The Greater War

Other Combatants and Other Fronts, 1914-1918

Jonathan Kraus, Jonathan Kraus

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137360663
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The Greater War is an international history of the First World War. Comprising of thirteen chapters this collection of essays covers new aspects of the French, German, Italian and American efforts in the First World War, as well as aspects of Britain's colonial campaigns.

1

The Battle of the Ardennes, August 1914: France’s Lost Opportunity

Simon House

On 3 August 1914 France and Germany declared war on each other. It was an event for which both nations’ armies had prepared for decades, France since her catastrophic defeat in 1870–1871, Germany on a continuous basis since the time of Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Clausewitz. Preparation consisted of building, training and equipping ever-larger conscript armies, and of planning. Germany had her Schlieffen Plan, France had Plan XVII. History has dealt more kindly with Schlieffen and his successors than it has with Joffre, the owner and executor of the latest and last French plan.

For years Schlieffen’s plan was regarded as a study of genius, a war-winning creation in the style of the elder Moltke, marred only by the manner in which the younger Moltke chose to execute it. It is only recently that revisionist research has questioned the ‘given’ of the past, that if Moltke had strengthened his right wing as Schlieffen had wanted, even at the expense of the left, then France would once again have fallen. Now we question it all: was there a Schlieffen Plan at all? Written as a Denkschrift in 1905, did it have any relevance to the military situation pertaining in August 1914? Did Germany ever have, or plan to have, sufficient army corps to execute the Schlieffen concept? Could even the most modern and best-trained army in the world sustain the supply lines and rudimentary communications needed to command and control the vast force – nearly three-quarters of a million men – marching on a 400-kilometre loop across Belgium?¹ Despite revisionist argument and analysis, the Schlieffen Plan lives on in popular history: France saved by a whisker at the ‘Miracle of the Marne’, due to human error in execution.²

Plan XVII has been criticised from the outset. In 1930 Liddell Hart called it ‘a negation of historical experience, indeed, of common sense’, ‘a plan by which a frontal offensive was to be launched with bare equality of force against an enemy who would have the support of his fortified frontier zone’. And he accused General Joseph Joffre, commander-in-chief of the French army, of being no more than ‘a lever’ for the designs of a group of young staff officers peddling a disastrous new doctrine of offensive à outrance, or ‘all-out attack’.³ According to Cyril Falls, Chichele Professor of Military History at Oxford University from 1946 to 1953, the plan was based on ‘a disastrous doctrine’, ‘a sort of fanaticism, a veritable mystique of the offensive’ that caused the unnecessary slaughter of tens of thousands of young innocent French conscript soldiers.⁴ In recent years, fresh research has thrown new light on the French army’s planning and performance during the opening phase of the war, and a new, more balanced appreciation of Joffre and of Plan XVII is beginning to emerge.⁵ But, just as it is hard to shift the popular image of the Schlieffen Plan, no matter how detailed and compelling the new evidence, so, too, there is a long way to go before Joffre will be rehabilitated. This chapter, in examining Joffre’s little-known offensive in the Ardennes on 22 August 1914, seeks to add weight to a new understanding of Plan XVII, and to reveal details of a significant lost opportunity for Joffre’s armies to inflict a first defeat on Imperial German forces.

Plan XVII was, in fact, no more than a plan for the mobilisation and initial concentration and deployment of the French army.⁶ Unlike the so-called ‘Schlieffen Plan’, which embraced a military strategy and set of initial operational moves designed to force a battle of annihilation and German victory, Joffre’s Plan XVII stopped once the armies were in place and was then superseded by a series of General and Specific Instructions issued by the commander-in-chief’s office (GQG) to the army commanders for the conduct of operations in the field.⁷ Far from demonstrating stubbornly inflexible adherence to a single stupid frontal attack on the German frontier defences, this was a most flexible system of command and control, which worked so effectively that it enabled Joffre to plan and execute successive attacks, from right to left along the whole north-eastern front (i.e., what we today call the ‘Western Front’) in France and Belgium, culminating in the successful counter-attack on the Marne in September 1914.

Most of Joffre’s attacks in August 1914 ended in defeat, but that was more a matter of tactics, and of the comparative quality of pre-war preparation, than of grand strategy. And one of those attacks – the Ardennes offensive of 22 August 1914 – achieved, as we shall see, the much sought-after goal of strategic surprise, delivering superior forces at the decisive point without discovery by the enemy. So deep-rooted and widespread is the continuing popular misconception about Plan XVII and its execution that it is difficult to know where not to start but to stop detailed analysis in a short chapter such as this. It is necessary to limit ourselves strictly to the narrow constraints of the Battle of the Ardennes, and to the lost opportunity contained therein.

The Battle of the Ardennes commenced early on the morning of 22 August 1914, when two French armies advanced due north from their start lines on the rivers Chiers and Semois into Luxembourg and the Belgian Ardennes. It was conceived by Joffre as a counter-attack against the major German thrust in the north from Aachen and Liège into Belgium; in essence, it was planned to sweep aside the weak forces covering the Ardennes forests and swing round the then exposed German right flank, trapping the ‘northern group of German armies’ (as it was known to French intelligence) between the Meuse and Ourthe rivers, where it would, of course, be annihilated.⁸

The Ardennes counter-offensive was the last of the first phase of attacks envisaged by Joffre in his General Instruction No. 1, issued on 8 August 1914.⁹ It had been preceded by a limited attaque brusquée by a strengthened army corps of the French permanent frontier protection force into Alsace on 7 August, and then by a major attack into Lorraine by two French armies – Dubail’s First and Caslelnau’s Second – starting on 16 August.¹⁰ The Lorraine attack was Joffre’s one outright offensive, unconstrained by what the Germans were doing and intended to seize the strategic initiative. It failed, and, in two bloody encounters at Morehange and Sarrebourg on 20 August, the French were forced to withdraw. It is worth noting in passing that Joffre had wished to open his attacks in Belgium (as, indeed, the Germans were doing), but the politicians forbade him to breach Belgian neutrality; therefore, since French grand strategy was predicated upon bringing the Russians into action as quickly as possible, and to do so Joffre had promised to launch his own attack at the earliest opportunity, he had no choice but to attack across the common frontier in Alsace and Lorraine.¹¹

Emphasis has been placed in this chapter on Joffre’s flexible approach to planning the opening encounters of the war. Nothing exemplifies this better than the troop movements, redispositions, that he ordered during the four days of 18–21 August. Even though the Lorraine attack was presented and perceived as the major French offensive that was to be executed ‘with all forces assembled’ and with all the cran, élan and spirit of offensive à outrance that the French troops and local commanders could muster, Joffre was already weakening the attack force before the battles of 20 August in order to strengthen his left wing. On 18 August two army corps (XVIII and IX) were ordered to leave Lorraine and move to the Ardennes front, reducing Dubail’s and Castelnau’s attacking force by fully 20 per cent.¹² It is the strongest possible indication to the modern historian that Joffre was not totally fixated on Alsace-Lorraine, as is all too often suggested.

Equally significant in this respect is the fact that Joffre altered the initial deployment of de Langle de Cary’s Fourth Army from that set out in Plan XVII, and in a way that suggests a particular line of thinking. The French Fourth Army was, according to Plan XVII, the reserve army, concentrating and deploying behind the other four armies lining up along the frontier. Its initial dispositions saw its four army corps located between Reims and Verdun, facing north-east and perfectly positioned to support the front line armies either south-east or north-east of Verdun. But on 2 August, even as the first troop trains were in transit, Joffre ordered a change of orientation, so that Fourth Army would position itself facing north, between Fifth Army on the left and Third Army in the centre.¹³ This order suggests that from the very beginning Joffre was thinking of action on his left as well as on the right, and that he was thinking of giving Fourth Army a major role. So when, on 18 August, Joffre moved troops from his supposed main offensive to strengthen de Langle’s Fourth Army, it suggests that Joffre’s flexible planning process was in full flow, and the Ardennes front was gaining in importance.

The burgeoning concept of a counter-attack through the Ardennes was driven by French intelligence about German intentions and actions. Given that Joffre and his staff have been castigated by generations of historians for intelligence failures, and given the assertion already made in this paper that Joffre achieved strategic surprise when he attacked in the Ardennes, a review and reappraisal of France’s intelligence situation is clearly required.

The first source of intelligence about Germany’s initial deployment came from information gathered in and around the railheads. In a key intelligence assessment issued on 9 August 1914, 21 of Germany’s 26 active army corps were correctly identified by name and number at their detraining points.¹⁴ Unfortunately for Joffre’s long-term plans, one that escaped identification (VI Corps) had sent its advance guard to the Eastern Front as part of the mobilisation, and was tagged there by French agents, while its subsequent transfer to the west went unnoticed. It went on to spring a surprise of its own when it appeared, still undetected, on the battlefield in the Ardennes on 22 August. As an overall piece of intelligence gathering, however, the French Intelligence Bureau’s first report was good work, based as it was on Plan XVII’s pre-war Plan de Renseignements and implemented by members of the French Intelligence Bureau’s Service spécial.¹⁵ Joffre’s agents at the railheads had identified a northern group of about five or six army corps with two or three cavalry divisions disembarking at Aachen: about 20 per cent of the regular, active strength of the German army. Two other groups were gathering in the centre, either side of the fortress of Metz, each comprising about four army corps and two or three cavalry divisions; together these two groups constituted about 30 per cent of the active army. The two groups around Metz facing Verdun seemed at that stage to constitute the stronger force and greater threat. The northern group would have a long way to travel through Belgium before reaching the French frontier; nor was it yet clear on which side of the Meuse the Germans would deploy their greatest strength; therefore, Joffre could feel confident in launching his own pre-emptive strike across the common border in the south in his attempt to gain the initiative. But it is clear that, from this early date of 9 August, Joffre was watching developments in the north, and waiting for events there to clarify.

Joffre sent his cavalry corps to take up the intelligence gathering where the secret Service spécial’s reach ran out.¹⁶ General Sordet took his three cavalry divisions north into the Ardennes on 6 August in order to clarify the situation regarding the northern group of German armies: were they increasing in strength? Would they march south, and, if so, when and on which bank of the River Meuse? But Sordet’s mission was a complete failure, for three reasons. First, an early lesson about modern warfare was learned: lightly armed cavalrymen could no longer penetrate a defensive screen whose fire power was boosted by modern rifles, horse artillery and mobile (wagon-borne) machine gun companies, especially in the large formations of horsemen used by the French; when Sordet came up to the security screen around the northern group of armies near Liège and Namur, his horsemen could not penetrate it and could gather no useful information as to size or intent.¹⁷ Second, in the vast area of the central Ardennes there was nothing to find: until Liège fell and the way was clear to advance in force across the Meuse, the central groups of German armies remained safely hidden behind the German/Luxembourg border, several days’ march from where Sordet was searching. It was not until 18 August that the general order was given by Moltke to commence the great offensive, and by then Sordet and his troops would be long gone. Third, French cavalrymen did not look after their horses very well, and, after ten days of long and hard riding that exhausted their mounts, the cavalry corps was withdrawn. So Joffre’s initial picture of the situation in the north remained blurred and incomplete, and he did not feel ready to make firm plans.

One of the most enduring criticisms of French intelligence during this period, and one of the most telling, is the failure to realise that the Germans would use their reserve divisions in the front line, thereby effectively doubling the size, if diluting the quality, of the forces that Joffre would face. The report of 9 August from the railheads ignored reserve units, simply because they were still all gathering in their barracks deep in Germany. Only when the first-line (active) divisions left to march to their entraining points did the next tranche of older reservists come flooding in to the empty barracks to form the reserve divisions. Later French reports would contain details of reserve unit movement, and considerable data about their whereabouts was gradually collected; but that is where errors in analysis and interpretation mistakenly drew incorrect conclusions from accurate information. There was a welldocumented rift between Joffre’s intelligence staff and his operations staff, the latter believing themselves superior in judgement.¹⁸ Those operational staff officers could not believe that, as a matter of principle, the Germans would do anything that they themselves would not do. French reserve divisions were poorly trained and unfit to enter the line of battle; so, by definition, German reserve divisions had to be the same. French reserve divisions travelled in a second line behind the first to guard lines of communication, rivers, bridges; so, by definition, that was what the German reserve divisions would do. The French knew where the German reserve divisions were – drawn up in a second line behind the first – but the operations staff simply discounted their value when calculating the odds during planning.

The upshot of all the French intelligence gathering, analysis and interpretation, of all Joffre’s deliberation and calculation, was that by 20 August the generalissimo was convinced that a surprise thrust through the Ardennes northwards onto the open right flank of the northern group of German armies had the po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgement
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. The Battle of the Ardennes, August 1914: France’s Lost Opportunity
• 2. ‘Only Inaction Is Disgraceful’: French Operations Under Joffre, 1914–1916
• 3. The Influence of Industry on the Use and Development of Artillery
• 4. Missed Opportunity? The French Tanks in the Nivelle Offensive
• 5. Applying Colonial Lessons to European War: The British Expeditionary Force 1902–1914
• 6. Jan Smuts, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and the Great War in German East Africa
• 7. The Egyptian Expeditionary Force and the Battles for Jerusalem: Command and Tactics in the Judaean Hills, November–December 1917
• 8. A Picture of German Unity? Federal Contingents in the German Army, 1916–1917
• 9. Out of the Trenches: Hitler, Wagner and German National Regeneration After the Great War 1914–1918
• 10. Training, Morale and Battlefield Performance in the Italian Army, 1914–1917
• 11. Seasoning the US 2nd Infantry Division
• 12. From the Essex to the Dresden: British Grand Strategy in the South Pacific, 1814–1915
• 13. Attrition: How the War Was Fought and Won
• Select Bibliography
• Index