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Читать книгу: «The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice», страница 2

John Bourne, Peter Liddle, Ian Whitehead

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Second, open, mobile or semi-mobile war is not less expensive than trench warfare. Fighting on the Eastern Front in the First World War was predominantly semi-mobile. The distances were greater than on the Western Front and the densities of men and equipment, especially artillery, were less. Casualties, however, were higher than on the Western Front. The British Expeditionary Force’s worst calendar month for casualties during the Great War was, unsurprisingly, July 1916. The second worst was April 1917 (Arras). The third worst was October 1917. The fighting in all these months could be characterised as ‘trench warfare’. But the fifth, sixth and seventh worst months were April, August and October 1918, all periods of semi-mobile war, the last two during a period when it is generally recognised that the BEF was well led, well resourced and operationally proficient. During the ‘Advance to Victory’ in the final hundred days of the war, from 8 August 1918, the British Tank Corps, the epitome of mobility and technology, lost a third of all its officers and men. Tanks crews were so vulnerable to disfiguring facial wounds, caused by ‘metal splash’, that they took to wearing chain-mail visors, reminiscent of medieval knights.

Nor is it true that the Second World War was won by ‘manoeuvre’ and the First by ‘attrition’. The mobile war of the Blitzkrieg or the Western Desert or the breakout from Normandy was no more typical of the Second World War than slogging matches like Stalingrad, Cassino, Kohima and Imphal, Caen and the Falaise gap, or the Reichswald. The US Navy’s freedom to ‘hop’ from island to island in the Pacific War was achieved only at the cost of epic attritional naval battles, such as Midway and the Coral Sea, fought principally by aircraft at long range. And once ground forces were landed, they faced an equally grim attritional struggle against ferocious resistance from Japanese soldiers, often dug into hillside bunkers and trenches, reminiscent (in a very different landscape) of the fighting at ‘Passchendaele’. This process is usually known as ‘winkling out’, a typical cant phrase for what was a desperate business, contracted at close quarters, often with flame-throwers and grenades.

Third, trench warfare was not peculiar to the First World War. Trenches (saps) had always been part of siege warfare, the dominant mode of war for much of military history. They played a leading part in the final campaigns of the American Civil War in northern Virginia and in the Russo-Japanese war. They were also a constant feature of the Second World War, though they were generally less permanent and are, perhaps, better characterised by the American term ‘foxhole’, a rapidly dug slit trench for one or two men, exhausting to dig, often under enemy fire. Life in them, particularly for a prolonged period, was certainly worse than life in a First World War trench system. The key word here is ‘system’. First World War trenches were organised places, with facilities – primitive maybe – but still real, and comradeship. (Rob Thompson has characterised the Western Front as ‘trench city’.²⁰) US troops in the Belgian Ardennes, in the harsh winter of 1944–45, found themselves occupying foxholes 4 or 5 feet deep, 2 or 3 feet wide and 6 feet long, for 10, 20, even 30 nights in succession. Trench foot, that spectre from the early days of trench warfare, made a reappearance, causing 45,000 men to be evacuated from the front line, more than were put out of action by the enemy.²¹

Fourth, technology does not save lives in war. The conceit that it does is often used to explain lower British casualties in the Second World War. It was repeated recently during the British television series Great Military Blunders²². The role of technology in war is to take lives, not to save them. First World War soldiers were killed by technology, high explosive, gas, aircraft, tanks, as were those in the Second. Many of the technologies used in the Second World War were deployed in the First. The ‘all-arms, deep battle’, utilising sophisticated artillery techniques, armour and ground attack aircraft, employed during the autumn of 1918 by Allied armies on the Western Front, was the true precursor of modern war. The contribution of ‘boffins’ was also apparent. The development of artillery in the British Army, on which its success in 1918 principally rested, owed much to the contribution of the scientist Lawrence Bragg, the engineer Harold Hemming, the cartographer Evan Jack and the brilliant meteorologist Ernest Gold. The Second World War had more sophisticated signals systems than the First (especially radar and the man-portable radio), its aircraft flew higher and faster and carried more ordnance, its tanks were better armoured, more potent and quicker, but there was comparatively little fundamental change in field artillery, small arms, mortars and grenades. A British soldier of the First World War would have felt quite at home with the Lee Enfield Rifle Mark IV, the Vickers machine-gun and the Mills No 36 grenade. The excellent Bren replaced the Lewis gun, but it would have held no mysteries for a First World War Lewis-gunner. Indeed, the generation of small arms used in the First World War survived in many armies until the 1960s.

Also, in both World Wars the reality of war at the sharp end was ‘low tech’. First World War trench raiders favoured knives, knuckledusters and bludgeons. In the vicious, prolonged, hand-to-hand, street-to-street, building-to-building combat that characterised the battle for Stalingrad, one of the most prized possessions was a sharpened spade. Great claims are sometimes made for the ‘war-winning weapon’. The tank has been portrayed in this way in the First World War; the Soviet T-34 tank and the P-51 Mustang (or its drop tanks) in the Second. There is no doubt that a technological lead, such as Fokker’s development of the interrupter gear in 1915, allowing German aircraft to fire machine-guns through their propeller blades, gave them a decided (if temporary) operational advantage. But, in many cases, complaints about the enemy’s superiority in technology merely disguise tactical inferiority. This was sometimes the case in the Desert War, where skilful German use of tanks in combination with the excellent 88mm field gun, rather then the inherent inferiority of British armour, was the decisive factor. The focus on quality disguises the importance of quantity. The T-34 was an excellent tank, but so was the German Tiger. The Soviets, however, produced far more T-34s than the Germans did Tigers, sufficient for the Red Army to survive a 75 per cent loss rate in armour.

This book is a study of comparative experience. What results it produces depends on what is compared. The true comparison is not between the experience of soldiers on the Western Front and in the Western Desert, but between soldiers at Verdun and Stalingrad, between the fighting of 1916–18 in France and Flanders and the fighting of 1944–45 in north-west Europe. Such comparisons show no dramatic lessening in the grim toll of casualties; indeed, quite the contrary. When like is compared with like, modern war is shown for the truly brutal and expensive business that it invariably is. Lower British casualties in the Second World War overall are explained not by better technology or by better generalship but by the smaller scale and lesser intensity of the ground fighting in which it was involved before D-Day. In the Royal Navy (and the merchant fleet), where seamen were involved from day one of the war with the main forces of the main enemy, casualties were higher than during the First World War.²³ High casualties were also central to the experience of Bomber Command, which spearheaded the British war effort against the main forces of the main enemy from 1942 onwards.

From these perspectives, the experience of the two World Wars seems much more similar than is often supposed, a view that is strengthened by consideration of some of the ‘actualities of war’.

The first of these is ‘the army’. The two World Wars were fought principally, though not exclusively, by organised military forces. The men (and women) who served in them, however, were not principally ‘soldiers’. When war crept back on to British university syllabuses in the 1960s, it did so as a partner (a junior partner) in the relationship between war and society. War was considered worthy of academic consideration in proportion to the extent that it had social consequences. These were felt through the need of modern, ‘total’ war, in particular, to mobilise ‘civilian’ workers, including women, and the vulnerability of those civilians to enemy action through ‘strategic bombing’. This ignores the fact that wars were fought, as well as supported on the home front, by civilians. The mass armies of the two World Wars are united by their essentially civilian natures. Sir William Orpen described the British soldier of the First World War as ‘the British workman in disguise’²⁴. Michel Corday depicted the French soldier, in similar terms, as ‘merely a peasant in a steel helmet’²⁵. The First World War had a higher proportion of volunteer soldiers than the Second did. The British Army was recruited wholly by voluntary means until the spring of 1916. The Australian Imperial Force was recruited by voluntary means throughout the war, as was the (British) Indian Army in both World Wars. But this was not the norm. Most soldiers, in most armies, in both World Wars, were conscripts, chosen because of their youth, their physical fitness and the degree to which their skills could be dispensed with by the war economy. In the British and American armies, with their traditional peacetime reliance on small, Regular forces, this meant that only a small number of wartime soldiers had any significant degree of peacetime training, something the conscript armies of Europe and Japan avoided. In both World Wars the British and American armies undoubtedly suffered from having to improvise large armies from small Regular cadres. This was, perhaps, particularly true of the British Army in the First World War, when it was allowed little ‘preparation time’ before being committed to combat. The civilian nature of armies also had consequences for their discipline and morale. In the German and Japanese armies potential problems were resolved by ‘indoctrination’ of an extreme kind.²⁶ ‘Indoctrination’ jars on Western liberal ears, but it produces formidable soldiers. It can also produce the most cruel and barbaric. On the whole, the British and American armies in the Second World War learned the lessons of the First. They recognised from early on that if the conscript soldiers of ‘democracies’ were to be asked to die, they had a right to understand the cause for which they were dying. Towards this end they mobilised an impressive array of talented writers, film-makers and artists. In the British case, Second World War practice built on that established towards the end of the First, and many exaggerated claims have been made for the political effects of the Second World War Army Bureau of Current Affairs.²⁷

The process of converting civilians into soldiers and their ‘blooding’ has been a staple of feature films on both sides of the Atlantic. The dramatic effects achieved by following a group from civilian life through to combat, however, often required a stability of ‘cast’ that was often not achieved in real life. For many soldiers, as Sir John Baynes and Cliff Pettit point out later in this book²⁸, the reality was to be thrown into units, where they knew no one, after only the most exiguous training. War is a notoriously difficult thing to prepare anyone for. Far from coping with it as ‘soldiers’, many brought the resourcefulness, resilience and comradeship, rooted essentially in civilian values, to the business of mutual survival in extreme danger.²⁹ Although both World Wars were ‘global’, ‘mass’ affairs, at the sharp end they were fought by small groups, the infantry section, the machine-gun team, the tank crew. Combat effectiveness depended on the morale and cohesion of these groups. ‘Comradeship’ is a constant theme of wartime memoirs from both World Wars. It was undoubtedly a reality, deeply felt and never forgotten. But this somewhat cosy concept ought not to disguise the often brutal reality of military discipline, not least – perhaps – in the Italian army in the First World War and the Red Army in the Second. The Italian Army’s attempts to bolster morale by a series of random executions would have done justice to a barbarian horde; the Soviet NKVD executed 15,000 Red Army deserters at Stalingrad alone.

The second ‘actuality of war’ that united soldiers of the two World Wars was the elements. The ‘high tech’ image of the Second World War, all speeding armour and diving aircraft, disguises the fact that war is a labour-intensive, physical, outdoor activity, which takes place at all hours and in all weathers. The front-line infantryman was a ‘beast of burden’. Towards the end of the First World War, and during the Second, he may have obtained a lift into battle, but once he got there he had to carry everything he needed. Everything he needed seems to have weighed the same for centuries, certainly since Roman times, about 601b. American slang for an infantryman, a ‘grunt’, is clearly well observed. In both World Wars, front-line infantrymen of all armies carried heavy burdens, worked long hours, and often got little sleep. They froze in the Iraqi desert at night during the First World War and on the Don steppe during the bitter winter of 1941–42 in the Second (the Wehrmacht boot, with its steel toecap and heels, might have been designed specially to induce frostbite). They were soaked to the skin in Flanders in the First World War and in Flanders in the Second World War. They burned under desert suns in the Sinai during the First World War and in Libya during the Second. They sweated through the African bush in the First World War and the jungles of Burma in the Second.

Both World Wars offered almost every kind of terrain. Some of it was familiar. Soldiers often commented in letters home on the similarity of the country through which they passed or on which they fought. But much was deeply foreign. German soldiers on the Russian steppe were sometimes demoralised by the infinite space and huge skies. This produced a desperate nostalgia (literally ‘home-pain’), which, as James Cooke shows later in this book, often led to the idealisation of ‘home’.³⁰ Wherever they went, on whatever terrain, soldiers would eventually make the acquaintance of mud. Mud is inseparable from war. British Army uniforms were dyed ‘khaki’, the Hindustani word for ‘dust’ (dried mud). American ‘doughboys’ acquired their name from the adobe dust of the Mexican border war of 1916–17 that covered their uniforms. German slang for an infantryman is dreckfresser (‘mud-eater’). Learning to keep clean and to keep equipment on which your life might depend clean was part of the universal experience of soldiering in both World Wars. Few have better captured the image of soldiers adapting to these conditions than the painter Eric Kennington in The Kensingtons at Laventie, where functional efficiency has entirely replaced ‘smartness’ as a military virtue.³¹ Apart from details of uniform and equipment, photographs of combat soldiers from the two World Wars are barely distinguishable. Dirty, unkempt, haggard, exhausted, prematurely aged, they look straight past us with the tell-tale ‘thousand-yard stare’ that transcends time and reveals a universal experience.

The final ‘actuality of war’ that bridged the experience of front-line soldiers in both World Wars to be considered here is ‘artillery’. Both conflicts were wars of the ‘guns’. Stalin called artillery the ‘god of war’, and in both World Wars, like the Gods of Ancient Greece, it dealt out death with a chilling impartiality. Artillery was the major cause of death and wounds on the battlefield in both wars. It was also the major cause of psychiatric casualties. ‘Shell shock’ is often regarded as a phenomenon of the Great War.³² I was never aware that it existed at all in the Second World War until I came across General Patton’s famous assault on a ‘shell-shocked’ GI. The experience of being under prolonged artillery bombardment was among the most terrifying that anyone has invented. The German veteran of the Western Front, Ernst Jünger, likened it to having a giant continually aim blows at your head with a huge hammer and just missing. The chances of being killed by a high-explosive shell, fired from ten miles away, were far greater than being killed in single or small group combat, in which personal skill, training, equipment and determination might be a factor. This reality contributed to the fatalism of soldiers, remarked upon by many commentators. High explosive did not distinguish between the callow recruit and the old hand, between the brave man and the coward, between the willing soldier and the man who just wanted to go home. Knowing when to take cover, being able to see that tiny but significant fold in the ground that another might miss, helped to keep one man alive while another would perish. But, ultimately, it was a matter of luck (front-line soldiers on all sides in both World Wars were deeply superstitious). To be a front-line soldier in the two World Wars was eventually to recognise your mortality, that one day, not this day or even the next day, given long enough exposure to the ‘God of war’, he would deal death or wounds to you and that your fate was to ‘lie on the litter or in the grave’.³³

Notes on contributors

Dr J.M. Bourne, The University of Birmingham, UK

John Bourne has taught History at the University of Birmingham since 1979. He thought that the publication of Britain and the Great War (London: Edward Arnold, 1989, 1991) would be his first and last on that conflict, but he was mistaken. During the last ten years his work has become increasingly focused on the British Army during the First World War and he is currently completing a revisionist study of the British Western Front generals.

Chapter 2
Preparing for war: the experience of the Cameronians

John Baynes and Cliff Pettit

The aim in this chapter is to look sequentially at the experiences of men drawn into the preparations for war in 1914 and 1939, emphasising in the second half of the chapter the similarities and differences between these two threshholds to British active service soldiering in the two World Wars of the 20th century. The study is mainly based on the recollections of those who served in The Cameronians (Scottish Rifles), a regiment no longer shown in the Army List, but one of which both authors were proud to be members in their day.

1914–15

Although a few people in Britain foresaw the tragic consequences of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, the speed of events that led to the outbreak of hostilities on Tuesday 4 August took most of the nation by surprise. Once the die was cast, however, virtually the entire population enthusiastically endorsed the decision to declare war against Germany. Mobilisation of the Regular Army, the Reserves and the Territorial Force was ordered on 5 August. Within days Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, also called for volunteers to join a new army, since he realised that troops would be required in far greater numbers than could be provided by existing organisations. By 25 August the first hundred thousand men, referred to as ‘K1’, had been enlisted, so he called for a further hundred thousand. Nearly double that number came forward.

To see how these events affected the various components of a particular regiment we shall look at the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) at their home bases in Glasgow and the county of Lanarkshire, commencing with Captain R. M. S. Baynes, a Regular officer at that time at home on leave from a tour of colonial duty with the West African Frontier Force in Sierra Leone¹:

‘When war was declared I was at home in Kent and either that day or the day after I had a telegram telling me to rejoin the 1st Battalion at Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow. When I got there I found intense activity: reservists coming in and all sorts of preparations being made. Also arriving were a lot of officers – veterans of the Boer War – many of whom had just dug out their uniforms, and looked as though they had just arrived from South Africa without having time to wash or change since arrival. I can’t remember how long it was but it was two or three days after I got there, and we were really getting things going, when Kitchener made the announcement that he required a hundred thousand men, which were to be raised immediately. Robertson was commanding the battalion – always known as “Blobs” – and he sent for me and told me that he was very sorry, but as I’d been away from the battalion for some time, I must be one of the three officers who had to be sent off immediately to help with this business of raising a new army. It was a bitter disappointment, but there was nothing to be done about it. Off I went to the depot.

At the depot in Hamilton, instead of the intense activity of Maryhill we found utter confusion. Reservists had been coming in and were fitted out, and the staff were getting on with things fairly well, although the depot was extremely full. But immediately the announcement of the first hundred thousand was made, volunteers started pouring in: their tents were pitched in a sort of playing field in the middle of the barracks, and every available space was taken up by men sleeping. There was not enough preparation in the way of food and rations, and we had to send out into Hamilton and collect everything possible in the way of food. The first night things got so bad and the depot was so full that we had to close the gates and at intervals open them and then charge the people outside, thus keeping them from breaking in. All this first kind were a pretty rough lot, many of whom were unemployed, and they were only too anxious to join up and get some food and pay. After a few days I was sent off with a 2nd Lieutenant, 200 men and half a dozen or so NCOs from the depot. We were put on a train but we’d no idea where we were going.

We eventually found ourselves at Bordon in Hampshire. Nobody at Bordon knew anything about us either, but I met the garrison adjutant, whom I’d known before, and he told me that I’d better go and choose some barracks to live in. I chose Martinique barracks, which were nearest the station, and went in there with my 200 men.

Some days later another 200 men arrived and these were put into other barrack rooms, which we took over. Later came another 200, and then some officers of various sorts and kinds. I think the first officers were probably old volunteers dating back to the previous century. There were certainly two ancient majors, and then more odd people turned up. There were those who’d been on jobs in various strange places, odd Indian army people who’d been on leave, and so on. What was interesting was the sort of men who arrived with each party. The first lot that I had taken down were a pretty rough crowd who, as I said, had more or less broken into Hamilton and joined up for food and jobs. The next lot were rather better. They’d had jobs and had given them up and joined the army. Then later a superior class came down. These were all very well dressed, with a couple of them carrying suitcases, and later on came an even smarter variety. Also a lot of ex-NCOs who were most useful. One thing about it was that with all these men to select from there was no difficulty in finding somebody for any kind of job such as cooks, clerks and people who did all kind of mending such as bootmakers. I also found as mess president a man who was one of the directors of the Savoy Hotel in London.

To start with, as I said, we were more or less camping. We had absolutely nothing in the way of uniform or equipment or anything else. In spite of that we started marching quite soon, as one of the first things to do was to get the men as fit as possible. I think that broomsticks, instead of rifles, were the first equipment that we learned to drill with. Then a certain amount of uniform started to arrive. This was all old full dress uniform from every kind of unit, and you’d get a most extraordinary selection on parade. You’d see a man for instance in a rifle tunic and tartan trews, wearing a straw hat, next to somebody else in a red coat and some civilian trousers. At all events the men were clothed – in a way. The next stage was khaki, and everybody got fitted out not so very long after. There were no khaki overcoats available, and so a supply of civilian coats were sent down. This distribution was most amusing as in those days people wore very heavy overcoats, and senior NCOs, sergeant-majors and so on all took the large heavy double-breasted kind with belts. Other junior NCOs had double-breasted ones without belts, whilst the rank and file had to make do with the single-breasted ones which were not so handsome.

I can’t remember how many hours training we put in per day, but the training syllabus came down from the War Office. We had to fit in so many hours on each subject for every company every week, and I had to make out a chart of the times and places of various kinds of training to ensure that we distributed it properly, as well as the training facilities such as ranges, assault courses, parade grounds and so on. These charts were always known by the company commanders as “my Chinese puzzles”. The first great occasion was when we got a complete battalion on parade, though strangely dressed, and took them out for a route-march as a battalion. [After some confusion about its correct title the battalion was by now officially designated 9th Scottish Rifles.]

We then moved to Bramshott, and it was a very proud day when we got the whole battalion on parade, fully armed and with a certain amount of transport, and we were able to march out of the barracks at Bordon as a real unit, led by our pipers. I’d started getting pipers very early in the proceedings and one of the first was boy Gibson from Dunblane, who was 14 years old and afterwards became sergeant-major in the regiment. He was a tough lad who insisted on playing a full set of pipes, although I’d offered to buy him a smaller set, and went out on all marches. He never fell out, but very nearly burst from the amount of food and buns that were given to him at every halt by the local inhabitants. He was a most popular person and an enormous help to the battalion. I think eventually we had six pipers and they really were quite good.

It must have been either January or February 1915, certainly when there’d been a lot of snow, that the division was inspected by Kitchener. We were all drawn up along miles of road at Frensham Ponds on a bitterly cold day. Kitchener was late for some reason, so we were standing about in the snow for over an hour. A good many men were falling out or down.

All this time we were training pretty hard, and there was not much time for amusement, but we were now and again able to get up to London at weekends, where we had some very cheerful parties indeed. Of course we were all very keen to get to France. I shall never forget the shock we’d had earlier after the news of the Battle of the Marne, and then the advance from the Marne to the Aisne. We were all terrified the war would be over before we could get into it.’

Leaving the 9th, the regiment’s first-formed K1 battalion, shortly before it crossed over to France, let us return to the first days of the war and look at one of the four Territorial battalions.

On 7 August there arrived at 261 West Princes Street, Glasgow, Headquarters of the 5th Scottish Rifles (created in 1908 out of the 1st Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteers), a very tall, rather irate subaltern who some years later was to become famous as the first Director-General of the BBC. Lieutenant J. C. Reith had been working for the firm of Pearson in London as an engineer on a big dock-building project, but there had been confusion over his mobilisation orders, which had been incorrectly telegraphed to him. The muddle was eventually sorted out, and he joined his company as described in his book Wearing Spurs² published in 1966, although he had actually written the account many years earlier:

‘A Territorial battalion mobilised – On Active Service – a curious and interesting spectacle. We who had been amateurs had become professionals; what we had done in odd moments, voluntarily and in a sense unofficially, was now full-time, compulsory and very official. The authority of officer and NCO, in general the run of military law, had been observed almost on sufferance and on occasion; now they were mandatory and permanent. From being rather farcical, an officer’s job had suddenly become very serious; the play-hour had merged into life itself and turned solemn reality – all rather bewildering. Camp each year was mobilisation of a sort, but the period was limited to a fortnight, and we were not On Active Service. It was these words which made the circumstances and conditions and atmosphere radically different. Trivial faults became crimes; minor crimes became major ones. Officers commanding companies were instructed to impress upon their men the awful import of the term; to warn them of the penalties of disobedience or neglect of duty. My OC company was thoroughly in form to do so. The death sentence was frequently to be found in the rubric. “And you’re On Active Service now,” he would with portentous solemnity interpolate, and glare along the ranks. We had no doubt about it.