L’année de la victoire

Michael Baker 0:34

Back to Unknown Warriors with me, Michael Baker. In this podcast, I want to look at 1918, the last year of the First World War on the Western Front, the year in which the German gamble of the spring offensives failed, leading in the summer and autumn to a renewed Allied push that finally saw the Germans retreating and surrendering in huge numbers. The German collapse culminated in the armistice of November 11th, which ended the fighting on the Western Front. So, a momentous year in the war, yet one that's often been ignored in the popular narrative. I spoke to Peter Hart, oral historian at the Imperial War Museum and the author of many books on the First World War. His latest, entitled The Last Battle, Endgame on the Western Front, 1918, came out to mark the centenary. I started by asking Peter how 1918 had fitted into the British narrative of the Western Front.

Peter Hart 1:50

Until quite recently, it was almost the invisible year. The focus was almost entirely on the Somme and Passchendaele for a while. We've just lived through the centenary, and we see the incredible concentration on Mons. Then we saw Gallipoli, which is a very minor campaign, very interesting but very minor. Then loads on the Somme, but not the Somme campaign, just the first day. Then loads on Third Ypres, but very much concentrated on Passchendaele, on the tragic element. And then it almost disappears. I mean, it's only thanks to the Western Front Association, you know, a fairly geeky group, that there was any celebration of the 8th of August and moving towards British victory. But if you read a lot of books, you're almost surprised how we ever win. It's almost like we're losing, we're losing, we're making mistakes, we're losing, losing, we're all dumb. And then suddenly, oh, we've won. How has that happened? You know, this isn't amongst academic historians. This is more amongst popular historians.

Michael Baker 2:50

So how has 1918, as the year of Allied victory on the Western Front, been put back into the narrative?

Peter Hart 2:56

Well, I'm not pretending to be some massive trailblazer, because I'm not. There are a bunch of academics who've been working very hard. There's now a perception that the war was won by the combined efforts of the British, the French, the Americans and the Belgians. That they employed a whole raft of new measures, which had finally been incorporated into the all-arms battle. And that they first wore down and then defeated the Germans in the field. The Germans are still capable of an extremely strong and virile defence, which can smash you to bits. But it's a little bit crusty. So there's a sort of hard outer surface often. But if you get through that, then you're going to get quite a way until they can next find somewhere to stand again. Their tactics have also changed. And they're heavily reliant on machine guns and artillery. For me, the most important battles are the four battles in four days, which are brilliantly masterminded by Foch, but with Haig as very much his second lieutenant in this, which are the American and French attacks in the Meuse-Argonne area on the 26th September. The very next day, the British attack towards Cambrai. And then the day after that, the French, British and Belgians attack towards Ypres. And then the day after that, they attack towards the St. Quentin Canal. And these four blows are like body blows. I always compare it to like being kicked on the shins, thumped in the chest, giving an uppercut to the jaw, followed by a knee to the bollocks. And it sounds crude, but that is what did for the Germans. And the point was that then there's a phasing. So they never really stop, but they're moving to different parts of the front, different threats. And it gets inside the command loop of the German army. They cannot respond quick enough. The Battle of the Sambre on the 4th of November is the final blow from the British. And that is a huge offensive. I can't remember how many divisions there are. 13 divisions or something. I can't remember. It's as big as the first day on the Somme. And yet it's completely forgotten. Or if it is remembered, it's remembered as the day that Wilfred Owen died. Like all deaths in war, it's a tragedy. But it's not the most important thing that happened that day. The most important thing is it's the last chance the Germans have of stopping us. The Germans had been broken.

Michael Baker 5:17

Today's military historians of the First World War talk a lot about the learning curve and the all-arms battle. At its simplest, the learning curve was the learning process undergone by the British and Allied armies in the course of four years fighting on the Western Front. This process was by no means always consistent and it could be patchy. Nevertheless, the objective was to improve enough to defeat the Germans in the field. By 1918, so the argument now goes, this learning process had begun to emerge as an operational approach which exploited together all the different components of your fighting capability on the ground and in the air. This was the all-arms battle.

Peter Hart 6:03

The thing about the Western Front is it's more like a big dipper than a learning curve. So there's two big dippers running side by side, German and British. There's the French as well, of course, but that's not complicated. And they get up and down depending on different weapons and tactics. Every time the British bring in a new tactic, the Germans respond with their own tactics. But the all-arms battle was the final solution and it is basically the result of hard work. It's actually the whole British army working together. Direction provided by Haig. They have a series of reports after every action, every use of every weapon, to look at it, what went right, what went wrong. And these are put together by people with different shaped heads from the rest of us. You know, very, very bright people. And then they produce the SS series of reports, which are basically how-tos. And over the years they get more and more sophisticated until you end up with the final versions, which is the all-arms battle, which is artillery providing the massive barrages, providing the gas which denies whole areas, machine guns firing in concert, used tactically to deny an area. You know, millions of rounds pouring down from the sky, indirect fire. Lots and lots of mortars. It's got aircraft diving down. It's got tanks flattening wire and taking out command posts. It's got cavalry as the only, only fast-moving resource in the British army, which is why they never got rid of it entirely. No good for charging, but for moving quickly and disrupting. Light tanks, the whippets. And then it's got the British infantryman at the heart of it, who has just massively changed. Wellington would have recognised a 1914 infantryman. Good at firing his rifle. Not very good at coordinated arms at all. 1918, they've got the rifle, which they're now not very good at. In addition, though, they've got 3-inch mortars, the Stokes mortars. They've got heavy mortars. They've got rifle grenades, hand grenades. They've got light machine guns in the form of the Lewis gun, 36 per battalion. The firepower is massively increased. And they're not advancing now in lines. They're advancing in little strings or sausages of sections. And they're under the command, basically. It's become a corporal's war. This is the all-arms battle. Everything working together. And what's more, flexibly, so that when the tanks break down, because they're a one-use weapon almost, you know, the first day, great, second day, a lot break down, third day, nearly all of them are broken down. There's no tanks, so you use the artillery and the mortars in a different way. You use different tactics. You adapt to the situation and what weapons you have in hand. And it's a brilliant system of warfare that's very modern. The assault tactics are very similar to the Second World War. The British Army in 1918 is very modern.

Michael Baker 8:53

What really comes across, once again, is how artillery tactics became key to the war on the Western Front and critical to ultimate Allied success. In particular, the hurricane or creeping barrage, when it worked well, could be highly effective in front of advancing troops.

Peter Hart 9:12

They'd always wanted a hurricane barrage, you know, to keep secrecy. But they didn't have enough guns and ammunition. In the early days, like on the Somme, they have a massive, you know, eight or nine day barrage, which, of course, lets the Germans know they're coming. The introduction of tanks to flatten the wire, coupled with predicted fire, you know, so that you can fire off the map, meant they could just open up a creeping barrage, rolling in front of the infantry, which basically, it doesn't destroy the ground too much, but it does destroy the German ability to resist. And it's all about preventing them from firing their weapons. It may kill them, but the real point is to get them to get their heads down so they're not firing as the British troops are in no man's land. And it's this move on from destruction to prevention from fire that marks something really incredibly important in British artillery tactics.

Michael Baker 10:02

In the all-arms battle, aeroplanes too now came into their own, as more than simply reconnaissance machines. Here's what an RAF pilot of 92 Squadron remembered of the open warfare that accompanied the fast-moving German retreats of autumn 1918.

Citation 10:19

If you could shoot up transport and block the road, that was a fine thing. Personally, I used to try and attack them from the front, not the back. If you could manage to shoot up a couple of transport wagons, the whole road was blocked for some time. Then they were just cold meat. You went along with the bombs, pulled the plug, and away they went.

Peter Hart 10:45

The air war was always important in the sense that it provided the photographic reconnaissance and the artillery observation for the guns in the first three years in the static warfare. But when it moved on to mobile war, they actually become ground attack. In the end, the ground war is what's all important. There's an awful lot of aircraft by 1918. And, you know, they run along firing a machine and dropping their little 20-pound Cooper bombs and generally making a nuisance of themselves. They even support the tanks because tanks cannot and never can and never do face artillery well. Artillery will always defeat tanks. But the aircraft flew ahead to take on the identified gun positions. I mean, it's so sophisticated and so well organised.

Michael Baker 11:27

What's really striking about 1918 is that after years of stalemate, the war on the Western Front suddenly becomes mobile again. Equally dramatic at the end of that year is how rapid is the German collapse. Manpower, the lack of it, was critical here for between March 1918, the launch of their spring offensive and the following October, the Germans lost well over 40,000 officers and almost 1.2 million other ranks.

Peter Hart 11:59

I used to be considered more a naval historian than anything else and I'm well aware of the contribution of the Royal Navy blockade assisted by the Americans as well because they helped enormously. But the point is that the Germans, in 1918 they were suffering. The manpower shortages forced on them by two things. One, our relentless attacks in 16 and 17. The French playing an incredible role dating right back to 1914. The often forgotten role of the Russians in degrading the German army and just endlessly fighting. And now you come to 1918 and the Germans are just starting to be at the end of their tether. They had to launch those attacks, the spring offensives. They had to win before July 1918 when they knew the Americans would be there. And so they launched assault after assault after assault and that killed hundreds of thousands of themselves. That is the final blow followed by the well-directed and extremely well-carried out a series of offensives by the British, French and American army.

Michael Baker 13:02

Given Peter's long experience of the oral archive at the Imperial War Museum, one of the delights of his book is the wealth of first-hand testimony to these unfolding events on the Western Front in 1918. It gives us the voices of the men on the ground, making the story by turns graphic, poignant and blackly humorous.

Peter Hart 13:25

I've always had a belief that if you're a popular historian as opposed to an academic historian, your duty is to inform people in a way that they find interesting. And I think that the best way of making people empathise is to actually use the words that people were there. In their words, they reflect that experience in a way I never could. I mean, I use oral history and that is brilliant for moods, how people got on. It's not so great for fighting because people go into shock and often can't really properly remember it. It becomes very vague. Diaries. Diaries are very good. As long as you remember that people are writing it for themselves and they're the centre of their own world. Letters. And again, great, but remember who they're writing to. You write differently to your mother than what you do to your father or your girlfriend. You know, you have to remember where sources come from. War diaries can be useful but as I always say about war diaries, they are mainly there to make sure that the commanding officer doesn't get into any trouble and are normally written by a staff officer, you know, an adjutant or intelligence officer who's absolutely determined that it was the unit on the right that gave way, not their unit. My favourite was I interviewed who was a staff officer. He got the logistic orders wrong and didn't send the food forward to the advanced brigades and I always, just looking at him, he was sat there going, whoops.

Michael Baker 14:44

War could also be cruel in its randomness with men talking and laughing one minute then abruptly struck down the next by a shell burst. In one case, carelessness had fatal consequences. In October, men of the 1st Royal Inniskillings were hunkered down overnight in shallow funk holes. They were told not to smoke in case a lighted match gave away their position. One man chanced it and within minutes a shell landed in the line. Three men died, others were seriously wounded. The man responsible escaped unscathed.

Peter Hart 15:22

It was a moron who did it and he was told not to smoke. He did and it drew a shell. We can't prove that that's what drew the shell but certainly the person who wrote the account thought it was. And people were horribly wounded and died. But that's what oral history is about. It brings things right into focus. And war is slightly random. No plan survives contact with the enemy because of course the enemy have plans which are deliberately designed to counter you. And this is why sometimes I think one-sided history where you think it's all down to the British. Well actually the Germans have got a lot to say.

Michael Baker 15:59

As it became common knowledge that the war would end in a matter of weeks or even less men were faced with the unenviable prospect that having survived through so much they could still die in the closing stages. Inevitably, as some men admitted, the desire to live struggled against a sense of duty.

Peter Hart 16:18

I find it impossible not to put yourself in that situation. You've just about survived the war so far. Your mates have been killed, some of them. Others have been wounded. Some people have been driven mad, you know, with stress. You've still survived. You don't know the war's going to end on the 11th of November but you do know it's going to end very soon. And then you have to go into this attack. Poor old Wilfred Owen attacking across a canal. You know, not an easy job. Lots of people were killed, not just him. But what a thing. You've gone through, you know, one, two, three years of war and then that 4th of November and you have to do that. And not everyone can hang back because, you know, you have to go forward with your mates. And by this stage in the war what becomes clear is motivations and it's not king, country, religion or even the family back home. For me, and it comes out in interviews then and ever since, it's comradeship that takes you forward in these terrible minutes. But what a temptation to hang back that must have been knowing that the war is going to finish. Knowing this is probably the last time you'll go into action and knowing that you could be killed as easily that day as any other day of the war.

Michael Baker 17:29

Recalling the final week or so before the armistice on the 11th of November, a second lieutenant in the Royal Garrison Artillery confessed,

Citation 17:37

We were advancing and we had rather a close shave from a shell in a field of cabbages and I thought, oh my God, I don't want to get killed now. The war's coming to an end. It made it more difficult. I don't know to what extent I evaded the risk but I do know it was harder to do it. You knew jolly well what you ought to do and I didn't want to when it was dangerous.

Peter Hart 18:04

There was another very tragic comic quote which is two Americans talking and one says, oh, it's awful this war and the other one says, yeah, but if you'd been killed early on it wouldn't be so bad because you'd been spared all the trouble but if you got killed now you've had all the trouble and then you still get killed and it finishes off with him saying, if I was to be killed the last day of the war I'd never get over it and of course, then he was killed on the 10th of November and that's the point. You can't make bargains with whatever God you've got against random bits of metal flying across the battlefield which could hit you or they could hit your mate or they could miss both of you.

Michael Baker 18:40

Amid all the talk of an imminent end to the war the Americans, relatively new to the battlefront, launched a push on the 1st of November to try to break through German positions in the Argonne Forest and advance across the River Meuse. Unlike the British and the French, the Americans did not have the advantage of four years fighting behind them.

Peter Hart 19:02

When you actually read and hear the accounts you become aware that these lads are exactly the same as Kitchener's army in 1916 because yes, they were inexperienced, yes, their generals were inexperienced, yes, they made mistakes, yes, they were full of braggadocio but so were the British in 1916 with the same results attacking the same enemies in defensive positions like the poor old Americans had to do on the Meuse-Argonne. We were slaughtered on the 1st day of the Somme and the Americans were slaughtered. Brave, not very good. They learned. One thing I would say about the Americans is they do learn quickly because they actually finally listened to what the French and British are telling them and by the end, you know, their attack on November 1st was quite well carried out. They still had some problems with moving artillery forward and things like that to support the initial advance but they did fine and they were getting better.

Michael Baker 19:55

Any idea that the fighting got easier the nearer the armistice approached is utterly belied by this American offensive of November 1918 in the Meuse-Argonne. The extremely difficult terrain alone guaranteed a brutal and bloody struggle.

Peter Hart 20:12

The rolling hills next to the Meuse remind me of the Somme and, you know, it's just a killing ground. Very strong defensive positions, open valleys and woods as well and then the actual Argonne Forest is, I mean, again, I've been there and it's just amazingly steep ravines, death traps. They defended it with trench lines, concrete pillboxes and barbed wire. Barbed wire, not to stop me getting at you but to direct me to the side. You definitely don't have to go because it's going to be a machine gun trap. You're going to run into machine guns and they had no idea where they were in the Argonne. They got lost and if you get lost you can't get your artillery support. I mean, it's so difficult for the Americans and they need to be given a lot of credit and a lot of admiration for the courage with which they fought and the contribution they made.

Michael Baker 21:02

Finally, I asked Peter about General Sir Douglas Haig. Haig had been Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force since December 1915. By the summer of 1918 he was commanding five separate British armies. alongside France's Field Marshal Foch Haig presided over Allied victory on the Western Front in November. So what's today's verdict on Haig's stewardship in 1918?

Peter Hart 21:31

Haig was a perfectly competent general himself. My interest in him was as Commander-in-Chief and he gives direction very important clear direction of what he wants and he doesn't get knocked off it. He also sets up the systems to analyse how things are going. What the British army are doing is best practice. They find it, they analyse it and they produce best practice and then they carry it out. And that's the system that he enabled. He's an enabler and that's his greatest skill. He doesn't lose his nerve when the Germans attack in 1918. No one else commanded five armies in the field and what's more he had to at the same time deal with the British government, the French government and the French army and by the way the American army and the Belgian army. Now in the Second World War there are separate people dealing with all this. Haig had to do it all. The stress was incredible and it showed if you look at pictures of him from 1914 to 1919 just after the war you'll see he's aged a lot. He only lasted another ten years before he died, a relatively young man. This idea of him being Butcher Haig are not a nonsense. First World War is a butcher's war. It's not the generals, it's that particular stage of tactics. War is terrible and it was like that. But after the war he devoted the rest of his life to looking after his men. He refused to accept his earldom until something was done for the wounded. He made sure the Royal British Legion British Legion as it then was was non-political which was one of the best gifts he gave to us because political ex-soldiers movements are dangerous see the Freikorps etc. in Germany and he just spent his life touring going to see soldiers charities he spent the whole of his life doing. And when people say where is Haig? Westminster Abbey St Paul's Cathedral and no he isn't. He's at the Abbey Dryburgh Abbey just near to be beside his home and he's buried in a mock-up Commonwealth War grave. As a tribute to his men he's buried in the same grave that so many of his men were. He's a staff officer that's what he is. He's not a Napoleon or a Wellington he's a staff officer a brilliant committed staff officer and organiser. His thoughts are well-marshalled sometimes he's wrong of course he is in a complex war like that but fundamentally I admire him enormously. The thing is that the hatred and that's the word I'd use that was generated in the 50s 60s and 70s has not been dissipated despite all the work of professional historians people like Gary Sheffield John Bourne Gordon Corrigan all of them very few would go along with Haig as butcher some of them are critical of him and sharply critical but even those are in the minority these days.

Michael Baker 24:12

I've been talking to the historian Peter Hart about his book The Last Battle Endgame on the Western Front 1918 If you want to know more about Peter's work or about the last year of the First World War please follow the links on my website www.unknownwarriorspod.co.uk In the next episode of Unknown Warriors I'll be discussing the compelling evidence that the First World War did not end in 1918 but continued well into the interwar period. with profound implications for its connection to the Second World War I hope you'll rejoin me.