A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (51 page)

But just then, before enough Anzac troops could be brought up to consolidate what had been gained, Mustafa Kemal arrived with a single ragged battalion at his heels. Compass in one hand and map in the other, he had been leading a forced march to the shore since getting word of the landing. As soon as he saw the enemy troops, he led his men in an attack that cleared the crest. He then ordered his men to lie down, rifles at the ready, and sent back word for the rest of the battalion to hurry forward. An epic fight for the high points called Chunuk Bair and Sari Bair was on, and what followed was a day of desperate close-quarters fighting, much of it hand to hand, with both sides constantly bringing forward more troops and launching one assault after another. Kemal, ordering his men to make yet another charge in which no one seemed likely to survive, uttered the words that would forever form the core of his legend. “I don’t order you to attack,” he said. “I order you to die. In the time which passes until we die, other troops and commanders can take our place.”

Slowly, at terrible cost, the Turks forced the Anzacs backward down the hill toward their landing place. That night, unaware that the Turks too had reached the end of their strength, the general commanding the landing force sent a message reporting failure and asking to have his men taken off. Hamilton, after much agonizing, replied that the Anzacs must stay where they were and “dig, dig, dig.”

Three days later nineteen thousand British troops attacked at Cape Helles, briefly taking the high ground overlooking the end of the peninsula. Then they were driven back, suffering three thousand casualties in the process. On May 26 twenty-five thousand British and French attacked again, made no progress, and gave up after nearly a third of them had been killed or wounded. The Australians and New Zealanders remained crowded into, and unable to break out of, the wretched toehold that they had named Anzac Cove. Gallipoli was turning into something almost worse than outright defeat: a stalemate as tightly locked as the one on the Western Front.

Mustafa Kemal
Saved Gallipoli for the Turks.

As in Europe, both sides were soon mounting sterile attacks followed by equally sterile counterattacks. As in Europe, the soldiers on both sides developed the familiar mixture of fear and respect, of hatred and admiration, for the men they were fighting. The Turks “came over in two great waves from their trenches, in great hulking mass,” an Australian private observed of one attack. “They were rather big men, the Turks, fine body of men. As they came over, they were shouting ‘Allah!’ and blowing their trumpets and whistling and shouting like schoolboys. As they got closer, within nice rifle range, we had the order to fire and opened up with rapid fire and brought them down in hundreds, hundreds of them fell, and in front of our trenches.” A corporal at Anzac Cove took a less admiring view: “The Turks suffer severely in their half-hearted bayonet attacks, usually delivered at night. They approach calling on Allah. We hold our fire until they are within twenty paces. Then they get a couple of stunning volleys and we hop out and bayonet anyone who cannot run away quick enough. I have not been lucky enough to catch one yet.”

By May 8 the British and French had taken twenty thousand casualties. They had no uncommitted reserves to throw into the fight, and their supplies of shells were low. Desperation was deepening not only at Gallipoli but in London. With two more divisions, Hamilton wired Kitchener, “I could push on with great hope of success. Otherwise I am afraid we shall degenerate into trench warfare.” Not everyone was even that hopeful. “Damn the Dardanelles” was Fisher’s judgment—“they will be our grave.”

Background

AN INFINITE APPETITE FOR SHELLS

THE GREAT WAR IS REMEMBERED AS THE WAR OF THE
machine gun. Its defining image is of doomed foot soldiers, bayonets fixed, climbing doggedly out of their trenches and being mowed down like so many stalks of corn by gun crews dispensing instant death at the industrially admirable rate of ten rounds per second. And of course that image is no mere phantasm. It happened again and again from the summer of 1914 until the autumn of 1918. The machine gun was one of the war’s essential elements, a prime reason why so many offensives failed so miserably, a puzzle that the generals had to solve before they could begin to succeed.

But in fact it was artillery that dominated the battlefields. World War I was the first major war, and it would also be the last, in which more men were killed by artillery than by small arms or aerial bombardment or any other method of destruction. Until late in the war artillery was the only weapon that, when used to maximum advantage, could neutralize the machine gun. It was the one weapon without which infantry, both when attacking and when defending, had almost no chance. Armies could and did misunderstand and misuse the machine gun and survive. There was less room for error where the big guns were concerned. Huge numbers of such guns proved to be indispensable from the start, as did astronomical numbers of shells. Where this need was not met, empires tottered.

The Boer, Russo-Japanese, and Baltic Wars had all given warning of what would happen if the armies of the great powers of Europe met in battle armed with thousands of the latest rifled, breech-loading, rapid-firing cannon. No one came close to imagining, however, how great the hunger for shells was going to be when such a war came. In the years leading up to 1914 all the powers had spent heavily on artillery (in addition to its heavy artillery, Germany began the war with more than five thousand smaller field guns and twelve hundred field howitzers), and all entered the conflict with what they thought were immense quantities of ammunition. All were stunned by the speed with which their supplies were exhausted. When 1915 arrived with both fronts deadlocked, all the belligerents found themselves desperately short not just of shells but of production capacity. No amount ever seemed to be enough.

The French, who thought they had a three-month supply on hand at the end of July 1914, were rationing the number of shells given to each battery within six weeks; the Battle of the Marne nearly cleaned them out. The British, believing that they were going to war with a six-month supply, were running short before the end of October. The Russians, proud of having stockpiled a thousand rounds for every gun in their army, were likewise soon baffled by a conflict in which a single artillery piece might be called upon to fire a thousand times every couple of days.

When Grand Duke Nicholas told the Petrograd government that he needed two and a half, then three and a half million shells per month, these were numbers that Russian industry could not begin to provide. And so the Russians began placing huge orders overseas, first with British suppliers (who cheerfully accepted them and the advance payments that came with them in spite of being unable to meet their own army’s needs), then with the United States. Being essentially bankrupt by early 1915, Russia was able to pay only by drawing on a line of credit of £25 million per month grudgingly extended by a British government fearful of collapse in the east. The systemic corruption and profiteering of the Russian procurement system assured that much of the money simply disappeared. Much of what was ordered was never delivered, and much of what was delivered piled up uselessly at Russia’s only functioning (and woefully inadequate) ports of entry, Vladivostok at the eastern end of Siberia and Archangel in the Arctic.

Though the shortage was severe for all the belligerents, its nature varied from country to country. Austria was plagued by the need to produce ammunition for a ridiculously large number of different kinds of guns, many of them antiques long since discarded by armies that had done a better job of modernizing and standardizing. But even the most modern armies encountered problems not only of quantity but of shell type. All of them, before the war, had given priority to the production and accumulation of shrapnel, an antipersonnel projectile that, upon exploding in midair, showers lethal lead pellets over a wide area. The early months of the war showed that, though shrapnel was effective in cutting away barbed wire, it was useless for destroying fortifications and killing the men inside. Only high explosives such as dynamite and nitroglycerin did the job. The consumption of high-explosive shells—much more complicated and costly than shrapnel—increased exponentially.

A British munitions plant, pouring out shells for the armies of the Entente

France and Germany adapted best. In Paris an able and energetic young socialist politician named Albert Thomas was named undersecretary for armaments in the ministry of war and hurried to make changes. He got three hundred and fifty thousand skilled industrial workers—eventually half a million—released from military service and assigned to munitions factories and coal mines. He brought tens of thousands of women onto the payrolls of private and government plants. He thereby started a gender revolution that would change European society; by the end of the war women would fill more than a third of all industrial jobs in Britain and France, and more than half of such jobs in Germany. Prisoners of war were put to work as well, and refugees. With remarkable speed France was soon coming close to meeting the needs of its army.

Germany’s situation was especially perilous in the first year of the war. Moltke, uniquely among Europe’s prewar military planners, had insisted on the development of industrial facilities capable of achieving and sustaining high rates of munitions production. These facilities provided a basis for rapid expansion, but they were not nearly enough. The Germans had used more ammunition in the Battle of the Marne than in the Franco-Prussian War; First Ypres and the war in the east further drained supplies; and the naval blockade put in place by Britain cut Germany off from sources of essential commodities.

To attack the problem Falkenhayn, in his capacity as minister of war, recruited a dynamic young Jewish industrialist named Walter Rathenau. Rathenau got almost miraculous results out of Germany’s chemical and engineering industries. Soon camphor, essential in the production of gunpowder, was being extracted from turpentine rather than imported from Japan. Nitrogen was being drawn from the atmosphere rather than from the guano deposits of Chile, and wood products were replacing American cotton and also providing the acetone needed for making nitroglycerin. In Germany as in France, skilled workers were exempted from military duty and women went into the factories. By the summer of 1915 Germany was manufacturing upward of four million shells per month. That was sufficient, though barely.

Historians who have examined the question argue persuasively that the shell crises of 1914 and 1915 need not have been as serious as they were and in fact were sometimes not as serious as the generals claimed. In many battles, especially when bad weather turned roads to muck, the problem was not so much a lack of ammunition as an inability to get the necessary tons of it to the waiting guns. In Serbia in 1914 horse-drawn Austrian wagons laden with shells were able to move only twelve miles in four days of hard labor. Gunners were often profligate, opening fire, for example, upon seeing just one or two distant soldiers. The Russians made especially bad use of their supplies, stockpiling mountains of shells in fortresses that usually had little military value and eventually fell to the Germans.

Generals on both sides became adept at blaming a shortage of shells for their failure to produce the results they had promised. In Russia, Minister of War Sukhomlinov was so convinced that his rivals were using such complaints to undercut him politically that he withheld urgently needed ammunition. At the end of First Ypres, Sir Douglas Haig complained to a journalist that his troops could simply have walked through the German lines unopposed “as soon as we were supplied with ample artillery ammunition of high explosives.”

Haig’s failures in later offensives, when his supplies of ammunition were practically infinite, make this complaint dubious at best. But it was not the last such complaint to be made—and made publicly—by a senior commander of the BEF. The result, before 1915 was half finished, would be a crisis that brought down Asquith’s Liberal government and led to a radical redistribution of power among Britain’s political leaders.