Attrition

[phil andrade]

Sasho,

 

This is not just a revelation to me, it’s actually something of a shock.

 

The Germans made so much of the massacre of the innocents at First Ypres : what would they have of British demographics ?

 

All the more remarkable given that the Germans suffered per capita deaths that were double those of the U.K..

 

I am wary of using the word scandalous, but it fits here.

 

Wasn’t there a British ruling about restricting frontline service to males of 19 years and older ?

 

If so, when and why was it lifted ?

 

Phil 

[Marilyne]

this thread goes back a long way... I just downloaded Robin Neilland's book on attrition on the Kindl (got a bargain) and will have to find the time to get more acquainted with the details... I'll start with re-reading the complete topic here, I guess... 

 

M.

[MikeMeech]

7 minutes ago, phil andrade said:

Sasho,

 

This is not just a revelation to me, it’s actually something of a shock.

 

The Germans made so much of the massacre of the innocents at First Ypres : what would they have of British demographics ?

 

All the more remarkable given that the Germans suffered per capita deaths that were double those of the U.K..

 

I am wary of using the word scandalous, but it fits here.

 

Wasn’t there a British ruling about restricting frontline service to males of 19 years and older ?

 

If so, when and why was it lifted ?

 

Phil 

 

Hi Phil

 

I must admit I am slightly confused about this argument on 'age of conscription'.  Pre-war the German Army start their conscription at the age of 20 (When Britain had no conscription at all), however, various sources also say that the males were eligible for conscription between the ages of 17-45?  During 1918 is it being suggested that only over 20s were serving in the German Army?  'The First World War, Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914-1918' by Holger H. Herwig, has the following on page 422, reference later 1918:

 

"The only true reserve available was the cohort of 1900 - 400,000 youths of whom 300,000 could be expected to be fit for duty.  'Too bad about the [loss of this] young blood' was General von Hutier's terse comment."

 

The cohort of 1900 would be those that turned 18 during 1918, but the cohorts of 1898 and 1899 had already been called up and were serving and both those groups were under 20.  Apparently these were in the same age groups as the British conscripts, so presumably just as 'scandalous'?

 

Mike

 

 

[phil andrade]

Mike,

 

Confused ?  I’m bloody bewildered .

 

Could it be that long standing conscription actually aids husbandry in terms of protecting    the very young ?

 

German militarism, I often read, went hand in hand with state welfare that was superior to that of the British.

 

British conscription had something of a wing and a prayer about it, with the Derby Scheme being tried as a half way house and exposing flaws in the system.

 

Could it even be argued that British socio economic conditions were such as to expose the most vulnerable to a callous and inept selection ?

 

I would be most reluctant to embrace any school of thought that smacks of Joan Littlewood’s interpretations of the Great War , but I’m beginning to succumb in the light of Sasho’s presentation of data.

 

Editing here : without books to hand, I rely on memory and cite a comment made by John Terraine.  The British loss of life in the war was so much lower than that of France, Germany and Austria, but it produced a sense of shock and outrage that transcended that among other belligerents.  Small wonder, if the loss of teenagers was so disproportionate.

 

Phil

Edited 25 May , 2021 by phil andrade

[phil andrade]

3 hours ago, Marilyne said:

this thread goes back a long way... I just downloaded Robin Neilland's book on attrition on the Kindl (got a bargain) and will have to find the time to get more acquainted with the details... I'll start with re-reading the complete topic here, I guess... 

 

M.

 

You put me to shame , Marilyne !

 

I dived straight back into this thread without reading much of the previous posts.

 

I’d better revisit them and see if I’ve been through my own learning curve !

 

There’s one statistical citation that’s been bandied about regarding an absolutely appalling impact of 1914-18 on German males born between 1892 and 1895 : between 35 and 37 percent of them, it states, were killed.

 

Teenagers saved, mature men massacred.

 

edit : I might be mistaken in those dates. Apologies.

 

Phil

 

 

Edited 25 May , 2021 by phil andrade

[ilkley remembers]

10 hours ago, phil andrade said:

The British loss of life in the war was so much lower than that of France, Germany and Austria, but it produced a sense of shock and outrage that transcended that among other belligerents.

 

Phil,

 

It would be interesting to see the context of this quotation from Terraine. I certainly don't recognise it, although, it has to be said that he isn't my 'go to' authority as far as WW1 is concerned. It just seems such an odd thing to write and more specifically what point is he actually trying to make? Is he, for example, advocating some sort of British exceptionalism as far as shock, outrage or indeed grief as a result of loss?  I wonder what your thoughts are? 

[Robert Dunlop]

The two important books that I would recommend on the German perspective are:

 

1. 'Victory must be ours: Germany in the Great War 1914-1918' by Laurence Moyer; and

2. 'War experiences in rural Germany 1914-1923' by Benjamin Ziemann.

 

The second book is particularly powerful, drawing on letters, censor reviews, parish records, newspapers, etc to provide a detailed understanding of how soldiers and families from rural Bavaria experienced the Great War.

 

Robert

[phil andrade]

16 hours ago, ilkley remembers said:

 

Phil,

 

It would be interesting to see the context of this quotation from Terraine. I certainly don't recognise it, although, it has to be said that he isn't my 'go to' authority as far as WW1 is concerned. It just seems such an odd thing to write and more specifically what point is he actually trying to make? Is he, for example, advocating some sort of British exceptionalism as far as shock, outrage or indeed grief as a result of loss?  I wonder what your thoughts are? 

 

 

Edward,

 

Returned from my seaside bivouac, I can now provide the source.

 

John Terraine, THE GREAT WAR, 1914-18 ( 1965) , page 232,

 

 

When these figures penetrated the understanding of the British people, they brought a sense of dismay and outrage hardly matched in any other country ;  in the agitation it was not perceived that the British, compared with other major participants, had got off lightly.

 

You'll find this point  reiterated in other works - Gordon Corrigan's MUD, BLOOD AND POPPYCOCK, for example - when the historian seeks to " debunk myths" about the Great War.  There is a theme, emphasised by Terraine and others, that in their outrage and their quest to vilify Haig and his entourage, the British, unused to Continental warfare on the grand scale, were unable, and, perhaps, unwilling, to accept that mass casualties are a concomitant of this kind of warfare, and that the assessment of Britain's war is distorted by failure to countenance the essential nature of such conflict. 

 

My thoughts are that there is validity in Terraine's view if we analyse the actual number of British dead compared with that of other belligerents.  In absolute and proportionate terms the loss of life was much more bearable than that suffered by France or Germany, to name but two.  Yet I feel that there is a degree of complacency, too, in how the argument is pitched.

From July 1916 until the Armistice, British casualties were indeed heavy, sometimes appalling.  The Somme, especially, comes to my mind.  French and German comments at the time were evidence of how profligate the British were seen to be with the lives and blood of their soldiers.

 

What Sasho has revealed to us adds a dimension which , I think, should be set against the view expressed by Terraine : an extremely high proportion of teenage dead suggests that British outrage had a unique legitimacy.

 

Phil

[MikeMeech]

51 minutes ago, phil andrade said:

 

 

Edward,

 

Returned from my seaside bivouac, I can now provide the source.

 

John Terraine, THE GREAT WAR, 1914-18 ( 1965) , page 232,

 

 

When these figures penetrated the understanding of the British people, they brought a sense of dismay and outrage hardly matched in any other country ;  in the agitation it was not perceived that the British, compared with other major participants, had got off lightly.

 

You'll find this point  reiterated in other works - Gordon Corrigan's MUD, BLOOD AND POPPYCOCK, for example - when the historian seeks to " debunk myths" about the Great War.  There is a theme, emphasised by Terraine and others, that in their outrage and their quest to vilify Haig and his entourage, the British, unused to Continental warfare on the grand scale, were unable, and, perhaps, unwilling, to accept that mass casualties are a concomitant of this kind of warfare, and that the assessment of Britain's war is distorted by failure to countenance the essential nature of such conflict. 

 

My thoughts are that there is validity in Terraine's view if we analyse the actual number of British dead compared with that of other belligerents.  In absolute and proportionate terms the loss of life was much more bearable than that suffered by France or Germany, to name but two.  Yet I feel that there is a degree of complacency, too, in how the argument is pitched.

From July 1916 until the Armistice, British casualties were indeed heavy, sometimes appalling.  The Somme, especially, comes to my mind.  French and German comments at the time were evidence of how profligate the British were seen to be with the lives and blood of their soldiers.

 

What Sasho has revealed to us adds a dimension which , I think, should be set against the view expressed by Terraine : an extremely high proportion of teenage dead suggests that British outrage had a unique legitimacy.

 

Phil

Hi

 

The British 'Military Service Act' of January 1916 had conscription ages from 18-41.

The April 1918 Act had ages from 18-51, if you were older you could volunteer and if you were over 17 you could also volunteer but not go overseas until over 18.

 

The pre-war German conscription made all male liable for military service between the ages of 17-45, but they were called up for service at the age of 20, although under that age you could volunteer to join early, usually those that wanted to make the army their career.  At the start of the war there would have been a major call-up with lots of older men returning to service, so in theory the age profile of the German Army should have risen.  Due to the war situation many of the classes would be called up early, the 1914 class came in at the normal time, the end of September 1914.  However, the 1915 class was called up in April, May and June 1915 followed by the 1916 class between August and November 1915.  The 1917 class was called up between January and May 1916 (about 18 months early some presumably still 18).  The 1918 class appear to have started coming into service between September 1916 and January 1917.  Parts of the 1919 class appear to have been called up in Germany during January and February 1917 but the majority not until May and June 1917, these may well have been under 18 when called up but would have been over 18 on completion of training.

 

The French  Army followed a similar call up pattern to the Germans calling up 'classes' early.  Both the German and French armies did not recognise any form of 'conscientious objection', if I have understood their systems correctly.

 

The British, German and French armies all appear to have recruited the same age groups and used 18 year old's on the battlefield.

 

By the 1918 German Spring offensive the German army had split their division into 'attack' and 'trench', putting fit/young/experienced into the former and the less fit/older/inexperienced (including recent recruits) in the latter.  The casualties during the offensive would probably be biased towards the former, so the 40,000 casualties on the first day would be likely to be in their twenties.  During the 100 days it may well be that the casualties would be the older remaining troops plus recent recruits, that may of course increase the 'average' age of casualties.

 

I do not think there is any 'uniqueness' in British Army recruiting and any look through 'age of casualties' would need to be undertaken very carefully with very detailed analysis, or were German and French 18 year old's bullet proof?  Or has their been a look at the average ages which may be increased by the number of 'older' men becoming casualties?  The German and French armies were certainly using their 18 year old's on the battlefield during the war and not just 1918.

 

Rather more questions to be answered I expect.

 

Mike

 

 

[phil andrade]

Mike,

 

You and I have encountered some notorious statistical tropes before : the six week life expectancy of the subaltern, the twenty five percent of all Scottish soldiers being killed, and , of course, the airmen dying more in training than in combat.  Let’s hope those distortions have been kicked into touch.

 

Now we have something quite grotesque : the fourfold increase in the ratio of British teenage soldiers being killed compared with their French counterparts.

 

This is hard to believe, let alone account for.

 

But my trust in Sasho’s scholarship is profound, and we’ll have to wrestle with this appalling fact and make it intelligible.

 

Phil

[MikeMeech]

32 minutes ago, phil andrade said:

Mike,

 

You and I have encountered some notorious statistical tropes before : the six week life expectancy of the subaltern, the twenty five percent of all Scottish soldiers being killed, and , of course, the airmen dying more in training than in combat.  Let’s hope those distortions have been kicked into touch.

 

Now we have something quite grotesque : the fourfold increase in the ratio of British teenage soldiers being killed compared with their French counterparts.

 

This is hard to believe, let alone account for.

 

But my trust in Sasho’s scholarship is profound, and we’ll have to wrestle with this appalling fact and make it intelligible.

 

Phil

Hi

 

There are lots of figures out there, for example france-pub.com/world-war-1.php  mentions that "36% of the soldiers aged between 19 and 22 were killed" (how many under 20?)

 

Another online source states that 6 out of 10 French soldiers between the ages of 18-28 died or were permanently maimed.  Early war the age profile of French troops would be higher than late war due to the call up of all the reservists.  A lot of the French were killed in the early years of the war which may up the age profile of the dead, I think the French figures may need closer scrutiny.

 

Mike

[ilkley remembers]

7 hours ago, phil andrade said:

When these figures penetrated the understanding of the British people, they brought a sense of dismay and outrage hardly matched in any other country ;  in the agitation it was not perceived that the British, compared with other major participants, had got off lightly.

 

Thank you for taking the trouble to find the quotation and adding some context. However, it still seems like an unsubstantiated assertion which to me shows the Terraine's limitations ie his desire to reassess Haig into a more favourable light.

 

As far as the figures are concerned I share the reservations of MickMeech, although, he puts it rather better than I am able.

[Robert Dunlop]

I can't comment on the 'sense of dismay and outrage' of the British people but there seem to be differences in perceptions of WW1 when talking with French and German citizens, from a purely anecdotal perspective. When I have asked about these perceptions, most see WW1 as yet another of the major wars that afflicted Europe over several centuries. I have never heard about any equivalent of school studies of the war poets, for example, which seems more prevalent in the UK. I recall such studies focusing on the poetic equivalent of 'dismay and outrage'; perhaps Terraine was drawing on this when he penned the above quote?

 

Robert

Edited 27 May , 2021 by Robert Dunlop

[Sasho Todorov]

On 27/05/2021 at 03:03, MikeMeech said:

Hi

 

There are lots of figures out there, for example france-pub.com/world-war-1.php  mentions that "36% of the soldiers aged between 19 and 22 were killed" (how many under 20?)

 

Another online source states that 6 out of 10 French soldiers between the ages of 18-28 died or were permanently maimed.  Early war the age profile of French troops would be higher than late war due to the call up of all the reservists.  A lot of the French were killed in the early years of the war which may up the age profile of the dead, I think the French figures may need closer scrutiny.

 

Mike

 

To explain my methodology I used the genealogical databases from both Memoires des Hommes and the CWGC. As stated before, MMDH, being built within the administrative structures of the French conscription system (each death file was originally written by the regimental depot with the primary purpose of determining pensions for the families of those "mort pour la France") is significantly more comprehensive than the CWGC system when it comes to consistently recording the information needed for determining age at death-- birthday and day of death. The CWGC still provides 500,000 ages at death from the tombstones registered within the system, giving a coverage level for the land combat troops of 540,000 age at deaths for 970,000 entries.

 

To reup my findings:

 

France: (Avg/Median/%<20)

1914: 27/26/1.2%

1915: 28/27/4.6%

1916: 29/28/3.2%

1917: 29/28/4.6%

1918: 28/27/3.6%

 

Commonwealth:

1914: 28/27/8.2%

1915: 26/24/13.0%

1916: 26/24/11.7%

1917: 27/25/9.8%

1918: 26/25/15.6%

 

One factor that makes me particularly confident in my research on this topic (though I hesitate to make it seem too big of a deal, it was just a Saturday project made substantially easier by my earlier work organizing the MMDH database for a divisional casualty study) is that the BEF age trends match what one would intuitively expect from an army initial made up of long service professionals+territorials and reservists, transitioning to a volunteer based force: the massive decrease in both average and median age at death, and then back into a conscript force, until the release of the 18 year olds in 1918 for foreign service knocks it back down again.

 

On 26/05/2021 at 23:58, MikeMeech said:

The British, German and French armies all appear to have recruited the same age groups and used 18 year old's on the battlefield.

 

I do not think there is any 'uniqueness' in British Army recruiting and any look through 'age of casualties' would need to be undertaken very carefully with very detailed analysis, or were German and French 18 year old's bullet proof?  Or has their been a look at the average ages which may be increased by the number of 'older' men becoming casualties?  The German and French armies were certainly using their 18 year old's on the battlefield during the war and not just 1918.

 

Rather more questions to be answered I expect.

 

Mike

 

 

 

The data really doesn't support an argument that the French were using 18 year olds on the battlefield in large numbers, though there is a bit more evidence for German troops trending younger. The general mistake you are making is applying the British conscription at 18 model to the continent's conscription at 21 model. The class of 1914 for the French and Germans, for example, were those born in 1893, not 1896 as you are assuming. The German class of 1917 would be entering the training depots in their late 19's, early 20's, in 1916, and the class of 1919 was being called into training in their early to mid 19's. I'd also note that there was a substantial lag time between being inducted into the depots and being released for wartime service. While the lag time may seem incongruous with the need to rapidly replace holes being formed in the fighting ranks, this was a major reason why the depots were generally kept pretty well stocked and it must be stressed that somewhere around half of all replacements were returning convalescents. The United Kingdom was very much an outlier during WWI for conscripting so early. Continental conscription has historically been at 21, and this model was followed by the United States as well when it entered both WWI and WWII. The transition to the U.S. to a draft at earlier ages was a product of the Korean and Vietnam wars.

 

To give an idea of the total age distribution I'm attaching a percentile chart (1914 to 1918) by age of death in years, with the French in blue and the Commonwealth in orange. You'll notice that the distinct areas of separation are in 18-20 (much higher for the commonwealth) and 29-35 (higher for the French). This is in part due to the fact that the French were filling a significantly larger portion of their army with the classes of men inducted as reservists. In fact, the French reserve divisions of 1914 were closer in manpower composition to the German landwehr divisions than the German reserve divisions.

 

In short, French 18 year olds weren't bulletproof, they just weren't on the battlefield in significant numbers.

[Sasho Todorov]

17 hours ago, phil andrade said:

But my trust in Sasho’s scholarship is profound, and we’ll have to wrestle with this appalling fact and make it intelligible.

 

Phil

 

Thanks Phil, I really appreciate it!

 

On 25/05/2021 at 03:59, phil andrade said:

Mike,

 

Confused ?  I’m bloody bewildered .

 

Could it be that long standing conscription actually aids husbandry in terms of protecting    the very young ?

 

German militarism, I often read, went hand in hand with state welfare that was superior to that of the British.

 

British conscription had something of a wing and a prayer about it, with the Derby Scheme being tried as a half way house and exposing flaws in the system.

 

Could it even be argued that British socio economic conditions were such as to expose the most vulnerable to a callous and inept selection ?

 

I would be most reluctant to embrace any school of thought that smacks of Joan Littlewood’s interpretations of the Great War , but I’m beginning to succumb in the light of Sasho’s presentation of data.

 

Editing here : without books to hand, I rely on memory and cite a comment made by John Terraine.  The British loss of life in the war was so much lower than that of France, Germany and Austria, but it produced a sense of shock and outrage that transcended that among other belligerents.  Small wonder, if the loss of teenagers was so disproportionate.

 

Phil

 

In terms of interpreting shock and outrage, it's worth noting the massive cultural shift within France as a result of WWI. Beyond just its acceleration of the already crisis level French demographic problems, WWI also profoundly shifted French culture away from what had previously involved a fair dose of glorifying militarism.

 

If I could hazard a guess as to why it may have impacted the UK even more, the UK, as Robert noted, had never experienced the true costs of the colossal continental wars. One major factor to add in is the impact of the British class system. The tendency of the UK to shovel private school graduates and other members of the upper class into the ranks of the junior officers meant a corresponding higher toll reaped within the ranks of the UK's elite. Compare Churchill being handed a battalion to faff around with when he left the cabinet to Abel Ferry slumming it as a corporal and then a lieutenant while occasionally going back to Paris to wear his other hat of being member of the standing cabinet.

 

You can actually see a bit of a reaction to the losses within the upper ranks within the decision making of the B.E.F. Still working on completing the introductory articles for my website, but you should be able to find my CWGC divisional tracker in beta form here: https://nopathosnopoets.wordpress.com/. Basically it's an organization of the CWGC data into deaths per day per division (as in how many deaths are recorded for an individual day among the battalions that composed the division), and should give you a good flow of the war. An interesting element is that the U.K. Guards division, despite having a well deserved reputation for success, was relatively sparsely used compared to the other top divisions in the B.E.F. following its stint at the Somme in 1916 where Robert Asquith was killed. The nasty side effect of concentrating the fashionable battalions was a corresponding higher shock to the people with powerful voices when the bill came due.

 

This would have likely had a compounding effect as the disproportionate losses among the educated and upper classes (and the way in which a greater portion of the Commonwealth industrial classes were held back for work in the war industries) meant that those with the largest megaphones were also those who had lost the largest slices of their social circles during the war. 

 

[MikeMeech]

38 minutes ago, Sasho Todorov said:

 

To explain my methodology I used the genealogical databases from both Memoires des Hommes and the CWGC. As stated before, MMDH, being built within the administrative structures of the French conscription system (each death file was originally written by the regimental depot with the primary purpose of determining pensions for the families of those "mort pour la France") is significantly more comprehensive than the CWGC system when it comes to consistently recording the information needed for determining age at death-- birthday and day of death. The CWGC still provides 500,000 ages at death from the tombstones registered within the system, giving a coverage level for the land combat troops of 540,000 age at deaths for 970,000 entries.

 

To reup my findings:

 

France: (Avg/Median/%<20)

1914: 27/26/1.2%

1915: 28/27/4.6%

1916: 29/28/3.2%

1917: 29/28/4.6%

1918: 28/27/3.6%

 

Commonwealth:

1914: 28/27/8.2%

1915: 26/24/13.0%

1916: 26/24/11.7%

1917: 27/25/9.8%

1918: 26/25/15.6%

 

One factor that makes me particularly confident in my research on this topic (though I hesitate to make it seem too big of a deal, it was just a Saturday project made substantially easier by my earlier work organizing the MMDH database for a divisional casualty study) is that the BEF age trends match what one would intuitively expect from an army initial made up of long service professionals+territorials and reservists, transitioning to a volunteer based force: the massive decrease in both average and median age at death, and then back into a conscript force, until the release of the 18 year olds in 1918 for foreign service knocks it back down again.

 

 

The data really doesn't support an argument that the French were using 18 year olds on the battlefield in large numbers, though there is a bit more evidence for German troops trending younger. The general mistake you are making is applying the British conscription at 18 model to the continent's conscription at 21 model. The class of 1914 for the French and Germans, for example, were those born in 1893, not 1896 as you are assuming. The German class of 1917 would be entering the training depots in their late 19's, early 20's, in 1916, and the class of 1919 was being called into training in their early to mid 19's. I'd also note that there was a substantial lag time between being inducted into the depots and being released for wartime service. While the lag time may seem incongruous with the need to rapidly replace holes being formed in the fighting ranks, this was a major reason why the depots were generally kept pretty well stocked and it must be stressed that somewhere around half of all replacements were returning convalescents. The United Kingdom was very much an outlier during WWI for conscripting so early. Continental conscription has historically been at 21, and this model was followed by the United States as well when it entered both WWI and WWII. The transition to the U.S. to a draft at earlier ages was a product of the Korean and Vietnam wars.

 

To give an idea of the total age distribution I'm attaching a percentile chart (1914 to 1918) by age of death in years, with the French in blue and the Commonwealth in orange. You'll notice that the distinct areas of separation are in 18-20 (much higher for the commonwealth) and 29-35 (higher for the French). This is in part due to the fact that the French were filling a significantly larger portion of their army with the classes of men inducted as reservists. In fact, the French reserve divisions of 1914 were closer in manpower composition to the German landwehr divisions than the German reserve divisions.

 

In short, French 18 year olds weren't bulletproof, they just weren't on the battlefield in significant numbers.

Hi

 

Reference the Germans, Boff in 'Winning and Losing on the Western Front', page 53, mentions that in August 1918 31% of the German POWs were 21 or under, and quoting Benjamin Ziemann:

 

"... , nearly a quarter of German dead in 1917-18 were 18 to 20 year olds, compared with 7.6 per cent in 1914.  Those aged 25-29, on the other hand, who made up 30 per cent of the dead in 1914, by 1918 represented only 20 per cent.  Younger men thus replaced and diluted the core of twenty-something combat veterans, the Stammmannschaft, on which units depended, leaving those units, in Scott Stephenson's view, more friable."

 

It appears the Germans were using 18 year olds on the battlefield.  If these French figures are correct it makes for some very disturbing interpretations: 

 

Were the French willing to defend France to the last British 18 year old, but not there own? 'Let the British youth die, not our own to defend France'?

Does this mean DLG should have refused any French request to extend the line the BEF was holding, so as not to use 18 year olds?  After all the French were not using the latter so why should the British to defend France, the latter's man power problems could not be as bad as they said?

After the German Spring Offensive should DLG have shrunk the BEF so as not to use British 18 year olds, and just let the French take the strain, again why should the British make the sacrifice to defend France with their 18 year olds if the French were not willing to?

Was this French policy sensible or just 'selfish'?  

 

As I say it become rather disturbing, 'perfidious France'?

 

Very uncomfortably

 

Mike

 

 

[Sasho Todorov]

29 minutes ago, MikeMeech said:

Hi

 

Reference the Germans, Boff in 'Winning and Losing on the Western Front', page 53, mentions that in August 1918 31% of the German POWs were 21 or under, and quoting Benjamin Ziemann:

 

"... , nearly a quarter of German dead in 1917-18 were 18 to 20 year olds, compared with 7.6 per cent in 1914.  Those aged 25-29, on the other hand, who made up 30 per cent of the dead in 1914, by 1918 represented only 20 per cent.  Younger men thus replaced and diluted the core of twenty-something combat veterans, the Stammmannschaft, on which units depended, leaving those units, in Scott Stephenson's view, more friable."

 

It appears the Germans were using 18 year olds on the battlefield.  If these French figures are correct it makes for some very disturbing interpretations: 

 

Were the French willing to defend France to the last British 18 year old, but not there own? 'Let the British youth die, not our own to defend France'?

Does this mean DLG should have refused any French request to extend the line the BEF was holding, so as not to use 18 year olds?  After all the French were not using the latter so why should the British to defend France, the latter's man power problems could not be as bad as they said?

After the German Spring Offensive should DLG have shrunk the BEF so as not to use British 18 year olds, and just let the French take the strain, again why should the British make the sacrifice to defend France with their 18 year olds if the French were not willing to?

Was this French policy sensible or just 'selfish'?  

 

As I say it become rather disturbing, 'perfidious France'?

 

Very uncomfortably

 

Mike

 

 

 

The answer is that using 18 year olds during a historical period where lack of nutrition meant puberty began significantly later than today is absolutely idiotic and should only be done as a last resort. We're talking about boys who were significantly less advanced in their physical maturation than a comparative teenager today and, as the Germans noted with their own men, also psychologically much less prepared for the stress of the battlefield than their somewhat older cohorts due to their brain not having finished development.

 

Secondly, the French manpower pool was completely and utterly stretched as is. The untapped younger classes were still working in the wartime economy and it has to be stressed that France mobilized a significantly larger portion of its military age manpower than the United Kingdom-- 80% of military age men vs. only a bit over 50% for the U.K. Those teens not yet in the ranks were in the factories and, just as importantly, in the fields helping run the farms, a sector which became a particularly bad crisis point over late 1916 through 1917, requiring the release of substantial portions of the older classes of the French army back into the civilian economy. 

 

The French weren't being perfidious, they were being significantly smarter in how they used their manpower, as compared to the U.K. which was chucking undeveloped teens into the ranks instead of shifting them into factories and war industries first, or the Germans, who were tapping into their younger classes in large part because of the incredibly wasteful manpower utilisation of the mismanaged Hindenburg program. This did not have an impact on the actual size of the forces they could maintain in the field, essentially every man in France was either working in a critical industry or in the army. Pulling the 18 year olds out of the economy would have required shifting equivalent amounts of older classes out of the army, otherwise France would face food shortages or the French war industries, which were supplying not only France's colossal effort but also much of the other powers of the Entente, including most of the AEF, would slow down.

Edited 27 May , 2021 by Sasho Todorov

[phil andrade]

This is a suggestion that I venture with some diffidence, but it might have merit.

 

The cost to France of the “first shock “ was so frightful that, in a  peculiar sense, it carried a benefit.

 

The six weeks that spanned the Battles of the Frontiers and the Marne took the lives of about one fifth of all the French soldiers who were killed in the entire war.  If that’s an exaggeration, it’s not by much.

 

To suffer such a monstrous blow, and to be still on your feet and in the fight, is to impart a compelled “smartness “ that Sasho has alluded to, and might we attribute the husbandry of their boys to this unique French experience ?

 

Phil

[MikeMeech]

Hi

 

The British only broke their rule of not using not using under 19s on the battlefield due to the crisis of the German Spring Offensive, 'Call-to-Arms' by Charles Messenger, page 276, has the following:

 

"On 23 March, two days after the German attack opened, General Maurice noted in his diary: 'All our drafts in France are already exhausted and by stripping England of men we can just about replace our casualties.'  But to do this, the authorities felt forced to break the under-19 rule and send out soldiers aged 18 1/2 and over, who had six months training, to France."

 

It does continue with some more details.

 

'The French Army and the First World War' by Elizabeth Greenhalgh, page 287, mention the French side:

 

"Petain concluded, that the French armies had 'reached their limit'; the British would have to manage in the north; French depots were empty of troops until July.  He foreshadowed the dissolution of units since Clemenceau as war minister had refused his reiterated request for a further 200,000 men to make up the deficit."

 

The author also mentions, quoting Philippe Boulanger, that:

 

"The class of 1919 had been called up in April 1918, and 229,215 men incorporated, 75 per cent of the total."

 

Then reference Foch and Clemenceau on increasing Allied manpower:

 

"Both embarked on a long and acrimonious series of discussions to extract more British and American troops.  The French were convinced that more than a million British soldiers in uniform were to be found in the UK, not all of whom could possibly required for Home Defence."

 

Many of the troops in the UK were of course in training and were 18 years or so old, basically these were the troops that the French were requesting to be used on the battlefield and why the British broke their under-19 rule to supply them to defend France.  It seems odd if the French who had 'reached their limit' did not use their '18 year olds' if they expected it from Britain?  Maybe the French did have a less manpower crisis than they were claiming, it is all slightly odd?

 

The UK was not actually flush with unused labour, it too had a large industrial base that was supplying British and the Entente, including coal, for example, to power French industry as well as more 'military' items.

 

Mike

 

 

[Sasho Todorov]

1 hour ago, phil andrade said:

This is a suggestion that I venture with some diffidence, but it might have merit.

 

The cost to France of the “first shock “ was so frightful that, in a  peculiar sense, it carried a benefit.

 

The six weeks that spanned the Battles of the Frontiers and the Marne took the lives of about one fifth of all the French soldiers who were killed in the entire war.  If that’s an exaggeration, it’s not by much.

 

To suffer such a monstrous blow, and to be still on your feet and in the fight, is to impart a compelled “smartness “ that Sasho has alluded to, and might we attribute the husbandry of their boys to this unique French experience ?

 

Phil

 

Not by too much at all, the French had taken 122,000 dead by September 12th, 1914, 303,000 military dead by the end of 1914, and 653,000 by the end of 1915. There's also the element that France had hit the demographic plateau far earlier than the rest of Europe, meaning that its pool of military age men was proportionally smaller vis a vis its population than the very young German population or the UK. Both the UK and Germany had a lot of slack in their manpower pools for the first years of the war (due to Germany's under-mobilization of men thanks to the army's resistance to incorporating more urban recruits during the pre-war period), whereas the French had to operate within tight confines from day 1. End result being a significantly more efficient use of labor in the war economy.

 

25 minutes ago, MikeMeech said:

Hi

 

The British only broke their rule of not using not using under 19s on the battlefield due to the crisis of the German Spring Offensive, 'Call-to-Arms' by Charles Messenger, page 276, has the following:

 

"On 23 March, two days after the German attack opened, General Maurice noted in his diary: 'All our drafts in France are already exhausted and by stripping England of men we can just about replace our casualties.'  But to do this, the authorities felt forced to break the under-19 rule and send out soldiers aged 18 1/2 and over, who had six months training, to France."

 

It does continue with some more details.

 

'The French Army and the First World War' by Elizabeth Greenhalgh, page 287, mention the French side:

 

"Petain concluded, that the French armies had 'reached their limit'; the British would have to manage in the north; French depots were empty of troops until July.  He foreshadowed the dissolution of units since Clemenceau as war minister had refused his reiterated request for a further 200,000 men to make up the deficit."

 

The author also mentions, quoting Philippe Boulanger, that:

 

"The class of 1919 had been called up in April 1918, and 229,215 men incorporated, 75 per cent of the total."

 

Then reference Foch and Clemenceau on increasing Allied manpower:

 

"Both embarked on a long and acrimonious series of discussions to extract more British and American troops.  The French were convinced that more than a million British soldiers in uniform were to be found in the UK, not all of whom could possibly required for Home Defence."

 

Many of the troops in the UK were of course in training and were 18 years or so old, basically these were the troops that the French were requesting to be used on the battlefield and why the British broke their under-19 rule to supply them to defend France.  It seems odd if the French who had 'reached their limit' did not use their '18 year olds' if they expected it from Britain?  Maybe the French did have a less manpower crisis than they were claiming, it is all slightly odd?

 

The UK was not actually flush with unused labour, it too had a large industrial base that was supplying British and the Entente, including coal, for example, to power French industry as well as more 'military' items.

 

Mike

 

 

 

The controversy of UK manpower is multi-faceted. Many French officers, like Mangin, were quite recognizant of the critical nature of the UK war industries, especially shipbuilding, to the overall success of the Entente. Foch and Clemenceau were a bit more shortsighted, though I don't think unreasonably so, given that DLG was pretty open in wanting to fight anywhere other than France. The question of held back manpower was and is still a raging controversy within the inter-British discussion proper, considering how much of a sore spot it was between Haig and DLG in their duel of memoires.

 

The French weren't requesting that the British specifically deploy their teenagers, while they didn't, they were requesting the deployment of what they believed, rightly or wrongly, to be a large cadre of military age manpower being deliberately held back from France by DLG. One factor in this was that the French mobilized a wider swathe of its manpower, meaning that a lot of the manpower held back because they were unfit by British standards for wartime service were, within the French context, in the ranks.

 

I agree on UK mobilization rates and the critical nature of a lot of its wartime economies. My criticism is that the better path was to cycle more young men (18-19) into the war industries and cycle more mature men out of them and into the ranks. This is what I was discussing when it came to understanding France's manpower crisis. The French manpower crisis was the fact that the French were at the limit of the total number of people they could keep in the field. What you're interpreting as a slack, or remaining mobilizable men, was actually a deliberate choice to keep the teens in the war industries and the men in their 20's and early 30's in the army. As I noted before, cycling in the French teens would have required cycling out the older French men, because the French economy simply could not continue arming and feeding its war effort with any fewer workers.

Edited 27 May , 2021 by Sasho Todorov

[phil andrade]

Sasho,

 

The official rendition of French military casualties, presented to their Parlement in 1920, gave a total of 1,528,000 dead on the field, missing or prisoners, of which 313,000 were attributed to August and September 1914.  This figure obviously includes prisoners, but there were an additional 16,000 who died in hospital, and officers are not included.  My reckoning was not much of an exaggeration, after all !

 

Phil

[ilkley remembers]

8 hours ago, Robert Dunlop said:

I can't comment on the 'sense of dismay and outrage' of the British people but there seem to be differences in perceptions of WW1 when talking with French and German citizens, from a purely anecdotal perspective. When I have asked about these perceptions, most see WW1 as yet another of the major wars that afflicted Europe over several centuries. I have never heard about any equivalent of school studies of the war poets, for example, which seems more prevalent in the UK. I recall such studies focusing on the poetic equivalent of 'dismay and outrage'; perhaps Terraine was drawing on this when he penned the above quote?

 

 

Terraine is putting forward an entirely anglocentric view which simply does not stand scrutiny.  He fails to see for, example, that in Germany consciousness about the war (dismay and outrage at the outcome) was driven by a conservative modernism which ultimately resulted in the rise of Nazism. The Weimar Government and later the Nazi's  deliberately suppressed attempts to reflect upon the realities of the German experience on the Western Front and instead chose to politicise and twist the argument to promote a nationalist agenda. Artistic interpretations by artists such as Dix and Kollwitz and writers such as Erich Maria Remarque were branded degenerate and subject to censorship. In fact it wasn't until the 1960's and the analysis of Fritz Fischer that Germany begins to reflect upon the results of WW1

 

In France a pacifist agenda was set as early as 1916 by Henri Barbusse in Le Fue which had such an important influence on British post war writers.  In Britain the primary means of expressing feelings about the war were through literature, a medium which here is particularly strong. Today we simply see an anti war agenda set by a small group of poets but in reality the picture really is more complicated and it shouldn't be forgotten that many writers in the 20s particularly of the political right chose to use WW1 as a conduit for their more nationalistic views. For historians like Terraine focusing on what he calls 'dismay and outrage' is to some degree a ruse to suggest that postwar pacifist views had driven the negative interpretation of Haigs generalship.  

 

 

5 hours ago, Sasho Todorov said:

One major factor to add in is the impact of the British class system. The tendency of the UK to shovel private school graduates and other members of the upper class into the ranks of the junior officers meant a corresponding higher toll reaped within the ranks of the UK's elite. Compare Churchill being handed a battalion to faff around with when he left the cabinet to Abel Ferry slumming it as a corporal and then a lieutenant while occasionally going back to Paris to wear his other hat of being member of the standing cabinet.

 

Worth a thread of its own and suspect that it would result in a right old ding dong

 

5 hours ago, Sasho Todorov said:

If I could hazard a guess as to why it may have impacted the UK even more, the UK, as Robert noted, had never experienced the true costs of the colossal continental war

 

If memory serves me right France only endured one 'continental war' between 1815 and 1914 and that lasted only 6 months. Technically Germany hadn't been through any since it only came into being in 1871. Prussia it has to be said suffered 3 although none on the scale of either WW1 or the Napoleonic Wars. Europe had been remarkably war free for 100 years so I suspect any comment that Germany, France, Italy etc were more used to wars than Britain is a bit off the mark

 

The British had been part of many continental wars over the centuries and famously lost one in America. I suppose as a country that projected power via its navy it could afford to   to sit back and watch the fun where at all possible. Although, when they did become involved they had on occasions a a remarkable tendency to  'high tail it' back home when the going got too tough

[Sasho Todorov]

2 hours ago, phil andrade said:

Sasho,

 

The official rendition of French military casualties, presented to their Parlement in 1920, gave a total of 1,528,000 dead on the field, missing or prisoners, of which 313,000 were attributed to August and September 1914.  This figure obviously includes prisoners, but there were an additional 16,000 who died in hospital, and officers are not included.  My reckoning was not much of an exaggeration, after all !

 

Phil

 

Your memory was indeed on point (apologize if how I wrote things might have given the opposite impression)! Only thing slightly off was the total, 1.8 million vs. 1.5 million when you add the deaths within the hospital system, when you factor in the roughly 530,000 POW's lost, that gets you to about the 1.3 million dead between August 1914-November 1918 that should appear. I actually used the 1920 global figures to run my estimates for French POW losses by period of the war a while back, cross referencing it with my studies of the MMDH database. Can't find the twitter thread where I put them in, though, unfortunately.

 

To use the initial months of the war:

 

August-September 1914: 329,000 killed, missing, died of wounds, or POW--- 182,473 confirmed dead for about ~150,000 prisoners (Maubeuge alone would account for 30-40,000 of these).

 

October-November 1914: 125,000 total, 86,887 confirmed dead, for ~40,000 prisoners.

 

December-January 1915: 74,000 total, 57,693 confirmed dead, for ~15,000 prisoners.

 

It inspired me to use my significantly more detailed army level casualty figures in my modified pro-rata casualty tracker (which divides up the unallocated dead in the combat arms into a distributed share based on an army's proportion of the infantry losses for the day) to calculate the actual French dead, missing and POW count for verdun to be not 162,000 dead, as so often claimed by authors who conflate dead and missing with "dead", but actually ~105,000 dead and ~55,000 prisoners. I can't get a perfect grasp on the German figures (though with my current training of my Fraktur OCR software I may be able to accomplish my goal of going back through the verlustlisten to get the type of casualty data), but I'd estimate German losses similarly in the 100,000 dead range and 40,000 prisoners, given that they lost somewhere along the lines of 20,000 prisoners alone during the twin days of the October 24th and December 15th counter-offensives.

 

2 hours ago, ilkley remembers said:

Worth a thread of its own and suspect that it would result in a right old ding dong

 

 

Yeah, I'm nowhere well established on this forum to feel like having a go at trying to track the impact of the British class system on military organization and decision making.

 

 

Quote

If memory serves me right France only endured one 'continental war' between 1815 and 1914 and that lasted only 6 months. Technically Germany hadn't been through any since it only came into being in 1871. Prussia it has to be said suffered 3 although none on the scale of either WW1 or the Napoleonic Wars. Europe had been remarkably war free for 100 years so I suspect any comment that Germany, France, Italy etc were more used to wars than Britain is a bit off the mark

 

The British had been part of many continental wars over the centuries and famously lost one in America. I suppose as a country that projected power via its navy it could afford to   to sit back and watch the fun where at all possible. Although, when they did become involved they had on occasions a a remarkable tendency to  'high tail it' back home when the going got too tough

 

That's true, but I think it's worth noting from an institutional and cultural memory standpoint. Even though it hadn't happened to often, it was still fairly baked into the French concept of their own history that every now and then the entire nation would be cast into a massive conflict where high sacrifices would be attached. Consider that a decent amount of the older cadres of French leadership would have had grandparents who fought in the Napoleonic wars. Foch, for example, was inspired by his grandfather's service to embark on his career. Compare this to the UK, where the entire defining element of UK grand strategy up until that point had been as limited as possible engagements in the European ground theaters of its major wars, in favor of the colonial campaign and naval blockade. The defining theme of much of the post-war writing basically centers on whether Britain was right to have abandoned this method of fighting. No one's population was used to major continental wars, but from a psychological standpoint I do think the UK's was uniquely unprepared for it, especially when it comes to the more engaged upper+educated classes who would have likely had a stronger concept of the historical method of British fighting.

 

Edited 27 May , 2021 by Sasho Todorov

[phil andrade]

Sasho,

 

The French claimed to have captured 26,550 German prisoners at Verdun in the entire ten months of battle in 1916.  Two thirds of these were taken in the counter offensives of October to December.

 

The number of Germans posted as killed , missing and prisoners was about 100,000, with 236,000 wounded.

 

From this I would infer about 75,000 killed and, at a guess, another 20,000 died of wounds.

 

The French 162,000 killed and missing does not include died of wounds after evacuation.  That's my supposition.

 

The Germans claimed 66,000 prisoners by mid July.

 

Hazarding a guess, I would suggest 95,000 French killed and 20,000 died of wounds for the entire battle..

 

I reckon that one tenth of all French killed/ died of wounds on the Western Front 1914-18 are attributable to the Battle of Verdun in 1916.

 

Phil

 

 

[phil andrade]

Reverting to our discussion regarding Terraine's allusion to the special British outrage, it might be worth stressing that this was written in 1965, when the fiftieth anniversary of the Great War had unleashed commemorative publications and TV series : the outstanding BBC series being the groundbreaker : which, to be fair, was largely arranged by Terraine himself.

 

This was just twenty years, more or less, since the end of the Second World War, which afforded the British people their most celebrated triumphant narrative.  By comparison with 1939-45, the Great War assumed a very unflattering aspect of futility and of transcendental horror.  The casualty figures themselves becsme a medium through which the Donkeys could be excoriated and exposed .

 

I think Terraine was making it his mission to put the casualty figures into perspective, and, in my opinion, he made a very effective contribution to historiography here, and changed a lot of minds.  He went too far, though.....in my assessment he made some almost mendacious adjustments to the presentation of casualty figures, and, in his attempts to vindicate the conduct of attritional war, he " over egged" the pudding, so to speak.

 

Phil