and the British had tried to drill it into German heads: both sides wasted enormous amounts of money on ships that would never do anything. On 31 May, in the context of Verdun, the Germans sailed forth, the intention being to destroy the fast British battle-cruisers, which deterred attacks on the cross-Channel troop-traffic or the sending of commerce raiders into the wider ocean. Through intelligence work, the British were not taken by surprise. The two fleets had to move with much caution, for fear of mines and torpedoes, and since the newest British battleships were diesel-powered and had enormous guns, the range was such that the ships hardly even needed to see each other (though the accuracy of shooting was low, and most rounds missed). In a sense this was the same story as on the Western Front – enormous weight but a hopelessly limited capacity of control. The British were dependent on old-fashioned signal flags: it was difficult simply to know what was going on, and the British commander, Jellicoe, behaved with great caution, knowing that, if an action went wrong, he could lose the war in an afternoon. This battle of Jutland lasted only a few hours, with 150 ships on the British side, 100 on the German. Losses were 14 to 11, before the Germans prudently retired. They had obviously had the better of the day, British ships being less well armoured and having fewer watertight bulkheads: but the Germans reckoned that they had had a narrow escape, and that there was no way of eliminating the British naval superiority by fleet action. Their Admiralty now proposed submarines instead, and the High Seas Fleet remained in port, indeed becoming a ‘risk fleet’ in the sense that theGerman empire itself was at risk, realized two and a half years later, of being overthrown by the resentful and drunken sailors.
The British had not expected to have to produce a land army, and at first the authorities had been overwhelmed by the great numbers of men who volunteered. However, they were now in a position to do something with their ‘new armies’ (as they were called) and the French emergency gave some urgency to this. Chantilly had agreed that there was to be a Franco-British effort, the French, originally, to have taken the lead. The new British commander, Douglas Haig, would have preferred an attack in Flanders, which might at least clear the Belgian coast, but the simple fact was that the French and British armies adjoined around Amiens, the chief place in Picardy, astride the river Somme – an area where poppies grow in profusion. They have become the symbol of the British war dead.
There was no particular strategic significance for an attack on the Somme. True, Haig still imagined that the German line could be breached and cavalry could pour through the gap, but it could have been poured more effectively elsewhere, in so far as it could be poured at all. As the German line solidified in 1914, it had done so along ridges, not substantial in absolute terms but certainly substantial in relative terms, which allowed their guns a greater advantage, and also gave them the benefit of earth less likely to turn into mud, because further from the water-table. The most that Haig could do would be to take those ridges. However, the British war industry was now able to make thousands of guns and millions of shells and so, as in other armies, the general idea was to launch an enormous bombardment, with an attack on twenty miles of front (long enough for the advancing troops not to be enfiladed).
Haig did not trust his men’s capacity, and therefore relied on crushing bombardment. True, for any pre-war soldier, the quantities of mateáriel available seemed enormous, but that wasnot really the case, given the scale of the task. There were other problems – firstly that a considerable number of the shells were ‘duds’ or fell short, and secondly that the artillery were not adequately trained for their task. One war-winner was the
The British had not expected to have to produce a land army, and at first the authorities had been overwhelmed by the great numbers of men who volunteered. However, they were now in a position to do something with their ‘new armies’ (as they were called) and the French emergency gave some urgency to this. Chantilly had agreed that there was to be a Franco-British effort, the French, originally, to have taken the lead. The new British commander, Douglas Haig, would have preferred an attack in Flanders, which might at least clear the Belgian coast, but the simple fact was that the French and British armies adjoined around Amiens, the chief place in Picardy, astride the river Somme – an area where poppies grow in profusion. They have become the symbol of the British war dead.
There was no particular strategic significance for an attack on the Somme. True, Haig still imagined that the German line could be breached and cavalry could pour through the gap, but it could have been poured more effectively elsewhere, in so far as it could be poured at all. As the German line solidified in 1914, it had done so along ridges, not substantial in absolute terms but certainly substantial in relative terms, which allowed their guns a greater advantage, and also gave them the benefit of earth less likely to turn into mud, because further from the water-table. The most that Haig could do would be to take those ridges. However, the British war industry was now able to make thousands of guns and millions of shells and so, as in other armies, the general idea was to launch an enormous bombardment, with an attack on twenty miles of front (long enough for the advancing troops not to be enfiladed).
Haig did not trust his men’s capacity, and therefore relied on crushing bombardment. True, for any pre-war soldier, the quantities of mateáriel available seemed enormous, but that wasnot really the case, given the scale of the task. There were other problems – firstly that a considerable number of the shells were ‘duds’ or fell short, and secondly that the artillery were not adequately trained for their task. One war-winner was the
Similar Books
