Howard WWI

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World War One: The Crisis in European History--The Role of the Military Historian

Author(s): Michael HowardSource: The Journal of Military History, Vol. 57, No. 5, Special Issue: Proceedings of theSymposium on "The History of War as Part of General History" at the Institute forAdvanced Studies, Princeton, New Jersey (Oct., 1993), pp. 127-138Published by: Society for Military HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2951809.Accessed: 12/07/2011 15:22

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2/13

World

War

One:

The Crisis

in

European History

The

Role of

the Military

Historian

Michael Howard

ILITARY

history-by which I mean the

history

of

armed

forces

and their

operations

of

war-can no more be

separated

from

general historythan can the activityof war itself fromthe societies that

engage

in

it.

But the

association

can

be

of

varying

degrees

of

intimacy.

At one

extreme

are the societies of

classical

antiquity

which

were so

constantly engaged

in

war that their

general

history

was all

effectively

military history. At the other are

those periods

when the armed

forces of

a

state and

their

campaigns

have

seemed

sufficiently

remote from

the

concerns

of

society as a

whole

for

their activities

to

form the

object

of a

discrete and

specialized

study.

Such

was the case in

eighteenth-centuryEurope,

the

age par excel-

lence of

Limited

War,

when the

antimilitaristic

mind-set of the

Enligh-

tenment was

formed

in

France, Britain,

and the United States

among

a

class

of

philosophes

who

saw war as the redundant

activity

of

an

obsolescent

feudal ruling class. Events

in

Europe

between 1789

and

1815 forced some

readjustment in

such views by continental

thinkers,

but

even the

Napoleonic warshadbeen

very largely

foughtby gorgeously

uniformed

specialists,

often

in

regions

remote

from the main

centers

of

population-certainly remote

from

Britain and the United States.

For Victorian England military affairs were literally peripheral. Wars

were

fought by small

professional forces a

long way

from

home.

Military history, however

popular,

was not a matter that

attracted

the

attention

of

serious

scholars.

The

army

itself was

a

marginal

element

in

society

and its

activities

a

matter

of

only intermittent

interest. The

navy

was

even more

peripheral,

but

although

no

one underrated

its

impor-

The

.ournal

of

Military History

SPECIAL

ISSUIE

57

(Octoher 1993):

127-38

?

Societv for

Militarv

I

istorv

127


3/13

MICHAELHOWARD

tance, it had to

await

the era

of Alfred

Thayer

Mahan for

any

serious

study

of

its

activities.

On

the

Continent,

events took a

somewhat different course. There

the

Napoleonic Wars had

been

formative

and

central,

and their

historians,

whether Frenchmen like Adolphe Thiers or Germans such as Heinrich

von

Treitschke,

had

naturally

to

give

military

history pride

of

place.

But

by the end of

the

century, even in

Germany,

academic scholars were

happy

to

leave

the

study

of

military

affairs

to

the

specialists

of

the

General Staff

whose interest in it

was

primarily

didactic;

and

if,

like

Hans

Delbriick,

they were

rash

enough

to

trespass

on

that

private

territory, they

received

very rough

treatment indeed.'

The First

World War

changed

all

that. Clausewitz

had

seen

in

the

Revolutionary

Wars of

his era the

first

appearance

of

Absolute

War,

and

for

someone

brought

up

amid

the

assumptions

of

the

eighteenth

century

it

was

a

reasonable

judgement

to make. But

if

Absolute War

meant

the

mobilization of all

national resources

in a

fight

to

destruction,

the difference between the

wars

of

the

revolution and the

Limited

Wars

of

the

immediate

past

was

minimal. The states

of

Europe-even

Napoleonic

France-simply

did

not

have the

capacity

to mobilize

their

resources

for

a

total

conflict,

and vast

areas of

the

continent

must

have remained unaffected

by

the

Napoleonic

campaigns.

Absolute War became possible only when, as happened in nineteenth-

century Europe,

the

state acquired

the

bureaucratic

structure, the

transportation

networks,

and the

communication

systems that

gave it

the

capacity to

mobilize its

manpower

and

industrial

potential for

military

purposes,

together with

the ability,

through

taxation and

loans,

to

finance a

prolonged

struggle. It

was then that

war

became absolute,

or

total, in

an

unprecedented

sense. Then

also

the military and

their

activities

ceased to

enjoy the

kind of

autonomy

that had

given the

concept of

military history

its

peculiar

legitimacy.

Once war was

conducted by

governments rather

than by

generals and

fought

by-and

against-entire

peoples rather

than by

professional

armies,

the boundary

between military

and

general

history

became very

difficult to

trace.

The

one

merged almost

imperceptibly into

the

other.

It

is

indeed

almost absurd

to

categorize the

conflict of

1914-18 as if

it

were just

another war

between

European

states and

their

auxiliaries

on

the

model

of

those of

Louis

XIV or

Napoleon or

Bismarck; a

simple

clash

of

the

Great

Powers to settle the

balance between

them.

Both at

the time and since, The Great War was widely seen as a cataclysm

resulting

from the

interplay of

forces almost

beyond human

control; a

World

Crisis

(the term

used

by Winston

Churchill as

the title

for his

1.

Arden Bucholz,

Hans

Delbruck

and the

German

Military

Establishment

(Iowa City,

1989).

128

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World War One: The Crisis in European History

own history of the war, of which the

first

volume

appeared

in

1923)2

that transformed European society and shattered its states

system,

destroying four great empires and

provoking revolutionary upheavals

whose effects are still working themselves out. It was this sense of the

almost cosmic dimension of the conflict that led to such widespread

dissatisfaction with the simplistic

war-guilt explanations

and accusa-

tions

that

were

current

after

the war;

a dissatisfaction

that was

not

created,

however

much

it

may have been

exploited, by

German

historical

revisionism, and has not been

entirely laid to rest by the controversy

over the work of Fritz Fischer.3 Few

historians today

are

content

to

seek

the

causes

of

the war in

the diplomatic archives,

or

even

in

the

military

plans

of

the Great Powers. Many, if not indeed

most,

now

interpret

it as

part of a general crisis-economic, social and cultural-affecting the

whole

of

European society at the turn of the

century.

The search for

the causes

of

the

war

will

no

doubt continue at

various levels of explanation for as

long as historians write. But it is

doubtful

whether the question would be so

hotly debated

if

the war had

not

had such far-reaching social,

economic, and political consequences;

if it had been fought in a different manner, with a different outcome; if

it had ended before the exhaustion of the

participants

and the

entry

of

the United

States. And

for

an explanation

of

why

the war took the

course that it

did, why it lasted

for

so

long,

and

why

no

decision

was

reached on the battlefield, we have to consult the military historians.

Although a vast amount of

military history has been written

about

the First World

War,

I

do not know of

any single satisfactory operational

account

of

it.

(I

do

not,

incidentally,

know

of

a

single satisfactory

general account

of

the war itself, but that is more understandable.)

The

reason is

clear; it is extraordinarily

difficult

to

treat

the

military aspects

of this war in

the discrete fashion

that traditional

military

historians

prefer and their readers expect.

Individual campaigns

or battles can be

insulated and

described: the Battles

of the

Marne

and

of

Verdun,

of

Tannenberg

and of

Caporetto, the Dardanelles and the Palestine

cam-

paigns, provide examples. But

it is difficult to do this unless we take

them out

of

a

highly complex

context,

without

which

they

have

in

themselves

very little significance.

With the

possible exception

of

the

Battle of the Marne (which was not a true battle at all) these were all

episodes

in

the

war,

rather than

decisive

turning points

such as

Austerlitz,

Trafalgar,

or

Sedan.

2.

Winston

S.

Churchill,

The

World

Crisis

(London,

1923).

3.

Fritz

Fischer,

Germany's

War

Aims

in

World

War

I

(New

York,

1967).

MILITARY HISTORY

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5/13

MICHAEL

HOWARD

Military historians are most at home when dealing with strategies of

manoeuvre; the operations of armed forces involved in a series of

engagements leading up to decisive encounters. In this respect the

Second World War provides a far happier hunting ground

for

the

military historian than does the First. Although that war was (for the

Europeans at least) quite as total as the First World War-in some

respects considerably more-its course was determined by a series of

military operations directed according to rational strategic concepts;

operations each of which had a clearly defined outcome, with unambig-

uous winners

and losers.

The

First World War

was

not

like

that,

and

military historians can at least help to explain why it was not.

Few people doubted in 1914 that a long war would be shattering for

European society. The populations

of Western

Europe

were

believed

by

their

rulers to

be

highly

volatile.

Socialism

was

rife,

labor strikes

were

endemic,

and

for

the

past

decade the Second

International

had

been

mounting increasingly effective demonstrations against

war. Even if

the

people themselves initially supported

a

war,

their

capacity

to endure

the

prolonged disruption

and

hardship

that war

would

bring

in

its wake

was a matter of widespread doubt. The former Chief of the German

General Staff, Graf Alfred von Schlieffen, expressed

this

in

his famous

article

of 1909 when

he wrote

that a

strategy

of

attrition

is not

feasible

when it requires the support of millions (of men)

and milliards

(of

marks).

4

It was this prospect

that

made

it

so important

to

keep

the war

short, and drove military

leaders to

adopt strategies

that

optimized

rapid operational success.

The

much-despised

Cult

of

the Offensive

was less a

question

of

irrational

vitalism,5

as it

has so often

been

depicted, than

of

perceived operational necessity. Military

commanders

mobilized the largest forces of which they were capable

and

directed

them so

as

to

bring

their adversaries to battle

under the

most

favorable

possible

circumstances

in order to

force

a clear

and victorious decision.

4.

Reprinted from the Deutsche

Revue of

January

1909 in Graf

Alfred von

Schlieffen, Gesammelte

Schriften

(Berlin, 1913), 1: 11-22.

5.

The idea

that the cult of the

offensive

was

in

itself irrational had

been

examined and largely

endorsed by

Jack Snyder, The

Ideology of

the

Offensive:

Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Cornell, 1984). In fact

German

offensives were uniformly

successful

throughout 1914 and

1915,

and

continued to be

so on the Eastern,

Southeastern,

and Southern fronts

in

1916

and

1917.

French,

Russian, and Austrian

failures

were due less to mistaken

concepts

than

to sheer

operational

inefficiency. See

Douglas

Porch,

The March

to

the

Marne:

The

French

Army,

1870-1914

(Cambridge,

1981),

and Norman

Stone,

The

Eastern

Front,

1914-191 7

(London, 1975).

130 SPECIAL ISSUE

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World

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European History

They were of course working on the

assumption that their

adversaries

could

be brought to battle, and that

the battles

would

be at

least as

decisive as in

previous wars. As we know, the

battles did not prove

decisive, when indeed

they

were

fought at all; so by the end

of

1914,

although European armies between them had already suffered nearly a

million casualties,

the war remained un-won.

In

1915 the German High

Command still saw no reason to

despair

of

the traditional

strategy of manoeuvre bringing about

a decision, even

if

it took longer than expected.

True, Erich von

Falkenhayn, the Chief

of

the German

General Staff, denied to the commanders on

the Eastern

Front, Ludendorff

and von

Hindenburg, the opportunity they demanded

of

repeating the

Schlieffen Plan

against the Russians with another huge

battle of encirclement; but none the less their operations in 1915

rescued the

Austrians, eliminated all Russian threat to

German territory,

and

drew the

Western

powers into a series of fruitless offensives in

an

effort

to relieve

pressure

on

their

allies.

But another

year went by

without a decision; Italy had entered

the war against Germany, and the

Western allies were

still undefeated. Britain had

hardly begun to draw

on

her huge resources and those

made available to

her by the United

States. Could a

traditional strategy of manoeuvre now

be as effective on

the

Western

Front

as

it

had

been

in

the East?

Von Falkenhayn thought not.6 He saw no reason why the Western

allies

should

not

be able to

repel

a

German

attack

on

their

heavily

fortified positions

as effectively as the Germans had resisted their

own

throughout

the

previous year.

So

he revived

the

concept

of

attrition,

the

Ermattungsstrategie

that

von

Schlieffen had dismissed

as

impossible.

German society had shown itself

unexpectedly stalwart

over the past

year

under the strain of a

prolonged

war,

but he believed

the

French

to

be more

vulnerable. The French

army

must be

encouraged

to

bleed

itself

to death by

being compelled to recapture

an

objective

that the

Germans had

been able

to

seize at

comparatively

low

cost. The

objective

would be

the fortress

of

Verdun,

a

name hallowed

in

the

military history

of

France.

The low

cost

would

be achieved

by

a

massive use

of

heavy

artillery.

The ultimate

target

was

the

will of the

French

people

to

continue the

war.

Von

Falkenhayn's

strategy

did

not

work;

not

because it failed

to

inflict

nearly lethal

damage upon

the French

army,

which

it

did,

but

because

the Germans

had as

yet

failed

to

develop

an

operational strategy

that

enabled them to do this without suffering equal losses themselves. The

same

difficulty

was

to

confront the

Western allies when

they

launched

their

offensive on the Somme later in

the summer

of 1916. The

British

6. Erich von Falkenhayn,

General Headquarters and its Critical

Decisions,

1914-1916 (London, 1921).

MILITARY

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7/13

MICHAEL

HIOWARD

Commander

in

Chief, Sir

Douglas

Haig,

initially believed

that

this

attack might

break the

strategic

deadlock and

restore battlefield

mobility,

but his

subordinates

were more skeptical; and even

Haig soon

accepted

that this was

a

battle

of

attrition

fought

to inflict

losses on the

enemy

rather than to gain ground; a battle to be prolonged until the late

autumn and

renewed the

following year.7

The

main instrument for

infliction

of

such

losses, on the Somme as

at

Verdun, was not so much

manpower as

artillery.

This

required

the

mobilization

not

only

of

manpower

but

of

industry,

and the

reordering

of

all

domestic

priorities to produce guns and

ammunition

on

the

enormous scale

requisite for

military

needs. The

British,

once

it

became

evident at the

end of 1914

that there was

to

be

no

rapid operational

decision

in

the

field, had

already begun

such a

reordering

in 1915 with

the creation of a

Ministry

for

Munitions under the

dynamic

leadership

of David

Lloyd George-a

reordering

that in

its

turn

transformed

labor

relations and

brought working-class

leaders

into full

partnership

in

the

running

of

the

war.

The

Germans followed suit the

following year

with

the

Hindenburg

Programme,

when

the scale

of

the Materielschlacht in

which

they

had

involved themselves became clear. Thus

by

the end

of

1916

the search

for

victory on the battlefield

was

resulting

in

nothing

less than

the social and

political

transformation of

the

belligerent

societies.8 Not only the armies but the peoples of Europe were involved

in a total

war; one whose strains did

eventually precipitate

the revolutions

so

gloomily anticipated

before

1914. Even the victors

were

to

emerge

so

badly traumatized that

they

were unable to assume the

subsequent

burden of

creating

a

more stable

European,

let alone World Order.

Counterfactual history is a

more legitimate

activity for military

historians

than for most. It is their

business to

explain why commanders

took

certain

decisions

and to trace

their

consequences. In evaluating

them, they have to

assume that

those commanders might

have taken

other

decisions, which

would have

had different consequences.

It is thus

reasonable for

them to

ask what might have

happened in the

First World

War

if

the

military

leaders had taken

different decisions; if

their opera-

tional

strategies had

been more

successful, and they had not

found it

7. On this, see particularly Trevor Wilson and Robin Prior, Command on the

Western Front:

The

Military Career

of Sir

Henry

Rawlinson, 1914-1918

(Oxford,

1992).

8. For

the

impact of

military

requirements on

social change

see, for

Britain,

Trevor

Wilson,

The

Myriad Faces

of

War:

Britain

and the

Great

War,

1914-1918

(Cambridge, 1986). For

Germany, see G.

D.

Feldman,

Army,

Industry and Labor

in

Germany,

1914-191 8

(Princeton, 1966).

132 SPECIAL

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World War One: The

Crisis in

European

History

necessary to adopt a

strategy of

attrition.

With

greater

military

skill,

might the war

have been fought

and

won

without bringing

about the

collapse

of

European society?

Such

certainly

was

the

assumption

of

postwar critics who

accused

the

younger von Moltke

of

having

watered

down the Schlieffen Plan; or of British Easterners like Winston

Churchill and

David

Lloyd George who argued

that a reinforcement

of

other

theaters

might have avoided

the deadlock

on the Western

Front;

or of

analysts

like Liddell

Hart

who

believed

that deadlock could

have

been broken

by more skilful

tactics.9 Behind

such criticism

lies

the

assumption

that alternative

strategic

decisions

or

superior

operational

skills

might

have

avoided deadlock, have

brought

about decision

without

catastrophe, and so

saved

the old

European

order from revolution

and

collapse. Upon

such

military assessments there

thus

hang immense

political

consequences.

The most

plausible of these

hypotheses

concerns

the

Schlieffen

Plan.

Most

historians today write on

the

assumption

that the

Schlieffen

Plan

was foredoomed to

failure, and

that the offensive

strategies

of

1914

were

in

themselves irrational. Neither

hypothesis is

self-evident. We

will

not

enter here

into the

question,

whether the

plan

would have

been

more

successful

if

Schlieffen's

original

instructions had been

more

closely followed.10

Certainly

even as

modified

in 1914

it

was such

a

grandiose and mechanistic affair that it demanded great good fortune

to

succeed

in

its

totality.

But whatever

variant

of it was

adopted,

it

called

for

commanders whose

nerve

was

stronger than

that

of

their

adversaries,

and

who

had the

capacity

to

improvise

when

things

started

to

go

wrong,

as almost

certainly they

would-and

as

in

fact

they

had

in 1870.

Given

such

commanders,

could

German

strategy

not have been

adjusted

to

meet

unexpected circumstances, as it

had been

in

that

earlier

war,

and

still

achieved

its

goals,

if

by

rather

different

means?

There was

no

lack of such

enterprising officers

in

the

higher

ranks

of

the

German

army.

We

may

wonder

what

might

have

happened,

for

example,

if

Ludendorff

had

been

entrusted

in

September

1914

with the

kind of

responsibilities

on

the Western Front

that

he

was instead

given

in

the

East.

If

the German armies

had continued to

advance,

pushing

the French

away

from

Paris

and

detaching

the

minimum

force

necessary

to

contain

the French Sixth

Army

and the B.E.F. on

their

right flank,

might

they

not still

have presented their

political masters with

a

decisive

operational

victory that would

have knocked France out of the

war,

brought Russia to the peace table, left Britain isolated, and achieved the

mastery

of

Europe as

decisively as did their

successors

twenty-five

years

9.

Churchill,

World Crisis;

David

Lloyd

George, War

Memoirs

(London, 1936);

B.

H.

Liddell Hart,

History

of the

World

War (London,

1934).

10.

Gerhard Ritter,

The

Schlieffen Plan:

Critique of

a

Myth

(London,

1958).

MILITARY HISTORY

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MICHAEL

HIOWARD

later?

What

if

Joffre

had been as neurotic as von

Moltke,

or von Moltke

as

phlegmatic and adaptable as

Joffre?

But

this was probably the last

chance for

either side to achieve an

operational decision

on so

Napoleonic a scale. Although, as

we

have

seen, another year was to pass before the belligerents consciously

adopted

attritional

strategies, none

of

their operational

options

in

1915

held out

comparable

hope of such rapid and total

success. Neither side

had yet

developed the techniques that would make

breakthrough possible

on the

Western Front

where

alone

decisive

military success

could

bring

immediate

political results; while the

strategical

alternatives

offered

by

Churchill

and

the

Easterners

in

London-even a

successful Dardanelles

campaign-merely

offered the option of

an equally long

war,

if one

fought under

marginally more favorable conditions for

the Allies.

Military historians may

reasonably suggest

that Germany did stand

a

good chance of

achieving

decisive victory

in

the field in

1914,

and

that

under

more enterprising

commanders she

might

well have

done

so. But

they are not in

a position to answer the

question,

whether

such a

victory

would have

brought about peace; above

all, a peace

that might

have

preserved the old

order

in

Europe. For that we have

to

turn

to the

general

historian, who has studied

the nature

of

the

belligerent societies

and

the

issues that

appeared to be at stake.

The first point that such a historian is likely to make is that Germany

in 1914

was

no

longer

controlled by

a

Bismarck concerned with

fighting

a limited

war

and then

reconstructing

a viable balance of

power.

The

famous

September

Programme

of 1914

indicates

the

peace

terms

that the German

ruling

classes intended

to

impose

on

their defeated

adversaries.11

France would have been reduced

to

the status of

Italy,

if

not of

Spain.

The Habsburg

Monarchy would

have

survived,

but

its

position

in

the

Balkans would

have

been

explicitly

underwritten

by

German economic and

military power. Russia would have been enfeebled

by the loss of

her western provinces.

The

Continent

would,

in

fact, have

been subjected to a

German

hegemony

almost as total

as

that of

Napoleon.

Britain,

had she continued to

fight,

would

have

done

so

alone, and

Germany

could

have

renewed the naval race

against

her

under

conditions

of

considerable

advantage.

The

British

leadership

in 1914

would

thus have been

even

less

likely

than

were their

successors

in 1940 to

accept

any

kind

of

compromise

peace:

not

that

the German

leadership

of 1914

was

likely

to

have

offered one. For a significant number of influential Germans, Britain

was the

preferred

adversary, and her humiliation the ultimate

object

of

the

entire

war. However

complete

the German

victory

by land,

a

11. Fischer, Germany's War Aims; Hans

W.

Gatzke, Germany's

Drive to

the

West (Baltimore, 1950).

134

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prolonged Napoleonic conflict with Britain was still inevitable.

So

long

as the British could preserve their sea power, they

could survive

as

they

had survived in the past and, they confidently

believed, ultimately

win

as they had won

in

the past.

To judge the prospects for such survival, we turn to the naval

historians. In 1914 the general expectation was that the issue at sea,

like that on land, would be settled by an

immediate operational decision

brought about by a clash of battlefleets. When

it was not, both sides

settled into a

conflict

of

attrition

at

sea

as

they

were

soon

to

do on

land;

but it was a conflict of a kind with which naval

strategists were more

familiar than

were military.

The

British

had

prepared

for

a

strategy

of

blockade, and felt comfortable with it. But they

did not feel comfortable

for very long.12 Submarine warfare introduced

a new operational

element with

which they found themselves quite

unable

to

cope.

After two years of successful submarine warfare,

the German High

Command believed, at the end of 1916, that

they had

in

their hands a

war-winning weapon, restraints on whose use were purely political.

Naval historians might be able to tell us what

the prospects might

have

been of submarine war successfully bringing

Britain to terms if the

United States had not entered the conflict. But to explain why

the

German government decided to risk American

hostility at all, we have

to turn back to the political historian who will explain the domestic

situation

in

Germany

in

the autumn

of

1916,

and the

part

that this

played

in

the German government's

decision

to

adopt unrestricted

submarine warfare and defy the

United States.13 Certainly

no

purely

military specialist can explain

the

psychology

of

the people who,

in full

awareness

of the risks

involved,

took

a

decision that was

in the

long

run

to

prove

so

catastrophic.

But

in

any

event

by

1917 it

was probably

too late for a German

victory to prevent the social disintegration

of at least Eastern Europe.

The Russian Revolution

was imminent, and

with the death of the Emperor

Franz Josef in December 1916 the Habsburg Monarchy was widely

regarded as unrescuable.

Within

Germany

itself, the Reichstag Peace

Resolution

of

summer

1917

showed

that

political

disintegration

had

gone so far that even total military victory could

not

have prevented

12.

Avner Offer,

The First World War: An

Agrarian

Interpretation (Oxford,

1989). Offner's interpretation, based as it is on the mind-set of the Britishruling

classes,

seems to me

overly subtle. British

blockade

strategy in fact, followed

traditional

lines that

required little

adjustment to deal with the

special circumstances

of

the

First

World War.

13. This has in

fact been done

by Gerhard Ritter in Vol.

3 of his

study The

Sword and

the

Sceptre: The Problem of

Militarism in

Germany,

4

vols. (Coral

Gables,

Fla., 1969-73).

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HISTORY

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MICHIAEL

OWARD

vast

postwar political

turmoil. The

effects of

two

years

of

attritional

strategy

were

irreversible,

irrespective of who now won

the

war.

In

dealing

with

that attritional

strategy,

military

historians

have on

the whole

been

as

unhappy

as the

commanders

whose

operations

they

have

described.

For the

latter,

there was

always

a

large measure of

ambiguity. Von

Falkenhayn at Verdun

found

it

impossible

to

translate

his

strategic concept of

inflicting

crippling

losses

on

the French

while

minimizing

those of

the

Germans into

operational

reality.

Indeed, he

failed to

make

his

subordinate

commanders

understand the nature

of

his

object

at

all.14

In

the

same way, as

we

have already

seen,

there was

within the

British

High

Command

a

fundamental

ambiguity

about

the

object of

the Battle of

the

Somme, as

indeed

about

most of the

further

offensives on

the

Western Front.

Most

of the

army

commanders con-

cerned,

especially Rawlinson

and

Plumer, saw

the

offensives as

aiming

at

limited

objectives

to be

gained by

maximum

use of

firepower

in

order

gradually

to erode

enemy

strength

with

minimal

losses to

the

attackers.15

But

Haig,

while

paying

lip-service to

these

objectives, still

thought in

terms

of an

operational strategy

aimed

at seizing

military

objectives far behind the lines. And indeed it is difficult for field com-

manders to

devise

plans and to

motivate their

troops

without

being

given

some

kind of

operational

objective. It

is not easy

to

accept the

harsh

fact that

the

process of

fighting

in itself and

the

killing

off

of

the

enemy

is

more

important

than

any

physical objective

to

be

attained.

For

whatever

reason, British

military

historians

describing the

Battle

of

the

Somme,

and indeed

the

fighting on the

Western Front

in

general,

have

found it

difficult to

focus on an

analysis

of

the operations

themselves.

They

have let

themselves be

diverted,

either upwards to

a discussion of

high

strategy and

a

debate over

the rationale for

those

operations;

or

downward,

to

compiling battlefield memoirs

and

analyzing

the

nature

of

trench

warfare.

It is only

during

the last ten

years

or so that

we

have

seen

serious

operational

analyses,

focussing

on

the technical

problems

as

they presented

themselves

to

commanders

at different

levels,

by

historians such

as

the

Canadian T. H.

Travers

and

the

Australians

Trevor

Wilson

and Robin

Prior.16

They

have

given

us

a far

deeper

understanding

than have

any previous historians

of the

true

nature

of

those campaigns, of the varying degree of competence of the generals

14.

See

Alistair

Horne, The

Price of

Glory:

Verdun,

1916

(New

York,

1978).

15. See

Wilson and

Prior,

Command

on

the

Western

Front.

16.

Ibid.

T. H.

Travers,

The

Killing

Ground: The

British

Army, the

Western

Front

and the

Emergence

of

Modern

Warfare,

1900-1918 (New

York,

1987).

136

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World War One: The Crisis in European

History

concerned, and of the

enormous organizational

complexity

involved in

their planning and execution.

After

reading

them we

can better

appre-

ciate the

professional qualities, as well as the cultural

and

other limita-

tions,

of the

commanders involved.

But even these works still leave open the question: how far did the

attacks

on

the Western Front achieve their

objective

in

terms

of

the

attrition they

inflicted?

A

study

of

success

or

failure

in

terms

of

ground

gained

or

comparative casualties suffered-a matter over

which

the

British official

historians agonized

for

years-does not

in

itself get us

very far. Behind such statistics lie the

deeper questions, whether

compar-

able casualties

could

have been

inflicted with less

cost;

whether

greater

operational

skill

might have

rendered it

unnecessary

to resort

to such a

strategy

at

all;

and-a

question

that takes us

beyond

the

competence

of

military

historians

as

such-precisely

what role

this attrition on the

battlefield played in the overall

weakening of the Central Powers and in

the eventual

collapse of their societies.

For while

the Western allies, in

particular the British, were exhausting

themselves by

a

strategy of attrition, the

Germans were

reinventing

a

strategy

of

manoeuvre;

or

rather,

tactics that

made

such a

strategy

once

more

possible.

In

the

spring

offensives of 1918

they

used them

to

shatter the

Allied lines

in

the West.

Again,

we

look

to

military historians

to explain how they did this and, yet more important, why the Allies

had

not

developed such tactics sooner, and rendered

unnecessary

the

bloodletting

of

1916 and 1917. But here again, the full explanation

cannot be

provided

by the military historian.

It

requires

a

profounder

understanding of

the nature

of

German

society and

that of

its

adver-

saries.

7

Even

so,

a final

paradox

remains.

Why

did Ludendorff

not

use

his

rediscovered

operational skills in a true strategy

of

manoeuvre

directed

against

a

key objective such as Paris,

or

Allied communications with the

Channel ports?

Why instead did he launch that series

of

uncoordinated

attacks with

the

general attritional objective

of

weakening

Allied morale

and

making

them

friedensbereit, ready

for

peace? Why

did he

not

revert

to the

traditional

operational goal

of

using

his forces

to obtain

decisive

victory

in

the

field,

when it

appeared,

for the first time since

1914,

to

lie

in

his power? The explanation

for

that decision

perhaps

also

lies

beyond the competence

of

the purely

military

historian.

As

for

the final Allied offensives of

1918, these are treated all

too

often in histories of the war (though not of course by Americans) as a

17. Bruce Gudmundsson, Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German

Army,

1900-1918

(New York, 1989).

See also Michael

Geyer,

German

Strategy

in

the Age

of

Machine Warfare, 1914-1945,

in

Peter Paret, ed.,

Makers

of Modern

Strategyfrom Machiavelli

to

the Nuclear Age (Princeton, 1986).

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MICHAELHOWARD

kind

of

anticlimax after the drama

of

the failed German offensives; a

mere following up of an exhausted enemy, rather than the skilful

exercise

of

hard-won skills

by armies that had painfully learned their

trade

over the

past four years and

were

now being commanded with

considerable competence. Even so, in spite of their successes, those

armies

still

did not achieve a clear operational decision

in

the field; and

to

assess the

impact

of

their victories on German

public opinion, on the

morale

of

the German forces, and on the decisions of the German High

Command, we have to turn away yet again from the sphere of military

history and ask the general historian to tell us about developments on

the domestic front. The analysis of the causes

of

Germany's collapse

demands

an

expertise at least as far-ranging as does that

of

the causes

of

the

war itself.18

We can end only with the banal conclusion that

in

dealing with a

conflict

as

total in its ramifications

as the First World

War

the

military

historian

can

operate only

as

part

of a

team; playing

a central

and

indispensable role,

but

providing explanations

that

themselves are

only

partial

and

need to be seen in a far broader context than the operational

activities

they describe. Indeed

a

fully adequate history

of

that

war can

probably only be written by a general historian who has taken the

trouble to

acquire

as full an

expertise

in

military

and

naval affairs as

he

possesses in political, social and economic matters. In the opinion of

the

present writer,

such a

maestro has yet to be

found.

18.

There are

of course

many

studies of this. The

starting

point must be

the

documentary collection

by

R.

H.

Lutz,

The Fall

of

the German

Empire

1914-1918,

2 vols.

(New York,

1969).

138

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