The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice. John Bourne

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СКАЧАТЬ (written by Wilfred Josephs), its contemporary film (some of it now known to be fake) showing men ‘going over the top’ and dying ‘on the old barbed wire’, its still photographs of trenches deep in water and stretcher-bearers carrying wounded men through thigh-deep mud, its interviews with veterans, its extracts from contemporary memoirs, conspired to reinforce an image of the war that was completely at odds with the script of Correlli Barnett and John Terraine. The stage production of Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War (1963) (followed by Richard Attenborough’s film version in 1969), and A. J. P. Taylor’s wonderfully readable, witty and damning The First World War: An Illustrated History (1963)¹⁶ further discouraged the revisionist cause.

      By the time I went to university, in 1967, there was a clear public consensus. The First World War was avoidable; the Second was not. The First World War was not really about anything, or not about anything important; the Second World War was about national survival at home and the defeat of a vile tyranny abroad. The First World War was hopelessly mismanaged by incompetent generals whose aristocratic, rural backgrounds ill fitted them to come to terms with industrialised war; the Second World War was well run by generals who understood technology, allowing them to fight a war of manoeuvre that avoided costly battles of attrition. The outcome of the First World War was futile, merely creating circumstances in which political extremism would fester, making another war inevitable; the outcome of the Second World War, sanctified by discovery of the Nazi death camps, was not only a military but also a moral triumph.

      The differences embraced not only the origins, purposes, conduct and outcomes of the wars but also the ways in which they were experienced by ordinary soldiers. Trench warfare on the Western Front in the First World War has come to be regarded as the epitome of human suffering and degradation, a sort of hell on earth. Two of the books on the First World War recommended as further reading at the foot of this chapter contain the word ‘hell’ in their titles. This is rarely the case with books on the Second World War. The implication is that the business of soldiering in the Second World War was easier. Only after many conversations with veterans of both wars did I discover the extent to which they themselves often felt trapped by these stereotypes. People only wanted to learn from First World War veterans how ‘terrible’ it was, and from Second World War veterans how ‘grand’.

      How different was the experience of ordinary British soldiers at ‘the sharp end’ in the two World Wars? Some parameters need to be set. The First World War is unique in British history. It is the only war in which the British Army was engaged with the main forces of the main enemy virtually from the first day of the war until the last. The British Army mobilised on 5 August 1914. The first soldier to be killed, Private John Parr (4th Battalion Middlesex Regiment), died on 21 August. Two days later the British Expeditionary Force blundered into the German Army at the battle of Mons. The two armies remained in contact for the rest of the war. This is very different from the Second World War. Arguably, the British Army only faced the main forces of the main enemy once – and briefly – in 1940. British civilian casualties were higher than military ones until after the invasion of Europe on 6 June 1944. The campaigns fought by the British in Eritrea, in the Western Desert, in Crete, even – to some extent – in Italy, were what Gary Sheffield describes later in this book as ‘big small wars’. From a German perspective, they were all essentially sideshows. The real big war was on the Eastern Front and, from 1944, in north-west Europe. The casualties on the Eastern Front, and the savagery of the fighting there, were far more severe than those of the Western Front in the First World War. British casualty rates in north-west Europe in 1944 and 1945 were comparable with those suffered in the infamous ‘attrition’ battles on the Somme and at Third Ypres that haunt the British national memory. They appear to have been even higher for officers.¹⁷

      There is a persistent, and simplistic, popular view that trench warfare caused high casualties and that the absence of trench warfare in the Second World War, the result of superior technology, accounts for lower (British) casualties. This view needs to be ‘unpacked’.

      First, trench warfare developed in order to reduce casualties. The early battles of the First World War were closer to those of Napoleonic times than they were to the battles of 1916 onwards. Vast numbers of men, sometimes gaudily dressed (especially in the French Army), deployed into the open, rolling fields of northern France, where they met the withering fire of smokeless, breech-loading rifles, machine-guns and quick-firing rifled cannon (mostly firing shrapnel, deadly against troops in the open). Casualties were enormous. The decision to ‘dig in’, from which trench warfare evolved, was made through necessity by soldiers themselves. If they had not done this, it is difficult to see how the war could have been sustained for very long. The trench system, which began to be apparent from as early as September 1914, was routinised with remarkable speed. It was recognised that troops should spend only a limited amount of time there and that only a limited number should be located in the very front line. Regular systems of relief and rotation were organised, both into and out of and within the trench system. Although trench conditions were often extremely unpleasant, troops of all sides did not submit to them passively. They did their best to make themselves comfortable. Part of the experience of war, in both World Wars (perhaps in all wars), is learning how to achieve reasonable comfort in adversity. Official and semi-official campaigns were launched at home to provide ‘comforts’ for the troops. Vast masses of material were brought in to make the trenches more habitable. A single square mile of trenches contained 900 miles of barbed wire, 6 million sandbags, 1 million cubic feet of timber and 360,000 square feet of corrugated iron.¹⁸ The logistical infrastructure to support this was huge and increasingly sophisticated.¹⁹ Defending the trench system was never cheap. The experience of the 46th (North Midland) Division, the first Territorial division to be deployed to France (in March 1915), is instructive. 46th Division was involved in only three major attacks during the war, at the Hohenzollern Redoubt (13 October 1915), at Gommecourt (1 July 1916) and at Bellenglise (29 September 1918); 13 October 1915 was its worst day in the war. Casualties suffered on those three days account for a significant proportion of the unit total, but by far the majority of its casualties were incurred in the routine of trench-holding, from snipers, shelling, mortars and harassing machine-gun fire. The British Army during the Second World War was rarely subjected to this constant, expensive, piecemeal attrition.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ