TOE, German Cavalry Division, August 1914

Transcription

November 20th, 1914 Three months ago, the nations of Europe went to war confident that theirs would be the winning side and the war would be over in weeks. Now that the reality of a long war has sunk in, we see something new- division, confusion, and hatred in the command structures of the armies themselves, where once they had been basically unified. This division and confusion would lead inevitably to the needless deaths of tens of thousands of men. I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to the Great War. Last week we saw the fighting peter out on the western front as the rains and snows of winter came on in force. On the Eastern Front, the Russians had surrounded the Austrians at the fortress of Przemysl, but further north had re-grouped at Lodz to meet the advancing German tide. On yet another Russian front, in Turkey, the Russian offensive had been crushed by the Ottoman forces, and in the Middle East, the British were marching on Basra. There were some Austrians who were actually on the move, though, 500,000 of them, and we’ll see what they were up to right now. For the past week, they had been invading Serbia, facing half their number of Serbs, who offered effective resistance but were generally retreating. The Serbs had driven the Austrians out of their land in September, but this time it wasn’t going to be so easy. Serbian morale crumbled as the Austrians managed to bring their heavy artillery through the Serbian mud. Much of the Serbian forces lacked ammunition or cold weather clothing too, and deeper and deeper the Austrians penetrated their territory. Serbian Field Marshall Radomir Putnik, who had actually been caught in Budapest when the war broke out but was allowed to return to Serbia by Emperor Franz Josef, had ordered a retreat to the Kolubara River, where defensive preparations had been prepared long in advance. On November 16th, the Austro-Hungarian forces attacked, but the Serbs pushed them back over the next few days. However, from the 19th, the Austrians managed to gain a foothold, seized higher ground to the south, and now forced the Serbs to retreat. Casualties on both sides were high, but they were exacerbated by frostbite and hypothermia. At this point, both armies were woefully unequipped for the onset of winter. Further north on the Eastern and Northeastern Fronts, though, winter was already here, and men were freezing to death every night in the trenches. There was a bit of chaos in the Russian high command as General Rennenkampf and his Siberian army in the north was probing toward East Prussia and hadn’t bothered protecting their flank, and when the Germans had began a surprise offensive last week, it had collapsed. General Nikolai Ruzsky, in charge of the whole Northeastern Front, had pulled his troops back to Lodz but he didn’t seem to understand the size of the German attack, and on November 18th the Germans reached and nearly surrounded Lodz, 250,000 strong against 150,000 fortified Russian defenders, but when a Russian retreat was ordered, it was countermanded by the Grand Duke Nicholas himself, the Tsar’s uncle, commander-in-chief of all of the Russian forces. Now, German General Ludendorff had attacked in order to preempt the Russian invasion of Germany, and this pre-emption was successful, as the Russians now had to divert tens of thousands of troops from the invasion forces to save Lodz and Warsaw. They did more than that and in just a few days had almost miraculously assembled around half a million men to fight the Germans, and Ludendorff was now overstretched. This was warfare on a gigantic scale, and though the Germans hoped for a victory as great as Tannenberg, during the week of fighting that followed the German war machine ran out of steam. By the 24th an entire German army corps was even threatened with destruction, and the Germans were stopped by the Russians, the weather, and exhaustion. Ludendorff had failed to take Lodz or reach Warsaw, though a Russian invasion of Germany was now plainly not going to happen in the foreseeable future. The Russians had suffered nearly 100,000 casualties, the Germans less than half of that, but once again the Russian advantage in men had overcome the German advantage in technology. A side result of the battle of Lodz was that Ludendorff’s superior von Hindenburg was promoted to Field Marshall. This sounds great for Hindenburg, but I think we really need to look at what was going on in the German High Command now that it was obvious to all there would be no quick glorious victory. So here are the machinations in progress: On November 18th the German Chief of Staff Falkenhayn, the commander in chief of the German forces, told Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg that the war could not be won because the allies have too many resources. He presented his plan for closing down the Eastern Front so that they could win in the west against the British, who Falkenhayn believed were Germany’s archenemy, and who he believed were fighting the war only for mercantile profits. Bethmann-Hollweg was shocked- for he could conceive no end to the war that did not cripple Russia, since he believed Russia’s interests were directly the opposite of German ones. He was also really worried about Austrian Chief of Staff Conrad von Hotzendorf, who said flat out that without fresh German troops, Austria might collapse, leaving Germany to fight the whole Eastern Front alone. So he travels to see Ludendorff in the East, and Ludendorff thinks that, far from closing down the Eastern Front, it’s actually Russia who can be beaten with more troops. It’s also no secret that Ludendorff hates Falkenhayn. So Bethmann-Hollweg goes back to Berlin and starts talking up the idea of firing Falkenhayn as Chief of Staff and replacing him with Ludendorff. Now, at around this time Kaiser Wilhelm was pissed off that nobody ever consulted him about the war and even said at one point “if they are under the impression in Germany that I am leading the army, then they are very much mistaken”, but Wilhelm did have one very important power- to appoint or dismiss the Chief of Staff. But the Kaiser says no to the idea of Ludendorff as Chief of Staff because he doesn’t trust him, and even goes so far as calling him a “dubious character”. So in response, Admiral Tirpitz and former chancellor Prince Bulow start talking about maybe having the Kaiser declared insane so that Hindenburg would be the de facto administrator and Ludendorff and he could have their way and get more troops in the east. Really, this was what was going on. Five months earlier, the German High Command went to war enthusiastically, now they were all taking sides against each other trying to wrap it up. But they weren’t unique. We’ve seen British commanders who wouldn’t work with the French, French ones who wouldn’t support the Belgians and all sorts of chaos and infighting in both the Russian and Austrian commands. It would only get worse as the winter wore on. The winter was indeed wearing on in the Western Front, which at this point was pretty much totally congealed in lines of trenches stretching from Switzerland all the way up to the sea. You know, when you look at that line it’s really easy to see how the geography kind of dictated the war plans throughout the war. The general idea both sides had for any major operation was an artillery bombardment followed up by infantry assaults, and then the cavalry following that up and breaking into open country. However, most of the Western Front was totally unsuitable for such a procedure. South of Verdun, for example, the front was totally inactive for four whole years, from September 1914 to September 1918. Too easy to defend and too hard to attack. Further north, it’s no coincidence that the trench lines followed the local railways. The Germans had taken and held the Metz-Lille line while the French held the Nancy-Paris-Arras line. This line was closer to the front, and according to historian John Keegan at least, explains why the French were better able to deliver reserves in the nick of time and win battle after battle. So here we are at the end of the week. The Russians and Germans fighting a battle on a titanic scale, the Austrians pushing the Serbs back at Kolubara, and other Austrians still under siege in Przemysl. The Western Front was quiet, although quiet meant men being killed every day, as the First Battle of Ypres would not officially end for another couple of days. Imagine being in charge of one of these armies. Millions of men under your command. Sure, you went to military school years ago and maybe commanded forces in your nation’s imperial possessions, but think what it must have been like to suddenly be confronted with the reality of 20th century war. Battles that raged non-stop for weeks, torpedoes beneath the sea and machines that could sail the skies, and the horrors of advanced weaponry that could kill hundreds of thousands of the enemy as they killed hundreds of thousands of your men in mere weeks for the gain of a few dozen meters of foreign soil. This was the reality that the high commands of the warring nations now all had to face, and it was a reality that could break the spirit of any man. Some tried to find ways to end the war, some to shift the blame, and some merely sent ever more troops to their needless deaths, but all of them now counted men within their own command structures as their enemies. This was modern war. In an earlier episode / In our August 21 episode we already talked about the difficult and transition to modern warfare and what horrible consequences the soldiers had to suffer because their superiors were not prepared for this new kind of war. You can check it out right here. Don’t forget to subscribe to our channel and tell your friends all about us. See you next week.