The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (6 page)

His proposals on fortresses also broke down because they offended against the orthodoxies of planning. The fortresses were thought to be essential, because of Russian backwardness, for all planning had been dominated, in the later nineteenth century, by considerations of extreme prudence. German mobilisation was more rapid than Russian, because of German railway-building, and the Germans would be ready within a fortnight, whereas the Russians would take at least six weeks. Moreover, the Russian strategic position was poor, because Poland jutted out, vulnerable to a pincer-movement, between the Central Powers’ territory. Russian railways were poor, with irregularities even within single main
lines: for instance, the Moscow-Kazan line could take forty trains in a day, but its Arapovo-Ryazan section, only twenty-one, and bottlenecks of this type immobilised much of the scarce rolling-stock. The field-kitchens at Smolensk and Vyazma could manage only 35,000 hot meals in a day; the signalling-capacity in important junctions such as Minsk and Bialystok was low, and trains could therefore be exposed to German bombing as the sidings jammed; at Trawniki, where troops would be unloaded for the Austro-Hungarian front, twenty trains could arrive in a day, but, for lack of long platforms, only ten of them could be unloaded. Not surprisingly Obruchev, chief of staff in the 1890s, felt that ‘until we have built up our railways, there is no plan that can guarantee success.’

Despite talk to the French of an offensive, Russian planning remained very defensive. Poland west of the Vistula was to be altogether evacuated, and the great concentrations of troops were far from the border—in 1890, 207 battalions on the Niemen, 324 on the middle Vistula, 284 on the Galician border, 188 in reserve around Brest-Litovsk. In 1906, by the provisions of ‘Plan No. 18, restored’, the groupings were much the same, based on the fortresses: thirteen divisions on the Baltic coast, eleven and a half on the Niemen, thirty-four on the middle Vistula, fifteen on the Galician border and six in reserve. This plan seemed to guarantee safety against a pincer-movement from northern and southern Poland; it also gave the Russian army a chance to strike either at Germany, or at Austria-Hungary, since the bulk of forces was gathered in the middle. But, to attack, the Russian army would need at least six weeks, if not two months. By 1909, this delay seemed to be inadmissible; in any case, the Bosnian crisis revealed Russo-German hostility as nothing else had done.

In 1910 Sukhomlinov and Danilov re-wrote the plan. No. 19 was a radical change. They felt that, to save the French from isolation in the first weeks of war, Russia must mount an attack. But to attack from the centre would be dangerous, as the flanks would be threatened both from Galicia and from East Prussia. One of these bastions must be ‘taken out’. There was little sense in ‘taking out’ the Austro-Hungarian one, for Austria-Hungary would not influence the first period of the war. An attack on East Prussia was indicated; and because it was a salient, it could be attacked from two sides, south and east. A fairly accurate picture of German intentions meanwhile developed: it was thought, by the French and Russians, that the Germans would leave between sixteen and twenty-five divisions in the east, and would concentrate their forces in the west where ‘the great battles will probably take place, in the first two weeks, in Luxembourg, Belgium and Lorraine’. It was clear that a Russian offensive would do much to help divert German troops from
the west, and with Plan No. 19, a serious offensive was to be made. However, knowing that East Prussia would make for severe tactical difficulties, Danilov prepared to allot to this province four armies, with nineteen out of twenty-eight army corps. The other nine would contain whatever the Austrians decided to send against Russia. In the circumstances, it was not worth while to waste money on the upkeep of fortresses, and Danilov proposed that they should be razed. For the full programme, he received Sukhomlinov’s support.
²¹

But there was an immediate outcry, the more so as important interests had not been consulted. All of Sukhomlinov’s enemies in the army and the Duma united to save the fortresses; and the Grand Duke’s men in the Warsaw and Kiev military districts were also mobilised to denounce the plan, which they would have to execute. Some people, among them Stogov, of the General Staff, thought that the French would certainly be defeated within three months. Russia would then have to fight Germany alone, and she might do better, in the early period, to knock out Austria-Hungary and thus secure a free hand for the later Russo-German war. Austria-Hungary’s ‘multifarious army would not survive the blow’ since ‘it is to be assumed that, if Russia wins, the Slavs will gravitate towards her’.
²²
Moreover, the East Prussian offensive, launched by four armies, would always suffer from a weak flank to the south, and a rapid Austro-Hungarian thrust could penetrate this flank and disrupt progress in East Prussia. ‘Studies’ of this possibility displayed that Austro-Hungarian troops could reach far into Volhynia by the twentieth day of mobilisation, and could capture even Brest-Litovsk not long afterwards. These notions, though sometimes reciprocated in the Austro-Hungarian General Staff, were pure fantasy. By the twentieth day of mobilisation, the Austro-Hungarian armies were still a long way south of their own border, and although there was an Austro-Hungarian cavalry raid on the fifteenth day, it had difficulty penetrating the cordon of gendarmerie. Just the same, Klyuev in Warsaw and Alexeyev in Kiev mobilised General Staff opinion against Danilov. Conferences of the chiefs of staff of the military districts were held, and demands were raised for a re-shaping of the plan, to allow for action against Austria-Hungary. In the meantime political events had produced Austro-Russian, rather than Russo-German, crises, and the planners now felt that they should cater for an Austro-Russian war. Accordingly, in May 1912, Plan No. 19 ‘altered’ came into existence. In theory, there were two variants: Plan G, for the case that Germany attacked Russia, and Plan A, for the case that Germany attacked France. Only the latter one was real, as everyone knew. It provided for a concentration of Russian troops not against Germany, but against Austria-Hungary. Twenty-nine and a half infantry divisions
were left for the German front, forty-six and a half for the Austro-Hungarian, and, in the event, rather more. Danilov’s East Prussian offensive was retained, but, missing two of the armies meant for it, was bound to be weaker than was safe. The fortresses were also kept up, and thenceforth planning and fortresses kept each other pinioned in a deadly embrace.

Faulty planning had much more to do with the initial Russian disasters than material weakness, or the supposed unreadiness of 1914. A compromise had been established between Danilov’s ideas and Alexeyev’s, and neither East Prussia nor Galicia really received enough strength. The counter-part of the quarrel, in England, of ‘westerners’ and ‘easterners’ was, in Russia, between ‘northerners’ and ‘southerners’. These latter represented the traditional cause, of Pan-Slavism, Constantinople, the Balkans, whereas Sukhomlinov’s men appreciated that the real danger, now, was Germany, and that it would be grotesque for Russia to begin a European war with an offensive against an enemy that did not matter very much. The weight of pre-war investment in fortresses—and of course in planning too, for the making of a plan was an arduous affair, not to be repeated too often—naturally swung things towards the traditionalists; and the political crisis of 1912–13 confirmed the trend. The whole planning-machine ceased to act on the logic of the situation, but became a kind of delayed-action seismograph, recording the diplomatic tremors of months before. By 1912, the Russian army was already fatally split between the northern operation and the southern one. Links between them were tenuous. In recognition of this, two separate army group commands, the ‘fronts’, were to be established in wartime. This was not an appreciation that affairs of command had become so complex that not only army commands, but also army group ones, were needed to administer the land forces; it was rather a perception that the army had to be divided between irreconcilable tasks. The construction of these separate groups was, as events were to show, an almost insuperable hindrance to the evolution of coherent strategy. It was not Danilov’s plan that illustrated the weakness of the Russian army’s command structure, but rather the upsetting of his plan.

With the ‘Great Programme’, deliberated throughout 1913 and becoming law in June 1914, the Russian army ostensibly became a European super-power, in conformity with the economic growth that Russia had experienced since 1906. The annual recruit-contingent was raised to 585,000,, for three-year service, such that the peacetime army alone would reach almost two million men—three times as large as Germany’s. Infantry divisions would rise to 122½ (from 114½), to Germany’s 96, and there would be 8,358 field guns to Germany’s 6,004. Each division would have
twelve howitzers in place of six (fifty-two German regular divisions had eighteen), and would have four heavy field guns to the German regular division’s eight. Six-gun batteries would also, at last, be introduced, and the artillery was to have an extra 5,000 officers and 30,000 men.
²³
Railway-improvements were also proposed, to help with mobilisation. But beneath this weight, there was not much muscle. The Tsarist régime could profit, outwardly, from economic progress; but the structure of the army, if anything, suffered from economic progress, which left so much money available for the wrong choices that so many of the army’s functionaries unerringly made. There were now guns, railways, trained men in plenty. But commanders neglected their reserve-divisions, preferred to place guns in fortresses, and set up a plan for war that did not exploit strategic railways particularly; besides, the continuing belief in cavalry’s efficacy meant that railways that might have sent infantrymen speedily to the front were loaded, instead, with horses and fodder for them. The sacrifice of locomotives to horses was a suitable way for this army to enter the war in 1914.

CHAPTER TWO
The Military Imperative, July 1914

Russian preparations for war alarmed the Germans more and more, and news of the ‘Great Programme’ deprived them of their senses. It was the last straw in an atmosphere of unprecedented international tension. Berlin felt itself to be encircled by powerful and unscrupulous enemies. In France, there had been a ‘national re-awakening’, which produced the nationalist Poincaré as President, and a new army law re-introducing three-year military service. The British, far from being frightened out of hostility to a Germany possessed of a large battle-fleet, were also unmistakably likely to join battle against Germany in a European war. True, some German statesmen hoped otherwise. But German soldiers had no illusions, and their plans allowed for the landing of a British expeditionary force in France.
¹
Italy, too, had changed from warm alliance to open unreliability; and in 1913, Balkan conditions caused a similar change in the attitude of Romania. In such a situation, the Russian threat to Germany seemed more dangerous than anything else, and German statesmen began to foresee a day when Russian troops, in the name of Pan-Slavism, caused a destruction of the Habsburg Monarchy, and the creation of a Russian empire reaching as far as Stettin and Trieste. Moltke, chief of the German General Staff, wrote in February 1914 that ‘Russia’s preparedness for war has made gigantic progress since the Russo-Japanese war, and is now much greater than ever in the past’.
²

In Europe at the time, there were widespread ideas that the German army was the most powerful in Europe, a vast war-machine of unconquerable strength. It was certainly a machine of considerable efficiency, as the campaigns of 1914–18 were to show. But it was not nearly as strong as foreigners feared, and as the Kaiser suggested. On the contrary, German generals felt very weak when they contemplated the forces of other generals.
³
The army had fewer battalions than the French army (1,191 to 1,210), and in 1914 fewer guns than the Russian army (6,004 to 6,700), to the 1,876 battalions of which it was also, of course,
inferior. It was also inferior to the French army in technical equipment of many kinds—lorries and cars for one.

The Germans were incontestably superior to their enemies only in one area—high-trajectory artillery—and even here their superiority was much over-rated.
⁴
They had appreciated before their enemies that this type of artillery, with a high-explosive rather than shrapnel munition, would be of importance in the war to come. A field-cannon, which still made up the overwhelming majority of every army’s guns, fired fast, far and straight; it could be used to break up mass infantry-attacks. High-trajectory weapons were slower, and their range was less. But they could reach behind enemy fortifications, such as earth-parapets, that were inaccessible to field-cannon. The war to come would, of course, be a war in which field-fortification played a preponderant part, and the Germans were first off the mark in developing field-mortars—their regular divisions had eighteen such weapons to fifty-four field-cannon, whereas the Russian army, in 1914, had only six per division (and forty-eight field-cannon). Plans to counter this were made by the French and Russians, but the Germans went ahead to equip their reserve-divisions as well with field-mortars. Moreover, in heavy field artillery, the Germans acquired some superiority. The
schwere Artillerie des Feldheeres
in 1914 contained 575 heavy guns, cannon and howitzers, whereas the French army had 180, the Russian army 240. Borrowings from the Austrians of 300 mm. howitzers gave the Germans a greater margin of superiority. But neither advantage was very great. The ‘monster artillery’ with which the Germans are thought to have ‘shattered’ their way through Belgium was a legend. They possessed in all, for instance, only three 420 mm. Krupp heavy cannon, although, as the war progressed, many more of these were produced. There was certainly no reason, in German field-mortars or heavy artillery, for Moltke to forget his fears, especially when he recognised other armies’ intention to close the gap.