Valor Friday

This week’s article will be a bit different, as I’m working on my next book. I’ve talked recently about several heroes of the World Wars, which is going to be the focus of the next Profiles of Valor. Sorry for the shameless plug. *grin*

The World Wars were, as their names would imply, conflicts of a global scale. The world was forever altered after both wars. The First World War (1914-1918) would see the fall of monarchal rule across most of Europe. During and after both wars, the maps of entire continents were completely redrawn. It’s possible for someone to have been born, raised, and lived in a European city at the start of the 20th Century and, having never left their town, been a citizen of four or more countries.

World War I, in terms of scale, was the smaller of the two conflicts. It was “The War to End All Wars” and “The Great War” in the postbellum years. It was a conflict that cost the lives of an estimated 8-10 million military personnel and 6-13 million civilians. Estimates of total military casualties (killed or wounded in action and those missing) are in the area of 30 million. The war was largely fought in Europe and the Middle East, but the battles extended to Africa, the Pacific, China, and Indian Ocean.

World War I was the last “old” war in which things like large formations of horse cavalry could be found on the battlefield. It was also the first “modern” war in which things like aircraft, tanks, and chemical weapons were utilized. It can thus be at times an anachronistic war.

As I said, most of the fighting was to be found in Europe. The opening months of the war in 1914 saw the belligerents, who had all to varying degrees been posturing for the coming storm, grind to a stalemate. As both sides dug into their lines, the infamous trench warfare that would come to define the war took shape. For years, tens of thousands of mens’ lives would be lost or forever altered in the cold, wet, muddy, insect, rodent, and disease filled trenches. Entire battles involving army formations of a size never before seen in history would square off and fight over precious little territory. The modern musical poets of Sabaton aptly call trench warfare a “synchronized sacrifice.”

The men making those sacrifices were parts of the largest (to that date) military mobilization in human history. On the Central Powers side, German Empire enlisted more than 13 million men, Austria-Hungary Empire almost 8 million, the Ottoman Empire just shy of 3 million, and Bulgaria fielded 1.2 million. They faced off against the Allies (Entente), with Russia leading with 12 million men, France 8.4 million, the UK more than 6 million (with another 2.5 million from their colonies and dominions), and Japan and Serbia contributing another 1.5 million combined.

As the war progressed, more parties joined, but on the side of the Entente. Italy, Portugal, and Romania joined in 1915-1916. Their militaries numbered 5.6 million, 100,000, and 750,000 respectively. In 1917 they were joined by the remaining members of the alliance, mostly the United States and other Latin, Central, and South American countries. The US contributed an additional 4.3 million men to the war, in what would be the final blow to the central powers. Already weary from years of hard fighting, the infusion of millions of fresh, eager Americans to the fighting ended the war just a year and a half after the US entered it.

If you total these numbers, more than 40 million men from countries on all six inhabited continents served during the Great War. It’s easy to see how it got its name from that alone.

When it comes to counting casualties, the human cost of the war is hard to undersell. On the Central Powers side, Germany suffered more than 7 million dead, wounded, or missing. That’s a full 66% of their total mobilized forces. Austria-Hungary, which ceased to exist altogether after the war, had 6.7 million casualties, a staggering 86% of their forces. In comparison the 1-in-3 chances you had as a combatant for the Ottoman Empire seem reasonable and the 21% casualty rate of the Bulgarians looks positively miraculous.

On the Allied side, things were a touch better, probably because of their far superior numbers. France had the highest casualty rate at 67%, Serbia at 58%, Russia 56%, Australia, Romania, and New Zealand about 50%, the British at 40%, Canada 34%, Belgium 31%, Italy 29%, and the United States a comparatively miniscule 5.9%.

Overall, the casualty rate on the side of the Central Powers was 66% and for the Entente it was almost 50%. With the cost in blood so high, you can now see how it was inconceivable that another war could be fought. It was such a colossal, brutal war that it was to be “The War to End All Wars.”

It’s a trope in the military movies for a briefing before a dangerous mission for the commanding officer to say, “Look to your left and look to your right. One of those men won’t make it back.” In the case of many of those fighting during World War I that would have been overly optimistic. Imagine the odds for an Austro-Hungarian Army soldier where only 1-in-10 men would come out of the war unscathed.

The battles themselves were incomprehensibly large. The Battle of the Somme, from 1 July 1916 to November of that year, was ultimately inconclusive. The British and French committed 2.5 million men to the offensive. They squared off against 1 million German troops. Hundreds of thousands of men would lay dead by the end, with tens of thousands captured or wounded.

The Hundred Days Offensive, which would end the war in 1918, saw more than 2 million casualties combined on both sides. It was one of five battles in the war that had casualties exceed 1 million men.

Little known in the west, the siege of the fortress town of Przemy?l (then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in the southeast corner of Poland) in late 1914 to early 1915 was one of the costliest sieges in human history. The Austro-Hungarian battle line consisted of 138,00 troops. The Russians numbered 300,000.

The Austrian-Hungarians held out for 133 days. More than 20,000 of them died, with the remaining 117,000 captured. The Russians suffered 115,000 casualties, with 40,000 of those in just the opening days of the siege.

Among the anachronisms of the war, the relatively new Dreadnought type of battleship (with HMS Dreadnought setting a new standard by which all new warships would be judged in 1905) first saw action. The last ships of the steam age, even some with sails, would last see active service in this war. Along with a pre-war and in-war rush to build warships such as dreadnought-type battleships, new forms of sea warfare were coming into their own. The nascent submarine services would be greatly expanded, to great effect for the Germans. The British Royal Navy were the first to utilize an aircraft carrier in combat.

The above chart shows the numbers of ships in service with the various nations at the start of the war in 1914. I can’t find detailed lists of the numbers of ships built during the war, but I know that the Royal Navy ended the war with 147 submarines, 443 frigates and destroyers, 143 cruisers, 70 battleships (includes large amphibious craft). The Royal Navy roughly doubled in size.

Similarly, the American fleet at the end of the war stood at 16 modern, post-Dreadnought battleships (to join the 23 pre-Dreadnought battleships), 93 destroyers, and 79 submarines. You can see the US Navy also about doubled in size, though they didn’t start building up their fleet in earnest until about 1916.

When it comes to naval losses, the numbers are equally startling. In April of 1917, the month the US joined the war, 430 merchant ships totalling about a million tons in displacement were sunk. In a single month!

Germany lost 187 U-boats during the war, most of them to the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy lost a total of 253 boats and ships. This included three aircraft carriers, three battlecruisers, 13 battleships, 13 cruisers, 12 light cruisers, 52 submarines, and 65 destroyers.

To break the stalemate that was the static line of the Western Front, where both sides had dug in to elaborate trench emplacements with carefully dialed in artillery to constantly bombard each other’s lines, new techniques and technology would be needed.

From 1916, Germany would use a new type of light infantry, the Storm Troopers or Shock Troopers as they were later known. The elite formation was drawn of volunteers under the age of 25, these men would be equipped with small arms and grenades. They would hit weakened parts of the Allied lines in a fast, violent force of action. The same basic idea would be used by Germany in the Second World War, but on a larger scale, during their Blitzkrieg (lightning war). Modern units such as the US Army Rangers are similarly employed on the battlefield.

Stormtroopers would develop and perfect the idea of a rolling artillery barrage. In a rolling barrage, carefully timed and aimed cannon fire would be directed at the enemy, behind which, in very close proximity, would be your infantry. The goal is to kill or incapacitate your enemy with the barrage and then your troopers could just mop up the stragglers. In the time before portable radios, this required considerable planning, training, and coordination to properly pull off.

Meanwhile, British engineers figured if you could drive over the trenches and be protected by armor as you traversed no-man’s-land, you’d be able to effectively reach the enemy trenches. Thus was born the tank. The UK, who pioneered the concept and deployment of armored vehicles, produced almost 2,400 tanks during the war. France built almost 4,500 of them. Though big, heavy, slow, prone to breakdowns, and with insufficient armor to protect a crew from anything more than small arms fire, they proved their worth. Every war since then has utilized armored vehicles.

For the first time during World War I, warfare would see application of the relatively new technology of heavier than air travel. Aviation would see the largest and most rapid advance during the war. Military aircraft, the few that existed, at the start of the war were utilized only for reconnaissance. In this role they served alongside, and would eventually replace, observation balloons. Soon though, pilots would start dropping grenades and then larger bombs, by hand, on enemy positions.

About the same time as the first bombing missions were undertaken, the Germans pioneered air-to-air combat. Firing small arms from the cockpits of their bi-planes at other aircraft, soon specially designated fighter aircraft were developed to shoot down enemy planes. By war’s end, dozens of men on both sides of the war had earned “Ace” status by having shot down at least five enemy aircraft in combat.

This rapid evolution led to a lot of experimentation. While wood framed, single engined bi-planes covered with doped fabric were the norm for the time, monoplanes (and even tri-planes like the Red Baron’s Fokker Dr.1 Dreidecker), metal construction, and multi-engined aircraft were attempted. It also meant that aircraft would arrive at the front and be considered obsolete in a matter of weeks. More than 50 different aircraft designs were produced in five distinct phases throughout the war. By the end of the war, dedicated designs for fighting, bombing, reconnaissance, and transport had been created.

At the start of the war, Germany had the largest contingent of frontline aircraft at 232. By the end of the war, they had almost 2,400 active frontline airframes. France started with just 138 and ended up with 4,500. The French Air Force expanded 3,260% during the war, the largest of any combatant nation.

More than 200,000 individual aircraft were built during the conflict. The French led the belligerents with nearly 68,000 aircraft produced. Britain built 58,000 and Germany more than 48,000.

Flying in those early days was dangerous stuff. Pilots were equally likely to die due to a crash caused by mechanical failure, running out of gas, or a navigation error than they were to enemy action. While 200,000 aircraft were built, more than 116,000 were lost during the war (to enemy fire, crash, or damaged beyond repair). France alone lost more than 52,000 airplanes.

The last of the great horrors of World War I were chemical weapons. Illegal by international convention, they were used to varying degrees by both sides. The brutality of chemical weapons use during the war is probably the worst long-term lesson of the conflict in our cultural memory. The scale of the devastation left an indelible mark which has prevented any country from utilizing them again in war at any large scale. The specter of their use though still lingers, as anyone who has spent time in modern military chemical protective gear can attest.

The first chemical weapons used were riot control irritants like tear gas. From there, toxic industrial chemicals like chlorine were utilized. Then, specialized chemical weapons like the mustard gasses, were developed and deployed by Germany.

In all three categories, the idea was to deny the enemy a parcel of land. All three types are designed more to incapacitate than kill, a desirable trait since killing one enemy takes one man out of the fight while wounding one takes out two or three (the wounded man plus his comrades who now have to care for him).

Chemical weapons held the promise of killing your enemy without destroying the infrastructure. Compare that to artillery barrages or aerial bombardment that, while killing your opponent, also destroys their defensive positions. Ideally, you want to kill the enemy and then advance your men into the enemy’s former revetments, turning them on the enemy and making your position all the more strong.

While this is a good theory, in practice, it didn’t work as well. Especially once the various nations realized there were protective means available. Initially just water (or urine) soaked rags would protect one’s breathing, but gas masks soon protected frontline troops en masse.

The casualty numbers for chemical weapons during WWI were high. A full 1.3 million men were harmed by them, with 90,000 dying as a result. The longterm damage caused wound affect tens of thousands of men for decades after the war.

Unfortunately, the War to End All Wars was not to be the end. The scale and human toll of the war would be eclipsed dramatically just two decades later. Join me next week as I take a detailed look at the scope of World War II.

Category: Historical, Valor, We Remember