Attrition

[phil andrade]

The dispatch I cited was dated 23 December 1916.

 

Haig was an optimist .

 

He stressed in that letter, Phil, that everything had been done that was possible to do.  What had not proved possible was the extra month or so of training that might furnish his artillery with the necessary proficiency.

 

I think there is evidence that he would have preferred delay until mid August, with the intention of getting more heavy guns and better trained gunners.

 

It’s incumbent upon me to find that evidence.

 

 

Phil

 

Edited 17 June , 2021 by phil andrade

[PhilB]

There is a different tone to Haig`s writing pre and post 1/7/16. The cynic in me says that, since his works were guided and approved by God, Haig therefore felt blameless. It`s why, in his later assessments, the blame always resides elsewhere.

[David Filsell]

Haig can rightly be accused of many failings but I not believe that Douglas Haig ever felt blameless about casualties. Equally and inevitably it is hard to select an better British candidate to lead the BEF.

Regards

David

[Robert Dunlop]

On 15/06/2021 at 22:14, phil andrade said:

Haig's belief in attrition ?   That's doubtful.  It would have been better if he had been an attritionist.  He sought breakthrough, whereas his subordinate, Rawlinson, advocated bite and hold attrition. In the event, he fell between two stools.  What I find hard to forgive is his insistence that the thing had been an attritional success, and his disdain for Churchill's cogent and - in my view - remarkably accurate assessment.

It is very important to understand what was meant by 'breakthrough'. Many authors have accused Haig of diluting the ability of the British army to achieve more success on July 1st 1916 through his insistence that the goal of the battle was to breakthrough to Bapaume. The insistence on widening the frontage of the attack to include Gommecourt is also seen in this negative light as well. There are three key issues that have been overlooked or underplayed in this type of analysis:

1. First, the concept of breakthrough cannot be interpreted as an insistence that every effort must be directed at breaking all three lines of resistance (or two, depending on the location) and forcing a way through to Bapaume on July 1st 1916. What Haig wanted was that the scenario of a complete collapse of resistance by the German army on the Somme, associated with a rapid withdrawal precipitated not by sheer force of arms but by collapse of morale, was planned for. The parallel example that shows the wisdom of such an approach to military planning is seen with the Battle of Megiddo in 1918. 

2. Haig totally supported the bite-and-hold approach advocated by Rawlinson on behalf of his subordinate commanders, who were the generals that oversaw the detailed planning at corps and division levels. Haig's support for bite-and-hold was not instead of support for planning for breakthrough, as defined above. In other words, the issue of breakthrough versus bite-and-hold was not a binary choice. We can tell that Haig supported the detailed approach to, for example, the sets of objective lines that were drawn up by his subordinate commanders because of his handwritten notes on some of the documents and from evidence in other battles that Haig read the details of operational plans thoroughly.

3. Haig knew about and supported the supplementary plans that would cover the situation of total failure in one or more sectors of the battlefront on July 1st. The details of these plans were also included in the various operational plans, which Haig read.

 

With regards to 'his insistence that the thing had been an attritional success' then let's suppose that Haig had reported the same 'remarkably accurate assessment' as Churchill. I think we can all agree that the actual numbers of casualties on all sides were awful. There are those that argue it is important to analyse and apportion blame in respect of the absolute numbers. Perhaps the more common approach is to identify and apportion blame for a proportion of the total number of casualties, ie a subset of casualties that could have been avoided at the time if there had been more effective planning and execution. In the past, this hunt has largely focused on the breakthrough versus bite-and-hold issue with respect to the Somme. Leaving aside the concept of scenario planning, bite-and-hold was not a magic answer to casualty rates. Rawlinson noted that, whilst an effective bite-and-hold operation could draw the enemy into losing more casualties through counter-attacks than the attack lost in the initial 'bite', bite-and-hold would not win the war. What Rawlinson did not note in his oft-quoted comments about the value of bite-and-hold was that these tactics were very costly to the attacker during the 'hold' phase. This was shown during Third Ypres for example. The shift from Gough's 'breakthrough' attempts to Pumer's 'bite-and-hold' tactics are hailed as the contrast to Haig with respect to July 1916 versus Rawlinson. As has been noted in at least one other thread on this Forum in the past, the Australian forces involved with Plumer's tactics lost higher numbers of casualties between the successive 'bite' operations.

 

Furthermore, let's suppose that it was possible to lose smaller numbers of casualties to achieve the same gains as occurred during the Somme campaign. 'Gains' have to include the ability to force the building of and retreat to the Hindenburg Line as well as the impact on the morale of German soldiers, as noted earlier in this thread, and the losses of experienced NCOs for example. We would be left with x - y numbers of casualties, where x is the total number that actually occurred and y is the number of casualties that wouldn't have occurred if the 'right' tactics had been used. x - y would still be a large number. Even if this number was less than z, the total number of German casualties, then would we have been satisfied as to the outcome? I hope not. Because the fundamental issue remains:

 

     Total war between determined enemies demands a high total price!

 

Our primary focus must be on stopping wars.

 

By no means should this stop us examining the 'what if' questions that underpin x, x - y, and z. The time has come, however, for us to set aside some of the assumptions that have been made previously. The emergence of much more information about the German perspective on the Somme, for example, as well as the detailed analyses of the planning for and execution of the attack on July 1st published by the likes of Jon Porter, means we must take more cognisance of the all-encompassing nature of attrition.

 

Robert

[Robert Dunlop]

On 15/06/2021 at 22:14, phil andrade said:

For the French, however, July 1916 marked a very significant turning point in their war of attrition : their performance was as brilliant as that of the British was abysmal.

 

The reasons for this merit discussion.

Phil, I can't comment on the notion that July 1916 was a 'very significant turning point'. Your second point is an important one. The French success on July 1st 1916 on the Somme has been analysed before on this Forum but rightly bears repeating:

1. The build-up to the Somme battle was detected by the German army but von Falkenhayn refused to shift reserves from the Arras area, which is where he perceived the main secondary assault to relieve Verdun would take place.

2. The German commanders in the Somme sector had to make local decisions about where to prioritise their defensive efforts.

3. The threat to the high ground either side of the Ancre was perceived as the highest priority, in part because earlier battles on the Somme such as the Battle of Serre in 1915 had focused on this sub-sector as well - a form of cognitive bias known as 'anchoring', pardon the pun.

4. German forces were reallocated from the southern half of the Somme sector to the northern half, deliberately weakening the defences in the south. Any new forces that were made available were allocated to the north.

5. The Somme river was an important consideration in deciding to reinforce the defensive Schwerpunkt in the north. South of Péronne, the Somme river formed a huge obstacle to any potential breakthrough.

 

Thus the brilliant performance of the French was aided by the oft-lamented efforts of the British, without meaning to detract in any way from the way that the French set about the tasks in their sector and from the ways that the French supported the British efforts in the south of their sector.

 

Robert

[phil andrade]

Robert,

 

Thank you for your comments.

 

They certainly make me feel that I should be more careful in attributing excessive zeal for “ breakthrough “ to Haig’s planning for the Somme.  Your reminder that we must be more nuanced is appreciated.

 

Prior and Wilson, in their Passchendaele study, remind us that the much vaunted bite and hold phase was accompanied by high British and Dominion casualties.  The “ Untold Story “....never was a book more aptly named, wrote Jack Sheldon !

 

I must give Haig credit for being accurate in his reports of the number of Germans taken prisoner by his troops.  No exaggeration taints  this aspect of his dispatch.  He alludes to about 5,700 Germans captured by the fifth day of the battle : one tenth of the total British casualties on the first day alone.  Haig was not aware of the enormity of the British loss that day, judging by his citation of 40,000 for the first two days.  For the entire battle, he reports 38,000 captured by the British.  Given his belief that the German loss was significantly heavier than his own, I have to wonder how he could reconcile that with such a relatively low number of prisoners : especially if, as he emphasised, the Germans’ morale had been so damaged, in which case they would have been more disposed to surrender.  If, as he claimed, his army had inflicted six hundred thousand casualties on the enemy, why had only six or seven percent of that damage comprised prisoners of war.  Such a figure attests morale and fighting resolve to be robust.  I need to make sure about something : was Haig suggesting that the 600,000+ German casualties were inflicted by the BEF, or did he allow for the French performance therein ?  A lot of my interpretation’s validity is dependent on that.  

 

In respect of what we’ve been discussing about the French, and the great turning point that I allude to, this needs to encompass the ensuing months of the Somme, not just the first day.  Your point that we must attribute much of Fayolle’s success to the heavy lifting done by the British is incontestable, in my opinion.

 

Here’s something that reached out and grabbed me when I was browsing through William  Philpott’s book, on pages 113- 114, depicting the personality and command record of Fayolle :

 

Fayolle held no illusions about the full grim reality of mass industrial war “ not merely between two armies , but between two nations.  It will continue as long as they have resources.......That is where civilisation has got to !  The next battle will cost 200,000 men, and one must question whether in that case it should take place. Can one expect decisive success from attrition ?  I don’t think so, it is still too soon.”

 

Note how accurate he was in his prediction of French casualties, virtually spot on.  He almost could be writing for this thread, especially in his final comment about the need for more time before attrition could be made a war winner.

 

Phil

 

 

 

 

 

Edited 18 June , 2021 by phil andrade

[Robert Dunlop]

On 18/06/2021 at 09:58, phil andrade said:

In respect of what we’ve been discussing about the French, and the great turning point that I allude to, this needs to encompass the ensuing months of the Somme, not just the first day. 

Thank you for the clarification, Phil. 

Unfortunately, the combined experience of the advances on the Somme, the halting of the German Verdun offensive, and the subsequent French counter-attacks at Verdun led to the terrible situation of the Chemin des Dames offensive in 1917. The latter almost led, arguably, to the collapse of the French army. In contrast to Fayolle's discerning interpretation of attrition, Nivelle promoted the concept of a dramatic war-winning offensive. Politicians were lured by the seductive prospect of an end to the attritional process. It was not to be...

Robert

[phil andrade]

7 hours ago, Robert Dunlop said:

Thank you for the clarification, Phil. 

Unfortunately, the combined experience of the advances on the Somme, the halting of the German Verdun offensive, and the subsequent French counter-attacks at Verdun led to the terrible situation of the Chemin des Dames offensive in 1917. The latter almost led, arguably, to the collapse of the French army. In contrast to Fayolle's discerning interpretation of attrition, Nivelle promoted the concept of a dramatic war-winning offensive. Politicians were lured by the seductive prospect of an end to the attritional process. It was not to be...

Robert

 

The aftermath of the Nivelle Offensive, with its attendant crisis of morale, brought spectacularly successful attritional results for the French, when they conducted some extremely effective  attacks in the second half of 1917.  One or two  friends of mine - very interested in the Great War - confessed that they had never heard of Malmaison.  Some British commentators have averred that it was only because the BEF was doing the heavy lifting in Flanders in the autumn of 1917 that the French could conduct operations in that manner.   Why, I wonder, did the French achieve such husbandry of manpower during that phase of the war on the Western Front, whereas the British were still serving their men up in a deployment that resulted in such a disproportionately heavy loss of life, relative to that of the enemy ?  Was this attributable to that tactical “ rigidity “ that the Germans constantly referred to when they assessed the metal of their various opponents ?  Did the British simply put too many men into their front line, while the French had developed better practices of dispersal ?  In this sense I would argue that July 1916 marked the turning point for the French.  Even in the Nivelle Offensive they achieved a casualty exchange rate that was significantly better than that of the British, despite the latter’s triumphs at Vimy, Arras and Messines.  Ironically, though , in May 1918 the French were to fall foul of their own advice when the local commander, Duchene , put too many men into the forward positions along the notorious Chemin des Dames.

 

Phil

Edited 19 June , 2021 by phil andrade

[Robert Dunlop]

Thanks, Phil. 

Jack Sheldon's work, unpublished but noted in a previous thread on this Forum, showed that the Anglo-French offensive known as Third Ypres was responsible for tying up the German military rail network in France during most of the second half of 1917. During the build-up to and conduct of the offensive in Flanders, the requirements for construction materials, men, weapons and munitions were such that virtually all military trains were devoted to fulfilling these requirements. There was no capacity to build up a stronger defensive response to the threat in the Chemin des Dames area, which expressed itself, in part, as the Battle of Malmaison. The situation was analogous to what happened south of the Somme river in 1916.

Bearing in mind that attrition is about more than just numbers of casualties, the Nivelle offensive had a terrible effect on morale as you noted too. The notion of the offensive being the longed-for war-winning major battle, based on all-new innovative tactics, was then contrasted with the relative failure, creating widespread discontent from the politicians, through the French high command (many of whom had warned that Nivelle's estimates were not realistic prior to the offensive), and all the way down to the frontline units. Despite the fact that the "casualty exchange rate that was significantly better than that of the British", the attrition of French morale was such that major offensive operations were no longer possible at that time. The French army was more than capable of maintaining a vigorous defensive posture, which is a major reason why the Germans failed to realise that French morale was at an all-time low. Offensive capabilities were not destroyed completely; the French played an important role in Third Ypres by helping to maintain a wide front for the assault on the German re-entrant opposite Ypres.

Given that the German army was almost totally absorbed with the defense of Flanders, Pétain was able to use the major pause in French operations to review the other factors contributing to lowered morale (lack of leave, etc), review the effectiveness of existing weapons systems (a huge army-wide survey was conducted for example), increase training, and build up stockpiles of munitions as well as develop new weapons systems and tactics (such as the development of the next marks of French tanks as well as further refinements to their use, such as the allocation of engineering units to support the advance of tanks across the battle zone). Malmaison was a small operation, not a huge offensive, that was made possible by the combination of months of unpressured preparation on the French side and total absorption in Third Ypres, by virtue of the contrasting scale and strategic significance of die Flandernschlacht to the Germans, on the German side. 

Malmaison cannot be viewed as a shining example of attritional success in isolation, in contrast to the overcast gloom of Third Ypres;  Malmaison was only possible due to Third Ypres, both in terms of the months long build-up to Malmaison as well as the battle itself (which I am familiar with and have studied in some depth, as you might expect ).

The huge build-up in French tank forces, some of which played a role in Malmaison, was to be very significant during the German Spring offensives as well.

 

Robert

[Robert Dunlop]

15 hours ago, phil andrade said:

... in May 1918 the French were to fall foul of their own advice when the local commander, Duchene , put too many men into the forward positions along the notorious Chemin des Dames.

The problem was not confined to Duchêne. In the build-up to Operation Friedensturm (July 15, 1918) for example, in which the Germans were hoping to pinch out the Reims sector, Pétain had to actively intervene to ensure that général Gouraud (GOC French Fourth Army) did not repeat the same mistake as Duchêne by maintaining strong French forces in the forward defensive line. Pétain had to vigorously overrule Gouraud, whose defence of Reims then went on to "...[gain] distinction for his use of elastic defense during the Second Battle of the Marne". 

 

Robert

[Robert Dunlop]

I forgot to mention that the massive pause in French operations after Nivelle's offensive was extremely important in enabling French industry to ramp up still further. This facilitated the supply of weapons, equipment and munitions to the American army during its build-up to becoming operational. The industrial requirements were huge, despite the outputs of American industry as well, and the response of French industry to the challenges has been undervalued in the literature. This aspect of the attritional campaign was in no small part due to the Anglo-British Third Ypres campaign drawing the German Schwerpunkt towards Flanders. The campaign, in turn, was possible because British industrial production had reached the point where such a campaign could be sustained, freeing up French industrial capabilities as well as creating the operational pause.

 

Robert

[phil andrade]

Robert,

 

The turning point for the French, covering the period July 1916 to December 1917, is manifest in their ability to exact such a heavy toll from the Germans while managing to achieve this without disproportionate loss to themselves.  I'm loathe to pitch the casualty figures into my threads, because I've made a bad name for myself with some members of GWF by doing this too much : but I do believe there is a narrative in those figures that really merits study and discussion.  To a very large degree, these figures themselves reflect the ability to utilise all the resources of a belligerent in attritional warfare,  we all agree on that.  The remit goes way beyond the actual battlefield exchange rate, but there's interdependency at play.

 

Compare Malmaison with the three bite and hold battles of Menin Road, Polygon Wood and Broodseinde, which are cited as the most successful features of the Third Ypres battles.  The number of German prisoners captured  in these three actions equated to roughly fifteen per cent of the casualties sustained by British and Dominion attackers.  At Malmaison, fought at roughly the same time, the French, in four days of intense fighting, captured a number of prisoners that very nearly equalled the total casualty list suffered by the attackers.  The Germans fought fiercely at one or two locations, deploying flamethrowers, and one French division suffered heavy casualties, so it was no push over .  A similar feat had been accomplished at Verdun a couple of months earlier, although there, too, a single division had lost several thousand men : evidence of how hard the fighting was.  At the same time, Currie's Canadians had demonstrated the BEF's equivalent at Hill 70/Lens ; I wonder how that compares using the criterion that I've cited for the two French offensives mentioned.

 

Churchill makes some of his most powerful comments in his first volume of his history of the Great War :

 

No war is so sanguinary as the war of exhaustion.  No plan could be more unpromising than the plan of frontal attack.  Yet on these two brutal expedients the military authorities of France and Britain consumed, during three successive years, the flower of their national manhood.  Moreover, the dull carnage of the policy of exhaustion did not even apply equally to the combatants.  The Anglo-French offensives of 1915, 1916, and 1917 were in nearly every instance, and certainly in the aggregate, far more costly to the attack than to the German defence. It was not even a case of exchanging a life for a life.  Two, and even three, British or French lives were repeatedly paid for the killing of one German........Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre.  The greater the general, the more he contributes in manoeuvre, the less he demands in slaughter.  The theory which has exalted the " bataille d'usure" or " battle of wearing down" into a foremost position, is contradicted by history and would be repulsed by the greatest captains of the past.

 

As to that period 1915, 16 and 17, I reckon that this caricature demands a lot of modification, especially regrading the performance of the French from mid 1916.  For the British, it holds true to a greater extent, although there was a degree of improvement.

 

Phil

 

 

 

 

[phil andrade]

25 minutes ago, Robert Dunlop said:

I forgot to mention that the massive pause in French operations after Nivelle's offensive was extremely important in enabling French industry to ramp up still further. This facilitated the supply of weapons, equipment and munitions to the American army during its build-up to becoming operational. The industrial requirements were huge, despite the outputs of American industry as well, and the response of French industry to the challenges has been undervalued in the literature. This aspect of the attritional campaign was in no small part due to the Anglo-British Third Ypres campaign drawing the German Schwerpunkt towards Flanders. The campaign, in turn, was possible because British industrial production had reached the point where such a campaign could be sustained, freeing up French industrial capabilities as well as creating the operational pause.

 

Robert

 

 

Thanks, Robert, you wrote this as I was getting my post together, and pitched it first.

 

Your comments perfectly exemplify that allusion I made to " interdependency at play".

 

I wish that I had your facility to make the point so skilfully and authoritatively !

 

Phil 

[Robert Dunlop]

The following image shows the transfer of German divisions on the Western Front in October 1917. Fourth Army (first column in both tables) was responsible for defending against Third Ypres. In the right-hand table, the segment labelled 'L' refers to the actions leading up to and including the Battle of La Malmaison. The two tables illustrate the huge draw of Flanders on German manpower, compared to the Chemin des Dames. What the table does not indicate is the divisions drawn into the Chemin des Dames sector once the battle opened there were suffering from exhaustion before they arrived:

 

 

Robert

[Robert Dunlop]

The following is a coloured representation of the German frontline on the Chemin des Dames before the battle (purple solid line), the gains made on day one (dotted red line), the final line that the Germans retreated to on 25 October (dashed red line), and the divisional sector of the German 13th Infantry Division (pink). The drawings are taken from the German map of the Battle of La Malmaison. The scale has been adjusted to the same ground scale as the underlying German map of Third Ypres.

 

 

Robert

[phil andrade]

Ingenious use of graphics, Robert, thanks !

 

Interesting to see that the ground yielded by the Germans in a couple of days in the Chemin des Dames fight equated to what they lost in 105 days at Third Ypres.

 

They obviously contested the British in Flanders with a stubborn fury.

 

The two graphics speak volumes about the preponderance of German effort devoted to containing the BEF at Third Ypres.  

 

What are we to make of the congratulatory announcement of Crown Prince Rupprecht, who, having stressed the severity of the fighting in the Battle of Flanders, entailing the deployment of eighty six divisons  ( twenty two of them twice)  and describing  it as the most violent of all battles fought to date, then announced that our losses were far fewer than for any previous defensive battle   ?

 

Phil

[Robert Dunlop]

There are other quotes from Rupprecht that need to be juxtaposed; the first from his diary during the actual fighting:

 

'Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria: Diary Entries

11 October 1917

"Our forces along the main battle front in Flanders are still thoroughly mixed up and confusion reigns in the various formations. It is really worrying that the fighting ability of our troops is reducing all the time and that all the means we have employed to attempt to counter the oppressive superiority of the enemy artillery have failed to have any effect. Because we are involved in a battle for time, there remains nothing for it, but repeatedly to give ground in order to force our opponents to waste time as they move artillery forward"' Source: Sheldon. op. cit. pp228-9.

 

This speaks to the wider attritional impact, over-and-above the numbers.

 

Robert

[Robert Dunlop]

Here are some quotes from Rudolf Binding, a former German cavalry officer who spent much of his time in Flanders:

'West Flanders, November 14, 1917

It is appalling up at the Front. I have just come back from a visit to our best regiment, which is holding a position I know well to the north of Passchendaele and has had heavy losses in the very first days. It is right in the mud, without any protection, without a single decent dug-out, for in this rapid withdrawal there is no time to dig. How many of those fellows who a fortnight ago were cheerfully celebrating the glorious record of their regiment will never laugh again; even the others who can laugh again do not laugh for long. "My fellows are in tears," reports one battalion-commander in despair, whose whole battalion lay covered by a regular blanket of English shells. Many of the men can hardly speak. You see wild eyes gazing out of faces which are no longer human. They have a craving after brandy which can hardly be satisfied, and which shows how badly they yearn to lose the faculty for feeling. Men drink it who have never touched it before as though by instinct. Scores of men were streaming to the rear, one by one but without stopping, all in need of rest; not malingerers.

One sees much magnificent conduct calmly and coolly shown in the middle of much which is less admirable and weaker. That type of man makes allowances for the others by increasing his own efforts. A battalion-commander, Freiherr von G, stuck to his battalion for two days with a splinter of shell in his lung. He remained simply as an example. One cannot say that the moral is low or weak. The regiments simply show a sort of staggering and faltering, as people do who have made unheardof efforts.'

 

Even more telling is this vignette about von Lossberg, who was the mastermind behind the German defensive tactics and a personal friend of Binding:

'Even men like General von Lossberg, who is made of iron if ever a man was, show how rapidly exhaustion comes. He looks grey and old, and yet only last month I saw him full of vigour.' 

 

It is very interesting to note that von Lossberg is almost completely silent on this particular phase of the war in this autobiography.

 

Robert

[Robert Dunlop]

On 20/06/2021 at 06:49, Robert Dunlop said:

Jack Sheldon's work, unpublished but noted in a previous thread on this Forum...

Here is one of Jack's quotes on this subject:

 

 

Robert

[Robert Dunlop]

And another overview from Jack, based on German sources:

 

Robert

[PhilB]

2 hours ago, Robert Dunlop said:

 Because we are involved in a battle for time, there remains nothing for it, but repeatedly to give ground in order to force our opponents to waste time as they move artillery forward"' Source: Sheldon. op. cit. pp228-9.

 

This speaks to the wider attritional impact, over-and-above the numbers.

 

Robert

Why did time attritionaly favour the Germans rather than the Allies at this time?

[Robert Dunlop]

Time for the Russian front to be destroyed, redeployment of Eastern Front forces back to the Western Front, and resuming the offensive initiative on the Western Front.

 

Robert

[PhilB]

Isn’t that possibility countered by the actuality that US troops were already building up in France?

[Robert Dunlop]

The US build-up was ongoing and no American forces had entered into combat operations. The threat of the American forces was a major factor driving the timing of Ludendorff's Spring offensives in early 1918, balanced by the need to wrap up the Eastern Front (which took longer than expected) and to re-train the divisions from the Eastern Front.

 

Robert

[phil andrade]

Whose argument is the more convincing when it comes to the reckoning of the war of attrition on the Western Front, 1914-18 - or, I ought to stipulate, 1915-17 - Churchill's or Terraine’s ?

 

In respect of Third Ypres, the interpretations diverge so profoundly that it’s bewildering trying to find some commonality .

 

The claims made by the British Official Historian in regard to the German casualties in this fighting were so exaggerated that even Terraine was embarrassed by them.

 

Even the German accounts are somewhat at odds with each other :  Rupprecht of Bavaria praised the steadfastness of his soldiers and told them :

 

” It was only because our Flanders front withstood every attack that was launched at it, that we were able to conduct massive blows against the Russians in the east and the Italians in the south.”

 

Hindenburg, however, gave a more circumspect rendition :

 

” From the point of view, not of scale, but of the obstinacy which the English displayed and the difficulties of the ground for the defenders, the battles which now began in Flanders put all our battles on the Somme in 1916 completely in the shade......It is obvious that these actions kept us in great and continual anxiety.  In fact, I may say that with such a cloud hanging over our heads we were seldom able to rejoice wholeheartedly over our victories in Russia and Italy. “

 

There’s another statement by Hindenburg that merits citation in view of what we’ve been discussing :

 

” As was to be expected , the French did not stand idly by and watch the attacks of their English Ally in the summer and autumn. In the second half of August they attacked us at Verdun and on October 22 north-east of Soissons.  In both cases they captured a considerable portion of the trench systems of the armies at those points and caused them important losses.  But, speaking generally, the French High Command confined themselves to local attacks in the second half of the year. “

 

 

Phil

Edited 22 June , 2021 by phil andrade