1915: victory remains elusive
In 1915 the new German Chief of Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, a dedicated ‘Westerner’,
was overruled, and the victors of 1914 at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes,
Hindenburg and Ludendorff, were allowed to make the main German effort in the East.
This proved extraordinarily successful, if ultimately indecisive, as victories and defeats
in the vastness of the geography in the East tended to be. The Austrians were rescued
from some early disasters and German and German/Austrian assaults from north and
south cleared Russian armies from nearly all of Russian Poland. The great German
victory of 2 May–27 June, known to history as the Gorlice–Tarnow Breakthrough,
offered a revealing commentary on the respective qualities of the German and Russian
armies. But by the end of 1915 a successful conclusion to the war was still nowhere in
sight. The French continued to weaken themselves severely by launching repeated
abortive offensives in Artois and Champagne, while the British staged their first notable,
but also abortive, attack at Loos (25–2 8 September).
Anglo-French disappointments on the Western Front in 1915 were fully matched
by an embarrassing failure against Turkey. A British-led effort to achieve an amphibious
outflanking of the Central Powers’ continental fortress by seizing the Dardanelles
and menacing Constantinople fell just short of constituting a military disaster. The
Dardanelles venture met first with naval failure and then with a bloody stalemate on land
on the Gallipoli peninsula. It was a half-baked strategic conception of Winston Churchill,
then the First Lord of the Admiralty, executed with extraordinary incompetence.
1916: attrition
Having been defeated on the Marne in the West in 1914, and having failed to secure a
decisive advantage in the East in 1915, despite major victories in Poland, in 1916
Germany returned to the West as the locus for its principal effort. In so doing, it pre-
empted the Allies’ belated plans to coordinate offensives against the Central Powers on
all fronts. Falkenhayn was permitted to attack the French fortress city of Verdun. His
purpose, which was not as well understood by his army as it needed to be, was not to
take the city. Rather, he intended to entice the French into expending troops at a rate
that they could not afford in a desperate campaign to hold the fortress, which he knew
had iconic significance for Paris. The Germans had amassed an awesome weight of
artillery and intended – at least, Falkenhayn intended – that Verdun and its environs
should become the graveyard of the French Army. He calculated, over-optimistically, that
at Verdun he could kill five Frenchmen for every two Germans. Such was the logic of
victory by attrition. The ‘battle’ lasted from 21 February until 1 8 December, with the
French suffering 542,000 casualties to the German 434,000. Falkenhayn had hoped that
French morale would crack under the cumulative weight of French casualties and, as
a consequence, that Paris would seek terms. Should that occur, Britain would find itself
in an impossible position, so the Germans reasoned. Falkenhayn regarded Britain as
Germany’s principal enemy, one which could best, perhaps only, be defeated strategically
by breaking its ‘continental sword’, which is to say the French Army.
Just as Allied plans for offensives were pre-empted by Germany’s initiative at Verdun,
so the increasingly bloody and self-defeating effort there was interdicted and weakened
World War I: modern warfare 87