Into This Abyss: The Eurasian War (1915-1919)

Sarantapechaina

The Outbreak of the Eurasian War.

The belief that any coming Great War would be short – by necessity, if nothing else – was quite prevalent in the years before the assassination of Sevket. Authors like Norman Angell and Jan Bloch argued that any conflict would be disastrous, nay, impossible, because of the rate at which a state’s resources would be consumed. Financially, no country could afford to fight for more than a few months before fiscal collapse left its armies and fleets at a standstill. If anything, the evidence of the Manchurian War confirmed this: Japan’s army in the field had been defeated, yes, but many analysts claimed it was Japanese financial exhaustion – which sparked a stock market crash in the spring of 1905 – which had forced Japan to make peace.

At the same time, in military terms, it was becoming increasingly apparent to some officers in the armies of both the Entente and the League that a new war was likely to be long and drawn out. The evidence of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War – and indeed even the Manchurian War – made it clear that a modern field army was almost impossible to destroy. And even given a victory on the scale of a Sedan, one’s opponent could almost always raise fresh armies, prolonging the fight. But the consequences of a long war were clear: devastating attrition, economic and social collapse, and, as in France in 1870-1, revolution.

For some, like the German Chief of the General Staff from 1891 to 1906, Alfred von Schlieffen, the path was clear. A long war would be avoided because it had to be avoided. Schlieffen’s prescription for Germany’s troubles during his tenure (a two-front war against France and Russia) had been a massive attack on France, marching through Belgium and the Netherlands, to destroy the French army as quickly as possible so as to turn on Russia. It was risky, yes, argued Schlieffen, but at least it had a chance of success: waiting until a British blockade starved Germany of resources, or until the French and Russians could crush Germany between their massive armies, had a certain success rate of zero.[1]

The war that faced European officers in 1915 was not Schlieffen’s war. Germany had lost one front – the war against Russia – but now saw itself faced with a multiplicity of global hotspots, each individually of lesser magnitude than a war against Russia but in aggregate possibly far greater. Russia itself no longer had to deal with the Germans on their eastern frontier, but instead with a near-continuous front stretching from the Caucasus across the entire breadth of Asia to Vladivostok. Britain and France had to sustain both a war in Western Europe and another one that embraced almost all of their colonial possessions.

With the fronts so widely spaced, with logistics virtually nightmarish, the likelihood of a Schlieffenesque knockout blow was even lower than it had been before. To mobilize their armies, Russia or the United Kingdom would have to spend months shuttling troops to their various fronts; Japan was only slightly better off, and the Ottoman Empire was far worse. There was only one place where either side could even hope to score a fast, decisive victory: Western Europe, where railroads were denser, troop numbers were higher, and where France and Germany both lay potentially vulnerable to a quick exit, at least in geographic terms. So while the war had started over the Caucasus, the world’s attention initially shifted over to Alsace and Lorraine.

It was clear that the French would be taking the offensive. While Germany had the luxuries of a larger economy, resource base, and manpower base from which to draw, France’s army was front-loaded, designed to work best in the shock of the initial blows of combat.[2] It had been the French, learning from Prussia’s mobilization in 1870, who had developed their rail lines to the Vosges, ensuring that France could get more troops to the frontier faster than could the Germans. France’s three-year law of 1914 had increased the trained manpower theoretically available for the initial campaigns. And most famously – if inaccurately – it was French theorists like Ferdinand Foch and Loyzeaux de Grandmaison who were known as the apostles of the offensive, who claimed that morale, the will to win – élan – was the key to modern war.

This so-called “spirit of the offensive” deserves some mention, for it is often reported that this meant that French – and German, Russian, Chinese, and so forth – soldiers were imbued with the foolish notion that only repeated incessant human-wave attacking could erode a defense based on modern firepower. Military tacticians the world over are supposed to have recognized the power of modern weapons like machine guns, high explosives, heavy artillery, and the like and decided that the only solution was to throw warm bodies at them. Only later in the war – with stormtroop and infiltration tactics properly developed – did generals have any idea as to how to fight a modern infantry war. This is used as part of a general indictment of the ostensibly idiotic European military leadership of the war era.[3]

But the basic conception behind modern infantry tactics was already there long before 1915. European generals in France, Germany, and even Russia had already decided that the key to advancing in the teeth of a modern defense was to build up fire support against the enemy, to (if possible) pressure his flanks, advance your infantry by bounds as close to the enemy lines as possible, and then to rush forward to drive the enemy out of his positions. So-called stormtroop or infiltration tactics were merely variations on this central theme, making use of specially trained detachments. Correctly applied, these tactics worked just fine for armies in Europe even in 1915. As an example, the French 41st Division, commanded by an officer with a sound understanding of the 1911 field regulations, attacked an German force of equal size in entrenched positions on the Meurthe River on September 9, 1915; within four hours the Germans were driven out of their positions, the French suffering three dead and sixty-two wounded.

Grandmaison, whose 1906 booklet was most castigated by later historians, actually emphasized the role of artillery support. Furthermore, he flatly stated that “a frontal attack across open ground [was] impossible”. In stating such things, Grandmaison was hardly breaking ground; theoreticians around Europe had understood the difficulty of attacking modern entrenched positions for decades. Grandmaison’s point was that, in order to succeed, even with the help of artillery, fire support from other infantry and machine guns, and flanking detachments, the infantry had to deal with immense psychological pressures unlike any other in previous wars: they had to believe they could succeed in order for any of the modern tactics to work.

What the French army’s real problem was, was that it failed to distinguish between a specific problem – grunt poilus mustering up the courage to storm the last hundred yards on a modern fire-swept battlefield – and a more generalized one, that of the operational problem of fighting Germany. Grandmaison did an excellent job at resolving the former; he provided no assistance with the latter. Therefore, up to 1914, war planning was left up to Victor Michel, the vice-president of the Conseil Supérieur de Guerre; his Plan XVII, completed in 1911, rested on a short-term defense of the eastern fortress line – Verdun-Toul-Épinal-Belfort – with a sizable mobile reserve in case the Germans invaded Belgium to circumvent the fortresses. Michel’s fall in 1914 brought a new war plan into being, Plan XVIII, which was later associated with the alleged idiotic belief in the spirit of the offensive.

Michel’s fall came not over any issues of defense or offense, but over his management of the army. Part and parcel of Plan XVII was a decision to increase the number of reservists in the front line of the army. With the military still reeling from the Dreyfus affair, graduation from military academies had slumped, while funding was nowhere to be found for reserve training (over a third of reservists did not even report to the colors in 1913). Much of the French military establishment was worried with Michel’s apparent preference for quantity over quality; fearing the dilution of trained men, they opposed the employment of reservists in the front line. Furthermore, Michel did not plan to increase the amount of artillery in the army commensurate with his increases in troop numbers, over the protests of Auguste Dubail, the munitions chief – again, an issue of quantity over quality. And Michel’s reservist proposals wouldn’t even be able to take full effect for several years; in the midst of the Zabern and Gough crises, with war apparently imminent, CSG was preoccupied with combat readiness. Michel had to go.

His replacement, Joseph Joffre, was the most senior available ‘safe’ general, unassociated as he was with either Michel himself or the scandal of the affaire des fiches in 1904 (which tarred Joseph-Simon Gallieni and Paul-Marie Pau respectively). Joffre, a somewhat enigmatic figure who spoke little and wrote less, may have achieved his initial position based on his republican credentials (always a concern after the Dreyfus affair) instead of military competence, but his subsequent actions showed a clear intent to make the French military war-ready, carried out with considerable energy. His part in the passage of the Three-Year Law in the fall of 1914 combined a willingness to increase the size of the mobilized front line army with a commitment to maintaining quality. Adolphe Messimy, the war minister, also improved Joffre’s ability to coordinate policy by abolishing the CSG and placing Joffre at the head of both the general staff and the army’s professional organization.

Joffre’s chief accomplishment, however, was Plan XVIII. Contrary to later belief, the plan’s main goal was not a suicidal attack into German Lorraine but rather a further refinement of France’s mobilization and concentration plans. Its fruit was a large army placed on the border before the tenth day of mobilization, an amazing feat; the central position of the concentration points, in western Lorraine, combined with the multiplicity of French rail lines, meant that the army could be rapidly redeployed further north, to guard against a thrust through Belgium, or east, to attack into Alsace. If the recommendations for the commander put something of a stress on an offensive into Lorraine, it was because that option was seen as the most practicable – placing a premium on at the very least a spoiling attack to mess up German mobilization and exploit France’s superior mobilization speed and numbers. Nevertheless, combined with the Three-Year Law, Plan XVIII was implemented with little time for the army to readjust its thinking before the outbreak of war.

If the French army’s thought processes were in flux, those of Germany were a disorganized mess, courtesy not of some disaster but of the Kaiser’s diplomatic success with the Treaty of Björkö. Schlieffen had reckoned on a two-front war, and had structured German doctrine to match: speed, firepower, and encirclement were his watchwords, and violating Belgian and Dutch neutrality the logical conclusion of his planning. Schlieffen’s successor Moltke inherited his preoccupation with a quick victory, but with Russia’s alignment towards Germany he also gained a multiplicity of other fronts with which to deal. Moltke was also less single-minded than was Schlieffen; he saw the benefits of other options, from tactics (where he recognized the benefits of breakthrough over encirclement, for instance) to strategy (where he believed that Belgium and the Netherlands were more valuable as neutral parties than enemies, especially since a flank march through the Low Countries would be logistically near-impossible to sustain).

The result was confusion on most points, which Moltke failed to resolve; having elected to avoid extremism on all points of doctrine and war planning, what was left was no unifying tendency at all. But at the same time, Moltke did play a key role in preparing the imperial army for war. He insulated the army from political interference, for one, removing the problems that bedeviled France. After 1907, he prevented the Kaiser from participating in the war games to boost his own vanity. And in the Reichstag, Moltke and the Prussian war ministers, Karl von Einem, Josias von Heeringen, and Hermann von Eichhorn, regularized funding increases by focusing on technological and equipment investment rather than (politically dangerous) increases in army size, resulting in a perpetually well-funded, professional, high-quality army which, unfortunately, was far from matching France’s in terms of numbers.[4] But even this was confusion: if Moltke still counted on a quick win over France (which he did, even if he pessimistically claimed that it was increasingly unlikely), it made no sense to focus on a smaller, long-service professional force to serve as a cadre around which to assemble a larger mobilized army.

Germany’s actual war planning similarly attempted to have it both ways. Moltke recognized the importance of Alsace-Lorraine, and deployed most of Germany’s mobilized army there – but he also was under significant pressure to aid Russia against its many Eurasian foes, and so made provision to deploy several army corps further east. Effectively, Moltke’s plan now rested on a defensive-offensive campaign in Alsace-Lorraine, but his expectations from it – vaguely assuming that the Germans could exploit a victory across the Vosges towards Paris, as they had in 1870 – were almost as unrealistic as Schlieffen’s march across the Low Countries.

Joffre’s armies were mostly concentrated in Lorraine by the eighth day of mobilization, April 12. The operational problem he had to solve was not easy, for it was by no means obvious where the French should attack. For one thing, the German cavalry – as part of Schlieffen’s prewar insistence on the superiority of speed and firepower – was superior to the French; Georg von der Marwitz’s troopers successfully blinded the French attempts at reconnaissance into Lorraine, so Joffre was unsure as to where the German points of concentration were. He had to rely on reasoning based on geography and other obstacles, and these were formidable: the rough terrain of Alsace lay directly to the east, while the Metz-Diedenhofen area was covered by a massive modern system of fortifications, the Moselstellung. Reasoning that the Moselstellung was likely to cover the slower German mobilization, Joffre decided that the main mass of German troops lay behind it, and masked the fortifications with one of his five armies while deploying three to attack between Metz and the Rhine. As it happened, though, the Moselstellung had been developed under Schlieffen’s tenure, to guard the pivot of his great wheel into Belgium; on April 13, the only troops there were a single army corps, reinforced by some Landwehr. With an entire army hanging uselessly in the wind, Joffre was sending two-thirds of his field army into the teeth of the Germans’ real concentration.

What resulted, between April 13 and April 17, was an engagement that is sometimes called either the Battle of Duß (after the name of the town close to the center of most of the fighting) or the Battle of Lorraine (by everybody but the Germans). Joffre’s armies, echeloned to the right, slammed into the advance guards of three German armies, dug in to protect the assembling rear echelons. Unable to gain a good picture of the battlefield – with cavalry forced back and air reconnaissance useless due to persistent mist – the French plunged straight into the teeth of coordinated German machine gun and heavy artillery fire. It was the artillery that really ripped apart the French. Germany had invested heavily in large-caliber, long-range, plunging-fire guns before the war, while the French had focused on their 75s, smaller direct-support guns. On the defensive, the prepositioned German artillery could force the 75s out of range and then turn on the unsupported French infantry. The result was carnage. When the German Second Army appeared on the French eastern flank, Joffre decided the battle was unsalvageable, and successfully broke contact over the night of 17-18 April.

This was, essentially, all according to plan as far as the Germans were concerned. Moltke, at the supreme army command (die oberste Heeresleitung, or OHL) in Koblenz, ordered a pursuit, to take advantage of the weakened state of the French armies. This was harder than it sounded. Thanks to having not engaged his largest single army – Charles Lanrezac’s Third – by leaving it in front of Metz, Joffre was able to cover his retreat with a sizable and well-supplied force. While Lanrezac’s troops prepared their defenses on the favorable terrain of the Grand Couronné de Nancy, backed by the guns of the fortresses at Toul and Épinal, the rest of the French armies would retreat behind the fortresses to reorganize and reinforce (and to purge many of the less desirable officers). A further problem was that Moltke in Koblenz – forced to deal with the imperial court (as the Kaiser was, after all, der oberste Kriegsherr, the Supreme Warlord) and with operations ranging as far away as China – was unable to maintain tight control over his army commanders in Lorraine. And due to the doctrinal confusion that Moltke himself had perpetuated, the army commanders didn’t even mutually agree on the correct course of action to take.

Beginning on 21 April, the German armies of Alexander von Kluck, Karl von Einem, and Rupprecht, crown prince of Bavaria, staged a fighting crossing of the Meurthe and assaulted Lanrezac’s lines. Due to the geographical nature of the land, most of the German troops were canalized into attacking the Trouée de Charmes, from where they were vulnerable to attack from three sides. And the 75s, which had bedeviled the French advance a week prior, now did sterling service in defending the Third Army’s front. On the offensive, they lacked the range to deal with the German heavy howitzers. But with the German advance outdistancing their artillery support, the 75s could fight on their own: and they were the perfect weapon for close infantry support, able to overwhelm German formations with a vast weight of metal. In ground that wasn’t so broken or wooded as German Lorraine, the 75s could employ ricochet fire, the so-called rafale, which enabled a single battery to sweep twelve hectares of ground in a minute's sustained fire.

These advantages enabled Lanrezac’s troops to hold on despite growing weight of numbers on the German side. But by April 25, the French grip on the Grand Couronné was tenuous; if Nancy fell into German hands, the Trouée de Charmes would be left wide open. Alarmed by Lanrezac’s warnings that he would have to withdraw, Joffre ordered the minuscule Fifth Army, designed originally to mask Alsace, to attack the Germans’ southern flank. Michel-Joseph Maunoury, who had been summoned from retirement to command the army a few days earlier, was able to bring just two corps to bear against the Germans at Baccarat. Two corps, however, was enough. Kluck, worried for his southern flank, had already begun to draw it in, and with actual pressure on it he elected to pull back the rest of his troops. Within two days, Rupprecht too had been forced to call off his attacks, and the Germans retreated behind the Meurthe.

Already, the Germans had begun creating prepared positions in Alsace and Lorraine; with their few miles of hard-won French territory now behind them, they began building fresh entrenchments to free up manpower. Moltke, although now suffering from heart problems, was determined to renew an attempt at mobile warfare. This time, the Germans would try to pass north of Verdun, along the Belgian border. With the equivalent of a heavily reinforced army, the Germans struck at the French in the northern part of the Woëvre, near the Briey ore fields. Although initially resistance was light, as Joffre had expected the Germans to try their luck further south again, a French reserve army was quickly deployed to the area and halted the attack in a series of engagements just east of Verdun during the first two weeks of May. Beginning on May 18, a solid line of entrenchments stretched from the Belgian border near Longwy to the Swiss border near Mülhausen, with little immediate prospect of breakthrough for either side.

Moltke himself did not survive the Battle of the Woëvre for very long. In late May he was ordered to “report sick” by the Kaiser’s adjutant (conveniently, he was feeling pretty sick at the time, probably from the stress of campaigning) and was replaced by the man many people felt should have succeeded Schlieffen in 1906, August von Mackensen. Mackensen was almost immediately forced to deal with French attacks on the Meurthe and the Mortagne, battles which slowly petered out into late June. It was these engagements that convinced Mackensen – and ultimately, the rest of OHL – that there was little chance of securing a quick victory in the west anytime soon. Instead, Germany’s mobilized army should be built for the long game, and deployed to exploit victories elsewhere in the world.

Around the same time Mackensen was deploying those arguments to convince the General Staff and the Kaiser, Germany's allies – namely, Russia - were beginning to engage their own enemies. Based on a totally inadequate rail network, the Russian military had attempted to mobilize well over two million men and disperse them on fronts from Manchuria clear to the Caucasus. In many of those places, the Russians’ enemies were able to move faster. For instance, in Korea the Russians were caught completely flat footed by the Japanese, who, blatantly disrespecting the supposedly sacrosanct rights of neutral nations, demanded to cross Korean territory and use the country as a base from which to fight the Russians. The Gwangmu Emperor’s protests were brushed aside, as was the Korean military, in a lightning campaign from April 16 to May 2 conducted by Field Marshal Oku Yasukata, one of the few IJA senior officers to come out of the Manchurian War with a good reputation. (Oku’s path was made all the smoother by Japanese advance work in Korea, which suborned a sizable portion of the officer corps and civilian administrators, many of whom had Japanese loyalties from Japan’s period of official influence before 1905.) Russia’s Manchurian armies, under the overall command of Nikolai Ruzsky, were unable to react quickly enough, and at any rate hadn’t fully assembled yet; the Japanese invasion caught them with their collective pants down, and Oku’s troops were able to successfully secure bridgeheads across the Yalu without major fighting. At the same time, more Japanese troops launched an amphibious invasion of Sakhalin, claimed by Japan until 1875, and brushed aside the small Russian garrison on the island within a few weeks.

The problems of Russia’s slow mobilization were exacerbated by – surprise surprise – doctrinal confusion.[5] Unlike France and Germany, Russia’s armies had recent combat experience, in Manchuria, and the Russians had notably won that war. The problem was assimilating the lessons learned from that war, and making good the (considerable) losses incurred in its fighting. Several years of bureaucratic confusion had finally resulted, in 1912, in the appointment of Vladimir Sukhomlinov to head both the general staff and the war ministry, lending a certain direction to Russian policy. Yet Sukhomlinov, a man genuinely interested in reform, rearmament, and war readiness – albeit on his own terms – was unable to fully resolve all of the conflicts in the army, and even if he had, his ‘Great Program’ would have been far from completion in 1915.[6]

Ultimately, what resulted was a disconnect between military and diplomatic policy on the level of strategy. Sukhomlinov and his chief of staff, Miknevich, both recognized the military value of standing on the defensive. It had good standing in the Russian historical tradition, drawing from examples like the victory against Napoleon in 1812 and Kuropatkin’s defensive-offensive campaign in the Manchurian War. Defensive operations made good sense based on Russia’s slow mobilization as well. But politically, an early defense was suicidal: Russia’s credit in Asia depended largely on an assertive posture, and that meant the strategic offensive.

The navy was, if anything, worse off. The engagements of Port Arthur and Tsushima had seen the virtual annihilation of Russia’s Baltic and Pacific fleets in 1904-5, making a reconstruction effort both desirable (in the face of Britain’s and Germany’s Dreadnought programs, which began around the same time) and necessary. At first blush, this would have seemed easy: both the tsar and his new ally Cousin Willy were ardent navalists, and the Germans would be more than happy to have Russian assistance against the formidable Grand Fleet. But that was where the conveniences ended. Germany wanted the Russians to build in the Baltic Sea, to support the High Seas Fleet, and the Germans wanted cruisers; the tsar and his naval war staff wanted Dreadnoughts, and Russia’s strategic interests lay in the Black Sea and Far East, not the Baltic, which needed no protection now that Germany was allied to Russia. In addition, the considerable finances that the tsar had devoted to the naval budget were mostly spent on plant, as the Russian naval yards were sadly insufficient for Dreadnought construction, meaning that ship construction lagged dramatically compared to the western powers. To complete the comedy of errors, the Russian naval minister from 1908, I. K. Grigorovich, wanted to cement the German alliance; he shifted the original plan (Dreadnought-based battle fleets in the Black and Yellow Seas) to a plan that focused on construction in the Baltic to appease the Germans. The result was, by 1915, already-scant resources thinly spread. Russia had two Dreadnoughts in the Baltic, and one in the Black Sea (plus four pre-Dreadnoughts); in the Pacific, a battle cruiser built along German lines had to suffice for a flagship for the depressingly small Port Arthur squadron.

Thus Russia had little hope of stopping the Japanese from entering Korea, as the IJN ruled the Yellow Sea. It had a slightly better – but still not all that good – hope of messing with the Ottoman deployment to Armenia. Enver’s mobilization was hampered by the fact that the Ottomans had no railheads there; the nearest ones to the Erzurum concentration point were at Ulu Kischla (700 miles from Erzurum) and Tell Ebaid (400 miles from Erzurum and on the wrong side of the Taurus Mountains). Thus the Ottomans had to rely on seaborne transport to get their troops to Trabzon, from where they could march along the one good local road to Erzurum. Had the Russians had a more aggressive Black Sea Fleet commander, perhaps they could have seriously interfered with Enver’s concentration; as it was, Viktor Kanin, the admiral in charge, worried about being drawn into an engagement with the numerically equivalent Ottoman fleet and restricted his ships to guarding Sevastopol and Batumi.

Even without the Russians interfering, it was not until June that Enver had any sort of army concentrated in Armenia. On the urging of Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, his chief of staff, Enver had chosen to launch an offensive against the Russian railhead at Sarikamiş, not far from Kars, to be of a piece with a general Entente offensive against the Russians and Qajars in northern Iran spearheaded by Sir John French’s British Expeditionary Force. Enver’s stumbling offensive was significantly aided by the poor command structure in the Russian Caucasus. The Russian viceroy, knyaz Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, was uninterested in military affairs; his deputy, Aleksandr Myshlayevsky, was widely seen as an idiot and had in fact been ‘banished’ to the Caucasus by Sukhomlinov to keep him from interfering with the latter’s reform program. Neither was up to the challenge of commanding the regular peacetime Caucasus forces deployed for internal security (of which there was a considerable need in wartime as well), let alone the avalanche of Russian army forces to be deployed there a few months from the outbreak of war, and even the viceregal office only constituted a primus inter pares over the other small Caucasus commands.

Russia’s overall objective for the Caucasus front was even less clear. Although the war had started over the region, the Russians certainly had no immediate interest in annexing Ottoman Armenia, despite Enver’s bleating to the contrary. The region was poor and in economic decline; it best served Russia as a buffer zone, not a province. Russian prewar expansion thus focused on northern Iran instead, which was seen as much more valuable. The Caucasus itself was also intrinsically valuable, due to rapidly climbing oil exploitation (Baku was in fact Russia’s busiest port in 1915, ahead of even Odessa). It was also one of Russia’s biggest internal security problems. Sukhomlinov, at the war ministry, reckoned that even of the million-man army scheduled to be deployed to the Caucasus at the outbreak of war, at least two thirds would have to be used to suppress seditious activity. The region was a hotbed of nationalistic sentiment – not just of the ‘bigger’ would-be countries like Georgia or Armenia or Azerbaijan, for practically every individual valley harbored a new language and a yen for self-determination – as well as socialism and pan-Islam. Nikolai Yudenich, the head of Myshlayevsky’s staff and probably the most competent of the Russian Caucasus command, argued that even after the Ottoman declaration of war, the Russians faced a far greater threat from Georgian valley dwellers than from Enver’s armies.

At any rate, despite Yudenich’s insouciance, the Russians made a series of panic moves in response to the Ottoman mobilization. Vorontsov, afraid for the security of the connections to northern Iran, withdrew half of the troops around Tabriz in May before ordering them back three weeks later, with the effect that they took part in no actions until early July. This left the Russians with a total of two corps with which to fight the Ottomans, and Myshlayevsky, exhibiting uncommon irrational confidence[7], ordered their commander, Fourth Army chief Aleksei Evert, to attack Enver’s concentrations in the last week of May (over Yudenich’s protests); Evert’s troops blundered into a Turkish firesack in the Çakir Baba Mountains and only narrowly pulled back before being encircled. Enver followed it up by successfully encircling a Russian division at Sarikamiş, inducing a fresh panic at Myshlayevsky’s headquarters at Yerevan. By July 1, although the Russians had now got two incomplete armies massing between Sarikamiş and Kars, Myshlayevsky was preparing to withdraw the Russian armies to the rail junction at Aleksandropol, and perhaps even out of the Lesser Caucasus Mountains.

Even more precipitate than the retreat in the Caucasus was the Russian pull-out from northern Iran. Russia’s only railroad leading into Qajar territory went through Yerevan and Tabriz. Part and parcel of the Ottoman offensive towards Sarikamiş was an advance partway down the Aras River, which threatened the Tabriz rail line, playing a role in the Amazing Stampeding Russian Army show Myshlayevsky was staging; his fear that the troops around Tehran would be cut off led him to order even further withdrawals. The net result was that the Iranian Constitutionalists, having compromised with the British in exchange for support, overran Luristan and much of central Iran south of the great salt desert before overextension and Myshlayevsky changing his mind brought the Entente advance to a halt. Further east, the Russians had taken the offensive, under the general direction of the governor of Turkestan, Aleksandr Samsonov, attempting to overrun Afghanistan as the gateway to India. Habibullah, the emir, had expected to be able to negotiate some kind of neutralizing arrangement with the Russians despite having declared war, as part of his policy to try to hold the balance between the two powers; Samsonov’s deployments forced his hand, and the BEF, waiting on the southern frontier, was called in. At Kholm on June 24, the Russians got their first taste of British marksmanship by running into Sir Douglas Haig’s I Corps and were forced to fall back in disarray; Haig immediately pressed French for the authorization to follow up the victory with an attack up the railroad to Bukhara.

It was in China that the Russians received the greatest humiliation of all, though. The rapid Japanese advance in May and June 1915 took almost everybody by surprise. Ruzsky had failed to halt the Japanese at the Yalu, so in the second week of May he organized a counteroffensive motivated not by his military instincts but by his desire to save his job. The Russians attacked the Japanese at the border port of Andong and soon saw for themselves just how much the Japanese had taken the lessons of the Manchurian War to heart. Oku still relied on the value of advanced infantry assault tactics, but unlike 1905, the Japanese also knew the power of the defensive. After three days of hard fighting the Russians were sent reeling back towards Mukden and the Japanese renewed their advance afresh, overrunning several isolated Russian units in the process. Another attempt to stand and fight, at Benxi at the end of the month, went about as well as the previous engagement for the Russians, and by the end of June Oku’s troops were besieging Mukden and Port Arthur while Ruzsky’s battered armies fell back further north along the Trans-Siberian Railway to recuperate.

Ruzsky and his defenders quickly leveled complaints at the Germans for not supporting them. Indeed, Germany had an Asiatic squadron stronger than the Russian one, although still far from being able to match Japan. United, Graf Spee’s East Asiatic Squadron and the Russians at Port Arthur might, just might have been able to interfere with the Japanese troop transports to Korea. Spee himself, however, discounted this possibility. Spee preferred the precepts of cruiser warfare, as propounded by Curt von Maltzahn, and his resources were well suited to the task. He had over five million marks at his disposal to buy coal and supplies while at sea, and through Germany’s global wireless network he could coordinate with Berlin. For Maltzahn and Spee, cruiser warfare – attacking British commerce – was not an end in itself; both recognized that the British volume of trade in the Pacific was too low to effectively attack. Instead, Spee’s cruisers would be a means to an end: drawing the British fleet, by driblets, out of home waters so the High Seas Fleet could steam out and crush the remainder.

The United Kingdom was uniquely poorly suited to the task of fighting a global naval war, despite its preponderance in numbers. Rather like Russia, in absolute terms it had the combat resources to overwhelm any single enemy, but in logistical terms, the Admiralty could not hope to coordinate such a fleet. Admiral Sir John Fisher, the apostle of the Dreadnought and the most polarizing single figure in British naval policy before the war, may very well have been, as his defenders claim, a force for modernization and innovation in the Royal Navy. But he was also a man who nonsensically forbade the institution of naval war planning, real naval gunnery exercises, several individual technical improvements to naval gun platforms, and refused to implement a real naval staff.[8] Britain was thus exceptionally vulnerable to the exact kind of plan Spee proposed. In theory, his seven cruisers could be swamped by a convergence of the Australian and New Zealand fleets, the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the British China Station flotilla. But in practice, those groups could only operate well together if they were physically fighting alongside each other - they had little to no chance of actually concentrating their forces to get there. The Japanese were preoccupied with security for their transports in Korea and south China, while the British were loathe to leave the Indian Ocean uncovered, and were furthermore confused by the Admiralty’s attempts to manage from across the globe.

It was not until July that the British finally figured out Spee’s course: towards South America, potentially to break out towards the Atlantic. Australia’s new battlecruiser, aptly named HMAS Australia, attacked the German wireless stations in their Pacific colonies to cut Spee off from Berlin, but this was arguably a blessing: he was no longer forced to deal with ineffective attempts to command from afar, unlike the British, and moreover, with no one to talk to, Spee’s squadron maintained radio silence, thus blinding the British to his movements. In August, alerted by American newspapers of Australia’s presence at Samoa, Spee steamed for Apia to try to overwhelm and sink her, lucked out, and managed to catch her unawares, destroying Australia after a several-hour fight. The Apia battle panicked the Admiralty, but Spee adroitly confused the British and Japanese into thinking he was headed for the Marianas while in fact doubling back for French Polynesia and the Chilean coast. By October, the British finally figured out what was up, and dispatched the Western Atlantic Squadron to sink Spee’s cruisers – but the British commander, Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, made a series of tactical errors that permitted Spee to wipe out the majority of the aging British ships off Valparaiso, forcing the remaining vessel, a modern armored cruiser the equal of any single one of Spee’s ships, to flee for the Atlantic.

The fact that Spee was never joined by the Russians at Port Arthur – with whom he could have annihilated virtually any single opponent, and even remained in the Pacific for some time – remains a testament to the looseness of the ties of the Three Emperors’ League before the war. But the use that the Germans made of Spee’s cruise was a combination of sound strategy and sheer dumb luck. Churchill and Fisher in London, although their personalities clashed on most issues, were unified in the necessity to dispatch ships to crush Spee, who was then cruising for the Río de la Plata to disrupt trade there. The means by which they did so remain controversial to this day, especially since by doing so the British played right into Spee’s hands: three battle cruisers and several older armored cruisers sailed south under the command of Admiral Sir F. C. D. Sturdee. This weakened the precious Grand Fleet, and gave the High Seas Fleet a decent shot at numerical parity if it were to attack.

Britain’s Grand Fleet, commanded since October 1914 by Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, controlled the North Sea at the outbreak of war. Britain’s naval strategy had gone through twists and turns for several years, but was eventually fixed on a premise with which few – excepting out-of-touch retirees like Sir Arthur Wilson, or enthusiastic daredevils (read: lunatics) like Churchill – disagreed: distant blockade. Despite all of the ink spilled and arguments had in previous years over the other options available to Britain’s fleet – an amphibious landing in the Baltic (rejected by the army in 1909) and a close blockade of the German coast, aided by an attack on Helgoland (rejected by the navy in 1911) – distant blockade, with the Grand Fleet sitting at anchor at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, played to Britain’s strengths. It forced the Germans to attack with numerical inferiority and ensured eventual victory through economic starvation. And all the while, even by not moving, the British fleet ensured command of the sea by virtue of its numerical preponderance and location. Jellicoe’s temperament was perfect for this strategy: bookish, intellectual, and analytical, he was far from the risk-taking Nelsonic ideal that Fisher and Churchill had in mind for a battle admiral.

Germany, on the other hand, was conferred with several disadvantages. Its High Seas Fleet was numerically inferior, and the pace of naval construction did not seem likely to change that anytime soon. The Germans were also stuck, with only two exits from the North Sea, one of which was highly impractical and the other of which was the Grand Fleet’s very lair. The High Seas Fleet, as the naval strategists Friedrich von Baudissin and Wolfgang Wegener recognized, was the prisoner of Britain’s geography. And the defensive advantages that the High Seas Fleet enjoyed – difficult tides in the Jade and Ems estuaries where it moored, Helgoland as an advanced outpost against the British, and a numerical superiority in destroyers well-suited to coastal warfare – were just the ones that warned the British off from an aggressive naval campaign, and which furthermore made taking the offensive logistically difficult. To cap it all off, the Kaiser himself made clear that high casualties for his prized fleet would be unacceptable, and tried to place limits on the authority of his naval commanders to take risks. How he expected to obtain reward without risk remained unclear.

At the outbreak of war, therefore, the advocates of the offensive, like Baudissin and Friedrich von Ingenohl, the commander of the High Seas Fleet, were silenced by the Kaiser and the chief of the naval planning staff, Hugo von Pohl, who argued that risking the fleet in a useless and risky action was pointless, with the army attaining such dramatic victories in Lorraine. A British destroyer and cruiser raid on the Helgoland Bight in May, which severely damaged one German cruiser and sank two light cruisers, failed to convince the Kaiser of the merits of committing the fleet to battle. What it did convince him, and Pohl, of was the need to find a proper use for Germany’s U-boats. Britain had led the development of the submarine early on, and still had the largest number of underwater vessels, but the Germans’ were more advanced and were being built at a faster rate (despite Fisher’s strident advocacy of the submarine, which he considered to be more valuable than battleships). The German naval staff had expected their U-boats to play a critical role in the defense of the Helgoland Bight, but they were nowhere to be found during the May raid. Ingenohl successfully argued that they needed to be dispersed and sent out to the North Sea to prey on the British blockading vessels and the Grand Fleet. Combined with the use of merchantmen converted to use as minelayers, the U-boats were expected to be the attritional force that they had failed to be in the Helgoland Bight.

The German strategy succeeded beyond Ingenohl’s wildest dreams. For three months, from June through August 1915, the U-boat/minelayer strategy gave the Germans control of the North Sea. Although early on, the Germans still had to try to work out the kinks in their vessels – several mechanical defects were exposed during the first weeks of June – by the end of August, U-boats had sunk some five cruisers and convinced Jellicoe to temporarily move the Grand Fleet to Ireland, whereupon it ran into mine trouble, leaving three vessels, including the brand-new superdreadnought HMS Queen Elizabeth, at the bottom of the sea. Jellicoe quickly took steps to limit the damage, and at any rate the Germans were running low on their stocks of torpedoes, but the attritional damage was done, and the gap between the Grand Fleet and High Seas Fleet continued to close.

Ingenohl continued to argue that the Germans needed to take the offensive by the very nature of the war, but failed to gain a receptive audience until word arrived in Berlin of the dispatch of Sturdee’s squadron to the South Atlantic in October. Persuaded that this would give the Germans something close enough to parity to potentially be decisive, the Kaiser green-lit a raid on the English coast, to be conducted by Franz von Hipper’s battlecruiser squadron; the British failed to respond in time, and Hipper got away neatly after blowing up several portside facilities near Yarmouth. Buoyed by the success of the Yarmouth raid, the Kaiser gave the go-ahead to sally with the entire High Seas Fleet two nights later, when the tides were right, but limited Ingenohl by prohibiting him from engaging the entire Grand Fleet if it were to show up.

Fisher’s failure to implement a proper naval staff once again impeded the Royal Navy in mounting an effective response. British decryption, run by the office at ‘Room 40’, was top-notch, and the Germans’ predilection for transmitting wireless messages even between neighboring ships at anchor in harbor meant that the cryptographers had more than enough sample material with which to work. Consequently, the Admiralty knew that at least part of the High Seas Fleet had set sail – or, at least, some of the admirals did, but the word failed to get out properly. Confusion limited the reaction force to a single battle squadron, Admiral Sir George Warrender’s Second, and two cruiser squadrons, one of which was Admiral Sir David Beatty’s depleted battlecruiser squadron. Yet luck seemingly smiled on the British. As the High Seas Fleet approached Lowestoft in the dark in the early morning of October 17, Ingenohl’s spotters found Warrender’s destroyers and assumed they belonged to the whole Grand Fleet. Ingenohl, constrained by his orders, gave the word for the High Seas Fleet to turn for the German coast, forfeiting the very chance he had hoped for.

Hipper’s battlecruisers had been farther out, and had already attacked traffic on the Wash and at Kingston-upon-Hull. By first light, they had turned around and were near a gap in the minefields at the Outer Dowsing when Beatty, poorly informed by the destroyer escorts, barreled into them. After initial contact and a few wild shots, Hipper, sighting Warrender’s Dreadnoughts, broke off, but Beatty’s blood was up and he ordered a pursuit. The British reliance on flag signaling and the lack of signals to cover Beatty’s specific orders meant that HMS Tiger, one of his battlecruisers, headed the wrong way in the early morning fog, leaving the British with two cruisers to Hipper’s four. The result was a vicious savaging: Beatty’s flagship, HMS Lion, was circled by three German cruisers, which poured metal into her until she went down, with Beatty himself among the casualties. HMS Princess Royal, Beatty’s other vessel, managed to escape and rejoin Tiger under the overall command of Admiral Archibald Moore.

At that point, though, Moore’s battlecruisers were joined by Warrender’s Dreadnoughts, arriving late on the scene. Vastly outgunned, Hipper attempted to pull away, with all of his battlecruisers sustaining heavy damage. It appeared as though the Germans were boxed in, but a false submarine sighting convinced Warrender to turn away, and when he finally managed to get his ships back on track the limitations of the signal book intervened again, confusing most of his vessels into attacking an isolated German cruiser attached to Hipper’s squadron. With the SMS Magdeburg acting as sacrificial lamb, Hipper managed to bring the rest of his battered squadron out of range and successfully made for the safety of the German coast.

Fisher’s obstinacy inflicted perhaps the unkindest cut of all after the Battle of the Outer Dowsing: without a naval staff, the British learned precisely the wrong lessons from the battle. Moore and Warrender were blamed for not having supported Beatty closely enough; failure to concentrate was held up as the main error. The British never knew that the entire High Seas Fleet had been at sea, and thus never realized the near disaster that had overtaken Warrender’s squadron. Furthermore, technical defects in Fisher’s battlecruiser designs, which made them extremely vulnerable to German gunnery, were not noticed. Instead, Moore focused on the relatively small caliber of many of the German guns, and noted that the British vessels could just shrug them off: Lion had died not from inferior armament but from overwhelming numbers. To an extent this was true (at least of Hipper’s battlecruisers) but it obscured the improvements the British themselves needed to make. Besides, British shells had shown their own inadequacy against the heavier German armor. Only after sustained fire from an entire Dreadnought squadron and several battlecruisers did even the aging Magdeburg give up the ghost. Many of these judgments were falsely confirmed after Sturdee’s squadron overwhelmed Spee near the mouth of the Río de la Plata on November 3, sustaining significant damage (and losing one cruiser) in the process; concentration and numbers, it seemed, were key. Nothing was done about the fleet-construction defects or the shell problems, nor about the signal book that impeded communication – much less about the need for a planning staff to coordinate it all.

Postwar British observers were struck by the way the Germans responded to the fight in the Outer Dowsing. During the winter of 1914-5 the High Seas Fleet stayed in drydock, with the Germans focusing on improvements to armor and on the introduction of heavier guns. Hipper also highlighted the weakness of German fire-control arrangements, noting that it took entirely too long for even the badly outnumbered Lion to be destroyed, with many German shots going wild even at close range. And all of the improvements were systematic, nearly fleet-wide, unlike in Britain, where even when modifications were made (and they were mostly not), they were only applied to individual vessels. Even with the remaining doctrinal disagreements between Pohl and Ingenohl – disagreements which were rapidly decreasing as the war went on – the German naval staff organization proved its worth at coordinating the war effort on the high seas.

The Kaiser was increasingly turning his attention to the naval war because it was clear that no quick decision would eventuate on land. Mackensen’s conscious determination to focus on the rest of the world – with all of the long-term planning that entailed – meant that Western Front offensive operations were left for later, handing Joffre the initiative once again for the remainder of 1915. Aside from the constant low-level pressure necessary to keep the Germans honest and a few more major actions (‘more major’ having the meaning of ‘entailing casualties in excess of about 25,000’) towards fall near Belfort, though, Joffre conserved his manpower, wary of the political backlash that came after the hemorrhage of late spring and anxious to gain the support of the steadily-mobilizing British Army.

On Russia’s periphery, operations remained limited by logistics. The initial failures on the Caucasus front were more the result of panic than any real threat, but it was too late to do much of anything about them now. The tsar instead contented himself by getting rid of Myshlayevsky and organizing a Caucasus Front independent of the viceroy, with Pavel von Plehve in command and Yudenich heading up the staff. With rapidly growing manpower after August, the Caucasus Front managed to easily parry Enver’s stumbling thrusts at Kars. A counteroffensive was ruled out, however, by the need to divert resources to Iran, where several British corps, rapidly becoming available due to a frenzy of recruitment at home, had joined the Constitutionalists and an Ottoman army under Ahmed Izzet Paşa in launching a general offensive around the shores of Lake Urmia to try to capture Tabriz. The Russians, aided by the worsening weather, managed to successfully grind out the defense and force the Entente powers to halt in early November. Still, Russia’s position in northern Iran was increasingly tenuous, and the tsar’s stavka, the Russian central command authority (headed up by velikiy knyaz Nikolai Nikolaievich), prioritized Azerbaijan ahead of everything other than Manchuria for the coming year.

Haig’s planned offensive towards Bukhara had petered out for reasons mostly beyond his control: he couldn’t really even launch it. Habibullah, anxious to retain his leverage over the British, limited the BEF’s size to its original two corps, claiming (spuriously) that Afghanistan lacked the resources to support more than that and that he could not be held responsible for the behavior of his tribesmen were the British presence to become more prevalent. Haig was therefore forced to seethe with his troops in defensive positions while the Russians went on their merry way, offloading troops in Bukhara, and finally launching their own offensive in October. It too stalled, albeit at a high cost in casualties for both sides that further irritated relations between Habibullah and the British.

Finally, fighting obviously intensified in China. The outbreak of war had seen Falkenhayn’s Chinese expeditionary force working up in Shandong, leaving it amply prepared for the Anglo-Japanese invasion that came out of Weihaiwei, upon which the Japanese were driven back with heavy casualties - but those exertions left the Beiyang Army unsupported, and it was on it that the hammerblow fell. Jiang, launching the opening stages of a Napoleonic plan to destroy the Qing and seize control of the Republican government, had planned a vast offensive utilizing large numbers of conscripts organized around Japanese cadres. His primary target was, once again, Zhengzhou, one of the largest and most important Qing bases and the center of several critical rail junctions. But Jiang’s plan was Marlboroughnic in conception: he expected to take Zhengzhou, but even if he failed, the effort would draw the attenuated Qing armies thither, and then he could follow it up by exploiting weakness elsewhere – Chengdu, to cover his western flank, and Jiangsu, to cover Nanjing and potentially link up with the Shandong invasion force. His timing was excellent – striking before the Russians managed to redeploy sufficient forces to hold down Manchuria and reinforce the Qing – and his attacks succeeded perfectly, with both Zhengzhou and Luoyang falling into Republican hands, Qing forces driven back on the Jiangsu coastline, and the Beiyang armies in Chengdu trapped in an urban battle of attrition that they lacked the manpower to win.

The startling success of Jiang’s Spring Offensive drove the Qing back on the Huanghe and the Qinling Mountains, and kick-started a dangerous coup against Yuan in Beijing (which he successfully put down with the aid of newly arrived German troops). It also spawned opponents, both foreign and domestic. Mackensen, with the news of the fall of Zhengzhou coming not long after the failure at the Grand Couronné, decided that China should be moved up to a top priority, and many of the reservists being mobilized were sent east along the Trans-Siberian Railway to augment Falkenhayn’s army. And within the Republic, Sun Yat-sen belatedly realized Jiang’s threat to his presidency. Worried about a military coup, he made moves to solidify his political support. On one level, he made the flashy move of marrying into the famous Song family, which made him the brother-in-law of Kong Xiangxi, the richest man in China and a key backer for the war effort. (His wife, Song Qingling, also had impeccable credentials with the Left, securing his ideological position as well.) [9] On another, Sun announced the dissolution of his tottering national-unity government in Nanjing in August, forming a new political party, the Guomindang, or Nationalist Party, incorporating elements of the old Tongmenghui and backed with the formidable support of the popular Song Jiaoren, to better organize opposition to Jiang. In the midst of these political squabbles which began to consume Jiang’s attention after the summer of 1915, it was inevitable that military efficiency would suffer, and with the influx of fresh Russo-German troops the Republican armies were driven back from the Qinling Mountains, reopening the supply lines to the Qing troops holding out in Chengdu.

Oku made good on his excellent position at the opening of summer 1915 and successfully captured Mukden, along with nearly a hundred thousand Russian soldiers and Ruzsky himself, on July 5. Port Arthur continued to hold out in his rear, however, and the Russians were massing ever more troops in the Hinggan ranges to the north. After halfheartedly attempting a rush down the railroad towards Kuancheng, where the remnants of the Manchurian Front were coalescing under the command of a new leader, Aleksei Brusilov, Oku settled down to establish strong defensive positions, launch irritating cavalry raids, and solidify control of Liaoning. Brusilov, anxious to reestablish control over the critical rail link, began probing attacks in August, but didn’t really commit large numbers of troops to the Mukden operation until September, trying to turn the worsening weather into an advantage. Aided by his attached Cossacks, which seriously threatened Oku’s lines of communication, Brusilov’s troops stepped off on September 20 and soon found themselves in a race to try to prevent Oku’s outnumbered defenders from withdrawing out of the noose Brusilov had so painstakingly constructed. Oku had been preparing to make a fight of things, but received orders from Hasegawa Yoshimichi, the chief of the imperial general staff, to preserve his army, and switched his plan in the nick of time. Ultimately, the Japanese managed to pull back to strong defensive positions forty miles from the Yalu, escaping Brusilov’s planned encirclement, but the breathtaking gains of the spring and summer had been erased, and the Japanese were in for a longer, grinding campaign of attrition.

There was but one theater left: Germany’s African colonies. The defense of these was entrusted to the colonial office, not to the general staff, and so policy revolved around maintaining the colony as a European colony – and ideally a German one, to be used in the peace negotiations – by retaining possession for the entire war. This clashed rather dramatically with the general staff’s inclination to seek battle and annihilate the enemy’s forces. Thus it was that German Togoland was surrendered within a week of the outbreak of war to the forces of the British Gold Coast Regiment. The Cape colony took considerably longer to do much of anything. To Asquith’s terror, Boer representatives threatened civil war in the Cape if they were forced to fight the Germans, and a few isolated units actually made good on that threat, which tied down British forces there for some months. Eventually, Asquith shocked everybody by proposing an old pet project of Campbell-Bannerman’s, a South African (white) dominion to be effectively dominated by an Anglo-Boer partnership. The Tories – who had rather abruptly ceased their harping over Ireland after the outbreak of war out of national solidarity – were pushed into hysterical histrionics about the betrayal of British sons who died in the Boer War and so on and so forth, further weakening the Asquith government (more on that later), but ultimately failing to hold Asquith’s South Africa bill up. By the time the whole situation could be resolved it was already November, far too late to think about attacking German South-West Africa. Further north, Kamerun and East Africa, Germany’s other colonies, had been hardly touched (save for a few outposts seized by the French on the Kamerun border areas) by virtue of the British and French having concentrated far more on other theaters with their disposable manpower. It took time to bring Indian, West African, and now South African forces to bear, and by the winter that had not fully been done.

Austria-Hungary was alone among the Great Powers involved in the war in doing basically nothing. The K.u.K. navy remained in base at Pola, joined soon enough by Germany’s Mediterranean squadron. France’s Mediterranean fleet established a barrage across the Adriatic entrances but did little else, unwilling to test the Austrians’ firepower in the restricted Adriatic waters. Austria’s army remained unmobilized, waiting in readiness; the head of the Austrian general staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, believed that Italy was the Dual Monarchy’s greatest foe, and persuaded Franz Josef to only send token forces to shore up the Germans on the Western Front.

If an overall verdict were given on the outcome of the 1915 campaigns it would have to be ‘indecisive’, of course. While the Entente made major gains in most areas, in all of them the gains were both disappointingly below prewar estimates and purchased at an outrageously high cost. Even the belief that Germany would collapse from financial exhaustion and from the destruction of its overseas trade proved unfounded. Qing China had proved more resilient than had been hoped. And the German imperial navy had been an incorrigible opponent; though Spee’s squadron was at the bottom of the Río de la Plata, it had done unacceptable amounts of damage on its way there, and the High Seas Fleet also continued to menace the east British coast.

With the current plans for the destruction of Germany – for Germany, the leaders of the Entente knew, was the linchpin of the Three Emperors’ League – proving insufficient, the British and French began to plan a new operation in the late fall of 1915. Joffre had long entertained the idea of violating Belgian neutrality to outflank the German fortifications in Alsace-Lorraine, and part of the reason French activity had been relatively sparse after the summer had been Joffre’s effort to build up a reserve for such a purpose. But members of the British cabinet, especially Churchill, came on board by November. Churchill had personally scouted the idea of seizing Antwerp to operate on the flanks of a German army passing through Belgium, and was disappointed when those plans had never been put into practice. Now, he was getting the chance to reactivate them, and even expand them.

For it would not be enough to invade only Belgium, Joffre knew. The Belgians controlled the narrow passage between Luxembourg (which would also be a target) and the Dutch ‘Maastricht appendix’, and had blocked it with the great and modern fortification of Liège; backed by Germans, Liège could probably hold off Entente armies for years, and would erase the whole point of the march around the Germans’ flanks. The Netherlands – or at least the Maastricht appendix – had to be occupied as well, to allow the Entente to send troops into the north German plain, from where they could seize the North Sea ports, or the Ruhr, even perhaps Berlin itself…Joffre knew the right buttons to push to convince Churchill of the plan’s utility, and won an immediate convert after meeting him personally at Grand Quartier Général (GQG, the French supreme command post) in Vitry-le-François in November. Onto this plan, Churchill tacked his old enthusiasm for an invasion of the Helgoland Bight, to capture Helgoland and Borkum and destroy the High Seas Fleet once and for all, since apparently Jellicoe was incapable of getting the job done through distant blockade. An even more ambitious plan, authored by Fisher, proposed landing the British troops in the Baltic, from where they could march to Berlin and end the war in a trice, but the army’s opposition and Churchill’s fear of the Russian Baltic Fleet scuttled it.

The Germans, of course, had an inkling that this would happen. Churchill’s enthusiasm for his Borkum Plan was well known (and had contributed to a naval scare or two in the prewar years). And the violation of Belgian neutrality had been foretold years before, by no less than Schlieffen, who argued that if the Germans did not invade Belgium, the French certainly would. Knowing the location of an attack and preparing to repulse it, however, are two entirely different things. It did not help that the tentative feelers made towards the Belgian and Dutch governments to try to warn them of the invasion fell on deaf ears, with both states – especially Belgium – so committed to their neutrality that it was rated as more important than the sanctity of their soil and the lives of their citizens. (A similar reaction, incidentally, drove Churchill and a few others into wishful thinking. Since it would be so destructive to Belgium and the Netherlands to resist in a hopeless struggle for the sake of their national honor and little else, presumably they would turn the other cheek when the British and French came in seeking passage.)

To aid in planning for this endeavor, Asquith gave up the war ministry portfolio – which he had held since the mutinous stirrings in the Army over Ulster the previous year – and gave it to the charismatic Earl Kitchener, whose iconic recruitment poster remains a cultural landmark to this day. Kitchener’s contribution to the actual organization effort is rather more dubious and debatable, but in the winter of 1915-6, at least, he lit a fire under the various staffs and cranked up the rate of recruitment while gearing Britain for a Continental war. The army had long promised the French that it would intervene on the Continent, although Russian belligerence and the lack of a German advance into Belgium had put that off somewhat. Now Continentalism was back with a vengeance, as British troops stationed in Asia were shipped back home, replaced by Australians, Indians, and New Zealanders. The Grand Fleet was significantly less enthusiastic about fighting the High Seas Fleet in the latter’s home waters, but Jellicoe recognized that proper timing could negate many of the Germans’ defensive advantages, and at any rate the British still – if narrowly – outgunned the Germans.

Of course, there were the requisite voices of caution. Richard Haldane, who had hoped to reclaim the war ministry (but who was seen as too much of a Germanophile for the job), argued that the war wasn’t going that badly, that the blockade would still take its toll on Germany, and that the British didn’t need to waste men, money, and their global reputation on invading neutral countries. He was partially discredited, though, not merely because of his Germanophilia – which was real – but because of his role in the Liberal opposition to Asquith. The outbreak of war had been a temporary boon to the Liberals, who successfully conned the Tories into cooperation in the name of national defense; thus Asquith had managed, underhandedly, to get an amending bill through the Commons that kept Tyrone and Fermanagh in ‘southern’ Ireland, although the implementation of Home Rule was to be left until after the war. But many Liberals, including Lloyd George, were aghast at the failure to address the Triple Alliance’s concerns (fortunately for the government, most of the unions' members had enlisted in the army), while others, like Haldane, disagreed with Asquith on the conduct of the war. Elements of the Army – and of course, the Tories themselves – were angry about the brutal crackdowns in Ulster after rioting erupted in the fall of 1915, which only added to discontent over South Africa and the Home Rule Act. And the worst fracture of all came over a most unlikely source, the 1916 war budget, in which Lloyd George doubled the duties on liquors, strong beers, and even sparkling wines, irritating the Conservatives (the traditional spokesmen for the “Drink Interest”), Labour (angry about the implicit assumptions Lloyd George was making about the drinking habits of the working classes), and Redmond’s Irish Nationalists (duh). Effectively, this meant that the 1916 campaigns would be an indirect vote of confidence in Asquith’s leadership. Well might Asquith or Churchill envy Joffre, Messimy, and the French prime minister, Gaston Doumergue, who enjoyed the backing of the union sacrée in the Chamber of Deputies.

Kitchener’s warnings about quality and troop training difficulties – due to which he was permitted to cannibalize the BEF, once it returned from Central Asia, to provide cadres – convinced the Cabinet and Joffre to hold off on the Belgian offensive for several months. So the first engagements of the year happened, in fact, in the Caucasus, where Yudenich’s long-awaited counteroffensive against Sarikamiş opened in February under the cover of a snowstorm. Despite unexpected defensive tenacity on the part of the Turks, the Russians managed to push them out of imperial territory and back across the Aras within a few weeks. They stopped there, though, leading to one of the sadder events to take place during the war, the still-shadowy Armenian genocide. Spontaneous violence against Armenians had already erupted in eastern Anatolia during the course of 1915 in retribution for Armenians' role in the outbreak of war. In March 1916, fueled by fears of Armenian collaboration with the Russians, Talaat instituted a policy whereby the army removed many of these potential fifth columnists away from the front. Most of them – a figure in excess of one million – were left in the Syrian desert without food or water, or simply shot. The Russians did have a few contacts in the Armenian community, but they were sparse, and at any rate Russia had no plans to attack, and so its armies basically just sat there while the Ottomans cleansed eastern Anatolia.

With everything as ready as it could reasonably be expected to be, the British and French ambassadors in Brussels delivered a note to King Albert on April 10, demanding right of passage and supply for their armies. Before April, the Belgians had been relatively uninterested in the whole war; the largely Catholic press was closest to Austria-Hungary out of all the Great Powers, and the Austrians weren’t doing anything. Colonially, the commanders in the Congo were worried about the potential effects of the war on the loyalties of the native population, but were prepared to use their customary repression to make things work. As noted earlier, Albert and his government felt that an honest maintenance of Belgium’s neutrality restricted Belgian policy and thus refused to mobilize on German advice in March when French preparations for invasion became unmistakably clear. It was unlikely that Belgium would have been able to financially sustain such a mobilization anyway. At any rate, on April 12, when the ultimatum ran out and the Entente powers declared war, Belgium’s army was both scattered and unmobilized.

Predictably, Ferdinand Foch’s groupe d’armées made short work of most of the Belgian army, which was not concentrated in time. The fortress of Namur, which guarded the Meuse valley, fell after a few days’ siege, and Antwerp, seized by General Sir James Grierson’s British Second Army, was captured even faster. Albert called for German aid within a day of the outbreak of war, and prudently pulled what forces he did have back to the protection of the fortress of Liège, on the German frontier. Aided by German reinforcements which were beginning to trickle in, the Belgian commander of Liège, Gérard Leman, put up a stout resistance to the initial French probes on April 22-25, forcing a pause while the French sought a way around to the south, through the Ardennes and Luxembourg.

Foch was aided in this by the British, who quickly advanced from Antwerp across northern Belgium to the Maastricht appendix. The failure of the Heemskerk government in the Netherlands to respond to the initial British violation of Dutch neutrality – they had had to go through Dutch waters to get to Antwerp – had touched off a political crisis in the Netherlands that immobilized Dutch decisionmaking, and the British took full advantage of their hesitation by crossing the Maastricht appendix without fighting on April 21. Although Grierson’s troops were pushed back from Aachen – thus ensuring the safety of Liège at least for a little while longer – British cavalry broke out and raided as far as München-Gladbach before OHL could redeploy troops to deal with the new threat. Fortunately for the Germans, the British and French had been expected for some months; unfortunately, ‘how’ and ‘where’ were unclear enough that Mackensen had not got troops close enough to the initial scenes of fighting. The result was the Second Army had only to deal with a shell of Landwehr until April 25, and after that was opposed only by equal numbers, fighting the German Tenth Army that had been slated for China.

With the odds beginning to mount against them as the Germans began to redeploy reserves via rail, the British launched a second attack on München-Gladbach in the first week of May and managed to capture the city and cross the canals to Krefeld. At the same time, Foch’s armies, reinforced by fresh troops, pushed through German and Belgian positions in the Ardennes at Malmünd and crossed into German territory there, nearly severing Liège’s supply lines once again. Confronted by the panicky Kaiser at OHL in Koblenz, Mackensen creditably remained calm. Joffre had ordered fixing attacks in Lorraine to prevent the Germans from withdrawing troops from that front and bringing them north, but the Germans were holding there easily without using their reserves. These reserves, amalgamated into an Eleventh Army commanded by Albrecht, the duke of Württemberg, slammed into the southern flank of the British salient in the Rhineland in the third week of May, driving them away from advanced positions near Jülich and threatening to cut off the entire Second Army. While the momentum of the Germans’ attack was unsustainable, the threat to his rear checked Grierson’s latest attack on Krefeld and forced him to reorganize his troops, all the while calling for his expected reinforcements.

Britain relied on command of the sea to send those reinforcements to the Continent, and to ensure that they had it, Churchill had ordered Jellicoe to launch the Borkum Plan on April 16. The Grand Fleet was to support an amphibious assault on Helgoland and then the resort island of Borkum to control the High Seas Fleet’s exits to the North Sea and seal it in port for good, while providing a base from which the Grand Fleet could crush the Germans if they tried to stop it. It was, of course, an exceedingly cunning plan, and it almost worked, too. The substance of the plan was fairly simple. Relying on the fact that the High Seas Fleet needed two high tides to put to sea because of the conditions around the Jade and Ems estuaries, the Grand Fleet would cover the amphibious operations at both islands and, if any of the High Seas Fleet came out, it could be engaged piecemeal, negating the attrition that the Grand Fleet had suffered over the past year.

The Borkum Plan ran into its first problem when it became apparent that the German defenses on Helgoland and Borkum were significantly stronger than they had been before the war, when British officers had scouted the islands disguised as tourists. This was mostly the fault of the Battle of Helgoland Bight the previous year, when Beatty’s raid had so discomfited the Germans; they had spent significant time and money improving coastal defenses, convinced that the British would be following up on their raid at any moment. These included mines, of which Jellicoe was extremely worried after the sinking of the Queen Elizabeth the previous year off Lough Swilly, which further constricted his options for maneuver. Archibald Paris’ Royal Marines hit the beach (as it were) at both places on the morning of April 17 and were placed under a withering fire from the start. Several battleships had to be drawn off to provide extra fire support, blanketing the island and providing succor to the marines but weakening the Grand Fleet’s potential response force against a German sally. What was worse, the Germans had been forewarned of the British arrival by shore-based aircraft, and had managed to scramble several cruiser squadrons and two battle squadrons before the Grand Fleet even got there, leaving the British with no time to engage the High Seas Fleet piecemeal. German land-based planes neatly neutralized Britain's secret weapons, two prototype aircraft carriers, though sheer numbers. The British also had to deal with Germany’s swarms of destroyers – which, even if the Grand Fleet hadn’t been so far from its Scapa base, would have outnumbered those of the British – and U-boats, which maintained a constant harassment.

When Ingenohl finally managed to get the entire High Seas Fleet out of harbor, he sailed into the first Dreadnought-on-Dreadnought clash in history. The British were disorganized, both from the efforts of covering the invasions of Helgoland and Borkum and from the utterly inadequate flag signaling that was supposed to serve as an effective mouthpiece for Jellicoe’s orders. The loss of Beatty along with one of his precious battlecruisers also proved to be a serious problem; his replacement, Vice-Admiral William Pakenham, was capable, but new and somewhat untested in his command, having commanded one of the the cruiser squadrons sent south to fight Spee the previous winter. Hipper promptly took advantage of the situation by coordinating a torpedo attack that drove one of Pakenham’s squadrons onto the German Dreadnoughts’ guns – and the torpedoes themselves, along with Hipper’s own fire, sank three of the prized British battlecruisers and crippled a fourth.

Belatedly recognizing the threat, Jellicoe managed to concentrate his Dreadnoughts and assemble in a semblance of line of battle. In the fairly confused melee that followed, the improvements that the Germans had made to their ships over the previous winter told dramatically. Although British gunnery was still slightly more effective in the relatively clear conditions than the Germans’, the Germans could shrug off many of the hits and near-hits. Fisher’s watchwords had been speed and firepower, but the necessary trade-off was armor thickness, and poor British policies about ammunition storage and gun maintenance contributed even more to making the Dreadnoughts virtual tinderboxes. HMS Orion, the first of the so-called superdreadnoughts, took eleven hits in six minutes and finally blew up only half a mile away from Jellicoe’s flagship, HMS Iron Duke. Further down the line, HMS Audacious broke in half after sustaining hits from three different German Dreadnoughts. After three hours of battering away, Jellicoe successfully managed to extricate the Grand Fleet by ordering Pakenham’s remaining battlecruisers to suicidally charge the Germans – the so-called “Death Ride” subsequently immortalized in British naval legend.[10] Surprisingly, despite being targeted by the entire High Seas Fleet, only one battlecruiser, the already-damaged HMS New Zealand, was sunk, while Pakenham’s four remaining vessels successfully broke free. Having sustained not-inconsiderable losses to his own fleet, Ingenohl elected not to pursue.

The losses to both sides were severe. Ingenohl’s High Seas Fleet lost two predreadnoughts in the prolonged melee with the Grand Fleet’s battle line, and sustained significant damage to most ships in the battle squadrons. In addition, Hipper had lost a battlecruiser – SMS Moltke – and the British had also sunk five light cruisers. Destroyer and U-boat losses were higher due not just to the covering role they had played while the High Seas Fleet got into position but also to fratricide from U-boat torpedoes. But the British had clearly been worse off. Two Dreadnoughts had been lost, along with a shocking five battlecruisers and nine light and armored cruisers. Damage to the rest of the Grand Fleet was so high that Jellicoe estimated that the entire fleet was unlikely to be able to take to sea for at least a year afterward. And the British had lost even more than that in terms of trained personnel: without the ability to conscript naval servicemen as the Germans did, the Royal Navy had gone into the war with a much smaller body of war-ready sailors. The British lost even more trained men when the marines on Helgoland, bereft of naval support and trapped by the Germans, were forced to surrender three days after the battle, having managed to maintain their position on the island for a remarkably long time given the circumstances. The marines on Borkum had tried to break out across the shallow channel to the Netherlands; about half of them made it, and were interned for the rest of the war.

With the Grand Fleet crippled, Ingenohl and Pohl urged the resumption of submarine operations. Beginning in May 1916, U-boats once again began to sally from the Bight, targeting British cross-Channel transports. Although the destroyers of the British Harwich Force[11] were able to interfere with their operations, the Germans still made shipping to Antwerp a nightmare and impeded the delivery of troops and supplies to bolster Grierson’s army in western Germany. Thus, although some British troops made it to the Rhine, by early June they were increasingly unable to hold their positions in the face of more rapidly growing German manpower. Foch’s efforts to outflank Liège stalled as well, with the Germans and Belgians making excellent use of the rough Ardennes terrain in holding off the French. When Grierson died of heart trouble on June 9, with British troops still on the offensive in the ruins of Krefeld, the campaign lost one of its strongest remaining advocates, and Henry Wilson, his chief of staff, took over and began to withdraw towards Maastricht, successfully parrying a fresh attempt by the duke of Württemberg to cut the British off in the process.

By mid-June, it was clear that heads would roll. Asquith had already dumped Churchill in May, taking over the naval portfolio himself while employing Fisher to run the day-to-day operations of the fleet. More rats fled the sinking ship when Haldane brought several Liberal MPs into coalition talks with Bonar Law on May 25. But it was not until June 11, with the clear failure of the Maastricht campaign, that a threat of a no-confidence vote forced Asquith to step down. Yet none of his opponents could muster the support to replace him. The Tories would need to combine with the Irish, which was beyond the impossible, or Labour, which was almost as unthinkable. Haldane lacked the support to claim the premiership for himself in a national unity government, and at any rate Bonar Law was still demanding concessions on Ireland that Haldane would have felt incapable of granting. So David Lloyd George, the Welsh Wizard, succeeded Asquith as PM almost by default, successfully bringing Haldane back (he was even made First Lord of the Admiralty, a post for which he was not particularly well suited, as a sop to the anti-Asquith branch of the Liberals). He had Second Army – now commanded by Haig – pull out of the Netherlands entirely, and did his damnedest to try and convince the new Dutch government of Pieter Cort van der Linden to let bygones be bygones (at which Grey, still Foreign Secretary, was mostly successful).[12]

With Liège continuing to stand tall, and German troops massing in the Ardennes for a counteroffensive to clear the fortress’s southern flank, Foch too was forced to give up on his invasion for the time being. The French, however, had much more freedom of action, both politically and militarily, than did the British. In addition, Second Army remained on the Continent, with Kitchener successfully fending off calls to withdraw it (Haldane in particular arguing that “Continentalism has failed” and that the empire was what needed protection). In August, Joffre and Foch used the British as the spearhead for a fresh offensive in Luxembourg, where Joffre judged the German lines to be weaker than anywhere else. He was right, but not right enough, as the Anglo-French attackers were repelled by large numbers of German heavy guns that were shipped to the scene in lieu of troops – part and parcel of Mackensen and Falkenhayn’s new strategy of spending matériel instead of manpower to avoid the heavy casualties of 1915. However, the Germans did lose a significant amount of ground in a coterminous Woëvre offensive east of Verdun.

In China, 1916 was the year of the Brusilov offensive, based on evolving operational assault techniques that Falkenhayn and Brusilov had cooked up in meetings in Beijing. The Russians eschewed mass attacks, which were deemed to be too costly (normally not a Russian concern, but considering the immense difficulty in getting manpower to the front in China, troops were increasingly at a premium), in favor of smaller-scale limited offensives that didn’t overextend outside of artillery cover. With a series of these bite-sized attacks all along the front, Brusilov eroded the Japanese lines by as much as twenty miles over the course of the summer. Eventually, the Japanese hit on the ammunition-intensive tactic of maintaining artillery fire at almost all times, preventing any Russians, anywhere from moving at all. Although this caused a political crisis in Japan in the fall – a “shell shortage” scare that was mirrored in the UK, France, Germany, and Russia – the Japanese did successfully halt Brusilov’s offensive, and the canny Russian was forced to return to the drawing board to try to find yet another workaround.

Falkenhayn himself was severely limited in operational terms: the Low Countries offensives had robbed him of the manpower he had planned to use to push the Republicans back from Zhengzhou. In addition, Entente troop strength in China continued to rise, with ANZACs finally making an appearance after completing the conquest of Germany’s Pacific island colonies. While the Germans were tied down defending against an Anglo-ANZAC-Japanese attack in Shandong in the late summer, Jiang reorganized his armies and, seeking to outflank Sun’s political victories with battlefield ones, opened a major offensive in northern Jiangsu, seeking to clear his flank preparatory to a grand crossing of the Huanghe to take Beijing. Unlike the great success of the Spring Offensive, Jiang’s Autumn Offensive ran into serious trouble; with the Beiyang Army now beginning to employ German artillery tactics, with infantry dug into the exceedingly messy canal country, the Republicans had to trade huge numbers of lives for every acre. Slowly, excruciatingly, Jiang’s conscripts managed to pry Duan Qirui’s crack defenders out of Xuzhou after a month and a half of fighting in which the Republicans suffered a horrifying 450,000 casualties; not long afterwards, the Autumn Offensive began to break down.[13] Hoping to make at least some profit from the whole enterprise, Jiang ordered a November attack around Chengdu, trying to give the city a bit of defensive depth and counting on Qing reserves having been drawn elsewhere; it succeeded in most of its objectives, but did not stop the rumbles of discontent from Nanjing.

Considering Russia’s other fronts, 1916 was actually quite a good year. After pushing the Ottomans out of Sarikamiş, Plehve and Yudenich prepared a limited offensive around Lake Urmia to clear the threat to Tehran; with British troops in the area drawn down in order to launch the Antwerp invasion, the Russians managed to drive the Turks and Constitutionalists back and secure favorable defensive positions. In July, the new Iranian Front, under the direction of Mikhail Alekseyev, launched its own offensive, attempting to capture Qum and shore up the Qajars with a badly needed victory. Unfortunately, the July attack was conducted around the edges of the great Iranian salt desert, and some Russian divisions recorded up to fifty percent casualties from heat exhaustion and dehydration. But Alekseyev, unwittingly, had timed his offensive well, for the Constitutionalists were riven by a political struggle: Rezā Khan, an accomplished former army officer who had defected in 1915 along with the equivalent of two divisions, was attempting to gain the supreme command, and the Bakhtiaris were blocking him from doing so. To prove his value, Rezā Khan withheld his troops from battle at Qum while many Bakhtiaris were killed by the advancing Russians, and then – as the exhausted Russians tried to push on southward without artillery support – he mounted a staunch defensive action, easily defeated the overextended Russians, and claimed a glorious victory. Nevertheless, Alekseyev had gained a buffer for Tehran and a badly needed victory to bolster the Qajar regime. What might have happened had the Russians not won at Qum was made clear in October, as a British-backed coup nearly wiped out the shah’s council of ministers, while emir Aslan Khan Choiski led an Azeri revolt around Tabriz that was only narrowly crushed.

With the oceans now almost completely free of German cruisers and South African political squabbles successfully dealt with, the Indian and South African armies began to deploy vast armies to invade the Germans’ African colonies. First up on the target list was South-West Africa, for its proximity to South Africa and for its congenial terrain for the Boers’ mobile style of warfare. Jan Smuts, a key figure in Union politics and a veteran of the kommando fighting of the war against the British, led the South African detachment, enjoying both a maneuver advantage from the large numbers of Boer cavalry and a considerable numerical advantage. Windhoek fell on May 18 and the Germans surrendered near Tsumeb two months later. Kamerun and East Africa were much harder nuts to crack; while about as large as Southwest Africa, their terrain was much less congenial, their troop detachments were larger, and their garrisons were led by able military commanders Karl Zimmermann and Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Lettow, a General Staff type, did his utmost to attract attention and tie down British troops, launching raids and even a full-scale attack into British East Africa in early 1916. While he failed in most of his objectives, like encircling the massing Indian Army troops attempting to oppose him, his actions and the incompetence of the local British commanders managed to convince the British to hold off on an invasion of East Africa until 1917. Zimmermann, by contrast, was a Colonial Office type who did his utmost to remain below the radar, only reluctantly fighting with the French when they threatened the agricultural subsistence of the Kamerun colony. The major engagement of 1916, on the Ngaundere plateau in October, came about by accident, with the French unintentionally succeeding where they had expended little effort and Zimmermann desperately – and, ultimately, successfully – collecting the troops to push them out.[14]

Elsewhere in Africa, the suspiciously nonbelligerent Italians were finding both success and failure. The Senussi insurgency in Libya was dying down, with the Italians enjoying the dubious honor of being the first state to employ poison gas in warfare during the storming of Derna. But for all that Libya was a “success story”, the Italian campaign in Ethiopia was going past “setback” towards “disaster” on the way to “cautionary tale”. Luigi Capello, the able Italian commander in “support” of Iyasu’s claim to the throne, had managed the campaign well through 1915, successfully capturing both Gonder and Addis Ababa. It was then that the wheels came off. Capello died of pneumonia in the winter of 1915-6, and his replacement, Alberto Cavaciocchi, was not up to par. The Germans, seeing a potential ally for Lettow in East Africa, began to ship Zewditu’s forces equipment and cash to throw out the Italians, and, armed with modern German rifles and even a few mountain guns (expertly smuggled in pieces aboard several U-boats and the cruiser raider SMS Emden), Zewditu’s loyalists mounted several effective ambushes against the Italians and marched back into Addis Ababa in May 1916. From there, the Italians were forced to fall back onto the Gonder plateau, from which the Ethiopians were temporarily unable to dislodge them.

By the winter of 1916-7, it was becoming clear that the Entente’s initial tries at destroying Germany, Russia, and the Qing Empire – the most dangerous members of the alliance – had failed. Somehow, the Germans were beginning to win the naval war, while achieving defensive victories in Western Europe, while the Qing proved more resilient than anybody would have guessed. Russia, impossibly, was actually advancing on all fronts. With the situation anywhere from ‘stalled’ to ‘slowly retreating’ across the major theaters of war, the British and French began to concoct a plan to break the stalemate. If they could not make headway against the strongest of the Three Emperors’ League, they would instead target the weakest…

As for the Germans, their situation, although far from desperate, was not particularly improving. Defensive victories were nice to have in one’s pocket, but everywhere Germany had been prevented from going on the offensive, and Russia’s gains, while heartening, were far too slow to be of use. The British blockade was still in existence, and continued to strangle Germany’s economy, albeit slower than anybody had thought before the war. In search of a fast end to the war – although ostensibly, in meetings with King Albert, for altruistic reasons – Mackensen began to plan a campaign to reconquer Belgium and restore the Bewegungskrieg, the war of movement, that Germany’s officers craved. The officers of the High Seas Fleet began to prepare for their own offensive, coordinated with the Russian Baltic Fleet, which would win the North Sea for Germany. And Falkenhayn finally began to gather the troops he needed for his own war-winning campaign.

One way or another, 1917 would be a year of decisive campaigns. The deadlock would not last much longer.

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[1] = Germany's OTL war plan in 1914 was not Schlieffen's plan, either, but I felt no real need to address the complicated modern historiography around it in the text of the TL. It suffices to say that the plan, as described by most historians and popular authors of the 1960s - the version most of us were fed in high school or Gymnasium - did not exist. However, if you are interested in the subject, I can recommend the book Inventing the Schlieffen Plan by Terence Zuber and the series of articles by Zuber, Terence Holmes, and Robert Foley (consisting of a great deal of back and forth arguing between Zuber on one side and Holmes/Foley on the other) in the pages of War in History over the last ten or so years. For what it's worth, I'd tend to side with Holmes over Zuber, if only because some of Zuber's assertions end up being a little crazy, but Zuber's great for minutiae. If you have access to Ph.D. theses, Mark Stoneman's (unpublished) on Wilhelm Groener and the social role of the Kaiserreich's officer corps ends up spending much of its time synthesizing the historiography of German war planning. (I have heard that he plans to turn it into a book, but it'd be too much work on top of teaching and editing to get it done any time soon.) Anyway. Just a side note.
[2] = This is an elaboration of what I was talking about on the previous page with respect to France and Germany's armies.
[3] = These comments apply to OTL and TTL. So does my rebuttal in the next few paragraphs. World War I was certainly not as stupid as Blackadder or All Quiet on the Western Front might make it seem. That doesn't mean it wasn't an awful experience for the soldiers, arguably the worst in human history, of course. On prewar tactics and how they were in fact constantly evolving and rather more appreciative of the role of firepower and the defensive than one might think, I would recommend Antúlio Echevarria's After Clausewitz.
[4] = In comparison with OTL, when the German army passed army legislation in 1912-3 to increase the size of the regular forces. They have gotten no such increases in TTL.
[5] = In my defense, this was a relevant factor for basically every army in the OTL First World War's opening stages.
[6] = Sukhomlinov's gotten an unfair reputation for being a backwards-looking fool, exacerbated by his penchant for affecting the manner and dress of a cavalry officer. In reality, the debate in the Russian army was not over whether modernization was a Good Thing, but over differing, and arguably equally valid, conceptions of what military modernization even meant. This, of course, applies to both OTL and TTL.
[7] = He was like an infinitely less talented and wildly less successful version of Jason Terry on the 2010 Mavs? Yeah, that analogy was reaching.
[8] = For which he will get fucking lambasted in TTL. Fisher was such a weirdo. For what it's worth, I consider Anton Haus to have been the admiral who did the best job for his country in OTL WWI, with Thaon di Revel, Essen, and Scheer getting honorable mention. The Jellicoe/Beatty tandem was a mess.
[9] = Altered circumstances for the Sun-Song marriage here. Instead of a bigamous elopement that estranged Sun from Charlie Song, everything's done much more, uh, normally.
[10] = Why, yes, I did draw a little inspiration from Jutland. Why do you ask?
[11] = Group of cruisers and destroyers stationed around the Straits of Dover to act as a rapid reaction force against smaller German sallies. Harwich Force was the group that had conducted the May 1915 Helgoland Bight raid.
[12] = The British were successful in large part because the Germans also exerted their not inconsiderable influence to keep the Dutch out of the war. Mackensen was worried that the Germans would not be able to cover the entirety of the Dutch border with troops and at any rate believed that the Dutch would offer little to no actual assistance on land or sea while permitting the British to seize the East Indies basically for free.
[13] = In retrospect, this decision was a mistake. Jiang should have masked Jiangsu - its very defensive qualities made it difficult for the Qing to ship troops there and made it a negligible threat against his flank - while attacking directly across the Huanghe to Beijing. His search for an easy and quick victory to bolster his political position ended up being nigh disastrous in both military and political terms.
[14] = Zimmermann was a colossally underrated commander in OTL who is frequently and unfairly slighted in favor of paeans to Lettow. Not that Lettow was a bad general or anything, but had it been East Africa that was attacked early on and Kamerun that was ignored for two years, Zimmermann would've been the last man standing and Lettow would've been forced to surrender.

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woop WOOP

As usual, I would love to have the opportunity to respond to questions and/or comments. :D
 

Super_Cool

What does the U.S. feel about the "rape of Belgium" by the Entente?

In OTL, the German invasion made Americans sympathetic to the Entente. Here, it seems the Three Emperor's League with get the support. How will British propaganda spin this?
 

Falecius

I'm really enjoying this, though I'm little perplexed on how Persia came to a civil war situation with the Qajar vs. the Constitutionalists, especially Constitutionalists with Reza Khan in their ranks. OTL, Persia was mostly fair game for Russian armies.
Also, Austrian inactivity seems to me a little bit extreme, particularly after Belgian violation. If anything, THAT thing should cause outrage in Austria.
 

Falecius

Leistungsfähiger Amerikan said:
Aight, it's time to start taking bets. Who wins this alternate World War I?
Click to expand...

The Alliance seems to have a decent chance.
There's still the Italian wild card. Last update hints at the possibility of the Entente trying to get their intervention. That could tip the balance, or backfire, since Austria's been doing basically nothing so far.
All in all, the Entente seems in a worse shape.
 
machine3589

machine3589

Leistungsfähiger Amerikan said:
Aight, it's time to start taking bets. Who wins this alternate World War I?
Click to expand...

I think the Dreikaiserbund has this war more or less in the bag after the last update. Barring the Entante making some major breakthroughs (unlikely, IMO) or the Russians having a revolution (very unlikely), there`s not much they can do to win this war.
 

Falecius

Also, a note. South Africa TTL goes reasonably well for the Entente, while premises are worse. OTL some Boers rebelled with arms, and that was some years AFTER the Union was established as a Dominion. TTL, I can easily see a far larger amount of Boer discontent because of the delayed Union, so probably a Boer revolt is still likely. Violation of Dutch neutrality may also have an impact.
Without Union, Smuts and Botha may be less firmly loyal, though I don't see neither joining an alt-Boer revolt. How do the British (more military stretched TTL) manage to avoid it? To the very least, I can imagine much more concessions to the Boers being made.
Also Entente TTL is losing heavily propaganda-wise. They are supporting rebels in both Iran and China, and the nastier figures are quickly rising to prominence among those rebels, reducing chances of truly demoratic change. How will Chinese Republicans, even in the event of a victory, restore Chinese independence and modernize the place when they have their hands so tied by the Entente imperialist control? Ditto for Iranian Constitutionalist, whose tie with Britain will alienate the clergy. And Britain is still, in the eyes of Americans for example, the onee power that is oppressing Ireland.
Worse, they are the side supporting Armenian Genocide. How will the Western public react when the news about it leak out? OL many Armenian refugees fled to France via Syria and Lebanon, TTL I guess many more will flee to Greece, Italy, and of course, Russia. On the top of it, Entente violated BOTH Belgian and Dutch neutrality.
I can see very, very bad PR for them.
 

Leistungsfähiger Amerikan

Falecius said:
Also, a note. South Africa TTL goes reasonably well for the Entente, while premises are worse. OTL some Boers rebelled with arms, and that was some years AFTER the Union was established as a Dominion. TTL, I can easily see a far larger amount of Boer discontent because of the delayed Union, so probably a Boer revolt is still likely. Violation of Dutch neutrality may also have an impact.
Without Union, Smuts and Botha may be less firmly loyal, though I don't see neither joining an alt-Boer revolt. How do the British (more military stretched TTL) manage to avoid it? To the very least, I can imagine much more concessions to the Boers being made.
Also Entente TTL is losing heavily propaganda-wise. They are supporting rebels in both Iran and China, and the nastier figures are quickly rising to prominence among those rebels, reducing chances of truly demoratic change. How will Chinese Republicans, even in the event of a victory, restore Chinese independence and modernize the place when they have their hands so tied by the Entente imperialist control? Ditto for Iranian Constitutionalist, whose tie with Britain will alienate the clergy. And Britain is still, in the eyes of Americans for example, the onee power that is oppressing Ireland.
Worse, they are the side supporting Armenian Genocide. How will the Western public react when the news about it leak out? OL many Armenian refugees fled to France via Syria and Lebanon, TTL I guess many more will flee to Greece, Italy, and of course, Russia. On the top of it, Entente violated BOTH Belgian and Dutch neutrality.
I can see very, very bad PR for them.
Click to expand...

Agreed. I thought it was hinted that the USA would enter the war, but without any major violations of American neutrality by the League I think the bad PR for the Entente will keep American out of the war.
 

Falecius

Leistungsfähiger Amerikan said:
Agreed. I thought it was hinted that the USA would enter the war, but without any major violations of American neutrality by the League I think the bad PR for the Entente will keep American out of the war.
Click to expand...

Or enter on the Dreikaiserbund side, if the Entente does something really stupid. Say hello to the once-glorious British empire in this case. :D.
However, I'm wondering how will British and French public opinion themself take the Armenian thing. Will they believe it is just German propaganda?
Or would it piss off them enough to create problems with the Ottomans? Especially since the Ottomans are likely to suppress and starve the Arabs in Lebanon as hard as OTL too, something that France will not find funny. Maronites may see Austria (or Italy, but less likely) as the power to ask for protection to.
 

Josephus

Maronites may see Austria (or Italy, but less likely) as the power to ask for protection to.
Click to expand...

Franz Joseph I (or, later, his sucessor) -is- titular (for now) King of Jerusalem, after all. :D
 

Sarantapechaina

Deckhand said:
Where is the Canadian Corps?
Click to expand...
Doesn't exist yet, although a Canadian division did make up part of the force invading the Rhineland. Volunteerism has been significantly more lackluster than last time around due in large part to the Entente's PR disasters, and the government has been equally unwilling to institute conscription.
Super_Cool said:
What does the U.S. feel about the "rape of Belgium" by the Entente?

In OTL, the German invasion made Americans sympathetic to the Entente. Here, it seems the Three Emperor's League with get the support. How will British propaganda spin this?
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It has certainly helped that the French and British haven't been on hair trigger response to "franc-tireurs" like the Germans were, nor has there been any disaster like the burning of Louvain. But "military exigency" has tended to be the Entente line there. It's not really playing well in Peoria. Nevertheless, the invasion of Belgium - just like the OTL invasion of Greece, really - isn't enough by itself to prevent the Americans from accepting cold hard British cash for resources.
Falecius said:
I'm really enjoying this, though I'm little perplexed on how Persia came to a civil war situation with the Qajar vs. the Constitutionalists, especially Constitutionalists with Reza Khan in their ranks. OTL, Persia was mostly fair game for Russian armies.
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Yeah, the north was, anyway. They pushed further south than they did in OTL due to no 1907 entente, but I didn't feel like they'd be able to utterly eradicate the Bakhtiaris or anything, that area's a bit rough and quite a long ways away from Russia's bases, while China remained the chief concern. Reza Khan was a late addition to the Constitutionalists' ranks, not for any real political reasons but because the Russians took the opportunity afforded by the outbreak of war to weed out a lot of the Qajar military, and he got spooked and ran. Plus, the British looked like the winning side in Iran in 1915.
Falecius said:
Also, Austrian inactivity seems to me a little bit extreme, particularly after Belgian violation. If anything, THAT thing should cause outrage in Austria.
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The Austrians do have a field army on the Western Front and they have made considerable political capital out of the Belgian invasion. Mackensen's plan to recover Belgium is supposed to utilize even more Austrian troops. But Conrad wants to keep the bulk of the army closer to home, partly out of logistical concerns and partly because the Ausgleich comes up for renegotiation in 1917.
Falecius said:
The Alliance seems to have a decent chance.
There's still the Italian wild card. Last update hints at the possibility of the Entente trying to get their intervention. That could tip the balance, or backfire, since Austria's been doing basically nothing so far.
All in all, the Entente seems in a worse shape.
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All legitimate points. With that said, the Entente is doing reasonably well against the Qing, the Autumn Offensive notwithstanding. They haven't been pushed back in any meaningful way in the West, and they have a good shot at bringing Italy on side. There are still quite a few hands to play.
Falecius said:
Also, a note. South Africa TTL goes reasonably well for the Entente, while premises are worse. OTL some Boers rebelled with arms, and that was some years AFTER the Union was established as a Dominion. TTL, I can easily see a far larger amount of Boer discontent because of the delayed Union, so probably a Boer revolt is still likely. Violation of Dutch neutrality may also have an impact.
Without Union, Smuts and Botha may be less firmly loyal, though I don't see neither joining an alt-Boer revolt. How do the British (more military stretched TTL) manage to avoid it? To the very least, I can imagine much more concessions to the Boers being made.
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Yes. TTL's Union aroused such an angry response in Parliament not just because of its mere existence but because it involved significant concessions on the language issue (Afrikaans being adopted as a state language way earlier) and the race issue (earlier institution of pass laws, tighter land use restrictions). That took some of the wind out of the rebels' sails.

Also, in 1915, the British military wasn't really that much more stretched than it was in OTL. There's no Western Front commitment until the Belgian invasion, and while most of the BEF is in Afghanistan and Central Asia at that point (although being withdrawn by the autumn by degrees as the Indian Army replaces it) elements of it are in Egypt and Africa. The East African Rifles were also redirected to South Africa, one of the reasons Lettow got a free pass for 1915.
Falecius said:
Also Entente TTL is losing heavily propaganda-wise. They are supporting rebels in both Iran and China, and the nastier figures are quickly rising to prominence among those rebels, reducing chances of truly demoratic change. How will Chinese Republicans, even in the event of a victory, restore Chinese independence and modernize the place when they have their hands so tied by the Entente imperialist control? Ditto for Iranian Constitutionalist, whose tie with Britain will alienate the clergy. And Britain is still, in the eyes of Americans for example, the onee power that is oppressing Ireland.
Worse, they are the side supporting Armenian Genocide. How will the Western public react when the news about it leak out? OL many Armenian refugees fled to France via Syria and Lebanon, TTL I guess many more will flee to Greece, Italy, and of course, Russia. On the top of it, Entente violated BOTH Belgian and Dutch neutrality.
I can see very, very bad PR for them.
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Very much so on all points. I can only assume that most of those questions are in fact rhetorical. :p Of course, the British and French are well aware of a lot of this. The reason they were willing to put up with such relations disasters is the same reason the Germans were, historically: they feel like they're screwed if they don't.
Falecius said:
However, I'm wondering how will British and French public opinion themself take the Armenian thing. Will they believe it is just German propaganda?
Or would it piss off them enough to create problems with the Ottomans? Especially since the Ottomans are likely to suppress and starve the Arabs in Lebanon as hard as OTL too, something that France will not find funny. Maronites may see Austria (or Italy, but less likely) as the power to ask for protection to.
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Public opinion in the western Entente powers on the Armenian situation is anywhere from "it's a Russian plot" to "it sounds pretty ridiculous but might be true but even if it is true it's necessary to keep our allies from going belly up".
 

Parma

Finally a nice time line

Just some nit picks.
The war is on for weeks in Europe between France, Germany and the UK and then Belgium and the Netherlands did not mobilize their armies? This is very unlikely.
The Belgians were slow in 1914 but never the less there army showed determined resistance.
The Dutch were very fast is their mobilization in 1914 and deployment of their army. The Dutch General staff anticipated for year on a large scale conflict between France and Germany and prepared the army a for that and made various war games anticipating on violation of the neutrality by advancing enemies from the Wets, South and East. The Dutch army was small but to 1915 standards up to date. Not to compare with the 1940 situation. The attitude of the Dutch politicians around 1915 was also one of defending neutrality by all means.

And just curious, but how is the South African Boer loyalty to Great Britain when the latter is invading the country which evacuate Paul Kruger more than a decade ago?
 

Sarantapechaina

Parma said:
Finally a nice time line
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Thank you. :)
Parma said:
The war is on for weeks in Europe between France, Germany and the UK and then Belgium and the Netherlands did not mobilize their armies? This is very unlikely.
The Belgians were slow in 1914 but never the less there army showed determined resistance.
The Dutch were very fast is their mobilization in 1914 and deployment of their army. The Dutch General staff anticipated for year on a large scale conflict between France and Germany and prepared the army a for that and made various war games anticipating on violation of the neutrality by advancing enemies from the Wets, South and East. The Dutch army was small but to 1915 standards up to date. Not to compare with the 1940 situation. The attitude of the Dutch politicians around 1915 was also one of defending neutrality by all means.
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Both states mobilized in 1915 but neither had the financial capacity to keep it up for more than a few weeks and demobilized when it became clear that the war was not going to be brought to their borders anytime soon. Both states also suffered severe financial problems after the outbreak of war due to the extinguishment of their trade with the rest of the world upon the institution of the Entente blockade, further limiting their options vis-a-vis preliminary steps in the event of war.

Belgium's army's reputation during the war received a major boost from the fighting around Liège. Outside of that, its performance in the 1914 campaigns was pretty dubious. Once the choke point at Liège could no longer be held, the Belgians were forced to try to defend a much larger area without the benefit of prepared fortifications. Even when it regained the protection of fortifications - at Antwerp - and even though it enjoyed numerical superiority over the German forces besieging the port, the Belgian army was unable to hold on there as well. It took until Ypres for the experience of battle - cumulative experience, winnowing of the less able of the soldiery, and so forth - to develop the Belgian army into something akin to an equal to its counterparts. Roughly the same occurred in TTL, but in reverse. The Belgians were unable to withstand a broad-front attack and elements of the army were isolated around Namur, but once they were backed up against Liège (and once the Germans could back them up) they held ground as well as anybody.

The Dutch army theoretically had plans to pursue the defense of Dutch neutrality against the British. Political fractures led to indecision there, though. Furthermore, the Dutch were faced with the unenviable situation of confronting a numerically superior foe, which they would have to do on the offensive. To be honest, I wasn't thinking that anybody would seriously complain about the handling of the Dutch, because the whole campaign turned out as well as can have been expected: negligible civilian casualties, virtually no military casualties, and the evacuation of Dutch soil by the foreign invaders without a fight. (Many) more Dutch died during the same time period as the invasion in the East Indies than in Europe.
Parma said:
And just curious, but how is the South African Boer loyalty to Great Britain when the latter is invading the country which evacuate Paul Kruger more than a decade ago?
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The invasion of the Netherlands did not play well in South Africa, but it was over and done with inside a few months, which limited the damage considerably.
 

Parma

Thanks for the explanation:)

Only history proved that the Netherlands and Belgium could sustain a mobilized army for 4 years. You are correct that this financial burden and the blockade wrecked their finances and economy.

At that time there were not much political difference regarding defending neutrality in the Netherlands among politicians. They only were divided in a camps which favored the Germans or the British. Most of them them Germans as well did the population.
A part of the plan of defending neutrlity was to fight a delaying action while diplomats would ask for foreign aid.
As for Belgium they were ruled by King Albert which was not a man who give up his realm without a fight. The forts of Antwerp were also an large (even out dated) but a point of concentration of the Belgium army. And if you want to use this port you need to conquer the North shore as well which was Dutch and were a concentration of Dutch troops in defensive positions. The Dutch army was at that time commanded by a capable commander and general staff.
And why are the Germans not responding, within one and a half hour you are from Germany at the Belgian and Dutch coast.

Just an other nitpick (sorry :) ) airplanes neutralizing an ship in 1915, even if it is a makeshift aircraft carrier? At that time planes could hardly carry its pilot let alone something of a bomb
 
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LordIreland

machine3589 said:
I think the Dreikaiserbund has this war more or less in the bag after the last update. Barring the Entante making some major breakthroughs (unlikely, IMO) or the Russians having a revolution (very unlikely), there`s not much they can do to win this war.
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I have to concurr with machine here. The Dkb has this one in the bag;)
 
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