World Wars of the Twentieth Century 325
Difficulties at home scarcely mattered as long as German armies
remained successful in the field. In spite of powder shortages, the
campaigns of 1915 had on the whole gone well for Germany. Vic
tories in the east pushed the Russian front far away from German
borders; Serbia was overrun and Turkey successfully repelled an am
phibious attack on the Dardanelles. Meanwhile, at home, the rise in
powder production slowly restored full striking power to the German
artillery.
The Germans’ strategic plan for 1916 proposed to take advantage of
their superiority in heavy artillery by attacking Verdun. Erich von
Falkenhayn, chief of the Great General Staff since the German failure
on the Marne in 1914, expected to bleed France white and compel the
Republic to sue for peace before Great Britain’s new armies could be
ready to enter battle. But the attack on Verdun, lasting from February
to June 1915, failed to achieve its expected goal, despite heavy loss of
life on both sides.
This disappointment was followed by two further shocks to Ger
many’s self-confidence. The British-French attack on the Somme
(July-November 1916) showed that Great Britain’s resources had
indeed been thrown into the war unreservedly. Then in the east a
Russian offensive against the Austrians won notable success and per
suaded the Rumanians to enter the war on the Allied side. The fact
that a shifty Balkan state had opted for Germany’s enemy implied that,
in Rumanian eyes at least, the war was going to end in an Allied
victory.^41 To forestall such a result, a heightened effort on the home
front was clearly called for. Germany responded by raising the stakes
and intensifying its war effort to match and overmatch British and
French mobilization. But before considering the new era inaugurated
by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and his quartermaster general,
Erich Ludendorff, who took supreme command on 28 August 1916,
brief remarks about British, American, and Russian responses to the
first years of war are in order.
Unlike the other combatants, the British prepared for a long war
from the start. Anything else would have limited their participation to
very modest proportions, for only four divisions could be found to
take part in the initial battles of 1914. But public opinion rejected a
merely marginal role, and when Lord Kitchener, the new secretary for
war, called for volunteers he met with massive response. Confusion
was enormous, and administrative routines at first took no account of
- Rumania’s king was a Hohenzollern and close relative of the kaiser. His betrayal
of kinship added piquancy to the German reaction.
