While I've been writing recently about the 1917 battle for Vimy Ridge (which I'll be looking at some more soon), I'd like to step backwards for a moment and look at the centennial time line.
The Spring of 1915 had seen action on most of the fronts in the war. From January onward, fighting was taking place in in France and Belgium, in East Prussia, Galicia, in Turkey (the Dardanelles, the Aegean islands, and the Caucasus), Mesopotamia, Persia, the Sinai, Arabia, West, South, and East Africa, even in Afghanistan and India (that portion that is today Pakistan).
Naval combat had taken place in the Atlantic, including the North Sea and the Channel, the Mediterranean, even in the Pacific, where a German ship was sunk off the coast of Chile. Although not a combatant, the United States had seen its first ship attacked by German submarines (the SS Gulflight in May); Sweden had the dubious distinction of being the first neutral country to lose a ship to U-boats (the SS Hanna, sunk without warning in March). American had even "captured" its first German vessels: the armed merchant raiders Prinz Eitel Friedrich and Kronprinz Wilhelm were interned in Newport News, Virginia, in March and April 1915.
Some of the war's new horror weapons had seen their first use in the Spring of 1915. Germans fighting in the Western Front's trenches in February had used flamethrowers for the first time. The first use of poison gas by the German and French armies took place in April. German airships made their first bombing raid on England in January.
And under a manmade hill in Flanders, hundred of British and Australian soldiers dug like moles, building a system of tunnels that would be packed with more than three tons of explosives. These explosives would be detonated in the first of innumerable mine attacks that took place across the Western Front of the rest of the war. Battles were not now restricted to the trenches or the skies above, but also took place in muddy tunnels far below the surface, as one group of diggers tried to outdo, foil, or eliminate their opponents.
This mine attack on the promontory known as Hill 60, near the Belgian city of Ypres, was a relatively small British action sandwiched in among a series of much larger offensives. In December of 1914, the French had begun an offensive in Champagne, seeking to take advantage of a rumoured move of German reserves to the Eastern Front. Two French armies attacked, made limited progress, and stalled as they fought off German counterattacks. Supporting attacks in Artois and in the Vosges Mountains had even less success, either at moving forward or at forcing Germany to halt redeployment of troops from the West to the East. The First Battle of Champagne ended in mid-March.
At about that time, the British made a highly successful but limited attack, trying to capture some high ground and cut German supply and communications lines. Although the two British and two Indian divisions involved burst through the German frontlines after a powerful bombardment, they were unable to communicate effectively with their supporting forces after battle had joined, and so the army was unable to exploit their success fully. German counterattacks again halted the Allied advance but left them in control of the town of Neuve Chappelle. The huge drain on ammunition supplies that the bombardment caused was Britain's first hint of the wholly unanticipated demand that modern warfare would make on domestic industry's ability to produce artillery shells.
The Champagne offensive, the battle of Neuve Chapelle (March), and the attacks on Hill 60 (April) represented the Spring Allied initiatives on the Western Front. They were followed by a German offensive, which began the Second Battle of Ypres (April and May). This attack was the Germans' first to employ poison gas on the Western Front. At Gravenstafel, northeast of Ypres (and Hill 60), the Germans conducted a major gas attack on troops of two French divisions. The French forces, a Territorial division and a division of tough Algerian troops, broke in horror at the effect of the strange toxic cloud boiling over their lines. Apparently the Germans underestimated the effect the gas would have, as they had planned only a limited advance to exploit the hole made in French lines by this unexpected weapon.
Troops of the Canadian Expeditionary Force moved to hold the east side of the German breakthrough, and despite a second gas attack the following day, the German advance was brought to a halt, having driven in the northern flank of the Ypres Salient by as much as two miles. The Germans renewed their offensive in early May and again later in the month, using more poison gas, along with a heavy artillery bombardment, and further reduced the salient.
At the same time, the French and British were engaging in their last offensive for the Spring and Summer of 1915, an attempt to reduce a German salient in Artois that projected westward from Lens to just north of Arras and included our old friend, Vimy Ridge. The French planned a massive attack with six infantry corps, a cavalry corps, an infantry reserve of three divisions, and an artillery supporting force of nearly 300 heavy guns and over 1,000 field guns. The supporting British attacks featured three corps. German forces defending the region number slightly more than half the Allied strength, but they were heavily dug in, held the area in depth, and was well positioned on high ground in most areas.
The battle began in early May and lasted through late June. Fighting followed a familiar pattern: early French gains, following careful planning, new tactical training, and massive artillery bombardments, proved hard to keep building on. Communications and movement of reserves were slow and clumsy over heavily shelled ground, dogged German counterattacks and counterbombardments disrupted efforts to consolidate on captured positions and to push forward. Although many German reserves had been dispatched eastwards to shore up the front after disastrous Austrian losses, the Westheer still had more than enough troops and guns to blunt and in places reverse the French thrusts, especially since they were operating over less disrupted terrain.
Both sides learned different lessons. The French, always attached to the offensive, were heartened by their initial success--if the right preparations could be made, officers like Joffre and de Castelnau insisted, sudden breakthroughs could still be achieved. Others, like Foch and Petain, still believed in the offensive, but felt that operations in Artois had shown that more limited attacks, with limited objectives, gained ground more slowly but led to gains that could be held, rather that bold leaps forward that were just as quickly driven back.
The Germans, on the other hand, perceived that the Allies' preparatory bombardments caused significant disruption; they began looking for ways to make their defenses more resistant, both by digging them deeper and stronger and situating their main defensive belts in positions where they were not directly overlooked by Allied positions, so that they survived offensive preparations in better condition, making penetration and capture by attacking forces more difficult and more costly in causalities.
