Italians - no telling, although they had substantial British and French forces stiffening them by that time.
French - unlikely. If you look into the French mutinies they were more against incompetent senior officers than against continuing the war, and the French units continued to man the line even while nominally in a state of mutiny. A lot of it was also down to how Nivelle had promised them that Chemin des Dames would end the war in a few days - it didn’t, and even though losses weren’t all that severe the shock of disappointment more than anything else caused the mutinies. With the ascent of Clemenceau and Foch to head the Government and Army respectively, IMHO the French army would have recovered without US assistance anyway.
Yes, I think the effect the US involvement had was more upon the German High Command than it had on the allied armies.
A bit harsh?
Should these two factors be considered?
First, did the Yanks have independence of operation, or were they under ultimate French control under Foch? If the latter, it’s hardly their fault about whether or not they did much, is it?
Second, was there an attitude towards the Americans by Allied leadership which limited their involvement under American leadership?
I’m wondering whether the Americans suffered the same problems of European disdain that the Australians did, which generally denied them lack of independence of operation.
When the Australians were given independence of action at Le Hamel, they demonstrated the new tactics which contributed a great deal to the victories which concluded the war.
Significantly, green American troops were attached to the Australians in the action at Le Hamel and distinguished themselves as keen and brave troops, winning praise from Australian troops who had by then up to four years of battle experience.
Chateau Thierry and related events weren’t exactly a cake walk, nor insiginificant battles, by themselves or in wider strategic terms.
Much as it pains me to give the Yanks any credit for doing anything after establishing in WWI their tradition of arriving late in a world war :D, it seems rather unfair to be dismissive of their contribution.
I doubt they needed to see what the British had.
Germany lacked the capacity to feed itself properly by 1918. Food riots had started before then in Germany.
Germany was pretty much on its knees in a number of domestic respects by 1918.
It copped a few finishing kicks to the head as its allies surrendered in 1918, independently of what was happening on the Western Front, which is too often overlooked in the histories which treat the Western Front as if it was the only battlefield and Germany as the only combatant on that side. Each surrender released more forces to confront Germany on the Western Front, in time. The writing was on the wall.
Very true.
I’m talking about the frontline troops here, not the staff, the polticians or the people back home.
Why seeing what the British had had demoralising effect on them, was that up until then they had assumed that the British were suffering from the same privations. Once they advanced and saw with their own eyes what was available to the British, and their allies, they began to understand that they could not win. They also undrstood that the British were falling back and shortening their supply chain while theirs was elongating, and they had not the logisitic support to sustain the offensive. Add to that that they outran their artillery umbrella.
Yes, the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts.
The Western Front is where the main war effort was fought, and the release of troops in other theatres would enable the Westen Front to be reinforced. It was on the Western Front that the war had to be won…And it was.
Pershing took the attitude that other than in exceptional circumstances US troops would only fight under ultimate US command, and throughout he strongly resisted being put under anyone (including Foch). His basic attitude can be summed up as that he would rather not fight than fight under a non-US commander. Which is pretty much what he went ahead and did.
The main limiting factor was that they simply had no appropriate training for trench warfare and virtually no appropriate equipment. Virtually all mechanised equipment had to be provided by the British and all the artillery by the French before the US troops were fit for battle.
When did the Australians experience this? I would suspect this was earlier in the war when higher commanders were still trying to control the battle as it unfolded. As the war went on they started to realise this was simply impossible and limited themselves to pre-battle planning, with the lower echelon commanders fighting the battle. If this is the case, I would expect the Australians to have the same independence of operation as any other British or Canadian unit of similar size. After all, in a conflict of that size nobody is going to let a Corps fight their own private war.
True, although I would point out at this point it was hardly a uniquely Australian achievement. Plumer for instance used very similar “bite and hold” tactics in taking Messines Ridge in 1917. Monash really just refined an existing set of tactics, following a trend that was present throughout the BEF to plan for limited tactical success and deliberately avoid trying for a breakthrough.
To be exact, four companies of them which were all the US army could scrape together at the time, despite having nearly a million troops in France.
It is also instructive to look at the experiences of the 27th and 30th US Army divisions which were attached to the Australian Corps for the battle to break the Siegfried line. To put it bluntly, they were stopped dead and only broke through after the British 46th division broke through elsewhere, and the US divisions displayed a level of competence which would not have been out of place on the first day of the Somme.
Quote from a participant:
Oh, and 80% of the troops fighting at Chateau Thierry were French…
A completely off-topic, but I just want to point that there is a B league footbal team in the province of Buenos Aires called “Douglas Haig” in honor of the general…I suposse some englander definately liked that guy and was not bother for the appaling tactics used by the british commander.
Can’t think where I read it, but a while back I saw a reappraisal of Haig that argued he actually didn’t do a bad job in the circumstances confronting him. Wish I could remember the reasons advanced to support that argument.
Haig was very, very popular with the troops at the end of the war - the idea that he was responsible for “appalling tactics” didn’t grow up until at least the 1930s, largely due to Lloyd George doing a hatchet job on him in his memoirs. Postwar Haig also did a hell of a lot to help disabled ex-servicemen and the like - the poppy appeal was for a very long time known as the “Haig Fund” in his honour - by popular demand rather than him wanting to big himself up.
In the early years, no side had the technology and tactics to deal with the devastating effect of the machine gun coupled with barbed wire, and the resulting stalemate situation of trench warfare. For example, the artillery had not the ability to lay on a creeping barage; there were no tanks to deal with the wire; the training of troops did not put enough store on fire and maneouvre (and if they had it would have made little difference given the above).
It has been argued (somewhere?) that the Americans ought to have been able to teach the allies some lessons, considering their experience of trench warfare in their civil war - but it seems they didn’t learn the lessons themselves (if there were any).
Do you have any solutions, P.K., given the circumstances?
Was it a lack of artillery ability, or that the tactic wasn’t fully developed yet and the associated technology wasn’t up to it?
My understanding is that even quite late in the war the biggest problem was that communications between the infantry field commanders and artillery weren’t assured, so that when things didn’t go as planned there wasn’t always the ability to alter the artillery timetable and ranges.
Thus advancing Allied troops hit by unexpected defensive fire could be stranded behind a barrage moving away from them, or unable to press home an advantage because the artillery was running to a fixed timetable that took no account of events in the field.
Wireless communications in WWII overcame a lot of the problems of field telephones and runners which, I think, caused some local disasters in WWI because of the lack of communication between distant artillery providing indirect fire and the infantry advancing under it.
Largely because nobody had realised they might need it - indirect fire was a relatively new ability (you can’t really do a creeping barrage with direct fire - at least not safely for your own troops). Once people realised they needed it and could do it it came into very common use.
More than that - WW1 is probably the only war in history where commanders at all levels were routinely cut off from each other. In previous wars (Franco-Prussian, American Civil War, etc.) the battlefields were much smaller so generals had a measure of voice control, and being aboveground was much less hostile so runners had relative freedom of movement. Postwar portable radios came in and solved the problem. The Germans never really got their heads around the nature of the problem and suffered accordingly (after they ground to a halt on the Marne, they never again had a successful offensive against the western Allies in terms of distance gained). The Allies eventually understood that the problem simply meant they couldn’t break through the front and changed their strategy to “bite and hold”/“peaceful penetration”. Basically they bit off chunks of the front - destroying or capturing any Germans in it in the process - according to a pre-set plan then as soon as they reached the limit of the plan stopped the battle. By late 1918 they had this down to a fine art, and would be ready to start again on another part of the front within a week or so. This - finally - restored movement to the battlefield, but didn’t make it a war of manouver.
It worked against the Germans too. For a long time the German tactic was to immediately counterattack with whatever they could scrape together against any Allied penetration into their lines. With the communication problems if shelling or anything else had cut their telephone cables they would be launching unsupported attacks with no reserves - one of the reasons the Germans suffered so badly on the Somme.
More like 90% of the problems of WW1. Outfit a WW1 army with modern radios and you would be in virtually a WW2 scenario.
But would it have changed dramatically the way WWI was fought?
The Allies still had to get out of the trenches, and the Germans had pretty much perfected defensive machine gun and other fire, with the benefit of being in entrenched positions which almost by definition were going to be primarily defensive rather than the Allies’ problem of always attacking the Germans.
I suspect that even the best wireless communications in the world wouldn’t have made any real difference up to 1916, and not much until there was some movement in the latter part of 1918.
Almost certainly. If you look at how attacks went, apart from rare exceptions such as Beaumont Hamel the Allied attacks could always seize the German first line of trenches. The problems they had were:
- Keeping these trenches in the face of German counterattack.
- Exploiting their break-in without proper artillery support.
Ultimately these were solved by pre-planned fire to protect the seized area and help expand it, as well as pre-planned limited exploitation.
Artillery on call would have made an immense difference, as would the ability to call up reserves when needed. Having a FOO with the attacking troops as opposed to pre-planned fire is the difference between night and day if the enemy doesn’t cooperate.
All true. But the “impact” cannot be measured purely in numbers of prisoners and miles taken. All tactical my friend, tactical. The Strategically dim position Germany was facing resulting from the US entry into the War is what made it all possible, it is also how and why we got there. The British Army suffered some key defeats in 1918 as did the French as the Germans were forced to make one last push with the shock troops of Spring. Although both certainly contained the threat and recovered while inflicting heavy casualties on the Germans largely negating their successes. But it was mainly the US Army and Marine Corp that halted the Germans at Belleau Wood, otherwise they probably would have taken Paris. And the American entry in the war marked the nail in the German coffin, and the difference between a negotiated peace and what was in effect an unconditional surrender. It was the threat of boundless, fresh US manpower that was the looming on the German war machine and indeed allowed the British (and their Commonwealth forces), whose revision of tactics, planning, and training was admittedly excellent --to take the gambles that insured victory. Otherwise, they would have sulked in the purgatory of stalemate…
As for the “German Army of 1916,” the Germans were also no longer fighting the Russians in 1918, freeing up numerous divisions and resources for the Western Front which made good many of their losses of 1916-1917. I would surmise that the German soldier of 1918 may have had some of their best training with the infiltration tactics of “Storm Troopers.” Ultimately, it was the German high command that wasted their potential and often misused them, deviating from the plans, causing them to take almost as many casualties as they inflicted.
But you are correct. I do need more history on WWI. It’s becoming a slight fancy…
This was largely political, since he refused to feed his soldiers to the Allied commands…And commanding an army raised from almost nothing in the space of 18 months is no easy task…
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Thanks for your comments on my comments.
I’ve been educated.
Did you get those insights mainly from reading or from your officer training? I’m wondering if WWI is studied in that sort of depth in TA officer training.
Ummm… maybe. I will concede that US entry into the war was one factor in the timing of the Kaiserschlacht offensive, and that it had a significant effect on Allied morale. However, from a month or two after the US entry into the war when the Germans realised that they weren’t actually doing anything of significance to the war effort until August/September 1918 the Germans actually seemed largely dismissive of the US threat and generally thought that the war would be over before the US made a significant contribution.
It’s relatively easy to make an arguament that all the battles were allied defensive victories. The Germans never managed to break through the line and suffered horrendous casualties in the process. Much worse, they started suffering from breakdowns in discipline in the process - breaking off attacks to loot captured stores for instance. An army that acts like that is on the verge of total defeat - as happened a few months later at virtually the same point during the battle of Amiens.
Ummm… Bellau Wood was one (rather small) part of the big battle. It has loomed rather large in US perceptions because it was their first major battle, but they weren’t all that big a part of the battle. Overall, in the Second Battle of the Marne the French suffered 95,000 casualties, the BEF 13,000 and the Americans 12,000. That puts US casualties at 10% of those for the battle of the Marne (and it was after all the battle of the Marne as a whole which stopped the German thrust on Paris, not the US contribution in particular).
German casualties incidentally were 1.4 times more than the combined allied total.
Maybe. Thing is the Allies were planning on this and the plan said that they would be launching the attacks to win the war in 1919, not 1918. It is actually very interesting to look into this planning (see this link) as it throws a great deal of light on the development of modern warfare. It’s virtually the prototype of Blitzkrieg, while there are some major errors in it that the Germans largely carried forward into WW2 and were only fixed by the Soviets.
One other important thing to remember - the general perception that attacking is more costly than defending just isn’t true. It’s a classic case of “the other side of the hill” in action - you see your own losses but not those of your enemy. Even in battles such as the Somme generally considered an attacking disaster casualties were roughly equivalent, and by the end of the war the attackers routinely took much lower casualties.
Only in terms of warm bodies. The troops withdrawn from Russia weren’t actually up to much - they had large numbers of communists within them, and since they’d been fighting a very different war weren’t really suited to the Western Front. It’s also worth noting that the Germans had to leave a million soldiers engaged in occupying the territories handed over at Brest-Litovsk.
Again, that’s something that’s badly overblown. Fire and manouver, hurricane artillery bombardments etc. were all features of the battle of Passchendaele nearly a year earlier. The only substantial difference was the emphasis on hitting weak points in the initial attack, leaving any points of resistance to follow on units. Given the conditions prevailing in WW1, that is at best of marginal benefit.
One big thing to point out about the initial German offensives against Fifth Army is that it had been gravely weakened prior to the attack - from memory the Germans outnumbered it about 2:1, and it was holding what was generally recognised at the time as too much front.
Haig fought the battle of the Somme a whisker over 18 months after British entry to the war…
WW1 as such isn’t studied, but small-unit (Platoon and smaller) infantry tactics are pretty much all you do. That gives you a rather good understanding of the problems of command and control, and given that we’re still using 30 year old Clansman radios which frequently fail also gives you practice at trying to command people spread over a wide area in a firefight without radio (at least 10 times harder). Mix this in with a fair bit of reading on WW1 out of personal interest and some things just jump out at you.