Chapter 21![[image]](http://imgdetail.ebookreading.net/202009/02/9781101198988/9781101198988__the-complete-idiots__9781101198988__Images__idiot_ww1_262_1.jpg)
Allies Imperiled
In This Chapter
- Changes in Allied leadership
- The Nivelle Offensive is born—and dies
- Mutiny on the Western Front
- A British offensive in Flanders
- Revolution takes Russia out of the war
“I am in blood/Stepp’d in so far,” Shakespeare’s murderous Macbeth says some two-thirds of the way through his great grim drama, “that, should I wade no more,/Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” And so the belligerents must have felt at the start of 1917, the third full year of the great grim war. They were past the point of no return.
The Central Powers had put a sweeping peace proposal on the table, hinged on annexation of large portions of the territory that they presently occupied. The Allies rejected it out of hand, without leaving open the possibility of further negotiation. It seemed that too much had been sacrificed on either side to stop the sacrifice now. On both sides, politicians and soldiers had come to an agreement: No resolution was acceptable except by defeating the enemy on the field.
Despair on the Western Front
The Americans were about to enter the Great War at a low point for the Allies. Every major Allied offensive had failed. The Central Powers, especially Germany, were in possession of huge tracts of Allied territory. On the Western Front, the armies continued to grind against one another. Men died, and nothing was gained by their deaths. Yet the Allies were hardly giving up. Thanks to conscription, the fighting strength of the British Army on the Western Front had multiplied to some 1.2 million men and was increasing yet more. France had summoned most of its colonial troops to Europe, so it now fielded 2.6 million men. Add the ever-gallant Belgians, and the Allies had 3.9 million men broadcast across the Western Front opposing 2.5 million Germans.
Shake-Up in British Government
That Britain, which had begun the war by losing most of its small professional army, was committed to the brutal mathematics of attrition was made evident by the New Year’s Day promotion to field marshal of Sir Douglas Haig, under whose command more British lives were lost than under any other commander in British military history.
If Brits retained faith in their military leadership, they turned their collective doubt against the civilian government. Prime Minister H.H. Asquith was forced to create a coalition government in May 1915, which was then replaced altogether in December 1916 by a new coalition under David Lloyd George.
Papa Joffre Loses Command
In France, the people lost confidence in their civilian as well as their military leaders. In December 1915, the Cabinet had been shaken up, and Aristide Briand, a long-time critic of the Western Front strategy and a political enemy of Joseph Joffre, was named premier. Nevertheless, it was Briand who named Joffre commander-in-chief in December 1915, encouraging him to defend Verdun at all costs. A year later, however, Briand, disgusted by the lack of progress under Joffre, replaced him with Robert Nivelle, persuaded that the dynamic hero of Verdun could break the Western Front deadlock. Briand did not have the opportunity to test his faith in Nivelle, however. In March 1917, the month before Nivelle launched his promised offensive, Briand’s government was ousted for the same reason that Briand had removed Joffre: lack of positive results in the war. Briand was replaced as premier by Alexandre Ribot, who, as we are about to see, did not favor the great offensive that Nivelle proposed.
At 61, Robert Nivelle was just four years younger than Papa Joffre, but, he was slender, suave, energetic, and dashing—he looked positively youthful compared to the rotund, slow, deliberate, and even doddering Joffre. The British liked him because (in the words of one British general) he was “good-looking, smart, plausible, and cool”—and he spoke fluent English as well.
The Verdun Formula
Best of all, Nivelle had an alternative to the static policy of defense and attrition. He had been appointed precisely because of what he had achieved with his counterattacks at Verdun (see Chapter 16, “ ‘They Shall Not Pass!’ ”). The success of these had depended on what Nivelle now called the “Verdun formula.” This formula consisted of using relatively small groups to attack specific objectives. The attacks were always preceded by what Nivelle called a “deception” bombardment: He would bombard the German lines and then halt the barrage, which prompted the Germans to reveal their own artillery positions by returning fire. When the artillery had revealed itself, Nivelle would commence a rolling barrage, sending his infantry in small units directly behind a curtain of concentrated fire that crept forward into the German lines, just ahead of the advancing French infantry.
Nivelle’s self-assurance and total confidence in the Verdun Formula combined with his incurable optimism and his espousal of national glory to make a potent package. Most of the Allied commanders were eager to believe that the plan he presented in January for a series of early spring offensives was the answer, the “formula” for dissolving the Western Front deadlock. Surprisingly few questioned the feasibility of applying tactics that had worked with small groups and along the very narrow front at Verdun to the vastly larger and broader scale of huge sectors of the Western Front.
Voices of Battle “We have the formula!”
—General Robert Nivelle, regarding his counterattack tactics at Verdun, 1916
Nevertheless, there were important dissenting voices. General Henri Philippe Pétain, Nivelle’s commander at Verdun, was unchanging in his advocacy of a sustained defensive strategy, and the new premier, Alexandre Ribot, agreed with Pétain. Besides, with the United States about to join the war, a risky French offensive now seemed wasteful. Ribot’s minister of war, Paul Painlevé, also objected to the Nivelle Offensive, and he even revealed that General Alfred Micheler, the field commander whose army group had been tapped to lead the assault, was pessimistic about its chances for success.
Nivelle didn’t debate such objections. Instead, he responded to them with an indignant threat to resign. The brand new government felt (as Nivelle knew it would) that it could hardly afford to goad France’s most popular and aggressive general into quitting. Thus blackmailed, Ribot and Painlevé reluctantly signed on to the Nivelle Offensive.
General Nivelle believed it possible “to break the enemy’s front in such a manner that the rupture can be immediately exploited; to overcome all the reserves with which our adversary can oppose us; to exploit with all our resources the result of this decisive battle.”
More specifically, Nivelle proposed that the British would make preparatory attacks north and south of the old Somme battlefield, at Arras and Bapaume with Cambrai as the objective, to draw out the German reserves. In the meantime, French forces would launch the major offensive in Champagne, north of the Aisne. This main attack would combine, as Nivelle put it, “great violence with great mass”—that is, intense artillery bombardments (the violence) followed by massive frontal attacks (the mass). Nivelle proposed merely to multiply the intensity of small-unit tactics, which had worked on the concentrated Verdun front, to cover a much larger area.
Ludendorff’s Move
Although Nivelle’s blind faith in the feasibility of magnifying small-unit tactics to the scale of a major offensive was at best questionable, one shortcoming was absolutely certain. He had failed to consider that his adversary, Erich Ludendorff, was nobody’s fool. The German commander had watched developments at the front and had astutely grasped the significance of Nivelle’s having replaced Joffre. It was obvious to him: The advocate of defense was out, and the champion of offense was in; therefore, an offensive was in the offing, and the only place it could come was on the Somme.
Crystallizing a Defensive Strategy
Acting on this insight, Ludendorff embarked on moves not only intended to frustrate Nivelle’s plans, but also to strengthen the German front.
Nivelle’s plan depended on the existence of shallow German defenses in Champagne. The less there was to break through, the easier the break would be. Ludendorff quickly deepened his defenses by establishing a third line of troops, well out of range of the French artillery. Next, he resolved purposely to withdraw to this new, intensively fortified line of defense.
The Hindenburg Line
It was called the Siegfriedstellung, the Siegfried Zone, or, by the Allies, the Hindenburg Line. The German lines between the towns of Arras and Reims formed a large salient bulging into French-held territory. Instead of beefing up forces along this salient, the Hindenburg Line formed the base of the salient, as much as 20 miles behind the original German front line. From the German position east of Arras, the line ran to the southeast and the south. It passed west of Cambrai and Saint-Quentin, rejoining the original German line at Anizy, between Soissons and Laon. The Allies remained unaware of this line of fortifications because of the German air superiority during the winter of 1916–1917 kept Allied reconnaissance aircraft out of the area.
Words of WarBooby traps are typically explosive devices triggered by some form of human contact and hidden in apparently innocuous places, such as houses.
On February 23, before the Nivelle Offensive commenced, Ludendorff made a preliminary feint back from the front of the salient. Then came a full-scale withdrawal to what was a much shorter, and therefore much more readily defended, line sited on ground the Germans strongly held and could readily defend. This move was completed on March 16. The towns that lay within the territory evacuated by the Germans, including Bapaume, Péronne, Roye, Noyon, Chauny, and Coucy, were simply left to the Allies—after having been rendered quite inhospitable. The Germans mined the roads, destroyed the trees, poisoned the wells, and blew up houses and other buildings. For good measure, they sowed the ruins with an array of booby traps.
The Hindenburg Line itself was ingeniously fortified. At the front was a lightly held outpost line that traversed ground thoroughly swept by machine gun fire. Behind this were two heavily fortified defensive lines, one behind the other. Behind these lines were the German reserves protected by elaborate fortified underground barracks. Ludendorff’s tactic was to hold the shortened, more heavily fortified Hindenburg Line with relatively few troops. When an attack came at a particular sector or point, the reserves, flexibly positioned in the rear, could be quickly moved up to mass against the attackers.
Battle of Arras and the Nivelle Offensive
The Western Front had changed so little month after month that this massive German withdrawal came as a bewildering shock to Robert Nivelle. Certainly, it was not what he had planned for—and yet, the eternal optimist, he refused to reconsider or alter his plan.
On April 9, he ordered the commencement of the British preliminary attack at Arras. At first, all went remarkably well. The initial bombardment benefited from greatly improved artillery technique and a new poison gas shell that the British had developed. The gas soon silenced the German artillery, and snow grounded German air operations.
At the northern end of the 15-mile battlefront, Vimy Ridge was taken by the Canadian Corps. Unfortunately, the British reserves were unable to exploit this breach because of congested conditions in the rear lines and the shell-torn ground that they had to traverse to pass through the front. British Cavalry could not get up. The small numbers of MK I and II tanks were employed in “penny packets” and quickly broke down or fell prey to German artillery and armor-piercing machine gun rounds. Congestion had not been a problem for Nivelle’s small units during the Verdun counterattacks. On an enlarged scale, however, exploiting initial gains in a timely fashion became far more difficult because large masses of troops could not move with sufficient speed and flexibility. Although the British gamely sustained the attack until May 5, by that time German resistance had been augmented sufficiently to repulse all assaults against the line. At Monchy-le-Preux, British cavalry broke through only to be mowed down by concentrated German machine gun fire. An attack by British tanks and Australian infantry at Bullecourt, which was not preceded by an artillery bombardment, failed because of poor coordination and strong German resistance. The advances made in the first five days of the British offensive would be the sum total of the British advance for the entire battle.
After repeated postponements, which gave the Germans time to shift reserves, Nivelle finally launched his own offensive—the principal attack—in Champagne on April 16, buoyed by confidence in the initial stage of the British attack. Nivelle moved along the Aisne River front from Vailly east to Craonne and Reims. His strength was indeed massive at 1.2 million men and 7,000 guns.
The outcome of this great enterprise, however, was a disaster.
To begin with, the element of surprise, which had demonstrated its value time and time again, had neither been achieved nor even sought. The irrepressible Nivelle had been highly vocal in his boasts of certain victory. Second, the Germans were quick to shoot down French observation craft over Champagne. This allowed German artillery to function with impunity and to destroy virtually all French tanks while they still were being driven up in columns, before they could be deployed against the trenches.
—General E.L. Spears, British liaison officer observing the Nivelle Offensive
As for the French artillery, the tactic of the rolling barrage can be devastating to a defender, but it is difficult to coordinate successfully with the advance of the attackers. The barrage moved ahead much too rapidly for the infantry, which became trapped in a blanket of machine-gun fire. The slaughter was horrific. as the French infantry struggled for the Chemin des Dames Ridge, a geographical feature that dominated most of their sector.
No one could deny the determination and gallantry of the individual French poilu. Despite all that went wrong, the troops managed to take the first German line before they were stopped. However, this represented an advance of perhaps 600 yards, whereas Nivelle had called for an initial thrust of six miles.
In five days, Robert Nivelle had lost 120,000 French soldiers, killed and wounded. He captured 21,000 or more German prisoners, but other German casualties were relatively light.
The French Mutinies
If the Nivelle Offensive seemed a wasteful fiasco to the government leaders who had both disapproved and allowed it, to many front-line French soldiers it came as nothing less than senseless mass murder and the proverbial last straw.
On April 29, French veteran troops who had flung themselves to slaughter against barbed wire, entrenched machine guns, and carefully presighted artillery, began to rebel. There was no violence against their commanders, just mass refusals to move up front or to attack. Soldiers shouted, “We’ll defend the trenches, but we won’t attack.” During the first three weeks of May, word of the rebellion traveled swiftly through the long trench line, and the French Western Front was paralyzed by mass mutiny.
The utter senselessness of the slaughter produced by the Nivelle Offensive was only one in a long series of soldiers’ grievances. Others included their terrible and wholly inadequate rations, poor medical care, and a command policy of refusing to grant even a few days of leave from time to time.
Mutiny or not, failure of the offensive or not, Nivelle ordered yet more attacks. On May 15, however, War Minister Painlevé had had enough. He relieved Nivelle and replaced him with Pétain. Nevertheless, the mutiny had now become the gravest imaginable of crises, as reserve troops refused to go into the line. By June, 54 French divisions were hit by mutinies, and only two reliable divisions stood between the Germans and Paris.
Fortunately for the Allies, the forces of French censorship were among the most effective aspects of wartime government. French counterintelligence agents successfully blocked all news of the mutiny, keeping not only the French people, but also General Ludendorff in the dark for weeks. By the time Ludendorff caught wind of dissent in the French ranks, the British under Haig had renewed attacks to distract him and his army. Indeed, so total were the effects of French censorship and propaganda that the full extent of the mutiny would not be known for more than a decade.
For his part, Pétain moved swiftly to suppress the mutiny. Instead of cracking down on the soldiers, he ascribed their rebellion to what he termed “collective indiscipline,” not gross insubordination or a premeditated conspiracy to rebel. He aggressively addressed the soldiers’ grievances and introduced steps to improve rations and medical care. Most of all, he instituted a regular program of rotating leaves, which sent more soldiers home more often. To the disgust of the British command, Pétain also promised to limit his operations to an “aggressive defense,” calling for local attacks of limited duration.
Doubtless, the troops were also heartened by the new strategic policy that Pétain rapidly instituted, in which the overall posture would be defensive, punctuated by numerous offensive moves of limited, more realistic scope. Finally, of course, there was the hopeful prospect of relief offered by the impending arrival of the Americans.
From the Front After being replaced by Pétain, Nivelle was offered command of an army group, which he declined. Instead, seeking to clear his name and reputation, he voluntarily submitted to review by a military commission, apparently with the tacit understanding that he would be whitewashed. He was. He then left the European theater of war altogether in 1918 to command French troops in Algeria. After the war, he was appointed to the Supreme War Council.
Flanders Fields
Sir Douglas Haig, commanding the British forces on the Western Front, briefly renewed the offensive at the Battle of Arras in an effort to draw off some of the pressure on Nivelle’s offensive. Relations between the British and the French—and between Haig and Nivelle, in particular—had been strained. Nivelle demanded very direct control over British forces on the Western Front, which the British civilian government, over Haig’s objections, in large measure gave the French commander. Haig valiantly fought to preserve the autonomy of the British forces (they were, he declared, to “be regarded by General Nivelle as Allies and not as subordinates”) even as he faithfully carried out Nivelle’s instructions during the great failed offensive.
With 54 French divisions torn by mutiny, Haig was now compelled to assume the burden of action on the Western Front. In fact, the British general embraced the task enthusiastically. While the French army healed itself, adopting a posture of what Pétain called “limited liability” pending the arrival of the Americans, Haig had virtually unlimited authority.
He determined to carry out long-cherished plans for a major offensive in the northern sector of the Western Front, in Flanders. Haig’s Third Ypres Campaign was motivated by the following objectives, of great concern to the British, but of only minor interest to the French:
- Germany’s U-boat campaign was exacting a heavy toll on British shipping. It was believed that the U-boat pens were located in Belgium, at Ostend and Zeebrugge. With an advance into occupied Belgium, these bases could be destroyed. The U-boats were chipping away at Britain’s mastery of the seas. If the British lost control here, not only would the island nation be immediately imperiled, but the blockade of Germany also would fail, and even the ability to transport American troops to Europe would be severely compromised.
- Pétain might be willing to wait for the Americans, but it would be 6 to 12 months before U.S. forces would appear in sufficient numbers to make a significant impact. Haig felt that the Allies could not afford to suspend offensive activity for so long a period.
- The government of Prime Minister David Lloyd George, discouraged by the Western Front deadlock, had turned increasingly to the Italian Front and the Middle East for a breakthrough. Haig felt that placing faith in these peripheral fronts was a dangerous delusion that threatened to draw off needed strength from the Western Front—there, and nowhere else, Haig believed, the war would be won or lost. If he failed to use his forces now, the British general worried, they might be taken from him and frittered away on a secondary front.
- Finally, there was the reason that Britain had declared war in the first place: to restore Belgium as a sovereign and neutral state.
Battle of Messines
Ypres was a British salient, an area of strength projecting into the German lines. Before a full-scale offensive could be launched from this salient, however, it was necessary to secure the high ground dominating the area, the Messines-Wytschaete ridge. Haig chose General Sir Herbert Plumer and his Second Army to assault this position.
Haig was renowned for careful, thorough preparation, and the Battle of Messines was certainly among the most thoroughly planned and prepared battles of the war. For 18 months prior to zero hour, British engineers had excavated a half-dozen mine shafts under the German front lines. Each of these tunnels ended in a chamber that was packed with high explosives, carefully fused so that it could be detonated at will. The British also massed 2,400 guns of all types—one gun for each yard of front—and the Royal Flying Corps also finally established air superiority over the Messines sector.
As usual, artillery preparation was also employed. All too often, as we have seen, artillery preparation—sustained artillery bombardment preceding infantry action—wasted time and effort; worse, the cratered landscape that resulted from it was a hindrance to any subsequent advance. In this case, however, the 17 days of intensive bombardment were well thought out. To begin with, the bombardment was directed chiefly at enemy artillery emplacements, not at entrenched troops. Haig did not plan to exploit the bombarded area with his infantry, so their progress was not impeded here. The main objective of the artillery preparation attack was to knock out opposing guns.
Zero hour, at dawn on June 7, began with the detonation of the mine shafts. Five hundred tons of buried high explosive produced a blast so tremendous that it was heard as far away as London. It blew off the crest of the Messines-Wytschaete ridge and caused untold German casualties, many, doubtless, either blown to bits or buried alive.
For the British attackers, the blast served as a signal to intensify the artillery barrage and to unleash a mixture of smoke and poison gas. By the time the British troops went over the top, the German defenders had not only been greatly reduced by casualties, but they also were thoroughly demoralized. The advancing British increased the level of demoralization by rolling over trench lines with tanks and by deploying more poison gas using the brand-new Levens projector, which was designed to hurl poison gas canisters squarely into the enemy trenches. It proved the most effective gas weapon of the war.
From the Allied point of view, the Battle of Messines must be considered the most satisfying local success of World War I combat. British victory was complete: The Germans not only vacated the ridge, but they also were too dazed and depleted to mount an effective counterattack. In contrast to the usual pattern in which an Allied attacker seized a German position only to be forced to relinquish it again, the Messines-Wytschaete ridge was taken and then remained in British hands.
Passchendaele
Victory at Messines emboldened the government of David Lloyd George to authorize the rest of the Third Ypres Campaign, provided that the French participated. What the British government didn’t know was the full extent of the French mutinies; French high command had kept them almost as secret from the British as from the Germans. As for Haig, he was pleased to be acting independently.
But the success of Messines was not to be repeated. To begin with, British high command was inflexible in its thinking and declined to “reinforce success,” which would have required making Messines Ridge the point of the main attack. Because Messines had begun as a diversion, the rigid decision was that it must remain a diversion. Another problem was that organizing the main assault took more time than anticipated, creating a lag between the initial inroads made at the Battle of Messines and the principal assault. When Haig finally commenced the operation, he did so with the biggest artillery preparation of the entire war, beginning on July 18 by lobbing 65,000 artillery shells from 3,091 guns. This time, however, the shells fell directly on the territory staked out for the British advance. They cratered the poorly drained ground, and the heaviest rains the region had seen in 30 years transformed no man’s land into a virtually impassible morass.
Nevertheless, the infantry assault, led by the young and aggressive General Hubert Gough, slogged into it—only to encounter extremely well-prepared German defenses. The British forces had been buoyed by wildly optimistic intelligence reports to the effect that German resources were so depleted that Germany could not maintain its armies in the field for more than four to six months and that reinforcements from the Eastern Front could not be rapidly transferred to the Western Front. Both assumptions were false. Delays caused by the bad weather and the prolonged artillery preparation had permitted the Germans, who were quite adequately supplied, to reinforce Flanders with many troops released from the east.
British troops became bogged down in the mud and were slaughtered by machine-gun fire, including strafing fire from German air attacks. They were also subjected to attacks with the newly developed mustard gas, which caused intense chemical burns on contact with skin, eyes, or lining of the human lung.
Against all odds, the British infantry took Passchendaele Ridge as well as Passchendaele village by November 6. Once there, however, the troops found themselves in a dangerous salient, completely bogged down in the mud. Even so, the net gain in territory was slight in terms of the ultimate goal of reclaiming Belgium: a mere five miles. The cost had been 300,000 British dead and wounded, plus 8,528 French casualties. German losses were also high, however, at 260,000.
“In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
“We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
“Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.”
Cambrai
Undeterred by the terrible costs of Passchendaele, Haig ordered General J.H.G. Byng’s Third Army to attack at Cambrai, France, some 50 miles south of the site of the Belgian battle. This time, terrain conditions were highly favorable for the attackers, and Byng did not precede the assault with an artillery preparation, so both the element of surprise and the excellent ground were preserved. For the first time in the war, large numbers of tanks—200 of them—were employed in the advance.
Initially, the attack went very well for the British. A five-mile breach was punched into the Hindenburg Line, which Byng was ready to exploit with cavalry as well as infantry. Unfortunately, the tanks, which had made a spectacular first impression on the German defenders, began to break down in large numbers after they had penetrated the enemy. This gave time for German reinforcements to plug the gap, which the British cavalry and infantry follow-up now proved too weak to breach. On December 3, Haig ordered a partial withdrawal.
In some respects, the Battle of Cambrai was all too typical of Western Front action. Both sides suffered approximately equal casualties, about 45,000 each (including 11,000 Germans and 9,000 British taken as POWs), and no territory was permanently gained by either side. In another respect, however, the battle was something of a breakthrough, at least from the perspective of tactics. Cambrai demonstrated that an advance can succeed without artillery preparation—indeed, that it was often folly to sacrifice surprise and favorable terrain to bombardment. It also suggested that the tank, if used in sufficient numbers, could be a valuable tool against entrenched positions. (Of course, this assumed the eventual mechanical improvement of the vehicles.)
A Separate Peace
Like Cambrai, the entire western campaign of 1917 had hard lessons to teach, particularly to the Allies. Whether the generals and politicians chose to heed them was another matter.
The most important lesson concerned the necessity of unified command, of very close cooperation among the Allies. Combined, the Allied armies substantially outnumbered the forces of the Central Powers and, for the most part, were better equipped and supplied. Yet, between them, Nivelle and Haig had spent the lives of half a million men without gaining anything tangible. The problem? In large part, the English, French, and Italians failed to coordinate action effectively. Offensives were either French, or British, or Italian. Although British soldiers participated in supporting such operations as the Nivelle Offensive, they did so in ancillary, subordinate, and often grudging ways. Only after Nivelle was out of the picture did Haig unleash his own separate—and ultimately unproductive—offensive in Flanders.
Of all the lapses in unity of command, however, the greatest came with the advent of revolution in Russia. By the end of 1917, it would altogether remove the great Eastern Ally from the war.
The Revolution of 1917
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was actually two revolutions. The first took place in March (according to the outmoded Julian calendar then used in Russia, it was still February), and the second occurred in November (or, by the old Russian calendar, October).
Ever since August 1914, the war had been an almost endless string of disasters for Russia. As Czar Nicholas II poured more resources into the hopeless struggle, the Russian economy, never good, fell apart entirely. In Petrograd (St. Petersburg, recently renamed because it sounded too German), food riots broke out in March 1917, the Petrograd garrison joined the revolt, and Czar Nicholas II abdicated the throne.
The Russian parliament, or Duma, appointed a “Provisional Government,” which immediately found itself challenged by the rival Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, 2,500 delegates who had been chosen from factories and military units in and about Petrograd. When the “official” Provisional Government voted to continue Russia’s participation in the war, the Soviet issued Order No. 1, directing the military to obey the Soviet Government, not the Provisional Government.
Between March and October 1917, the Provisional Government and the Soviet Government vied for control of the nation, which, during this period, continued to starve. The revolutionary leader Aleksandr F. Kerensky briefly seized the reins of government and attempted to establish a coalition of the Provisional Government and the soviets, but the issue of whether to go on prosecuting the war continued to divide the suffering nation deeply.
During the spring and summer of 1917, the radical forces opposed to the Provisional Government coalesced around a single intellectually forceful leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who, since 1903, had been the leader of a radical wing within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. He called his faction the Bolsheviks—the “majority”—while those who didn’t share his radical beliefs he dubbed the Mensheviks, the minority. Never mind that the group Lenin labeled the “minority” far outnumbered the group he called the “majority.”
A Second Brusilov Offensive
While the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks wrestled over control of the Provisional Government, General Aleksei Brusilov, whose offensive against Austrian forces had been one of the few Russian triumphs of the war (see Chapter 17, “Italy, the Eastern Front, and Elsewhere, 1916”), led the Eleventh and Seventh Armies—two of the nation’s few remaining viable military units—against combined German, Austro-Hungarian, and Turkish forces under German general Felix von Bothmer at Lvov (Lemberg), near the Polish frontier. The skillful Brusilov pierced the enemy lines for some 30 miles along a 100-mile front, and his subordinate commanders on either of his flanks made substantial inroads against the Austrian Second and Third Armies.
Combatants Nicholas II (1868–1917) was the most hapless of monarchs in an era of hapless monarchs. He became czar after the death of his father in 1894, but he was intellectually and temperamentally unprepared for the role. Personally charming, he was nevertheless shy and even timid. He had no interest in politics, and although he was fond of uniforms, his was far from a military mind.
Devoted to his wife, Alexandra, he deferred to her in matters both personal and political. Their son and heir apparent, Alexis, was a hemophiliac, whose suffering seemed to find relief in the faith-healing ministrations of a rustic Orthodox monk, Grigory Yefimovich Novykh (1872?–1916), better known as Rasputin—a name that means “the debauched one.” An illiterate peasant, Rasputin acquired a reputation as a mystic and a healer. He was introduced to the royal court in 1905 and, by 1908, began to exercise an inordinate influence, first over Alexandra and then the czar. In the meantime, his sexual debauchery created a scandal throughout St. Petersburg. Worse, he insinuated himself in the administration of the state. When Nicholas left court to take personal command of the army in September 1915, Rasputin, through Alexandra, ran the country for all intents and purposes.
As a military commander, Nicholas proved disastrous. As a head of state, Rasputin, popularly called “the Mad Monk,” was even worse. At last, a cabal of nobles, led by Prince Yusupov, succeeded in murdering Rasputin on the night of December 29–30, 1916. As for the czar, he responded to the riots that broke out in Petrograd in March 1917 by abdicating the throne in favor of his brother, Michael—who, quite prudently, declined the honor. Nicholas and the entire royal family were imprisoned by revolutionary forces and finally were executed, in secret, by firing squad, on the night of July 16–17, 1918. For years, rumors persisted that his daughter Anastasia had miraculously survived the night of carnage, and a woman purporting to be her later appeared in Paris; however, DNA testing performed on the exhumed remains of the family members in 1994 put these rumors to rest.
But with his nation dissolving beneath him, even Brusilov was unable to sustain the offensive. Morale and supplies were both reduced to a trickle. On July 19, General Max Hoffmann led a German counterattack, which made short work of the hungry and thoroughly demoralized Russian armies south of the Pripet Marshes in Galicia. All that prevented Hoffmann from pushing deeper into Russian territory was his own lack of supplies and an insufficiency of reserve troops.
Offensive at Riga
With the southern end of the Russian front destroyed, German General Oscar von Hutier led his Eighth Army against the northern end of that front at the important Baltic Sea port of Riga (in modern Latvia) and its associated fortress on September 1.
Hutier’s innovative tactics were rapid and intense. He, at least, had heeded the lessons of the Western Front. Instead of the customary long artillery preparation, he began with a brief, albeit violent, bombardment followed without delay by an infantry advance. The artillery fire was directed almost exclusively at the enemy’s rear rather than his front lines; this was to prevent those front lines from being reinforced from the rear. The advance and the positions from which the advance came were heavily masked by smoke and the concentrated use of poison gas. This mask preserved the element of surprise until the last possible moment.
Hutier put special emphasis on the use of light, rapid infantry units—shock troops called Sturmbattaillon (Storm Battalions)—to penetrate the enemy lines at various weak points and to ensure that the ability to maneuver would be retained. The shock troops would rapidly build up local superiority at various places along the front, while, in the meantime, artillery support was nimbly shifted from fire directed against enemy artillery positions to fire directed in support of the infantry advance. The Germans called this flexible use of artillery the Feuerwalz, or fire waltz.
Stunned by the rapid German success at Riga, the awestruck Allies dubbed the enemy general’s technique “Hutier tactics.” The Russian Twelfth Army crumbled and ran from the field in utter panic.
The Bolshevik Revolution
The panic at Riga reflected the chaos that prevailed in the rest of Russia. In October 1917, Lenin and his chief lieutenant, Leon Trotsky, led the Bolsheviks in the second revolution of the year, a virtually bloodless coup that toppled the Provisional Government and transformed Russia into a communist state.
The Treaties of Brest-Litovsk
Among the very first acts of the new government was the conclusion of a “separate peace” with Berlin, which resulted in an immediate armistice on December 15, 1917, formalized the following year by the two Treaties of Brest-Litovsk. The Ukrainian Republic signed first, on February 9, 1918, but Soviet Russia delayed until ruthless German advances against undefended territory finally moved Lenin’s hand. He signed on March 3.
The treaties not only took Russia out of the war, thereby freeing tens of thousands of German troops for service on the Western Front, but they also delivered either to German occupation or into the hands of newly created German puppet governments Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic Provinces, Finland, and the Ukraine.
—Vladimir I. Lenin, speech, 1920
For Russia, Brest-Litovsk was total defeat. As Baron von Kühlmann, one of the German treaty negotiators, wryly remarked, “The only choice they have is as to what sort of sauce they shall be eaten with.” For Germany, it was the first major breakthrough of the war. And for the Western Allies, Brest-Litovsk meant facing a reinvigorated enemy who no longer had to watch his back.
The Least You Need to Know
- By 1917, despair over the course of the war caused major shake-ups in the Allied leadership.
- The disastrous failure of Robert Nivelle’s offensive on the Western Front drove a large portion of the French army to mutiny.
- After the failure of the Nivelle Offensive, Henri Philippe Pétain replaced Nivelle as French general in chief and adopted a defensive posture as Britain’s General Douglas Haig led a costly, fruitless offensive in Flanders.
- After the Bolshevik Revolution, the new communist government made a “separate peace” with the Central Powers, yielding much territory to Germany and taking Russia out of the war.