The Great World War 1914–1945: 1. Lightning Strikes Twice

By the time I went to university, in 1967, there was a clear public consensus. The First World War was avoidable; the Second was not. The First World War was not really about anything, or not about anything important; the Second World War was about national survival at home and the defeat of a vile tyranny abroad. The First World War was hopelessly mismanaged by incompetent generals whose aristocratic, rural backgrounds ill fitted them to come to terms with industrialised war; the Second World War was well run by generals who understood technology, allowing them to fight a war of manoeuvre that avoided costly battles of attrition. The outcome of the First World War was futile, merely creating circumstances in which political extremism would fester, making another war inevitable; the outcome of the Second World War, sanctified by discovery of the Nazi death camps, was not only a military but also a moral triumph.

The differences embraced not only the origins, purposes, conduct and outcomes of the wars but also the ways in which they were experienced by ordinary soldiers. Trench warfare on the Western Front in the First World War has come to be regarded as the epitome of human suffering and degradation, a sort of hell on earth. Two of the books on the First World War recommended as further reading at the foot of this chapter contain the word ‘hell’ in their titles. This is rarely the case with books on the Second World War. The implication is that the business of soldiering in the Second World War was easier. Only after many conversations with veterans of both wars did I discover the extent to which they themselves often felt trapped by these stereotypes. People only wanted to learn from First World War veterans how ‘terrible’ it was, and from Second World War veterans how ‘grand’.

How different was the experience of ordinary British soldiers at ‘the sharp end’ in the two World Wars? Some parameters need to be set. The First World War is unique in British history. It is the only war in which the British Army was engaged with the main forces of the main enemy virtually from the first day of the war until the last. The British Army mobilised on 5 August 1914. The first soldier to be killed, Private John Parr (4th Battalion Middlesex Regiment), died on 21 August. Two days later the British Expeditionary Force blundered into the German Army at the battle of Mons. The two armies remained in contact for the rest of the war. This is very different from the Second World War. Arguably, the British Army only faced the main forces of the main enemy once – and briefly – in 1940. British civilian casualties were higher than military ones until after the invasion of Europe on 6 June 1944. The campaigns fought by the British in Eritrea, in the Western Desert, in Crete, even – to some extent – in Italy, were what Gary Sheffield describes later in this book as ‘big small wars’. From a German perspective, they were all essentially sideshows. The real big war was on the Eastern Front and, from 1944, in north-west Europe. The casualties on the Eastern Front, and the savagery of the fighting there, were far more severe than those of the Western Front in the First World War. British casualty rates in north-west Europe in 1944 and 1945 were comparable with those suffered in the infamous ‘attrition’ battles on the Somme and at Third Ypres that haunt the British national memory. They appear to have been even higher for officers.17

There is a persistent, and simplistic, popular view that trench warfare caused high casualties and that the absence of trench warfare in the Second World War, the result of superior technology, accounts for lower (British) casualties. This view needs to be ‘unpacked’.

First, trench warfare developed in order to reduce casualties. The early battles of the First World War were closer to those of Napoleonic times than they were to the battles of 1916 onwards. Vast numbers of men, sometimes gaudily dressed (especially in the French Army), deployed into the open, rolling fields of northern France, where they met the withering fire of smokeless, breech-loading rifles, machine-guns and quick-firing rifled cannon (mostly firing shrapnel, deadly against troops in the open). Casualties were enormous. The decision to ‘dig in’, from which trench warfare evolved, was made through necessity by soldiers themselves. If they had not done this, it is difficult to see how the war could have been sustained for very long. The trench system, which began to be apparent from as early as September 1914, was routinised with remarkable speed. It was recognised that troops should spend only a limited amount of time there and that only a limited number should be located in the very front line. Regular systems of relief and rotation were organised, both into and out of and within the trench system. Although trench conditions were often extremely unpleasant, troops of all sides did not submit to them passively. They did their best to make themselves comfortable. Part of the experience of war, in both World Wars (perhaps in all wars), is learning how to achieve reasonable comfort in adversity. Official and semi-official campaigns were launched at home to provide ‘comforts’ for the troops. Vast masses of material were brought in to make the trenches more habitable. A single square mile of trenches contained 900 miles of barbed wire, 6 million sandbags, 1 million cubic feet of timber and 360,000 square feet of corrugated iron.18 The logistical infrastructure to support this was huge and increasingly sophisticated.19 Defending the trench system was never cheap. The experience of the 46th (North Midland) Division, the first Territorial division to be deployed to France (in March 1915), is instructive. 46th Division was involved in only three major attacks during the war, at the Hohenzollern Redoubt (13 October 1915), at Gommecourt (1 July 1916) and at Bellenglise (29 September 1918); 13 October 1915 was its worst day in the war. Casualties suffered on those three days account for a significant proportion of the unit total, but by far the majority of its casualties were incurred in the routine of trench-holding, from snipers, shelling, mortars and harassing machine-gun fire. The British Army during the Second World War was rarely subjected to this constant, expensive, piecemeal attrition.

Second, open, mobile or semi-mobile war is not less expensive than trench warfare. Fighting on the Eastern Front in the First World War was predominantly semi-mobile. The distances were greater than on the Western Front and the densities of men and equipment, especially artillery, were less. Casualties, however, were higher than on the Western Front. The British Expeditionary Force’s worst calendar month for casualties during the Great War was, unsurprisingly, July 1916. The second worst was April 1917 (Arras). The third worst was October 1917. The fighting in all these months could be characterised as ‘trench warfare’. But the fifth, sixth and seventh worst months were April, August and October 1918, all periods of semi-mobile war, the last two during a period when it is generally recognised that the BEF was well led, well resourced and operationally proficient. During the ‘Advance to Victory’ in the final hundred days of the war, from 8 August 1918, the British Tank Corps, the epitome of mobility and technology, lost a third of all its officers and men. Tanks crews were so vulnerable to disfiguring facial wounds, caused by ‘metal splash’, that they took to wearing chain-mail visors, reminiscent of medieval knights.

Nor is it true that the Second World War was won by ‘manoeuvre’ and the First by ‘attrition’. The mobile war of the Blitzkrieg or the Western Desert or the breakout from Normandy was no more typical of the Second World War than slogging matches like Stalingrad, Cassino, Kohima and Imphal, Caen and the Falaise gap, or the Reichswald. The US Navy’s freedom to ‘hop’ from island to island in the Pacific War was achieved only at the cost of epic attritional naval battles, such as Midway and the Coral Sea, fought principally by aircraft at long range. And once ground forces were landed, they faced an equally grim attritional struggle against ferocious resistance from Japanese soldiers, often dug into hillside bunkers and trenches, reminiscent (in a very different landscape) of the fighting at ‘Passchendaele’. This process is usually known as ‘winkling out’, a typical cant phrase for what was a desperate business, contracted at close quarters, often with flame-throwers and grenades.

Third, trench warfare was not peculiar to the First World War. Trenches (saps) had always been part of siege warfare, the dominant mode of war for much of military history. They played a leading part in the final campaigns of the American Civil War in northern Virginia and in the Russo-Japanese war. They were also a constant feature of the Second World War, though they were generally less permanent and are, perhaps, better characterised by the American term ‘foxhole’, a rapidly dug slit trench for one or two men, exhausting to dig, often under enemy fire. Life in them, particularly for a prolonged period, was certainly worse than life in a First World War trench system. The key word here is ‘system’. First World War trenches were organised places, with facilities – primitive maybe – but still real, and comradeship. (Rob Thompson has characterised the Western Front as ‘trench city’.20) US troops in the Belgian Ardennes, in the harsh winter of 1944–45, found themselves occupying foxholes 4 or 5 feet deep, 2 or 3 feet wide and 6 feet long, for 10, 20, even 30 nights in succession. Trench foot, that spectre from the early days of trench warfare, made a reappearance, causing 45,000 men to be evacuated from the front line, more than were put out of action by the enemy.21

Fourth, technology does not save lives in war. The conceit that it does is often used to explain lower British casualties in the Second World War. It was repeated recently during the British television series Great Military Blunders22. The role of technology in war is to take lives, not to save them. First World War soldiers were killed by technology, high explosive, gas, aircraft, tanks, as were those in the Second. Many of the technologies used in the Second World War were deployed in the First. The ‘all-arms, deep battle’, utilising sophisticated artillery techniques, armour and ground attack aircraft, employed during the autumn of 1918 by Allied armies on the Western Front, was the true precursor of modern war. The contribution of ‘boffins’ was also apparent. The development of artillery in the British Army, on which its success in 1918 principally rested, owed much to the contribution of the scientist Lawrence Bragg, the engineer Harold Hemming, the cartographer Evan Jack and the brilliant meteorologist Ernest Gold. The Second World War had more sophisticated signals systems than the First (especially radar and the man-portable radio), its aircraft flew higher and faster and carried more ordnance, its tanks were better armoured, more potent and quicker, but there was comparatively little fundamental change in field artillery, small arms, mortars and grenades. A British soldier of the First World War would have felt quite at home with the Lee Enfield Rifle Mark IV, the Vickers machine-gun and the Mills No 36 grenade. The excellent Bren replaced the Lewis gun, but it would have held no mysteries for a First World War Lewis-gunner. Indeed, the generation of small arms used in the First World War survived in many armies until the 1960s.

Also, in both World Wars the reality of war at the sharp end was ‘low tech’. First World War trench raiders favoured knives, knuckledusters and bludgeons. In the vicious, prolonged, hand-to-hand, street-to-street, building-to-building combat that characterised the battle for Stalingrad, one of the most prized possessions was a sharpened spade. Great claims are sometimes made for the ‘war-winning weapon’. The tank has been portrayed in this way in the First World War; the Soviet T-34 tank and the P-51 Mustang (or its drop tanks) in the Second. There is no doubt that a technological lead, such as Fokker’s development of the interrupter gear in 1915, allowing German aircraft to fire machine-guns through their propeller blades, gave them a decided (if temporary) operational advantage. But, in many cases, complaints about the enemy’s superiority in technology merely disguise tactical inferiority. This was sometimes the case in the Desert War, where skilful German use of tanks in combination with the excellent 88mm field gun, rather then the inherent inferiority of British armour, was the decisive factor. The focus on quality disguises the importance of quantity. The T-34 was an excellent tank, but so was the German Tiger. The Soviets, however, produced far more T-34s than the Germans did Tigers, sufficient for the Red Army to survive a 75 per cent loss rate in armour.

This book is a study of comparative experience. What results it produces depends on what is compared. The true comparison is not between the experience of soldiers on the Western Front and in the Western Desert, but between soldiers at Verdun and Stalingrad, between the fighting of 1916–18 in France and Flanders and the fighting of 1944–45 in north-west Europe. Such comparisons show no dramatic lessening in the grim toll of casualties; indeed, quite the contrary. When like is compared with like, modern war is shown for the truly brutal and expensive business that it invariably is. Lower British casualties in the Second World War overall are explained not by better technology or by better generalship but by the smaller scale and lesser intensity of the ground fighting in which it was involved before D-Day. In the Royal Navy (and the merchant fleet), where seamen were involved from day one of the war with the main forces of the main enemy, casualties were higher than during the First World War.23 High casualties were also central to the experience of Bomber Command, which spearheaded the British war effort against the main forces of the main enemy from 1942 onwards.

From these perspectives, the experience of the two World Wars seems much more similar than is often supposed, a view that is strengthened by consideration of some of the ‘actualities of war’.

The first of these is ‘the army’. The two World Wars were fought principally, though not exclusively, by organised military forces. The men (and women) who served in them, however, were not principally ‘soldiers’. When war crept back on to British university syllabuses in the 1960s, it did so as a partner (a junior partner) in the relationship between war and society. War was considered worthy of academic consideration in proportion to the extent that it had social consequences. These were felt through the need of modern, ‘total’ war, in particular, to mobilise ‘civilian’ workers, including women, and the vulnerability of those civilians to enemy action through ‘strategic bombing’. This ignores the fact that wars were fought, as well as supported on the home front, by civilians. The mass armies of the two World Wars are united by their essentially civilian natures. Sir William Orpen described the British soldier of the First World War as ‘the British workman in disguise’24. Michel Corday depicted the French soldier, in similar terms, as ‘merely a peasant in a steel helmet’25. The First World War had a higher proportion of volunteer soldiers than the Second did. The British Army was recruited wholly by voluntary means until the spring of 1916. The Australian Imperial Force was recruited by voluntary means throughout the war, as was the (British) Indian Army in both World Wars. But this was not the norm. Most soldiers, in most armies, in both World Wars, were conscripts, chosen because of their youth, their physical fitness and the degree to which their skills could be dispensed with by the war economy. In the British and American armies, with their traditional peacetime reliance on small, Regular forces, this meant that only a small number of wartime soldiers had any significant degree of peacetime training, something the conscript armies of Europe and Japan avoided. In both World Wars the British and American armies undoubtedly suffered from having to improvise large armies from small Regular cadres. This was, perhaps, particularly true of the British Army in the First World War, when it was allowed little ‘preparation time’ before being committed to combat. The civilian nature of armies also had consequences for their discipline and morale. In the German and Japanese armies potential problems were resolved by ‘indoctrination’ of an extreme kind.26 ‘Indoctrination’ jars on Western liberal ears, but it produces formidable soldiers. It can also produce the most cruel and barbaric. On the whole, the British and American armies in the Second World War learned the lessons of the First. They recognised from early on that if the conscript soldiers of ‘democracies’ were to be asked to die, they had a right to understand the cause for which they were dying. Towards this end they mobilised an impressive array of talented writers, film-makers and artists. In the British case, Second World War practice built on that established towards the end of the First, and many exaggerated claims have been made for the political effects of the Second World War Army Bureau of Current Affairs.27

The process of converting civilians into soldiers and their ‘blooding’ has been a staple of feature films on both sides of the Atlantic. The dramatic effects achieved by following a group from civilian life through to combat, however, often required a stability of ‘cast’ that was often not achieved in real life. For many soldiers, as Sir John Baynes and Cliff Pettit point out later in this book28, the reality was to be thrown into units, where they knew no one, after only the most exiguous training. War is a notoriously difficult thing to prepare anyone for. Far from coping with it as ‘soldiers’, many brought the resourcefulness, resilience and comradeship, rooted essentially in civilian values, to the business of mutual survival in extreme danger.29 Although both World Wars were ‘global’, ‘mass’ affairs, at the sharp end they were fought by small groups, the infantry section, the machine-gun team, the tank crew. Combat effectiveness depended on the morale and cohesion of these groups. ‘Comradeship’ is a constant theme of wartime memoirs from both World Wars. It was undoubtedly a reality, deeply felt and never forgotten. But this somewhat cosy concept ought not to disguise the often brutal reality of military discipline, not least – perhaps – in the Italian army in the First World War and the Red Army in the Second. The Italian Army’s attempts to bolster morale by a series of random executions would have done justice to a barbarian horde; the Soviet NKVD executed 15,000 Red Army deserters at Stalingrad alone.

The second ‘actuality of war’ that united soldiers of the two World Wars was the elements. The ‘high tech’ image of the Second World War, all speeding armour and diving aircraft, disguises the fact that war is a labour-intensive, physical, outdoor activity, which takes place at all hours and in all weathers. The front-line infantryman was a ‘beast of burden’. Towards the end of the First World War, and during the Second, he may have obtained a lift into battle, but once he got there he had to carry everything he needed. Everything he needed seems to have weighed the same for centuries, certainly since Roman times, about 601b. American slang for an infantryman, a ‘grunt’, is clearly well observed. In both World Wars, front-line infantrymen of all armies carried heavy burdens, worked long hours, and often got little sleep. They froze in the Iraqi desert at night during the First World War and on the Don steppe during the bitter winter of 1941–42 in the Second (the Wehrmacht boot, with its steel toecap and heels, might have been designed specially to induce frostbite). They were soaked to the skin in Flanders in the First World War and in Flanders in the Second World War. They burned under desert suns in the Sinai during the First World War and in Libya during the Second. They sweated through the African bush in the First World War and the jungles of Burma in the Second.

Both World Wars offered almost every kind of terrain. Some of it was familiar. Soldiers often commented in letters home on the similarity of the country through which they passed or on which they fought. But much was deeply foreign. German soldiers on the Russian steppe were sometimes demoralised by the infinite space and huge skies. This produced a desperate nostalgia (literally ‘home-pain’), which, as James Cooke shows later in this book, often led to the idealisation of ‘home’.30 Wherever they went, on whatever terrain, soldiers would eventually make the acquaintance of mud. Mud is inseparable from war. British Army uniforms were dyed ‘khaki’, the Hindustani word for ‘dust’ (dried mud). American ‘doughboys’ acquired their name from the adobe dust of the Mexican border war of 1916–17 that covered their uniforms. German slang for an infantryman is dreckfresser (‘mud-eater’). Learning to keep clean and to keep equipment on which your life might depend clean was part of the universal experience of soldiering in both World Wars. Few have better captured the image of soldiers adapting to these conditions than the painter Eric Kennington in The Kensingtons at Laventie, where functional efficiency has entirely replaced ‘smartness’ as a military virtue.31 Apart from details of uniform and equipment, photographs of combat soldiers from the two World Wars are barely distinguishable. Dirty, unkempt, haggard, exhausted, prematurely aged, they look straight past us with the tell-tale ‘thousand-yard stare’ that transcends time and reveals a universal experience.

The final ‘actuality of war’ that bridged the experience of front-line soldiers in both World Wars to be considered here is ‘artillery’. Both conflicts were wars of the ‘guns’. Stalin called artillery the ‘god of war’, and in both World Wars, like the Gods of Ancient Greece, it dealt out death with a chilling impartiality. Artillery was the major cause of death and wounds on the battlefield in both wars. It was also the major cause of psychiatric casualties. ‘Shell shock’ is often regarded as a phenomenon of the Great War.32 I was never aware that it existed at all in the Second World War until I came across General Patton’s famous assault on a ‘shell-shocked’ GI. The experience of being under prolonged artillery bombardment was among the most terrifying that anyone has invented. The German veteran of the Western Front, Ernst Jünger, likened it to having a giant continually aim blows at your head with a huge hammer and just missing. The chances of being killed by a high-explosive shell, fired from ten miles away, were far greater than being killed in single or small group combat, in which personal skill, training, equipment and determination might be a factor. This reality contributed to the fatalism of soldiers, remarked upon by many commentators. High explosive did not distinguish between the callow recruit and the old hand, between the brave man and the coward, between the willing soldier and the man who just wanted to go home. Knowing when to take cover, being able to see that tiny but significant fold in the ground that another might miss, helped to keep one man alive while another would perish. But, ultimately, it was a matter of luck (front-line soldiers on all sides in both World Wars were deeply superstitious). To be a front-line soldier in the two World Wars was eventually to recognise your mortality, that one day, not this day or even the next day, given long enough exposure to the ‘God of war’, he would deal death or wounds to you and that your fate was to ‘lie on the litter or in the grave’.33

Notes on contributors

Dr J.M. Bourne, The University of Birmingham, UK

John Bourne has taught History at the University of Birmingham since 1979. He thought that the publication of Britain and the Great War (London: Edward Arnold, 1989, 1991) would be his first and last on that conflict, but he was mistaken. During the last ten years his work has become increasingly focused on the British Army during the First World War and he is currently completing a revisionist study of the British Western Front generals.