of the war that went into the history books. He rewrote his diary to suit his public image, and the British government instructed the official historian to follow his falsified account. Then the original records were burned, which prevented other historians from discovering the truth. So it remained until Denis Winter pieced together a different account of Haig’s flawed generalship by using the papers stored in overseas archives.

The public is not so easily fooled. They had seen so many sons go off to war armed with that sense of duty and dedication that is the currency of the young. Wives, sisters and daughters too had scoured the ever-lengthening casualty lists fluttering in the wind outside the town halls. Nearly a million British soldiers never returned home; of these over 700,000 were from Great Britain. About 2.5 million men were wounded. Even, if one includes the men serving in the lines of communication, those on home defence in Britain, and British army garrison troops in India and the Far East, it still means that of ten men joining the army, two were destined to be killed and five injured; only three would survive the war intact. Intact? These figures take no account of the psychological effects of the fighting and the long-term damage done by the various types of war gases. Pensions for the widows and the disabled were minuscule, and the cruelly contrived demands of postwar medical boards persuaded some veterans to give up their pensions rather than annoy their employers by frequent absences.

The First World War marked the death of many human values, and if Christianity was not numbered among the fatalities it certainly suffered injuries from which it has not yet recovered. Another faith shattered on the battlefield was the faith that the Empire had in the Motherland. Haig had ordered too many Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians to certain death for their countrymen ever again to trust their regiments to the direct command of Whitehall. The Australian Official History quotes one officer saying his friends were ‘murdered’ through ‘the incompetence, callousness and personal vanity of those in high authority’. Of the Somme another Australian officer is quoted as saying ‘a raving lunatic could never imagine the horror of the last thirteen days’.

Mammon too was among the wounded. In July 1917 Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer had admitted to the Americans that Britain’s financial resources were virtually at an end. The United States began lending the British $180 million per month. By war’s end Britain’s national debt had risen from £650 millions in 1914 to £7,435 millions (of which £1,365 millions was owed to the USA). This provided an unbearable postwar burden for the taxpayer, and in 1931 Britain defaulted on its debt. Congress responded with the Johnson Act of 1934: Britain’s purchases would now have to be paid for in cash.

Payments in full

The British liked to ascribe Germany’s remarkable fighting record to its robotic, merciless war machine, but it was the British soldiers who had been unceasingly ordered into futile and costly offensives. And, while 345 British soldiers faced firing squads during the war, only 48 German soldiers were executed.

Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria wrote in his diary in 21 December 1917 that while he knew of only one death sentence in his army, the British had executed at least 67 men between October 1916 and August 1917.

This disparity was partly due to the reckless way in which the British army had recruited men without consideration of their mental and physical stamina. It was also accounted for by the fact that the British army retained no less than 25 offences for which the penalty was death. Some of these, such as ‘imperilling the success of His Majesty’s forces’, gave the courts wide powers. General Haig, who confirmed every sentence, believed that the firing squads were essential to maintaining discipline, and repeatedly demanded that Australian soldiers be made to face them. But the Australian government resisted Haig’s pleas, in the confident knowledge that their infantrymen were widely acknowledged to be the best anywhere on the Western Front.

All information about military executions was concealed from the British public. The government would not even tell the House of Commons how many soldiers were being shot, because publishing such figures was ‘contrary to the public interest’. No one, not even next of kin, was permitted to know anything of the court-martial proceedings, and British soldiers had no right of appeal against a death sentence.

The army used firing squads to set an example to soldiers who needed one. Proclaimed throughout the army, executions were often staged before troops of the condemned man’s unit. It was thus made clear to his comrades that it wasn’t only murderers and rapists who were executed, it was exhausted men who closed their eyes, and men who refused to do the impossible. As the war went on, and ever younger conscripts were sent to the trenches, parents worried about how their sons would endure the ordeal. As stories of executions gained wider currency, the under-secretary for war admitted that there was great public anxiety, and questions by members of parliament, about whether wounded or ‘shell-shocked’ men were being executed, were met by outright lies. In the debate on 17 April 1918, several members, including serving officers, urged the government to change court-martial procedures so that an officer with some sort of legal training should be available to defend a soldier accused of a serious offence, and to ensure that all presidents of the court had previous experience of evaluating evidence. Even these modest reforms were denied.

In February 1919 the most senior of the official historians spent an evening with Douglas Haig, dining and studying the maps and papers. ‘Why did we win the war?’ Haig asked him.

No one knew. But after the war Haig had demanded, and got, a massive cash hand-out. He was also presented with a mansion overlooking the River Tweed, where he carefully revised his memoirs. No matter what lengths he went to in rewriting history, Haig was never forgiven for what he had done. Nor was it forgotten. There was no wild cheering in public places when war was declared on Sunday 3 September 1939. The ‘Great War’ and the dead in Flanders were still very much in the minds of the survivors from all nations.

The world after the First World War

Georges Clemenceau, the prime minister of France, said in 1917: ‘War is a series of catastrophes which result in a victory.’ For France that was true. As in the war to come, she emerged victorious only because the United States entered the war on the Allied side. Her provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were returned to her, and French troops occupied Germany’s Rhineland and Saar. But the victory was a sham. The northern region of France had been the heart of its industrial strength, and after many battles had been fought there, it was devastated. France was bankrupt and deeply in debt. Jules Cambon, a French diplomat, saw the drastic decline in fortunes and wrote: ‘France victorious must grow accustomed to being a lesser power than France vanquished.’

Germany had fought and survived the combined forces of Britain, France, the USA, Italy and Russia. The Fatherland was intact, and fighting had not brought destruction to any region of Germany, which even in defeat remained the strongest power in Europe. Germany’s population of 70 millions was growing, while France’s population of 40 millions was static. Within a decade of the peace treaty there would be twice as many Germans reaching military age each year as Frenchmen. Furthermore Germany’s potential enemies were weakened; by internal strife (Russia), by division into smaller units (Austria-Hungary); by impoverishment (Britain and France), or by concern for their own affairs (USA).

The sacrifices they had made persuaded the French people that they alone had won the war, and their government did nothing to correct this false impression. The Canadians buried at Vimy Ridge, the British sailors lost at sea, Australians and New Zealanders who had fallen at Gallipoli, the Indian Corps which had frozen at Armentières in the first winter of the war, Americans killed at Champagne and Argonne, all these were forgotten. Her allies became bitter at what they considered a lack of gratitude, and the Anglo-Saxon nations moved into isolation and away from friendship with France. The French thought the world was being too kind to the Germans, and began to regard themselves as the sole guardians of the Versailles treaty. For this reason the French army was never to be short of men or money.

Versailles – the peace treaty

The treaty the great powers signed in 1919 to end the First World War remains one of the most controversial historic documents of the twentieth century. The American President Wilson arrived in Europe with his own programme for a lasting peace. We will never know if his ideas were sound, for his Allies would have nothing to do with his ‘Fourteen Points’. Georges Clemenceau said: ‘Mr Wilson bores me with his Fourteen Points; why, God Almighty only had ten.’ Some said Wilson’s proposals were altruistic. Certainly there was nothing benevolent about the twisted political wrangling of the European politicians, but the treaty that finally emerged was not vindictive compared with Germany’s peace with France in 1871 or the terms Germany inflicted upon Lenin’s Russia in 1917.

In postwar Germany, politicians made much of the £1,000 million charged to Germany in reparations. Less was said about the £1,500 million loaned to her by Britain and the United States. The peace terms laid down that Germany could have an army no bigger than 100,000 men and must not build or buy tanks, submarines and aircraft. Few Germans recognized that this would aid their economic recovery; rather it was seen as an insulting and unreasonable order that had to be flouted and eventually rectified.

Perhaps the path to true democratic government would have proved more certain had the monarchy been maintained. Certainly a hereditary monarchy makes it more difficult for tyrants like Hitler to become the head of state.

As it was, Germany’s postwar democratic government – the Weimar Republic – was ridiculed as a puppet regime that implemented the forceful terms of the victors.

The most far-reaching effects of the peace treaty were the frontiers it drew. Austria-Hungary was split into pieces by the victors. The lines scrawled across the map cared nothing about consigning large numbers of Germans to live under foreign governments. Eventually, in Czechoslovakia and Poland, these vociferous expatriate communities were orchestrated and used by Hitler as an excuse for invasion.

Soldiers go home

At the end of the Great War the armies went home, and it was the attitudes and actions of these returning soldiers which created the world that went to war in 1939. Virtually all the men returning from the battlefields were to some extent cynical and embittered as they compared what they and their comrades had suffered with what others, less worthy, had gained. Most of the veterans’ associations – from the Croix de feu in France to Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts in Britain – were anti-Communist. Communists had conspicuously associated themselves with pacificism and anti-militarism. Returning soldiers despised the men who had stayed at home preaching against the war.

Despite its new democratic government, a defeated Germany was convulsed in a series of localized revolutions as left-wing and right-wing political groups fought for power. There were violent uprisings in many German cities and for a few days Bavaria had ‘a Soviet Republic’. Many German institutions – the army, big business and the labour movement – had survived the war intact; now each threw its weight behind the factions it favoured.

The government of this fragile republic saw its prime tasks as protecting the government from Communist takeover and keeping public order. To do this it came to terms with the highly organized veterans’ organizations: most notably the Freikorps, a huge patchwork of small armies, illicitly armed and ready to fight all-comers. Such units were used as an armed frontier guard against Polish incursions and as a secret supplement to the army permitted by the peace treaty. At first Freikorps men wore their old army uniforms. Later they were issued with a consignment of shirts originally intended for German soldiers in East Africa. Dressed in them, these men became the brown-shirted Sturm Abteilung – storm-troops – who eventually allied themselves to Hitler’s Nazi party to be its tough uniformed auxiliaries.

Few of the veterans were looking for personal material gain. Life in the front line had shown them a special sort of comradeship, a world in which men literally sacrificed themselves for their fellows. The ex-servicemen were looking for such a new idealistic world in peacetime too. In Russia Lenin had not waited for an end to hostilities before harnessing the energies of the soldiers to his Communist revolution. In Italy Benito Mussolini offered such men a uniformed Fascist state. But it was Adolf Hitler, in Germany, who most skilfully designed a political party that could manipulate the ex-servicemen. The declared aims and intentions of the National Socialist German Workers’ party swept away their cynical disillusion with politics and transformed such veterans into ardent Nazis.

Adolf Hitler, ex-soldier

Unlike their counterparts in Italy and Russia the German veterans felt that their leader – Führer – was an archetypal ex-soldier. There has been a mountain of contradictory material written about Adolf Hitler’s wartime service. In fact he was a dedicated soldier who respected his officers and showed no cynicism about the war.