The "machine guns" of Mons ?

[phil andrade]

Jack, that German commentary from FAR 3 lends support to salesie's contentions.

Phil.

[salesie]

Salesie. I think I mentioned this before, but will repeat it here. I wrote a German introduction to the Le Cateau guidebook. Nigel wrote the British one, which precedes it. As co-authors we had different points to make, but both are there side by side, for the reader to draw his own conclusions. The Le Cateau guidebook, like the joint one we wrote about Vimy, is two sided in its approach. They thus differ from almost every other Battleground book.

Jack

You did mention this, Jack, and I answered by saying, "Of course, this is the main problem with one-sided points of view. You looked at E= and Nigel looked at =MC2, and the relativity, the action-reaction, was completely missed, and when it's missed in this way people tend to turn to luck (or blind faith) when trying to explain miracles" (in answer to your assertion that II Corp's "escape" at Le Cateau was a miracle and purely down to luck brought about by German error alone).

I stand by my criticism of your introduction to the Le Cateau Guidebook - it is totally one-sided and thus becomes highly misleading. I haven't read Nigel's British version from the same work, but if it is as one-sided as yours is then it will be just as misleading. They shouldn't be side by side; they should be inseparably linked, just as the events of that action were in real life, just as all events are in the real world.

As to your latest assertion that, "The first time I could check the figures against those published in the San-Bericht was a couple of years later. Although not broken down by battles, it was clear to see that they were consistent with the results derived from the histories. On the basis of this explanation, I contend that the German army had twice as many casualties as the BEF at Mons and that BEF casualties at Le Cateau were double those of the German army. I believe, further, that Smith Dorrien was mistaken and Edmonds a fantasist."

I will start-off my answer to this by quoting your own words- I have given the post number so others can check the context if they wish:

Post #14: Casualties are tricky - especially in the German army where exact information depends on how assiduous the authors of the regimental histories were...

Post #18: I shall try to find some additional information about casualties, but I do not hold out much hope of getting close to an overall definitive figure for German losses. As I have already said, it is a fraught subject, but we should be able get closer to a reasonable general impression.

Post #23: This is the first part of an attempt at a more considered reply regarding casualties. It comes with every imaginable health warning, but is likely to be reasonably accurate as far as it goes.

Post #51 One of the problems in making authoritative remarks is that we are in the hands of the historians, who varied in how they used the contents of war diaries, casualty returns etc. I tend to trust Rolls of Honour. They were usually compiled with the utmost care and integrity, because they served to honour the fallen and, in the German army which has no memorials to the missing, for example, often these entries in regimental histories are the only record that an individual fought and died.

Post #53 The figures come with a health warning, because I have had to extract them from the regimental histories. Although I have no reason to doubt what they contain, the destruction of the Prussian archives in April 1945 means that there is no way of verifying them from primary sources. That said, I imagine that they are are reasonably correct.

Post #70, several pertinent sections: As I have admitted and Salesie has underlined, it impossible to be certain about the quality of casualty figures extracted from regimental histories........When it came to recording of casualties, I believe, firmly, that we can trust the Rolls of Honour where they exist........However, figures for wounded and missing are not recorded consistently because the Regimental Histories were done by private donation from those who served in the regiment........This brings me on to partial confirmation of the figures for Mons, which I have built up from the histories. Postwar a branch of the German army worked for about twelve years on a three volume document entitled Sanitaetsbericht ueber das Deutsche Heer [Medical Report on the German Army]. It was published by Mittler of Berlin in 1934 and was [mis]used by the British official historians during their later work. This was a massive undertaking by the world champions of bureaucracy and accounting and Volume III, in particular, is very useful and revealing. These figures are as definitive as it was possible to get them.

Post #76: Turning now to the reliability of my figures. I am not one to state that something is correct beyond doubt, if absolute proof is lacking. I caveat much of my writing, because I dislike the predilection of some historians for the use of unverifiable assertions. In my view they encourage the development and perpetution of myth and I do not wish to be responsible for false ideas gaining currency through repetition. As a result, for the benefit of this discussion, I worked my way through the figures but provided a health warning.

Where to start, Jack? In this thread you've started out by saying that casualty figures are tricky because the quality of their recording in the Regimental Histories is inconsistent, some compilers being more assiduous than others. Then you move through varying stages of doubt and always give a health warning, from not holding out much hope in achieving an overall definitive figure for German losses, to not being able to verify them with the primary sources because of the WW2 fire-storms, then on to saying that figures for wounded or missing are not recorded consistently because the histories you use as a source were dependant on private donations (telling the paying customer what they wanted to hear?).

But you end up by saying that the Sanitaetsbericht figures confirm your own. So the Sanitaetsbericht, published in 1934 under strict Nazi censorship and which greatly reduces the German Government's figures published during the war, confirms the figures that you have "plucked" from highly dubious sources?

To summarise:

On the one hand we have the words of Smith-Dorrien, backed up by a mountain of eye-witness evidence from those who fought the action - plus the words of at least one German officer, Bloem, along with a report from a German artillery unit, both backing-up Smith-Dorrien and his men's eye-witness accounts - plus you also tell us in post#191 that you never challenged the accepted view of Mons and Le Cateau before because numerous German histories described their casualties as 'heavy', as indeed did von Kluck himself.

On the other hand we have your decidedly iffy casualty figures, plus a little theorising about fire control/small arms fire.

Do you not think that Smith-Dorrien and his men, plus Bloem, plus the German artillery unit, plus Von Kluck, plus numerous German Histories may have got it right, and that it may actually be you that is mistaken?

Cheers-salesie.

[salesie]

‘Fire at the roof below the ridge of the house, about three feet down,’ I ordered exultantly, and I could have whooped for joy. I was now commanding effectively. Damn the rest of the enemy fire. Their rifle-fire was always poor anyway, and blow the shells. They might hit you and they night not[/i]

Anyway, hope this is of interest,

Aye

Tom McC

Nice post, Tom (I've chopped it to save space) - I hope some of the theorisers take note of how highly skilled troops actually "work" their craft in the field.

Cheers-salesie.

[Robert Dunlop]

These are two extremely different battles under extremely different conditions.

Thanks, Tom. I would like to come back to this comparison, but at a later date if I may.

No offence, I read this and chuckled, because something must be lost in translation. I think this must be a body of men and not an individual soldier (which it could easily be confused as).

No offence taken. The translation reads "human figures" plural, so it is not referring to the sighting of a human figure singular as you rightly point out.

Robert

[Robert Dunlop]

You mention French and Belgian musketry being effective, but, how many men are covering per yard? At what range are the targets? Do they have artillery support in abundance? Do they have sufficient cover with machine guns? What type of ground is involved? These factors need to be considered.

Tom, I totally agree. Again, however, I would like to put this on hold for the moment, other than to reiterate that the BEF infantry holding portions of the Ypres Salient in October and November were part of a much larger force that included French and Belgians. The BEF held on, stubbornly contesting the gains made by the German infantry and cavalry. So did the French and Belgians. The BEF was not left in its own pocket with everything melting away around it.

Peacetime shooting at targets and practicing to be a battle-shot, are two different disciplines and require different skills. Again, let us not forget some of the salient lesson that some of the BEF soldiers (JNCOs, SNCOs, WOs and Officers) took with them to France. Lessons bitterly learned and turned in procedures and tactical doctrine from experience gained in South Africa. Skills such as scouting, judging distance, defending, breaking away from a contact...

I have not quoted from the entire repertoire of German infantry, MG, artillery and combined arms training that was carried out in pre-War Germany.

Robert

[Robert Dunlop]

Do you not think that Smith-Dorrien and his men, plus Bloem, plus the German artillery unit, plus Von Kluck, plus numerous German Histories may have got it right, and that it may actually be you that is mistaken?

salesie, I can't speak for Jack but it is very interesting to look again at Bloem's account. Specifically, what level of casualties did BEF musketry inflict on advancing German infantry? How would the advance of Bloem's company have appeared to the elements of the British 13th Brigade that were defending opposite? Captain Wynne, who translated Bloem's account, noted that 1st Royal West Kent, 2nd Duke of Wellington's (West Riding), 2nd King's Own Scottish Borderers, and 2nd King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry (including MG section) Regiments were in action in this sector. I will check their war diaries in the National Archives later today. From Bloem's description, I would expect that whichever unit/s spotted and engaged his company noted that his entire company went down under a fusilade of fire, range approximately 150 yards. Not a German was left standing. There was virtually no movement on the battlefield thereafter.

Around sunset, the remnants of Bloem's company began to rally. Next morning, the battalion adjutant woke Bloem and gave him orders for the day. The adjutant noted that the BEF had evacuated its position and then gave the warning order that "the 1st Battalion will assemble in column of route and march to the bridges at St Ghislain: companies in the following order, B [bloem's company], A, C, D." The key point here is that Bloem's company was not rendered hors de combat, despite having gone down under heavy accurate rifle fire. Furthermore, once across the river the BEF's rear guards were detected south of Hornu and the German brigade began to deploy again. Bloem's reaction was "Good! B Company was ready."

We need to be extremely careful when interpreting the comments of Smith-Dorrien and other BEF reports of the effects of the musketry, especially on casualties. Whole units seemingly going down under heavy accurate fire did not necessarily equate with wholesale destruction of those units. I believe that this is the point that Jack is making. There is no discrepancy in the reports, only in the interpretation placed on them. The BEF were right to observe that German units often went down in large numbers. They also correctly observed that casualties were inflicted. It seems not to have been correct, however, to correlate all men going to ground with the total number of casualties.

As I have said before, this does not take away from the musketry skills of the BEF infantry. They fully earned the respect of their enemies.

Robert

[salesie]

Robert, do you really think that highly experienced British Regulars believed that when they opened fire and their targets dropped from view that they'd killed or wounded them all? Do you believe that such experienced troops didn't know that men take cover when under fire? Do you also believe that Von Kluck, the German artillery unit, and the numerous German Histories that Jack mentions made the same mistake?

Methinks thou doth theorise too much! The logical consequence of what you're saying is, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, that when in action the much vaunted German infantry could be stopped by inflicting just a few casualties on them - that when it came to the crunch they couldn't really face it.

Cheers-salesie.

[Jack Sheldon]

Salesie

You are perfectly entitled to your opinion about my introduction for the Le Cateau book. It is free country and you can say what you like. You would not expect me to agree with you that it is 'highly misleading'. I chose to emphasise the failure of the German intelligence system and the failure of the cavalry in particular at both the operational and the tactical level. They should have made Smith Dorrien pay a price for his courageous decision at Le Cateau, but they did not. Spears, in Liaison 1914, which I have already recommended as essential reading, would have had no difficulty in accepting the points I make. He adds, as I have also already mentioned, that the fighting ability of the BEF, demonstrated against three of the corps of First Army in turn also played a role in making the attackers wary of what it could achieve, even in hasty defence.

As far as casualties inflicted are concerned, I have no problem with their detail being challenged. After all, I furnished you with the means to do so. First; because, unlike you, I have provided figures and second; honesty demands that I point out that I cannot state that each and every one of the figures derived from the histories is free of error, no matter what the cause. Scholarship cannot treat unproved (though probably correct) information on the same plane as proven fact.

At the same time as stressing the impossibility of guaranteeing each figure supplied, I have also made it clear that there is absolutely no reason to believe that they are wildly wrong. My caution does not give you carte blanche to dismiss the results of my research as 'a few iffy fgures'. Individually they are not certain; collectively they provide a clear steer, one which is backed by the written accounts of the battle in the histories. In other words I am saying that the figures are no more 'highly dubious' than unsubstantiated ones which appear in British histories or, as I pointed out yesterday, in some war diaries.

I think your attempt to rubbish the Sanitaetsbericht is ill-advised. What can you possibly know about the precise circumstances of its publication? If you had examined it, you would not dismiss such a monumentally detailed, magisterial piece of work in this summary manner. To anybody familiar with the report, it comes across as though you are clutching at straws from a position of no knowledge and makes it difficult to treat the remainder of your contributions with the seriousness they deserve.

The use I have made of the San-Bericht figures is to say that because they are based on the comprehensive casualty return figures and because they support the overall figures for German losses at Mons and Le Cateau, derived from an examination of the regimental histories, any reasonable person would accept that they act in overall confirmation of this work, without guaranteeing any one set of figures absolutely.

If you re-read my earlier casualty post (191), you will see that I chose my words with care. I said that I did not initially question the Mons accounts. Once my work progressed on Le Cateau I most cetainly did. Let us stick with Le Cateau for the time being. I did not quote Smith Dorrien yesterday, because I was explaining my methodology and, at the time I was doing the original work, I was not familiar with his statement and sought only to challenge the Edmonds preface. However, because you keep mentioning Smith Dorrien, let us bring him into the discussion. This is the key quote, 'That the enemy received a very serious blow and losses far heavier than ours and gained a wholesome respect for the efficiency of British troops are facts beyond dispute. The failure of their official accounts to expatiate on the battle is ominously suggestive of their being none too proud of the results.'

Let us take each of the four points in turn.

1. 'received a very serious blow' This depends on what is meant by 'very serious'. In the overall scheme of a war on two fronts with the really major fighting taking place against the French army further south and where the casualties were far higher, the German army may not have regarded the casualties they incurred during the course of a twelve hour fight which left them in possession of the battlefield as 'very serious', but it is, at least possible.

2. 'losses far heavier than ours' I shall return to this one.

3. 'gained a wholesome respect' This seems to be wholly justified.

4. 'failure to expatiate on the battle' Bearing in mind that von Kluck's aim was to encircle and annihilate II Corps, it may well be that they 'were none too proud of the results'. Equally, within the constraints of this one volume of the Official History, which had to deal with extremely serious fighting elsewhere, they probably felt that the few pages devoted to what they, nevertheless, regarded as a victory, were commensurate with its overall importance. When it occurred, Le Cateau was the most imporatnt event of the day for the BEF; it was not for the German army.

Returning now to point 2. This is the crux of the matter. Bearing in mind that Smith Dorrien was writing against a background of British losses believed to amount to some 7,800, what did he mean by 'losses far heavier than ours'? What figure did he have in mind and whence was it derived? For his statement to stand as valid in this discussion, I challenge somebody to come up with answers. I have already made my position clear. I have not criticised Smith Dorrien or directed any jibe at him; I simply stated that I thought he was mistaken.

Here, as a reminder, are the facts. Le Cateau was an encounter battle which, for the German army, unfolded from left to right. Facing 5th British Division, one of its regiments, IR 72, was involved from 6.00 am and no other German infantry entered the battle until 9.00 am. The battle on this flank was over by about 2.30 pm. In the centre German cavalry bumped into units of 3rd Division in the early morning and were fixed where they were until infantry arrived about 11.00 am to take up the fight. The fighting here lasted until about 4.30 pm, the Germans making very little progress south of the Cambrai - Le Cateau road. On the 4th Division front, the Germans deployed only Jaeger Battalions, which took some time to get into position. The British troops held for a while but, threatened with outflanking, pulled back, with excellent support from the gunners and were all in Ligny by 4.00pm. The last of them did not pul back until about 7.00 pm, due to a misunderstanding.

So this was a battle of short duration. Only six German regiments fought at all, together with some cavalry units and three Jaeger battalions: 3, 4 and 9. Assuming that every single formation and unit was still up to its intitial reinforced strength (which is most improbable), the total strength of the Germans facing II Corps cannot have exceeded: 19,800 in the infantry regiments, 3150 Jaegers, 2,000 gunners and 9,000 cavalry.

The cavalry figure is much too high. It involves every cook and bottle washer in the entire cavalry of 4th and 9th Cav Divs, plus Husaren 10, the organic cavalry regiment of IV Corps. Furthermore we know that a high proportion of the cavalry spent the day milling around Cambrai and contributed nothing. The other figures, too, embrace every single man, including the regimental bands, and all the rear echelon elements. The figure for gunners includes all the ammunition columns as well as the front line gun crews. However to create an unrealistically worst case, let us assume that every single person was in range of a British rifle or gun at some point during the day. This means we up with a maximum German commitment of 34,000. (c.f the reinforced II Corps with 57,000).

Let us return to Smith Dorrien's statement and assume, for the sake of argument, that 'losses far heavier than ours' means 10,000. The German casualty rate for every single unit within miles would have to be (give or take a fraction) 30% for even that statement to be correct. If 'losses far heavier than ours' is anything over 10,000, the figures become even more difficult to defend. No matter what interpretation is put on the regimental figures, even those who suffered the most and took the highest casualties, it is impossible to get anywhere near 30% and cavalry figures were mere handfuls, as were those of the gunners and, as two handfuls or even four handfuls does not amount to much, I believe that I have every right to say Smith Dorrien was mistaken.

I have already mentioned that the San-Bericht figures for total casualties for the ten day period were killed, wounded and missing were 7,077. If we were to allow Smith Dorrien his 10,000, what would the German casualty figures for Mons be?

-3,000? Even if we throw in the 1,022 slightly wounded (and why should we, they stayed with their units), we would still end up with -1900 and none available to cover any of the other clashes.

These are the questions, Salesie, you or anyone else who shares your view, have got to answer. You have challenged me throughout this thread, sometimes quite provocatively. Now I am challenging you directly. Produce some authenticated figures to prove what Smith Dorrien and Edmonds wrote is correct, or accept mine.

Jack

[phil andrade]

To imagine that the German infantry advanced so clumsily that they were shot down in thousands is almost to demean the performance of the BEF - the task of the Old Contemptibles would have been rendered so easy. If the Germans did display such ineptitude, it must have been for a fleeting moment.

My only challenge to the correctness of the sanits bericht tabulations ( forgive my appalling spelling) is their disparity with the published official German figures of the time. These came from the Zentral Naichweisant for War Casualties and War Graves, and were hardly calculated to exagerate the extent of losses. They show a meticulously compiled total of losses for the army only on all fronts, broken down thus: killed in action and died of wounds 1,138,768; died of sickness 85,088; prisoners 389,979; missing 263,043; severely wounded 652,021; wounded 328,421 and lightly wounded remaining with units 1,829,820. These, it must be emphasised, are only those recorded up until 31st October 1917, when the war still had more than a year to run and with some of the heaviest fighting yet to occur. As such there must have been many who had suffered death or wounds up until that time, but whose fate had yet to be taulated. As it was, we might reasonably assume that many - probably most - of the 263,043 missing were dead.

At that time the record of the Sanits Bericht shows a total for killed and died of wounds of roughly 865,000 ( there were also an additional 680,000 mising and prisoners acknowledged by that time). The disparity in terms of recorded combat fatalities is significant - the Central Enquiry Office indicating a total 270,000 higher i.e. more than thirty per cent - than those allowed for in the sanits bericht. This is the only constructive and cogent challenge that I can offer to the validity of the source that Jack uses. Even if we extrapolate from this difference, and make a thirty per cent increase in the eight thousand odd killed, wounded and missing ( including those slight cases) that the sanits bericht tabulates for 1st army, we still come to a total of no more than 10,500.

I think we have to defer to Jack's reckoning on this. If we imagine that 5,000+ Germans were knocked over at Mons, and double that number at Le Cateau, we are not only entering the realm of fantasy, we are also attributing to German soldiers an ineptitude that diminishes the achievement of the Old Contemptibles.

Phil.

[George Armstrong Custer]

My question is how did Smith-Dorrien know what the Germans believed. Is there a known German source for his statement?

OK, I now believe that I am in a position to answer the above question, which is what kicked off this thread. Before doing so however, I'd like to address some of the tangental issues which have been thrown up en route to this point in the discussion.

Firstly the issue of the relative reliability of German and British histories, with particular reference to those which might be termed 'official'. The editor and main author of the British histories on Military Operations France and Belgium 1914 - 1918 was Brigadier-General J. E. Edmonds. Jack has dismissed Edmonds, without qualification, as a 'fantasist.' I believe it is important to correct that strikingly unfair calumny in order that those new to Great War research who read this thread do not come away with the impression that the British Official History is the work of a 'fantasist.' In fact, The British OH written by and under Edmonds' aegis remains, in my opinion, the bedrock of all literature on British military operations in the Great War. Whilst research in the years subsequent to its publication have greatly expanded our understanding of events and clarified and corrected aspects of the OH, it needs to be remembered that, in counterpoint to this, Edmonds had access to living individuals and documents which have long since gone, and the fruit of his decades of labour remains a great and essential resource for researchers. There have probably been enough tangents on this very interesting thread without going off on another on the particular issue of Edmonds being a 'fantasist' - perhaps Jack might care to start a new thread by adducing his evidence for that accusation at some point in the future. I will restrict myself here to drawing attention to the thread I started HERE on Edmonds' account of Loos and how he solicited, editorialised and synthesised the views of Haig with those of opposing opinions in the resulting published volume. Edmonds has been accused by some of writing the OH as a 'whitewash' on Haig's behalf. I submit that, on this evidence in the thread linked to, Edmonds comes out with his editiorial integrity and independence intact - and if a 'whitewash' was what was going on one would have expected to find evidence of it in the account of the opposing Haig and French camps over Loos. Jack mentions the Somme and Passchendaele volumes as examples of Edmonds "distorting figures to suit his own case". As I've said, this really ain't the place nor time to debate that, but I hope that in some future thread Jack may expound upon what he means by Edmonds' "own case" and his "distorting of figures" to suit it. Suffice to say at this point that it wasn't any 'whitewash' at Haig's behest - Haig died in 1928, and the volumes for 1916 and 1917 were published between 1932 - 1948, so I'd be interested to hear who or what cause Jack reckons Edmonds was doing the "distorting" on behalf of.

I'd like to move on now to how German sources have been looked at on this thread. Jack has set the most store in these sources, but I think I am correct in suggesting that he has invested the Sanitaetsbericht as being the most accurate, least biased and therefore most reliable source for German losses. Alongside what Jack has said regarding German sources on this thread I have been reading Appendix III German Historical Sources, on p. 407 of his excellent The German Army on the Somme. Here, Jack reiterates what both he and I and others have noted on this thread: "A major obstacle to the study of any aspect of the imperial German army is the fact that a bombing raid on Potsdam by the Royal Air Force, on 14 April 1945, completely destroyed the Prussian archives. Because Prussian formations and regiments accounted for almost 90 per cent of the army during the First World War, the seriousness of the loss of these documents cannot be overstated." This leaves three sources, the German Official Histories, the semi-official histories of the Reichsarchiv and the histories published privately by German regiments themselves. I need not expand upon the obvious caution which must be applied to the latter category - histories commissioned by the regiments of an army which has lost a war are unlikely to have had rubbing salt into the wounds as one of their purposes. On the German official and semi-official histories, Jack himself poses the question we've all been asking in Appendix III of his book: "However, one obvious question arises: to what extent can the content of such books be trusted?" Before answering his own question, Jack candidly admits the purpose of such books and the political atmosphere in which they were produced under the auspices of the Reichswehr: "Quite apart from a natural human tendency to put the best gloss on past events, it is undeniably the case that what was produced was intended to chronicle a lost war in such a way that the reputation of the German military in general and the Reichswehr in particular, would be enhanced." Pretty damning stuff, you might think, so far as how the credibility of these sources might be regarded so far as admitting to, for example, high casualties due to poor tactics and intelligence is concerned. Not a bit of it according to Jack, who tells us that, having found matches between what the official and semi-official German histories say and accounts in the privately produced German regimental histories (remember my caveat on those), as well as checking some content of Wurttemberg and Bavarian regiments (the Prussian archives - 90% of the German army - are gone, remember) with unspecified archival material held in Stuttgart and Munich, his conclusion is that this: "though not conclusive, certainly indicates that these secondary sources were produced with integrity and respect for the facts." I'm sorry Jack, but it's my view that you cannot credibly admit in one breath that these sources were 'intended to chronicle a lost war in such a way that the reputation of the German military in general and the Reichswehr in particular, would be enhanced', whilst asserting in the next that 'these secondary sources were produced with integrity and respect for the facts.'

This brings us to the record of the Sanitaetsbericht, which has been cited as the most reliable and unbiased so far as its application to German losses at Mons are concerned. This, as Salesie has quite properly pointed out, was published in 1934 - ie under the aegis of the Nazi regime. Jack's Appendix III on the veracity of published German secondary sources makes no mention of those published after the Nazi accession to power in January 1933. Salesie's initial pointing out of the significance of the Sanitaetsbericht publication date on this thread received no response. He having repeated it, I have to say I was disappointed to read Jack's somewhat angry and dismissive "What can you possibly know about the precise circumstances of its publication?" response this morning. Salesie's point regarding the date of the Sanitaetsbericht publication in 1934 is a highly significant one, and I would suggest it is the key to why there is an apparent discrepancy between the overwhelming body of British eyewitness accounts of Mons (and, indeed, many German ones) and the low casualties admitted to in the German publications which have been cited. One does not need to know " precise circumstances" of the publication of the Sanitaetsbericht. One only needs to know that it was published in Nazi Germany in 1934, and that the Nazis had passed the emergency decree 'For the Protection of People and State' on 28 February 1933. With one brief paragraph in that decree, the liberties enshrined in the Weimar constitution - including freedom of speech, of association and of the press, and privacy of postal and telephone communiations - were suspended indefinitely. Henceforth no newspapers or books could be published without the approval of Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda. On 10 March, 1933, book burnings were staged in all the major cities and university towns in Germany. Among those burned were Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front, the hollywood movie version of which was also banned from German cinemas. By 1934 book banning had been thoroughly organised on an administrative basis, and more than 4,000 titles had been proscribed by some forty different government departments, so that the problems of defining suitable criteria began to exercise some of the finest bureaucratic minds in Nazi Germany. It is too much for Jack to ask us to believe that a book such as the Sanitaetsbericht, whose statistics could be used to cut to the heart of Germany's wartime performance would be allowed to emerge untainted by the prevailing propaganda requirements which were applied to everything else which was passed for publication. Therein, I think, lies the explanation for the mystifying dearth of German casualties for Mons. I can see why Jack might find exploration of this aspect uncomfortable, as the inevitable corollary must be that such post-1933 sources are idealogically tainted and any conclusions drawn from them by historians without signal caveats must be suspect. Contrast the 1934 Sanitaetsbericht casualty statistics with the account from the 3 Guard Field Artillery History published in 1931 (pre Nazi), which Jack quotes in post #198 - the 1931 work supports British accounts of the casualties inflicted by the BEF before Mons - as do others such as Bloem - whilst the 1934 Sanitaetsbericht is entirely unsupportive. Draw your own conclusions.

The second issue I'd like to tackle is that of the consistency of British first hand accounts of Mons. We have seen fundamental contradictions in German accounts, and explored the reasons for these. But whilst allowance for hyperbole and over egging of the pudding has to be factored into some of the British accounts, there is no significant trend of contradiction in these accounts. The British accounts have in common references to the intensity and control with which the British musketry, supplemented by machine guns and artillery, was delivered, along with notice of the massed ranks formations of the advancing Germans, which exacerbated the effect of the British fire upon those close packed ranks on a narrow front. These elements of the story were in place in British accounts from the outset, and did not appear with the benefit of hindsight. For example a thoughtful book based on first hand accounts and published before the end of 1914 - written within weeks of Mons in other words - states the following:

Here we touch upon one of the hidden but fatal flaws in the German plan - the assumption that German troops, if not superior, must at any rate be equal in skill to others. The German troops at Mons, admittedly, fought with great daring, but that they fought or were led with skill is disproved by all the testimony available. It is as clear as anything can be that not merely the coolness and the marksmanship of the British force was a surprise to the enemy, but the uniformity of its quality.

The latter point, on the uniformity of quality of the British musketry presages - in a 1914 publication - the point Robert made in post #199 yesterday about the unity fire discipline of the BEF in 1914. The 1914 account continues:

Of the elements that go to make up military strength, uniformity of quality is among the most important. [.....] Against an inferior army the tactics of General von Kluck must have infallibly succeeded. Against such a military weapon as the British force at Mons they were foredoomed to failure. [.......] The British force, however, not only escaped annihilation, but came out both with losses relatively light, and wholly undemoralised. This was no mere accident. [....] Remember that quality of uniformity, remember the value of it giving cohesion to the organic masses of an army. Remember further the hitting power of an army in which both gunners and riflemen are on the whole first rate shots, and with a cavalry which the hostile horse had shown itself unable to contend against.*

We have had several first hand accounts of how the German battle formation and the British rate of fire resulted in high casualties amongst the former. To build on these for the purpose of indicating their preponderance, the following quote on the events of the morning of 23 August 1914 is taken from a book on Mons by John Terraine, which gives British eyewitess accounts - and the book having been written at the end of the 1950's (published 1960), these veterans were far from being in their dotage, with many of them about to be assembled as interviewees for the making of the BBC's landmark 'The Great War' series which Terraine co-wrote:

It was infantry shooting that dominated the day. The Germans, as they reached the British positions, pushed home their attacks in a fashion that astounded the regimental officers and soldiers facing them. Their uniforms were not as conspicuous as those of the French; there was less of flying colours, blowing bugles and beating drums; but the target they presented was just as obvious. "They were in solid square blocks, standing out sharply against the skyline," said one British sergeant, "and you couldn't help hitting them.....We lay in our trenches with not a sound or sign to tell them of what was before them. They crept nearer and nearer, and then our officers gave the word.....They seemed to stagger like a drunk man hit suddenly between the eyes, after which they made a run for us, shouting some outlandish cry that we couldn't make out...."

"Poor devils of infantry!" said a Gordon Highlander. "They advanced in companies of quite 150 men in files five deep, and our rifle has a flat trajectory up to 600 yards. Guess the result. We could steady our rifles on the trench and take deliberate aim. The first company were simply blasted away to Heaven by a volley at 700 yards, and in their insane formation every bullet was almost sure to find two billets. The other companies kept advancing very slowly, using their dead comrades as cover, but they had absolutely no chance....." When the Germans tried to form a firing line close to the British positions, says the sergeant, "a few of the crack shots were told off to indulge in independent firing.....That is another trick taught us by Brother Boer, and our Germans did not like it at all."**

That the eyewitness accounts given to Terraine were not coloured by the benefit of hindsight is vouched for by the extracts already given from the book published in 1914, and from those below from 1919 and 1916. All, from the year of Mons itself, are remarkably consistent in their essential points, and if asked to choose between these corroborative British accounts from the time of the event itself and German accounts prepared under the auspices of the Reichswehr or the Nazis, I know which I'd give greater credibility to. The German tactics at Mons on the 23 August and which exacerbated their casualties are attested to in Major General Maurice's account of 1919:

[T]he infantry of the [German] Third Corps began soon after 11am an attack in mass upon the loop of the canal to the north of Mons. This was the first occasion in which the corps had met modern rifle-fire, for it had not been engaged either in the assault on Liege or with the Belgian Army of the Gette, and it came forward to within close range of our rifles in the column formations preceded by skirmishers, which had often been noted by British observers of the German manoeuvres, who, with memories of the South African War fresh in their minds, had speculated as to what would happen if such tactics were employed against us. Now the day had come, and as had been expected the dense columns of German infantry made an easy target for the rapid and accurate fire of the British riflemen, [.........] The one complaint of our men was that they could not shoot fast enough to keep down the grey masses which surged against them, and yet they shot so fast that they could not touch the breeches of their rifles, and some of the German reports say that we had lined the canal with masses of machine-guns, a weapon with which we were peculiarly ill-provided.***

Which brings us neatly back to where I started this post - the issue of providing an answer to the question which started this thread - "how did Smith-Dorrien know what the Germans believed. Is there a known German source for his statement?"

Well, we can see from the above quote that Maurice was aware of an overestimation of British machine-guns at Mons by the untried German Third Corps, and that he was aware of this sometime prior to publication of his book in 1919. It is, however, a book published in September 1916 which I believe finally provides the answer to the question which initiated this thread. This is The Retreat From Mons By One Who Shared It, by Major Arthur Corbett-Smith. Corbett-Smith's credentials are good - his acknowledgments begin: "I tender my grateful thanks to General Sir Horace Smith-Dorien for his kindness in reading the proof-sheets of the book and for several most valuable items of information." Corbett-Smith also acknowledges input from Captain C. T. Scott of the Historical Section, Committee of Imperial Defence. Crucially, though, Corbett-Smith began drafting his book just a year after Mons. Whilst describing the action at Mons, Corbett-Smith breaks off to detail the German method of attack deployed at Mons gleaned from British observers and - crucially - a German officer POW. I will reproduce most of passage here, as it serves to reiterate the accounts of the massed German advance and the resultant high casualties given by British accounts earlier in this post, and indeed, throughout this thread. It ends with what is, in my view, the answer to the question of where Smith-Dorrien's and other British accounts of the German belief that they were facing massed machine guns originated:

It may be of interest at this point if the narrative be broken off for a few minutes to give some details of the methods the Germans employ in their infantry attack, especially as they differ so much from our own.

The two main features are (a) they consider rifle work as of comparatively little value and rely mainly on machine-gun fire, and ( they attack in dense masses, shoulder to shoulder.

British methods are, or were, precisely the opposite. Our men have brought musketry to such perfection that an infantryman will get off in one minute almost double the number of rounds that a German will; and, what is more to the point, they will all hit the mark. British troops, adopting the lessons of the Boer War, attack with an interval between the files, i.e. in extended order.

Now at Mons, and after, a German battalion generally attacked in three double ranks. The rear double rank had with it four or six machine-guns. They count upon the first three or four ranks stopping the enemy's bullets, but, by the time these are swept away, the last ranks (with the machine-guns) should be sufficiently near to carry the position attacked: say about 800 yards. [......] As a matter of fact their method never succeeded over open ground before the British fire, for the front ranks were always swept away at the very beginning of the attack, and so they did not get near enough with the rear ranks.

The German officer who gave me these details remarked that the rapidity and accuracy of the British fire were simply incredible, that they never had a chance. "Our men," he said, "have come to believe that every one of you carries a portable Maxim with him." ****

ciao,

GAC

* The Battles of the Rivers, by Edmund Dane, published by Hodder & Staughton, 1914, pp. 27-30.

** Mons, The Retreat To Victory, by John Terraine, Batsford, 1960, p. 91.

*** Forty Days In 1914, by Major-General Sir F. Maurice, published by Constable, 1919, pp. 79-80.

**** The Retreat From Mons By One Who Shared In It, by Major A. Corbett-Smith, published by Cassell, 1916, pp. 89-90.

[Jack Sheldon]

George

Many thanks for this excellent, detailed and though provoking post, which I look forward to answering properly when I have the time: probably tomorrow. I will just tackle one point now and that is the Corbett Smith quotation at the end of your post. First of all let me say that it is most useful, in that it pushes the published references regarding rifles/machine guns back a long way and may well have influenced other writers. The only difficulty with it is a doubt about whether C-S is a reliable witness on this matter. I assume that you posted it because you believe what he says and certainly that is one interpretation. However, I can think of at least three more possibilities:

1. The PW was not being truthful with him, but he faithfully represented what the man said.

2. He misrepresented what the man said.

3. He made some or all of it up.

Responses to the posts I have made tend at times to suggest that if there is one little flaw or room for doubt in any item on the published record this invalidates it as a source. I am not being paranoic about this; I hope that it will be taken as a neutral comment, because I am about to ask you to apply the same criteria to C-S.

His story about machine guns in the attack is complete and utter nonsense. It could not have been penned by anyone with knowledge of the German infantry unless he was setting out to be deceitful or untruthful. I can see no reason why C-S should be regarded as a man of anything other than the highest integrity, so the conclusion has to be that he knew little or nothing about the German infantry. Briefly, if each battalion had four machine guns each, each regiment must have had twelve; if six, then eighteen. The German infantry went to war in 1914 with six machine guns per regiment and one spare, making seven in all.

These guns were grouped into a regimental machine gun company and they operated independently under the direction of the regimental commander. They supported attacks, but usually off to a flank, or occasionally overhead. A typical example is the placement of the machine guns of IR 26 and 72, which were grouped to take on men of the British 5th Div at 1,400 and 1,000 metres, pouring fire down onto the area of Suffolk Hill, whilst the companies manoeuvred around it and advanced up the road towards Reumont. Naturally machine guns could be allocated to units and carried forward into the attack if the situation demanded it, but not as regular event and not in the numbers C-S would have us believe.

If he could not get that part of his story right, what credence should we put on the reference to 'portable Maxim', whatever they are and, if German attacks never succeeded, how did they end up in possession of the battlefields at Mons and Le Cateau?

Jack

[George Armstrong Custer]

Jack

Thanks for your interim response. You'll be aware, of course, that my post raised concerns which went rather beyond suggesting that any of your sources be comprehensively dismissed on the basis of merely "one little flaw or room for doubt." My doubts on some of the German sources cited were altogether more fundamental and related to the influence of the whole milieu in and agencies under which they were produced - whether that be the Reichswehr or the Nazi party. I am, of course, more than happy for you to apply such criteria to Corbett-Smith's account - though as I will demonstrate below, Sir John French at least would have had difficulty in accepting that Corbett-Smith wrote under any constraint of censorship similar to that pertaining in Germany when the Sanitaetsbericht was published!

Smith-Corbett's account may indeed be one or more of the options you offer - ie:

1. The PW was not being truthful with him, but he faithfully represented what the man said.

2. He misrepresented what the man said.

3. He made some or all of it up.

To which I'd add a fourth option - that Corbett-Smith misunderstood what the man said.

My main purpose in posting it, as I made clear, was its utility as a plausible source for Smith-Dorrien's assertion of what the Germans believed - or said they believed. The German officer's remark that ""Our men have come to believe that every one of you carries a portable Maxim with him" is one that I'd suggest might be read as having been said in tones of rueful humour. In other words it may very well have been an analogy to describe the German troops' respect for the intensity of fire directed at them by the BEF at Mons, rather than a literal statement of belief that the British each had a "portable Maxim" - whatever that is, as you rightly say. In which case his meaning has been changed in retellings since Corbett-Smith's book to imply that the Germans actually believed that it was predominantly machine gun fire rather than superlative musketry which was directed at them at Mons. Either way, however, I believe Corbett-Smith's German officer remains a plausible answer to the original question on this thread as to where Smith-Dorrien got his assertion from.

Which brings us neatly to a consideration of your quite proper question as to how reliable a witness Corbett-Smith is, and whether his entire testimony should be dismissed on the grounds that his report of German machine guns deployed is wrong. We can never know, of course, whether Corbett-Smith was simply relaying accurately what the German officer told him. What can be said about his work as a whole, however, is that its criticisms were taken seriously enough by Sir John French for him to order an investigation of the author by his Adjutant- General, and to cite the book as the third of four reasons for producing his own self-justifying book 1914 within six months of the Armistice. All of which probably tells us more about French's persecution complex than anything about the veracity of Corbett-Smith's book. There is this, however. Corbett-Smith's manuscript was proof-read and annotated prior to publication by Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien. In other words, if you are contending that Corbett-Smith was a liar, the dupe of a German POW or just a fool, then so too must Smith-Dorrien be for having effectively edited the manuscript and passed it for publication. It may be of assistance in helping readers of this make up their own minds to quote Sir John French on the Corbett-Smith book being one of the reasons for producing his own book 1914. As noted earlier, French produced 4 reasons for publishing his own book - number 4 was his sense of grievance over his dismissal as C-inC of the BEF in December 1915 - with Cobett-Smith's book cited as reason 3:

3. A book was published in 1916 or 1917 by a Territorial Officer named Major Corbett-Smith, who at the time [1916] commanded a battery of artillery at Leeds and was thus an Officer on full pay of the Home Forces of which I was then Commander-in-Chief. This book purported to be an history of the Battle of La Cateau and the Great Retreat. Certain parts of the book reflected somewhat strongly on me as Commander-inChief in the Field at the time. I considered this to be subversive of discipline in view of the relative positions of Major Corbett-Smith and myself.

I directed my Adjutant-General to take up the case, and in the course of the investigations the proof sheets of the book came before me, when I discovered that the margin was filled with notes in the handwriting of General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, and it thus became evident that this Officer had personally inspired the whole book. I have this document in my possession.

French the conspiracy theorist is letting his paranoia run away with him, however. It didn't take his Adjutant-General siezing Corbett-Smith's manuscript to 'discover' that Smith-Dorrien had read it and added comments and information, as Corbett-Smith had explicitly thanked Smith-Dorrien for doing so in the Acknowledgements in the published book! Bullitt Lowry has comented that "For a Field Marshal to read the proof sheets of a not very important book which did not really attack him seems petty, but the quarrel between French and Smith-Dorrien was long-standing and intensely bitter."*

So, to recap. I accept your criticism of Corbett-Smith's reference to the German machine guns; on that detail he may have been lied to or mis understood his German officer informant. Or, if you prefer, his whole account may be a fabrication. However the rest of his account in so far as the massed ranks of advancing Germans is concerned ties in with every other British eyewitness account. And given Smith-Dorrien's close involvement with the book I'd suggest that the account of the German POW is still the most plausible source of Smith-Dorrien's later assertion regarding German references to British machine guns at Mons.

Moving on from Corbett-Smith's misrepresentation of the deployment of German machine guns, I'm more interested in hearing your reasoning for dismissing the British official historian as a 'fantasist' whilst arguing the case for the veracity of German accounts prepared under the auspices of the Reichswehr and the Nazi party, and why we should accept these in place of the remarkably consistent body of eyewitness accounts - both British and German - of what happened at Mons. For the record, here's another account from the German side cited by Maurice which again confirms the deadly combination (for the Germans) of the deployment of their massed formations against British fire:

As to the effect of our rifle fire in the battle we have not only the evidence of our own men as to the heavy losses inflicted upon the enemy, but a letter found on a German officer captured by the French, and printed by them, is very much to the point; it runs:

"We have already left Belgium several days, after having fought and beaten the Belgians at Tirlemont, and the British at Mons. The principal tactics of the English consist in entrenching themselves in villages and in opening murderous rifle and machine gun fire. So we can only advance against them with artillery, and reduce these wasps' nests with the fire of our guns. We have too heavy losses if we attack these positions with infantry, because our infantry marches like Blucher." **

George

* French and 1914: His Defense Of His Memoirs Examined, by Bullitt Lowry, in Military Affairs, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Apr 1981), p. 81.

** Forty Days In 1914, by Major-General Sir F. Maurice, published by Constable, 1919, p. 85.

[salesie]

Salesie

You are perfectly entitled to your opinion about my introduction for the Le Cateau book. It is free country and you can say what you like. You would not expect me to agree with you that it is 'highly misleading'. I chose to emphasise the failure of the German intelligence system and the failure of the cavalry in particular at both the operational and the tactical level. They should have made Smith Dorrien pay a price for his courageous decision at Le Cateau, but they did not. Spears, in Liaison 1914, which I have already recommended as essential reading, would have had no difficulty in accepting the points I make. He adds, as I have also already mentioned, that the fighting ability of the BEF, demonstrated against three of the corps of First Army in turn also played a role in making the attackers wary of what it could achieve, even in hasty defence...

...These are the questions, Salesie, you or anyone else who shares your view, have got to answer. You have challenged me throughout this thread, sometimes quite provocatively. Now I am challenging you directly. Produce some authenticated figures to prove what Smith Dorrien and Edmonds wrote is correct, or accept mine.

Jack

Jack, I've chopped your post to save space, as well as to save my time in re-answering points I've previously addressed in this thread.

But I will say that I do know that I'm entitled to my opinion and that we live in a free country - that goes without saying. Once again, you use Spears to "justify" the points you make in your introduction to the Le Cateau Guidebook, and I have no doubt that he would have no problem with you raising them. But I would argue strongly that he would object to your one-sided use of such points. As before, the quote from Spears you use also mentions the role the BEF's fighting ability played in the events - in your introduction to Le Cateau you do not; you highlight the errors of Von Kluck, but make no mention of the BEF's role in the action except to say that Smith-Dorrien's II Corps was lucky to escape. Whereas, Spears, in the short quote you posted, clearly highlights action/reaction (cause and effect) between the opposing forces.

Though well written, your introduction is highly misleading because, unlike Spears, you fail to acknowledge in any sense that the BEF played a role in the events, except, of course, to offer the opinion that it was lucky to escape (lucky because Von Kluck made errors due to poor intelligence and for no other reason at all). You have justified this one-sided piece of yours by saying that Nigel covered the BEF's role in the battle, and that both pieces were placed side-by-side so the reader could make up their own mind. Is Nigel's piece just as one-sided as yours - did he fail to mention any interaction at all, any cause and effect, with the German First Army? If he did then his must be like yours - highly misleading i.e. the introduction would be akin to side-by-side reports detailing the loss of the Titanic - the first one failing to mention the iceberg, and the second mentioning the iceberg but failing to mention the ship.

Now, you challenge me to produce my own authenticated casualty figures or accept your own? First of all, Jack, I believe that I've demonstrated that your own figures are a long way from being authenticated by anything that could be described as a reliable source, and secondly, I do not rely on notoriously unreliable casualty statistics, I rely on the mountain of evidence that I believe clearly shows your own figures to be decidedly iffy and, therefore, on a balance of probabilities, to be utterly wrong.

Consequently, I'm happy to let any reader of this thread read the side-by-side opposing views and make up their own mind.

Cheers-salesie.

[salesie]

This brings us to the record of the Sanitaetsbericht, which has been cited as the most reliable and unbiased so far as its application to German losses at Mons are concerned...

ciao,

GAC

Excellent post, George (I've chopped it to save space). The publication date is highly significant, and I took the deadly silence it elicited to mean that no one wanted "to go there", but I was eagerly awaiting a response, in the event Jack made a somewhat disappointingly shallow one; I expected more from him. However, you covered more or less what I was about to say - and I must congratulate you on providing an answer more succinct and eloquent than I probably ever could (this is genuine praise, I'm not sucking up; you know from past experience that's not my style).

A first class post - nice one.

Cheers-salesie.

[Pete1052]

It seems highly implausible to me that the Nazis had any influence on the content of an esoteric work such as the Sanitaetsbericht. A specialized book of military medical history and statistics would have been of interest to only a very small reading audience and I'm inclined to think few if any Nazi activists would have even bothered to read it. I also doubt that in 1934 the Third Reich had any kind of mechanism in place to review manuscripts prior to their publication. The book burnings and bannings as I understand them applied to books that were already in circulation; perhaps later during the Third Reich there was an intimidation factor that influenced the content of publications but I doubt that it applied to dull and specialized works in 1934.

[George Armstrong Custer]

It seems highly implausible to me that the Nazis had any influence on the content of an esoteric work such as the Sanitaetsbericht. A specialized book of military medical history and statistics would have been of interest to only a very small reading audience and I'm inclined to think few if any Nazi activists would have even bothered to read it. I also doubt that in 1934 the Third Reich had any kind of mechanism in place to review manuscripts prior to their publication. The book burnings and bannings as I understand them applied to books that were already in circulation; perhaps later during the Third Reich there was an intimidation factor that influenced the content of publications but I doubt that it applied to dull and specialized works in 1934.

You miss the point of how mythic Hitler and others of the Nazi hierarchy saw their service as Frontkampfer in the Great War, Pete. If there was one issue that they would apply their powers of censorship to it was protecting the myth of the unbeaten German army stabbed in the back by bolsheviks and traitors at home. Tidying away unpalatable statistics would have been central to this. From that point of view works such as the Sanitaetsbericht would certainly not have been viewed as 'esoteric' and of no interest to Goebbels' ministry. And I didn't make up the figures for what the Nazis had in place by 1934 as far as book banning and censorship approval is concerned - get yourself a copy of Frederic V. Grunfeld's The Hitler File (1974) and Peter Adams' The Arts of the Third Reich (1992) and check out for yourself how quickly they got a grip on the country's cultural outlets.

ciao,

GAC

[phil andrade]

It seems highly implausible to me that the Nazis had any influence on the content of an esoteric work such as the Sanitaetsbericht. A specialized book of military medical history and statistics would have been of interest to only a very small reading audience and I'm inclined to think few if any Nazi activists would have even bothered to read it. I also doubt that in 1934 the Third Reich had any kind of mechanism in place to review manuscripts prior to their publication. The book burnings and bannings as I understand them applied to books that were already in circulation; perhaps later during the Third Reich there was an intimidation factor that influenced the content of publications but I doubt that it applied to dull and specialized works in 1934.

Agreed, absolutely.

It's a hell of a dull read : on the other hand, as Jack points out, it's indispensable as a primary source. If you want to find out how many soldiers were evacuated from Riga with diptheria in September 1917, then this is your Mecca. No way would the Nazis have given it a glance.

Hitler himself refered to the two million Germans who were killed in the war. He had no wish to play down the extent of German casualties - on the contrary, he emphasised how heavy they were.

Phil.

[George Armstrong Custer]

No way would the Nazis have given it a glance.

Don't you believe it.

[salesie]

It seems highly implausible to me that the Nazis had any influence on the content of an esoteric work such as the Sanitaetsbericht. A specialized book of military medical history and statistics would have been of interest to only a very small reading audience and I'm inclined to think few if any Nazi activists would have even bothered to read it. I also doubt that in 1934 the Third Reich had any kind of mechanism in place to review manuscripts prior to their publication. The book burnings and bannings as I understand them applied to books that were already in circulation; perhaps later during the Third Reich there was an intimidation factor that influenced the content of publications but I doubt that it applied to dull and specialized works in 1934.

Just a little research will show that by 1934 the Nazi party tightly controlled all publishing in Germany, no exceptions, all publishing - and given the party's slant on WW1, a proposed publication relating to that war would be at the top of their pre-publication reading list, and if not deemed "suitable" then it wouldn't have been published.

Also, self-evidently they could only burn already published books - any deemed "unsuitable" after they took power were never published in Germany - you can't burn a book that doesn't exist.

Cheers-salesie.

[phil andrade]

Don't you believe it.

Let's be clear on this.

Are we being asked to believe, that in an effort to flatter the military prowess of Germany 1914-1918, the Nazis pressurised the authors of the Sanits Bericht to surpress the true extent of German military casualties?

I do not beleieve so.

For one thing, there is a full disclosure in the tabulations of truly monstrous German losses in the offensives made by Ludendorff in the spring of 1918 : he was one of the Nazis' darlings.

The revelations about the figures for 1914, especially those pertaining to 1st Army, are, I admit, very hard to reconcile with the reports from Mons....so much so, that I suspect they might need revision. That does not amount, IMHO, to deliberate falsification.

Phil.

[David Filsell]

As a sideline - and as a general note - it is very clear from my research that the Nazi party not merely sought but succeded in taking total control of virtually all that was published in Germany after the party came to power. Gaining control of the media was central to Nazi doctrine. Control was such that virtually every text published was approved by the party to ensure that it reflected its values and beliefs overtly, or at lerast did not conflict with them. All texts and all authors had to be approved. In my bibliography of German accounts about the Great War which were translated into Englisd I have noted that every text first published in Germany from 1933/4 must be regarded as approved by the party and thus (possibly) tainted and treated with a considerable degree of caution.

[Jack Sheldon]

Once again George and Salesie, many thanks for these contributions. I am certainly not trying to duck any awkward questions; I am just up against a looming publisher's deadline and am trying to juggle that with the need to service this thread as well. I shall confine myself now to a few words about the San-Bericht. I fully see the point about the general conditions prevailing at the time, George. However, it is at least as incumbent on those who feel it must have been doctored to demonstrate why and to what end, as it is for those who accept it as the prime source of accurate information on casualties to show that it was not. I am also aware that not everyone in the discussion has ready access to the document. However, I also would not want to see this most interesting discussion degenerate into a conversation of the deaf; 'Yes it was'; 'Oh no it wasn't' etc., so here are a few thoughts as to why I regard it as trustworthy. These are certianly not exhaustive.

1. There was nothing unusual or controversial per se about these reports. The same exercise had been carried out after the Franco-Prussian war. It was also done on a two yearly basis in peacetime for all the different contingents of the army and the Imperial German Navy, so that particular trends could be identified. These reports were then used as the basis for future medical planning, so as to ensure that everything from the provision of infrastructure and movable assets to earmarking of medical personnel and stockpiling of dressings, drugs and other medical stores were based on experience and the best information available. In other words, the primary requirement was ensure that the army and navy could be correctly supported medically on mobilisation. This had cost implications, budgets are always tight and the medical branches had to fight their corner, like everyone else. They had no interest in painting a false picture.

2. The Weltkrieg 1914/1918 report is a detailed work on an heroic scale, full of interlocking statistics, charts and diagrams. It took years for a large team to produce, simply because of the size of the task. Had it been simpler, I assume it would have been published earlier. I think that the date is coincidental and that the process of getting so complex a document through the proof stages to the press could easily have begun before the Nazis came to power. I simply cannot even begin to speculate on the length of time it would have taken to rework all the figures, so that they still added up correctly.

3. What persuades me the most, however, is the internal evidence in the document. Here is one example from a multitude. For those who have access to the document, look at Uebersicht 4 on p 8 of Vol III.. Historians often talk about, say, the impact of the Somme and Verdun on the German army and state, without using precise figures, that it faced a manpower crisis. Similarly, the impact of the the Spring Offensives of 1918 are assumed, without being quantified. The chart to which I have referred shows it graphically and accompanies the visual reference with detailed figures. So to give an example, the unbridgeable manpower crisis, (the one which dogged it for the next two and a half years) for the German field army is shown as beginning in early September 1916 just as Hindenburg and Ludendorff took over - and what was one of the major decisions of the 5 Sep 16 meeting? To begin construction at high speed of the Siegfried Stellung [Hindenburg Line], so as to be able to shorten the line and save 14 divisions. The crossing figure came when the Sollstaerke i.e. the war establishment/total manpower liability reached 4,642,221, but the Iststaerke i.e the ration strength was only 4,538,159. By the time of the Alberich Bewegung in March 1917 the gap was 214,000 and projected to flatline for a couple of months, then to deteriorate through the remainder of 1917 as the available Ersatz [replacements of all sources] fell short of the increasing Sollstaerke. The situation can be tracked like this all through the war, culminating in fact in May 1918, when the gap was a hopeless 1.1 million.

4. It comes up with a final figure of killed and missing of 2,482,424 up until 31 Dec 18, by using figures other than the medical reports, because that system fell apart from July 1918, at which point its computed figure for KIA and missing was 1,973,701 (VolIII p 13). It explains the difference of 508,723 by saying that the Zentralnachweisamt [Central Office for Statistics] continued to collect information relating to, 'the last four months when casualties were very high' and that that office 'was able to include figures for prisoners who died in captivity.'

5. I accept its figures for the ten day period covering Mons and Le Cateau because they chime with and largely reinforce the results I obtained just by looking at the regimental histories. I am not going to repeat what I have said before about the accuracy of each figure considered in isolation.

Jack

[George Armstrong Custer]

Thanks for another interim response Jack. I don't particularly like answering a post by quoting every point and then answering, but can't think of a more suitable method in this case, so hope you'll bear with me. To make it easier to follow, my responses to you are in green.

However, it is at least as incumbent on those who feel it must have been doctored to demonstrate why and to what end, as it is for those who accept it as the prime source of accurate information on casualties to show that it was not.

As you'll know, you're being a trifle disingenuous here Jack. To identify precisely the effect on the content of this book having been published under the Nazi regime one would have to find a draft copy and compare it with any excisions, caveats or amendments in the final published version. One would need to spend weeks in German archives looking for Department VIII's correspondence on one particular book published by one particular publishing house whose records may or may not be preserved. Do you think this is practically possible? I don't, nor do I think it necessary under the circumstances. Our interest is whether the statistics from this book are of such overwhelming veracity that they ought to override all empirical accounts of what happened at Mons. In my view everything officially published under the Nazis is suspect, for reasons which ought to be self-evident but which I will detail in a post responding to Phil.

1. There was nothing unusual or controversial per se about these reports. The same exercise had been carried out after the Franco-Prussian war. It was also done on a two yearly basis in peacetime for all the different contingents of the army and the Imperial German Navy, so that particular trends could be identified. These reports were then used as the basis for future medical planning, so as to ensure that everything from the provision of infrastructure and movable assets to earmarking of medical personnel and stockpiling of dressings, drugs and other medical stores were based on experience and the best information available. In other words, the primary requirement was ensure that the army and navy could be correctly supported medically on mobilisation. This had cost implications, budgets are always tight and the medical branches had to fight their corner, like everyone else. They had no interest in painting a false picture.

Whether or not the compilers of the report had any interest in painting a false picture is irrelevant. The people who had the final say on whether the finished work was published or not, and whether it was published unamended were not the people who compiled it. For similar reasons, the publication of the Sanitaetsbericht in 1934 is not analogous to Imperial German publications in the aftermath of the Franco Prussian War (which, by the way, also differed in being a great victory for the Germans, so even on that basis there were different agendas at play).

2. The Weltkrieg 1914/1918 report is a detailed work on an heroic scale, full of interlocking statistics, charts and diagrams. It took years for a large team to produce, simply because of the size of the task. Had it been simpler, I assume it would have been published earlier. I think that the date is coincidental and that the process of getting so complex a document through the proof stages to the press could easily have begun before the Nazis came to power. I simply cannot even begin to speculate on the length of time it would have taken to rework all the figures, so that they still added up correctly.

The Nazi's specialised in producing "detailed work on a heroic scale, full of interlocking statistics, charts and diagrams" which took large teams years to produce. Some of these were on abhorrent subjects such as how to spot racial characteristics. Merely citing the scale of the work does not in itself confer validity upon its content. You say the date of publication was concidental because of the time it took to produce. Coincidental perhaps, but not irrelevant - whatever the agenda was when research on the work began it's publication was controlled by the agenda which took control of Germany in January 1933. Also we must not fall into the trap of believing that the only caveats which might be applied to this work are due to a suspicion of it being tainted by a Nazi agenda. There is a large question mark hanging over many of the German works produced during the Weimar era. You have yet to respond to my asking how you can reconcile your statements about these. On the one hand you have stated of the purpose of the Schlachten des Weltkrieges series that chronicles the battles of the Great War which Germany lost that "the object being to inspire future generations by emphasising the heroism of the individual triumphing against enemies who were superior both numerically and materially." On the German histories, officially and privately published, written in the pre-Nazi period you state that "Quite apart from a natural human tendency to put the best gloss on past events, it is undeniably the case that what was produced was intended to chronicle a lost war in such a way that the reputation of the German military and the Reichswehr in particular, would be enhanced." Yet despite the foregoing admissions you conclude that "these secondary sources were produced with integrity and respect for the facts." I'm sorry Jack, but I'm not convinced by the attempt in your book to reconcile that conclusion which is so at odds with what you admit the purposes of these German histories to be. My point here though is that if you admit the less than impartial agendas at play in the pre-Nazi era German histories of the Great War how can you convincingly argue that the most reliable of them all in your view - the Sanitaetsbericht - is one published under the Nazi's agenda in 1934?

3. What persuades me the most, however, is the internal evidence in the document. Here is one example from a multitude. For those who have access to the document, look at Uebersicht 4 on p 8 of Vol III.. Historians often talk about, say, the impact of the Somme and Verdun on the German army and state, without using precise figures, that it faced a manpower crisis. Similarly, the impact of the the Spring Offensives of 1918 are assumed, without being quantified. The chart to which I have referred shows it graphically and accompanies the visual reference with detailed figures. So to give an example, the unbridgeable manpower crisis, (the one which dogged it for the next two and a half years) for the German field army is shown as beginning in early September 1916 just as Hindenburg and Ludendorff took over - and what was one of the major decisions of the 5 Sep 16 meeting? To begin construction at high speed of the Siegfried Stellung [Hindenburg Line], so as to be able to shorten the line and save 14 divisions. The crossing figure came when the Sollstaerke i.e. the war establishment/total manpower liability reached 4,642,221, but the Iststaerke i.e the ration strength was only 4,538,159. By the time of the Alberich Bewegung in March 1917 the gap was 214,000 and projected to flatline for a couple of months, then to deteriorate through the remainder of 1917 as the available Ersatz [replacements of all sources] fell short of the increasing Sollstaerke. The situation can be tracked like this all through the war, culminating in fact in May 1918, when the gap was a hopeless 1.1 million.

Two points. First, of course not everything in the book will be irreconcileable with other sources in the way that the casualties for Mons are. And not everything will have needed to be adjusted to conform to the Nazi world view. It will all, of course, have been compiled under the auspices and requirements of either the Reichswehr or the Nazis. Handle with care, in other words.

4. It comes up with a final figure of killed and missing of 2,482,424 up until 31 Dec 18, by using figures other than the medical reports, because that system fell apart from July 1918, at which point its computed figure for KIA and missing was 1,973,701 (VolIII p 13). It explains the difference of 508,723 by saying that the Zentralnachweisamt [Central Office for Statistics] continued to collect information relating to, 'the last four months when casualties were very high' and that that office 'was able to include figures for prisoners who died in captivity.'

I'm not sure what the significance you are implying between suggested total figures for the whole war, which contain huge margins for error, particularly in identifying totals for actual KIA's, and the reliability or otherwise of the casualty figures given for individual actions such as Mons?

5. I accept its figures for the ten day period covering Mons and Le Cateau because they chime with and largely reinforce the results I obtained just by looking at the regimental histories. I am not going to repeat what I have said before about the accuracy of each figure considered in isolation.

Which unfortunately takes us back to the less than impartial purposes for which these regimental histories were written by the losing side in the Great War, as described in your own Appendix III to The German Army on the Somme.

George

[George Armstrong Custer]

Let's be clear on this.

Phil, I don't intend to be rude but, honestly, are you clear about anything? You spent several posts bemoaning the fact of your lost innocence, that you'd been misled for years by British accounts of what the BEF achieved at Mons and that it had all turned out to be a "legend". And your basis for this Road to Damascus experience? Jack's citing German casualty reports which didn't confirm British accounts of the damage they inflicted upon the Germans before Mons. And even these have now essentially boiled down to a single source which Jack holds to be unimpeachable - the Sanitaetsbericht of 1934. From apparently having swallowed hook, line and sinker the more hyperbolic British accounts of Mons for years, you have now become a staunch supporter of Jack's German sources which have such an iconoclastic effect on all British accounts. This is despite the deep misgivings which some - including Jack - have voiced over the purpose of and circumstances around the production of these German sources. With the zeal of the newly converted you now dismiss the concerns over the integrity of Sanitaetsbericht due to its having been compiled under the Reichswehr and edited and published under the Nazis by stating that the Nazis would have allowed publication of a book whose statistics could be used to gauge German performance in the Great War without checking it because, in your words, "It's a hell of a dull read." I'm afraid this reveals an astonishing misapprehension on your part on what the Nazi state was all about. I don't want this thread to get embroiled in the finer points of Nazi state control, but there are some general points regarding book publishing that you (and Pete) should be aware of, and as these also have relevance to my last response to Jack I'll set them out here as briefly as possible.

The events pertaining to book destruction and control of February and March 1933 were set out in my earlier post #210. Goebbels turned over control of book production in Germany to Department VIII of the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. This section had full supervisory power over 2,500 publishing houses, 3,000 authors, and 23,000 bookshops. It controlled 1 million books in print as well as the 20,000 new books published annually. Most important of all for the purposes of this thread, it approved every manuscript of a book or a play before publication or performance. Department VIII were the whizzkids who promoted Mein Kampf as the highest form of literary art. Yet you are asking us to accept that a book touching upon aspects of a subject dear to Hitler's heart (the German army's supposedly unbeaten performance in the field in the Great War) was allowed to be published under such a regime and such regulations totally unchecked because it was "a hell of a dull read." And Jack asks us to accept that the Sanitaetsbericht was published under these circumstances "with integrity and respect for the facts."

If anyone is still in any doubt on how total a grip the Nazis had on internal publishing in Germany from 1933, here's an extract from the Nazi equivalent of 'Publishers Weekly'. In June 1939, this Nazi-controlled booksellers’ journal voiced the following concern:

In the years since the National Socialist revolution, German literature has been thoroughly cleansed, and all the elements alien to the German character have been eliminated. But today we are faced with a new development that in many cases tries, using the indirect route of foreign translated literature, to familiarize us with exactly the same negative values that we have just spent so much effort in removing from German literature

source: Der Buchhändler im neuen Reich, June 1939, p. 209.

ciao,

GAC

[Jack Sheldon]

I was not going to post again today, but I feel that I must come back to you George regarding 10.55 am Post. I know that the SanBericht is just a subset of this thread, so I hope that others will bear with us a little longer.

It seems a little harsh to describe my motives for challenging you as disingenuous. It might be difficult to achieve. I have no idea, but it would be no harder than your implicit demand that I prove a negative, i.e. that the figures were not tampered with. I continued by indicating a couple of examples from within the book, verifiable by anyone who chooses to consult it, that material within it conforms to accepted historical opinion and, indeed puts flesh on the bones by providing exact figures. Your response seems to be that that is fine as far as it goes, but the case of Mons/Le Cateau is somehow different. I trust I am not misrepresenting the thrust of your remarks. I must confess that I have wrestling for the last couple of hours to think of any reason why anybody of any political persuasion should think it worthwhile to alter one line of Uebersicht 28 on page 36 of Volume III, which is where the First Army figures for 21 -31 Aug 14 appear. Compared with figures elsewhere on the Western Front for that period, they are small beer (though not to the regiments particularly hard hit, of course); compared with the losses for the whole war they fade into insignificance. Why would anyone want to change them? What purpose would it serve? What has it to do with the Nazi world view?

I quoted the overall figure of declared KIA/Missing for the entire war, lest it be felt that an attempt had been made to reduce the sale of the overall losses for some reason. As far as I know the figure it provides is consistent with generally accepted.

I stand by what I wrote in Appx III to my Somme book. I have never attempted to make false claims about the sources with which I work. I should, perhaps, have expressed myself a little more clearly in my final paragraph; I spend my days striving for improved style and felicity of expression. The point I was making was that I deal mostly in factual stuff: which regiment was where at a particular time, who it relieved, who its neighbours were etc. In my experience, which is increasing all the time, there are relatively few cases where a the facts of a particular event in a regimental history written by a Reichsarchiv author do not agree with that which appears in one produced either privately or under different auspices. The 'integrity and respect for the facts' phrase is based on work in the archives in Stuttgart and Munich and relates to the regiments of Bavaria and Wuerttemberg. As you rightly say I did not mention in the book which histories I ran a check on, but I am happy to share with you the fact that I compared the published accounts of particular incidents contained in the histories of Bavarian IR 16 and RIRs 6 and 8 and found no discrepancies, though in some cases lengthy accounts had been edited prior to publication - presumably for reasons of space. In Stuttgart I was able to look at archival material relating to IR 180, RIRs 119, 120, 121 and each of the regiments of 27th Inf Div (in relation to the battle for Guillemont). No problems there either. I also learned a lot by examining the files of the Prussian RIR 99, which spent a lengthy period under command of 26th Res Div and a large part of whose records survived.

This is an exercise which anybody else could repeat without too much trouble, so as to verify my point. As you will see from my footnotes, I do not make much use of the 'Schlachten' series, or the Offiical Histories. I read them to get the context, but the latter in particular are usually too general for my purposes. They are good for the odd quote but not much else and, in the case of the Somme, the two volumes only cover July 1916. The Third Ypres volume is next to useless - more's the pity. Apparently there was a four volume effort complete in draft, but was never published. Its content might well have been interesting. I believe it was a matter of budgetary constraints.

One of the things which made the Vimy book a real plasure to tackle was the fact that it was virtually a Bavarian battlefield, so I was able to use primary sources for large parts of the book and especially the build up to the April 1917 battle, which was reconstructed almosty entirely from primary sources. It is not aluxury I often enjoy, so what about the histories? I think it is important to bear the target audience in mind. These books were, for the most part, written for the benefit of the survivors or the bereaved relatives of the fallen. Many of them are published with a space in the front for the individual to record his war service and others suggest that they be kept in the family as a valuable record and an heirloom. Many of them were produced in very short print runs, often 1,000 or fewer and it took some regiments years to obtain enough pre-orders to cover the cost of production. There were other forces at work. I suspect that one reason for the flood of these things was that the regiments, many of which had long and distinguished records, were obliterated by Versailles and those left behind wished to capture their final chapter for posterity. They and their frequently accompanying rolls of honour were intended to serve as a permanent record and memorial to what they had achieved.

I simply do not know how popular they were with the general public. A handful do have second, expanded editions. These include Footguards 1 and RIR 261, but I have never seen one which contains a reprint history - not that that means it never happened. I can certainly say that they are rare and (unfortunately for me) expensive when they do come on the market. I have laboured this because I am trying to make the point that these histories, whether good, bad or indifferent were aimed at a very limited market - exactly like their British equivalents. The information they contain was certainly not provided with the likes of me in view. If they contained gross inaccuracies, the target audence would have wondered why. In a later post I shall go through all of them connected with Mons and Le Cateau, provide a date of publication and tell you if the casualties mentioned in them are described as 'heavy' or not.

In the meantime I am going to focus on just one which I think is worthy of our attention in this discussion. I am referring to IR 84, which was involved attack in a hard fight for the bridge at Nimy and on towards the town. This really is an inward-focussed history. It is built up entirely from regimental eyewitness accounts and was circulated in newsletter form to members of the regimental association every few months. The Mons newsletters were published as issues 8, 9 and 10 to Part 1 in January, May and September 1924.There are thirteen accounts of varying length about what happened at Mons. The only reason I have seen them is that the Bundeswehr library in Potsdam has a hand stitched and bound copy of all the newsletters, though one does have note on it saying 'Printed by Gerstenberg Brothers, Hildesheim'. I do not believe, personally, that this material was intended for wide circulation and it had nothing to do with anyone's world view outside the regiment.

Here are a few quotes:

Major Liebe, former regimental adjutant: 'The losses of the regiment were KIA 1 officer, 3 Unteroffiziers, 20 OR. Wounded 6 Officers, 10 Unteroffiziers, 45 men.' N.B. refers to day 2 near Mt Erebus.

Oberleutnant von Zeska, former Fahnenjunkerunteroffizier 12th Coy: The Battle of Mons may have been small and insignificant compared with the huge battles which were fought during the war in the West the east and the South... but it was a victory, which the First Army won over the British and which lifted early concerns from the hearts of our people... The great success of Mons... showed that the British had not been capable of halting our advance and their defeat was such that they were incapable of halting our victorious further advance during the coming days.'

Anonymous 9th Coy (following a somewhat breathless description of events):, 'The company gathered together and took a breather. The Feldwebel reported calmly and formally, '2 dead and 5 wounded'

Oberstleutnant Stubenrauch, former company commander 10th Coy: 'As far as I can remember the range was about 700 metres. As we advanced to the edge of the hill the enemy opened up with heavy rifle and machine gun fire.'

Feldwebel K Ehlers 10th Company: It was a day of serious casualties for 10th Company. Filled with pain I had to report the loss of 2 officers, 11 unteroffiziers and 205 men [not split into killed/wounded/missing]... The fight for Mons was a hot and bloody struggle , but victory was ours.'

Major Grebel former company commander 8th Company: 'According to my diary, on that day we had nine killed and 14 wounded.

If anybody wishes to see scans of any of these pages, which contain some vivid description, I should be happy to oblige. It is clear that 10th Coy was hit hard, 11th seems to have had a hard time too '11th Coy had serious casualties and Reserve Lt Matzen was killed', but otherwise the picture was mixed and some companies appear to have come through the day relatively unscathed.

Jack