A Criticism of the Allied Strategy

I

IN an article which appeared in these pages last November the writer argued that the German defeats at Verdun last summer and the dismissal of von Falkenhayn that followed the entry of Roumania into the war marked the definite downfall and disgrace of the old German General Staff. Had the Germans from the beginning concentrated on the East and remained on the defensive on the West, they might have halved their task; by invading Belgium and France they doubled it, and by making England’s intervention certain put out-and-out victory beyond their grasp. The succession of Hindenburg to Falkenhayn’s place with even greater powers meant that thenceforth German strategy would follow the natural orientation of German political ambitions Eastward; it confirmed the triumph of the Chancellor over Tirpitz, who had been the chief of the western expansionists. On the one side Tirpitz and Falkenhayn, and on the other side the Chancellor and Hindenburg, stood for two opposing schools alike of strategy and of politics, to which, as Clausewitz taught, strategy should hold up the mirror. Up to the late summer of 1910 strategy and politics had been at odds; but then began a new harmony between politics and strategy of which the remarkable victories in Roumania were the first expression, all the more striking because it coincided with a dangerous Allied offensive on the Somme.

It is early yet to say what bearing the policy which has forced the rupture with the United States has upon the view then expressed. The blockade is a repetition of the crime and blunder of the invasion of Belgium, only in a more extreme form. The soil of Belgium, which Germany violated in her supposed military interest, is the property of one neutral nation only. But the seas whose rights Germany has violated are the common property of all. Of the two similar crimes the second was the grosser. Can we reconcile this second crime with the view of the Chancellor’s policy expressed here last November? Has he gone over to the extremists who made England’s intervention certain, and who, as Mr. Gerard broadly hinted at the Chamber of Commerce banquet in Berlin, would make the intervention of the United States highly probable if their views prevailed ? Or is there some method in this seeming madness, some calculation which leaves the Chancellor’s views about German policy and strategy still intact? That remains to be seen.

It does not, however, necessarily follow that Germany’s desperate measures at sea will mean a change in her policy on land. Before Christmas it seemed highly probable that the offensive against Roumania would be followed by an offensive against Russia. There is now a considerable element of doubt. The Allied preparations in the West may have impressed the Germans as too alarming, and an offensive against Northern Italy may take the place of the offensive against Russia, which, if it were to produce decisive results, would have to be carried so far, and would make such heavy demands for troops, that it might leave the Germans an insufficient reserve to deal with a possible break-through on the West. A campaign against Northern Italy, which is so much nearer to France, and, moreover, would not require so many troops, would be free from some of the dangers of an offensive campaign against Russia. However that may be, we may confidently expect the German strategy in the coming campaigns to reflect, as the old strategy did not, the views of the Chancellor about the peace. A strategical defensive in the West (which is not incompatible with a tactical offensive at some points) will have for its political counterpart a peace policy which is prepared to throw over all ideas of territorial gain in the West. On the other hand, a strategical offensive against Russia will have as its obverse a policy that is concerned to deny to Russia Poland and Constantinople, and expects the rare and refreshing fruits of victory to fall in the East.

So much for the mistakes of German strategy in the earlier passages of the war — mistakes so colossal as to make those of the Allies appear trifling by comparison. There has been far too much laudation of German ability in this war. When one considers the vast amount of forethought given by the Germans to the war, and the mobilization for a period of forty years of the best brains of the country toward the one end of military success, and then surveys the results achieved, One is not tempted to envy the Germans for their cleverness, but rather to think how much better the French, the Americans, or the English would have done the job if they had given their mind to it. The Germans in international politics remind us of the dull schoolboy who, having worked out with immense industry an enormous sum in multiplication and division quite correctly to thirty places of decimals, manages at the end to produce a wildly incorrect result by pointing his decimals two or three places out.

The purpose of this paper, however, is to discuss the mistakes of the Allied strategy, or, at any rate, to present an unfamiliar and unorthodox view of what it might have been. The Allied strategy, too, like that of the Germans, has oscillated between East and West. Russia began the war with an attack on Germany in East Prussia, and in spite of the crushing defeat in the Masurian Lakes she might have continued to put her main offensive strength there. But she did nothing of the kind; instead, she turned against Austria. For Russia the war was primarily a Balkan war, a war of the Turkish Succession. She went on the plan of attacking the weaker member of the hostile coalition — a plan which Germany’s prime sin and blunder in invading Belgium and concentrating on the West made very much easier. Not so her Western Allies. Their efforts were directed, not against the weaker members of the hostile coalition, but against its head and front, Germany; their object, unlike Russia’s, seemed to be to find where the enemy was strongest and attack there; not to cast about for the decisive point which happened also to be weak.

The first principle of war is to concentrate overwhelming force at a point of such great importance that success or failure there will affect the result of the war; and the weaker the enemy is at this point, the easier it will be to establish indisputable superiority in force. The whole strategical problem was: which was the decisive point? and, if there were more decisive points than one, at which would the employment of a given amount of effort yield the greatest military return?

Russia answered this question in one way, the Western Allies in another. Russia said Galicia and the Carpathians; the Western Allies said France and Belgium. To one wing of the Allies the war was on its political side a war for priority in the Balkans; to the other wing it was a war against the political philosophy and practice which had made the invasion of Belgium possible. In this view the opposition between policy and strategy which ruined Germany’s chances of victory and even destroyed her character in the eyes of the world reappears, although under different forms, in the strategy of the Allies; and though it has not ruined their chances of victory, it has at any rate delayed its arrival.

It will at once be objected that the Allies had no alternative to acting as they did. At the beginning of the war France was attacked by five sixths of the whole military strength of Germany, and five sixths of this five sixths attacked her by way of the neutral territory of Belgium and Luxemburg. What else could the Western Allies do but put their main strength against so formidable a peril? There are those who would go further than this and say that the principal error in the Allied strategy was that they allowed any part of their strength to be diverted to other fields. Turkey, they say, might have been left alone; her offensive power was not very great. Bulgaria, too, must stand or fall with Germany, and every man used against her was an ineffective subtraction from the strength that ought to have been employed against the arch-enemy Germany. Some have gone further even than this, and argued that Russia would have been well-advised to leave Austria alone, to content herself with parrying her attacks, and even after the terrible defeat in the Masurian Lakes, to return to the attack on East Prussia with new concentrations of men.

This last argument has been put with a good deal of force by Count de Souza in the last of the studies of the campaign which he is writing under the general title of Germany in Defeat; and the military correspondent of the London Times, Colonel Repington, has consistently pleaded for concentration of our military efforts against Germany, although he has not carried his argument so far as to deprecate the concentration of Russia’s offensive effort against Austria. Colonel Repington is believed to express the views of the British General Staff, and the body of opinion in England which agrees with him may still be said to be dominant. The reaction in Germany from the western to the eastern school of strategy and politics has had its counterpart in England; but whereas in Germany the reaction triumphed (except on the sea), in England the official bias is still strongly to the western area.

The first question to be settled, then, is whether the British and French armies had any alternative to distributing their forces in the way that they did; and the answer depends to a very great extent on the view that we take of the battle of the Marne. If we regard it as the greatest strategical victory of the war, we can hardly maintain that the strategy of the Allies was still fettered after it had been won, still condemned to conform to the dispositions of the enemy. The test of a strategic victory is precisely this, that it confers on the victor freedom to make his dispositions as he pleases and not in conformity with the plans of the enemy. The use which the Allies in fact made of the victory of the Marne was to follow up the enemy and to attack him in his new positions; and as it turned out, this was not a very fruitful use. At the time of the Marne the Allies had possession of Antwerp and Belgian Flanders; both were lost after the Marne. The Allies certainly advanced their line from the Marne to the Aisne and recovered ground in French Flanders; but in the main the territorial gains, even in France, were small; and from the end of 1914 to the present time it is disputable whether the advantage in such small changes as there have been has rested with the Allies or with Germany. When the losses in Belgium are taken into account, the balance of territorial gain since the Marne has certainly been on the side of the enemy. It can hardly be maintained that this is a satisfactory sequel to a battle which was hailed at the time, and with justice, as one of the great victories of history. There must have been an alternative, or the battle of the Marne was not the great victory that the best military opinion has pronounced it to be.

The error of the Allies at this time was the failure to perceive the difference in the standard of strength that is required for a successful offensive and a successful defensive. Because the Allies were strong and clever enough to win the Marne it did not in the least follow that they were capable of doing to the Germans what the Germans had failed so signally to do to them. A cold, calm review of the situation after the Marne would have convinced the Allies that they had no chance of a successful offensive against the Germans in France until they had made preparations which, on the most favorable view, and begun at the earliest possible moment, could not be complete for another eighteen months at least. Those eighteen months need not have been wasted by the Allies. They might have been employed in a defensive campaign in Belgium which would have kept Antwerp and the sea-coast in our possession. Any surplus of energy that remained might have been employed in the East. The offensives of the Allies in France in 1915 were premature and accomplished no useful end. The theory of ‘attrition,’ which was invoked by popular writers to justify them, was unscientific, like the practice of unskilled draught-players who, unable to use an advantage they have gained, win the game by giving ‘one for one.’

Sir John French undoubtedly has military gifts of a very high order. It was at his request that the sphere of operations of the British army was transferred from the Aisne to Flanders, and it is perhaps not unreasonable to suppose that this was not an idea that suddenly occurred to him, but a reversion to plans of campaign that he may have conceived before he left England. The services of the British Expeditionary Force to the French army during the retreat from the Belgian frontier to the Marne were invaluable; and though they were nothing like so great on the Marne as popular pride supposed them to be, they were not inconsiderable even there. Looking back, however, on the later history of the war in the West, we may doubt whether the most effective place in which our assistance might have been given to the French would not have been in Belgium on the flank of the German advance. Had there been an active British army in Belgium when the battle of the Marne was fought, or even (if we take the permissible view that the battle of the Marne would not have been won without British aid) within a fortnight after that battle, the position of the Germans in Belgium would have been perilous in the extreme.

The popular legend about the Russians in England at this time had its ridiculous side, but showed real insight into the strategy of the situation. Half a million Russians would no doubt have been better, but 150,000 British would have sufficed to make serious inroads on the German flank and to save the coast of Belgium to the Allies. The victory of Ypres would then have been won in front of Antwerp. With a strong Anglo-Belgian army on the German flank there is every reason to think that the progress of the advance in France in the autumn of 1914 would have been not less but greater than it actually was. We could then have fallen back on the defensive until such time as we had equipped ourselves with the resources necessary for a successful offensive; and the position of the Germans, with an army between them and the Belgian coast, would have been one of such peril that they would have been compelled to keep up their numbers. In such a position the strategic initiative would have passed into our hands. It is one of the proofs of Mr. Churchill’s strategic insight that he did realize very early the tremendous advantage of some such position as this. Half a million from beginning to end should have sufficed to keep these advantages in our hands, though not, of course, to press them to decisive victory.

Having thus established ourselves in a defensive position full of the most alarming possibilities for the enemy, we should then have been free, while developing our resources, to look round for a field in which we might take the initiative more easily and at less cost than in France. There were three such areas: two in Turkey and the other in the Balkans.

II

If the danger caused by the entry of Turkey into the war were to be regarded through British spectacles, the area indicated was clearly Syria, with or without Mesopotamia. When Turkey became an enemy the foundations of our whole Eastern policy suddenly gave way. For more than a century we had supported her, because an independent and friendly Turkey was supposed to be necessary to the safety of our Indian Empire. Turkey was the buffer state between that Empire and Russia, and the first and main effect of her hostility, so far as England was concerned, was that the communications through Egypt were endangered. The surest way of defending Egypt and the communications with India was by attacking the communications of Turkey with the East. Turkey has only two routes to the East that matter — one along the northern shores of Asia Minor leading to Armenia, which was clearly the concern of Russia; the other through the Cilician Gates into Syria, and this was clearly our concern. A quite small military effort, made as soon as Turkey declared against us, would have given us Alexandretta and prevented Turkey Tom using the Bagdad railway and from reinforcing Syria with troops or munitions. Under these circumstances a serious attack on Egypt would have been quite out of the question. There might have been two supplements to this plan. If Akabah had been seized, we should not only have secured this flank of Egypt against attack but we should have cut Turkey’s communications with Arabia by the Hedjaz railway. It might also have been convenient to seize the head of the Persian Gulf up to the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates; but this campaign had no urgency. Can it be doubted that the cutting of Turkey’s railway communications with the East would have been infinitely more useful, not only to ourselves, but to the cause of the Allies as a whole, than, say, the dubious victory of Neuve Chapelle?

A second alternative would have been the forcing of the Dardanelles and the capture of Constantinople. If the first of the plans that are now being outlined would have insured the safety of Egypt and of the communications with India, and the defeat of Germany’s Bagdad railway schemes, the success of this second plan, by opening communications into Russia and breaking the blockade under which Russia was suffering, might perhaps have saved her from the heavy defeats of 1915, and would in any case have dealt a fatal blow at Germany’s ambitions in Turkey — a blow that would have been a dramatically just retribution for the criminal folly of the General Staff in invading Belgium. Begun early and without the distraction of a premature offensive in the West, this enterprise would not have been impossible of accomplishment; and success would also have saved Serbia by preventing Bulgaria from taking the side of Germany.

A third alternative — though much more difficult of accomplishment would have been so to strengthen Serbia that she not only could have resisted invasion, but might have developed an offensive against Hungary. This plan would have fitted in with the Russian strategy of concentration against Austria; it would have been invaluable if Roumania had come in early; and if our positions had been well established, it would have saved Roumania when she did come in. But the practical difficulties might very well have been insuperable, and this alternative cannot compare in attractiveness with the first and second.

The paradox of the whole business is that, while any one of these alternatives would have served and accomplished results far greater than any which were obtained on the West, and at far less cost, we should have tried all three in succession and each in a way that could not succeed. The first alternative we adopted in the form of a campaign in Mesopotamia which did not protect Egypt, and, so long as Turkey was free to reinforce her local troops by the Bagdad railway, was most unlikely to reach any decisive results. The Dardanelles campaign, again, was ruined partly by bad management, but mainly by a strange lack of appreciation of the great prize for which we were working. Mr. Churchill was one of the very few Englishmen who realized that the logical sequence of the Marne victory was, first, the defense of Belgian Flanders, and after that a vigorous offensive, not against the strongest part of the enemy’s defenses but against the weakest point at which victory would have given decisive results. This was, undoubtedly, Constantinople. Such a prize, once we had entered for it, was worth every man that we could spare after the defense of our lines in the West had been made secure.

Finally, after the failure of the second alternative, the third was tried under circumstances that insured failure from the very outset. It would have been at least an intelligible though not a wise policy to refuse at the outset to have anything to do with an Eastern campaign of offense and to confine all our offensive efforts to the West. It would have been equally intelligible, and productive under wise direction of immensely important, perhaps decisive, results, to confine ourselves on the West to a strict policy of defense, and to throw ourselves with all the vigor of which we were capable on the weak easterly wing of the hostile coalition. But the policy actually adopted, of attempting simultaneous offensives on both East and West fronts, was doomed to failure from the outset. Either West or East, — East rather than West, because not only was the offensive less difficult there, but success would bring us nearer to decisive results, — but not both East and West at the same time.

It is interesting to speculate as to what would have happened if England had waged this war on the lines of Chatham’s strategy, which was to avoid taking part in the main clash of European armies, except to supply money and munitions; to use the power of the fleet to the utmost; and to use the army only as an adjunct to the fleet in colonial operations or in such military enterprises on the Continent as were peninsular in character and could be waged on a system of strictly limited military liability. Some modification of this system would clearly have been necessary in view of pledges given by England in the military conversations with France that continued for years before the war; and as things were we had no alternative until after the battle of the Marne. But when that battle had been won, there were no valid objections to a reversion to Chatham’s principles of strategy.

These principles would probably have dictated a defensive campaign for Antwerp and the Belgian coast, because our naval problems were greatly complicated by their loss. They would certainly have dictated a war against Germany in Turkey, like Chatham’s wars against France in India and Canada. It is not impossible that, had this policy been adopted, the year 1915, or at least 1916, would have been as great in English history as 1757, the year of Plassey, or 1759, which saw the fall of Quebec. The element of doubt is whether France, if she had not had the British reinforcements that went to her in 1915 and 1916, would have been able to hold her defensive lines. The strong probability is that she would, though under such circumstances there could be no question of her attempting the offensive. But did she in fact gain anything by the premature offensives of 1915 and 1916? Were these not in fact an extravagant use of her manpower? There were many Frenchmen who thought so. On August 13 M. Painlevé addressed to the President a memorandum embodying the unanimous resolutions of the three principal committees of the French Chamber, the Committees for War, for the Navy, and for Foreign Affairs. He gave an account of this memorandum in a speech to the Chamber shortly after the resignation of M. Delcassé, the Minister for Foreign Affairs. The following were its concluding words: —

‘Seeing that all delays and all setbacks increase the danger and that the issue of the war is bound up with the taking of Constantinople, we ask the Government to take the urgent measures that the circumstances demand and to organize an expedition that will ensure the fall of Constantinople.

‘These considerations and conclusion represent the attention and deliberation of two months.’

If the most responsible and informed members of the French Chamber could take this view, — men who would certainly feel to their innermost fibre the passionate desire to see the hated enemy ejected from the soil of France,— Englishmen can hardly plead that it was the necessity of France which prevented them from making their offensive effort in the East rather than in the West. On the contrary, the premature offensives in the West, though they were inspired by a very deep and sincere regard for France, were a very dubious service to her. The true direction of our best service to France may well have been along the lines of the traditional British strategy as laid down by Chatham. It is even possible that in this way the war might have been brought to a successful close without any breach with that other British tradition of voluntary service.

Lost opportunities in war never return, and it must not be supposed that what was sound strategy in 1915 and 1916, is, therefore, sound in 1917. The submarine campaign and the shortage of shipping tonnage have made it impossible to revive the idea of an Eastern campaign, at any rate in the form which might in former years have led to decisive results. England has deliberately chosen the West as her field of main military activity and there is now no departing from that decision. What happened in 1915 and 1916 will presently pass to receive the judgment of history. This judgment will turn on the rivalry between the Eastern and Western schools, which with us, as with Germany, has been pivotal. It is an interesting question for the United States, which, if the war lasts, may wish to make the most effective use of their military power; and it is worth remembering that there are no submarines in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

But how, if we take the view that the East would have been the more profitable field of England’s military effort, are we to explain the obstinate attachment of the British General Staff to the Western theatre? In the case of Germany the cause was the existence of a government within the government, a General Staff under the influence of the Crown Prince and his clique, which was disloyal to the official foreign policy and allowed political prejudice and the force of dull unimaginative conservatism to interfere with its natural expression in war strategy. No such causes were at work in England. But there were other causes, all honorable and natural, which distorted the nation’s judgment. There is no such thing in history as a pure military problem, except perhaps in the narrower field of tactics. War is applied politics, and therefore, if we wish to understand the causes of success or failure in war, we must usually expect to find it in political conditions.

Three sets of causes may be distinguished for the preference given to the Western field alike in the minds of the people and in the official policy of the country — the popular causes, the professional, and the political.

Chief among what we have called the popular causes was misjudgment of the part played by the British army in the defense of France. It was very distinguished, but the vulgar idea that the main work of defending France from her enemies was performed by the handful of men who formed the first Expeditionary Force was, of course, ridiculously wide of the mark. Further, popular opinion, full of an exaggerated idea of the part that the British army had played in resisting the first invasion, failed to distinguish between the standard necessary for defense and the much greater standard required for a successful offense. The two ideas of defending France from invasion and of ejecting the invaders were in reality sharply contrasted; a wholly different set of considerations applied to the two cases. But the popular mind glided insensibly from the one to the other, unconscious of the depth of the gulf that lay between them. Finally, the mismanagement of the Eastern campaigns prejudiced the popular mind against them. They failed to distinguish between the grandeur of the idea of the Dardanelles expedition and the paltriness of the support that was given to it, and the not infrequent inefficiency of its execution. They judged by results, and by results, which were lamentable enough, the Eastern school stood condemned. Among English politicians Mr. Churchill was distinguished by the soundness, and even the brilliancy, of his views of strategy. Yet in the course of his advocacy of the Eastern school of strategy he became involved in the failures of the Dardanelles expedition, and most unjustly lost his political influence in consequence.

The professional causes can be stated quite summarily. Every soldier who is worth anything thinks the campaign in which he happens to be engaged to be far more important than any other. The campaign in France, even at the end of the first three months, was much the most serious that the British army had ever been engaged in. It was natural, therefore, that the professional interest and ‘pull’ (if that word is not misunderstood) of the Western campaign were vastly greater than those of any of its rivals.

And lastly, there were the political causes. Opinion in England was very slow to understand the real political causes that made the war; and no wonder, for Germany had done her best to obscure them by invading Belgium and concentrating on the West. Nine men out of ten interpreted Germany’s strategy as proof of a deep design on this country. It is very arguable that the turn of England might have come next; but it is none the less true that Germany did not begin the invasion of Belgium and France in order to strike at England. If we can disentangle the political causes of the war from the moral and personal causes, they are to be found almost exclusively in the East. Germany wanted to have the reversion of Turkey. That was why Serbia, the bridge-head between the Central Allies and the East, mattered so much. British opinion, official as well as popular, was slow to understand that, or to realize that Germany’s ambition to possess a great empire in the East threatened to alter the moorings of British foreign policy for the past hundred years.

So far from opposing these German ambitions, — at any rate in the form in which they had been revealed before the war, — England had been on the whole rather sympathetic. She had placed no obstacle in the way of the Bagdad railway scheme; on the contrary an agreement with regard to it between England and Germany had been initialed, though not signed, a few months before the war broke out. Further, English opinion was slower still to understand that there might be opposition between the Chancellor’s politics and the strategy of the General Staff. With regard to Balkan politics England’s part had been that of a mediator. She had certainly not been anti-German in the conferences that followed the Balkan wars, and for this among other reasons she had declined, in the earlier stages of the dispute, while it was still an issue between Russia and Germany, and before France and Belgium had become involved, to declare herself in regard to the Balkans.

To official England the determining cause of England’s participation in the war was France and Belgium; to unofficial England it was Belgium alone. The entry of Turkey into the war later, struck English people rather as an eccentricity of politics than as a fact that might have been foreseen from the first. Similarly, official England fought desperately against the idea that Bulgaria would come in against us. With British attention fixed so firmly on the West it was not surprising that at the first a persistently false view of the real causes of the war was taken in England, and that not only by popular judgment. It took Englishmen a long time before they could be induced to turn their heads away from France and Belgium; and when they did turn round in good earnest, the time had almost gone by when they could take decisive action elsewhere.