I've sadly neglected this blog, neglect that I hope to repair in the coming year. However, given that 2015 is almost behind us, I thought there might be time to do a few quick wrap-up posts.
For one thing, my last post was a review of what was happening in the war on the Western Front in spring 1915. So a post to review what major events took place during the year, on the Western Front and elsewhere, might be in order.
Since I'm an avid wargamer, it seems that there should be a word or two about the score or more of wargames and game modules that came out in 2015.
If I had the time and resources, I'd like to post on the Great War books that hit the shelves in 2015. I certainly don't have time and space to review even a portion of the; I wish I could even point the way to some decent reviews, but that's bit too much to aim for at this late date.
So, Games...
In 2015, going by Board Game Geek's records, publishers released 19 new games on the Great War, as well as 12 modules or other supporting material.
Six of the items in the supporting material category were new aircraft for the popular flying game Wings of Glory. I can't say much about them, as I haven't played the game much this year, and I've not played with any of the new figures, but they certainly look as gorgeous at those models usually do. Four are new fighters or ground-attack aircraft: the Hannover CL.III two-seater, the Macchi M.5 seaplane, the Nieuport 28 biplane fighter, and the Fokker E.V monoplane fighter. The other two are a bit of a cheat to include for 2015, but they're tremendous news: the "Giants of the Sky" aircraft--the British Handley Page O/400 and German Zeppelin Staaken R.VI heavy bombers. These ginormus twin-engine bombers have joined the WoG tabletop game by means of a Kickstarter campaign that raised six times its original goal. The aircraft models are rumoured to have arrived at the publisher's from the manufacturer a week before Christmas and may be flying around the world even as I write, but I'm not entirely sure they count as being relelased in 2015.
Five more of the "ad ons" are information books for the Great War at Sea system. Since they are all alternate-history products, I'm going to pass on by them. I'm also going to pass on two tactical modules for Critical Hit's "ATS" system (Blasted Woods and Tankschreken!)
So, on to the actual games. Six are repurposing of existing systems or republications, in whole or in part. The imaginatively titled Great War (complete with expansion, cleverly called Tank!) is the latest implementation of Richard Borg's card and miniatures system familiar to players of Memoir '44, BattleCry, Battlelore, and the Commands and Colors series. They're always entertaining games; they don't often feel as if they have more than a passing relation to the history they purport to be about, but in the tired refrain of excuse-makers everywhere, "Any opportunity to get people playing history-themed games [or watching execrably unhistorical historical movies] is a way to teach them about history, right?" Well, yes, but often all it teaches them is wrong. I can't speak to Great War, but I played a lot of Memoir '44 back in the day and, while it was a great deal of fun, I can't say that it seemed as if it taught anyone anything about the history of World War Two except (possibly) the names of some of the battles. Just going by the photos on BGG, this looks to be the same, with opposing trenches right on top of each other, tank on tank combat, artillery deployed on the board, etc.
Another reimplementation is Great War Commander, a repurposing of the Combat Commander system from Chad Jensen and GMT. I have tried several times to like Combat Commander but failed every time.The disconnect between the total randomness of the card-draw system and what it is supposed to represent creates an impassable gap in my willing suspension of disbelief. I have no problem with the use of cards in GMT's other CDGs like Paths of Glory, where they represent the scarcity of operational or strategic resources and cause players endless fits of indecision as they try to spread too few assets over too many problems. But in a tactical game like this, the inability of troops to take a perfectly normal action when in no way hindered by the enemy simply because they don't have the right card...I know I should wave my hands and say "fog of war" and "imperfect command and control" but it just breaks for me. Doesn't for others. De gustibus.
Also in the republication category are First Battle of the Marne from Turning Point (a repub of One Small Step's Miracle on the Marne) and In the Trenches from Tiny Battle Publishing (republication of the game of the same name from Grenier Games). And SPW has published Tannenberg: The Introductory Game as an envoi to their Die Weltkrieg Series. Splitting off Tannenberg from their original Tanneberg/Galicia game pair and selling it as a ziploc with a weblink to video tutorials, SPW looks to give new players and easy way in to their complex (but rewarding) WWI family of wargames.
In a way, even 1914: Serbien Muss Sterbien is almost a reimplementation, as it uses the same system developed for 1914: Offensive à outrance (itself related to 1914: Twilight in the East. But each volume in this series has tackled a different topic; here designer Michael Resch approaches the smaller (though not small) topic of the Austrian war on Serbia, instead of the opening phases of the Great War on the entire eastern or western front. I've not had a chance to play this yet, but I'm very much looking forward to.
Finally, there are the thirteen entirely new entries for this year. Four are strategic in scope (The Lamps Are Going Out, 1914: Germany at War; Balance of Power; 1WW: The First World War); four are operational (Lettow-Voerbeck: East Africa 1914-1918; The Russian Empire Strikes Back: Lodz 1914; Fateful Days: Marne Campaign of 1914; Gallipoli 1915: Churchill's Greatest Gamble); four are essentially tactical and almost Euro-ish (Wipers Salient, Les Poilus; Les taxis de la Marne; No Man's Land); and two are intriguingly hard to fit into other categories (I, Spy and Wings for the Baron). Tomorrow I'll take a look at these.
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
Thursday, May 14, 2015
The Western Front in Spring, 1915
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.
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.
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Vimy Ridge: Replaying the Battle: The Games
seems borne out by the way each author uses the notes section of the rules. In Harvey's version, the notes serve simply to give the players a quick historical overview of the game; no insights into the design process are supplied. Anderson's notes, on the other hand, provide a brief look at the evolution of the game design and an explanation of many of the choices he made in putting the game together, trying to give it both historical fidelity and at least a modicum of fun playability.Looking (briefly, so far) at the rules for the two games deepens this impression (that the Anderson game is more historically based, or at least more purpose-designed). In the Harvey game, the Allied player may set up his troops anywhere in the Allied trenches or behind. In the Anderson game, Allied divisions are restricted to setting up in their historical division areas of operation (though they are not restricted to operating there once the game begins).
 |
| a portion of Harvey's Vimy map |
 |
| Anderson's Vimy map |
The Harvey game also includes the limitation that the Bois la Folie is not subject to bombardment due to its reverse-slope position. This seems unlikely to be accurate, however, as it was specifically targeted by the Allied artillery fire plan, which included mortars and howitzers which would not have necessarily fired at a shallow trajectory.
So I still can't help feeling that, overall, the Anderson game hews closer to history. It also includes provisions for the tunnels that both sides used to bring troops forward without fear of shelling, the mines that Canadian forces exploded at the beginning of the attack, the (fairly ineffectual) tank support that the Canadians received
 |
| Imaginative Strategist's replacement counters |
Next: Playing the battle out on the gameboard.
Friday, April 10, 2015
Great War: plans and operations
One of the enduring canards of the Great War is that attacks consisted simply of large numbers of men climbing out of their trenches and walking slowly through a nightmarish moonscape of shell holes and barbed wire into the teeth of enemy machinegun fire. In such scenarios, of course, everyone knows they are going to die as soon as they get out of the trench and, sure enough, most of them do. No support is provided to the attackers, the enemy are ready and waiting to receive them, nothing is accomplished, and the attackers perish, gallantly but pointlessly, in the archetypal example of the brutal wastefulness of war.
For the most part, this image is utter nonsense. The number of casualties suffered by both sides in the Great War was horrific, but then the scale of the war is close to unimaginable for many modern readers and viewers unfamiliar with military history. Armies of millions lined a network of trenches and bunkers that ran from the Channel coast to the Alps. In the first day of battle of the Somme, when the British and French armies famously lost over 60,000 men killed and wounded, the initial attacks had consisted of 750,000 men. For a modern American perspective, the combined strength of the US Army and Marine Corps in 2011 did not reach 740,000, counting all commissioned and enlisted personnel everywhere in the world, not just those deployed to war zones, let alone actually those in combat roles (for example, US troop strength in Afghanistan has never reached 100,000).
So, about three percent of the British troops who went into battle on the first day of the Somme were killed, and six percent were wounded. Fewer than one in ten were causalities in what is widely seen as the most horrific trench battle of the war--far from the near-total slaughter generally depicted in popular images of the war.
Also omitted in most depictions of trench warfare are the tremendous amounts of preparation that went into such attacks. And of this, the battle of Vimy Ridge (mentioned yesterday) is a prime example. One of the reasons that Canadian troops succeeded so brilliantly in their attack can be seen in the months leading up to the offensive. Strategic and operational planning for the April attack began in November of the year before, and tactical planning began in January, leading to a final plan adopted formally in March. Officers studied previous engagements under similar conditions, developed new tactics, trained and rehearsed troops repeatedly in the months leading up to the assault. Officers and men learned the roles and responsibilities of their superiors and subordinates, so as to be able to take over for fallen comrades. Aircraft and patrols thoroughly explored the enemy defenses, and tens of thousands of maps were prepared and issued from the squad level and higher.
Often given short shrift in popular depictions of the war is the crucial role played by artillery. Guns had gone, during the course of the war, from weapons firing individually at targets visible to them within a few thousand yards to firing bombardments by map direction at targets often miles away. The detailed artillery plan for the Vimy attack coordinated the efforts of over a thousand field guns, mortars, and howitzers. Plans included preliminary bombardments directly on enemy defenses, a moving barrage aimed to protect the advancing troops and suppress any defenses they might face, and preparations for counterbattery fire against any German guns that might respond to the attack. (Techniques of direction- and distance-finding based on sound-ranging and flash-detection had become quite sophisticated.) Troops often did advance to the attack slowly, but when they did it was because they were trailing behind a screen of shell fire that both obscured them from enemy view, smashed bunkers and trench defenses, and tore up barbed-wire obstacles. Before the battle, engineers laid hundreds of miles of telephone wire so as to provide instant communication from observers at the operation's start line to the rear area where the artillery were located. In preparation for a new offensive, batteries would often be re-sited so that enemy guns that had previously been able to fire on them would shoot at the wrong coordinates. Multiple firing locations might even be prepared. And careful calculations would be made from all these locations to ensure that the guns were aimed precisely at the enemy defenses. And, if needed, miles of light rail would be laid to bring forward a steady stream of shells from depots deep in the army's rear area to the batteries' firing positions.
And there was more than high explosive to fear. By 1917, both sides had developed tactics for the use of chemical weapons. Some gas dissipated quickly; other forms were persistent. Some killed quickly, other types merely caused irritation or nausea. Different varieties and combinations served different purposes. Once an enemy's artillery positions or supply depots were located, those might be targeted for persistent gas attacks. If below-ground barracks were observed, heavy, long-lasting gas that would sink into them might be fired into the area. Firing on a position that one expected one's own troops to assault and capture, only gas that would dissolve or blow away quickly, so the defenders would be incapacitated but friendly forces arriving to take possession would not be harmed.
Another tool used by armies preparing for a defensive was the shovel. Not only would new firing positions for artillery be prepared, and new saps (trenches leading towards the enemy front line) be prepared, but where practical troops would engage in mining. Digging deep in the earth, sappers would create tunnels to bring friendly troops to the front line under cover--both protected from enemy artillery and invisible to enemy scouts and reconnaissance aircraft. And more tunnels would reach forward under no-mans-land to the enemy positions; chambers directly under the enemy's strongpoints were filled with high explosive which, when detonated, would destroy the strongpoint and open a gap in the foe's defenses.
So, tremendous amounts of preparation (planning, training, movement of troops, build-up of supplies) went on before an offensive was launched. Most troops knew where they were going and what they were expected to do. Enemy forces were often subjected to weeks of artillery bombardments and mining before an attack, destroying their strongpoints and weakening their morale. Enemy defenses received saturation shelling as an attack began, and troops were often preceded by a curtain of flame and destruction, making it well-nigh impossible to target them as they advanced.
So why did so many attacks fail? Why did the fighting continue year after year? In a word, resiliency. Defenders learned to build defenses stronger and in greater depth; instead of one line of foxholes, a fortified trenchline; instead of one trenchline, two, one behind the other; instead of linear fighting positions that, once penetrated, could be infiltrated laterally, belts of concrete pill boxes with adjacent fighting positions, which could support each other with fire. Instead of one gun position, half a dozen for each gun, all carefully sighted, so that enemy attacks would have to waster fire on unmanned positions.
And attackers still lacked one vital component: the ability to swiftly communicate between advanced forces and the main body. The initial stage of an attack had the full weight of supporting firepower (artillery, machineguns, aircraft) behind it. But an attacker who achieved his objective, capturing the enemy's frontline trenches, had no way to communicate with those assets. Two-way radios were too heavy to carry forward, even to mount on aircraft. Communication lines (telephone and telegraph) could be carried forward as troops advanced, but any shellfire into no mans land was likely to break those lines. Flag signals could be used, but only for limited messages and at the reach of line of sight.
So, far too often, attacks succeeded but follow-on forces could not be directed to the right area, higher headquarters could only learn which units had failed and which succeeded by men running back across the battlefield to report. And an area pulverized by the explosion of mines and weeks of artillery fire was not suitable for the rapid advance of cavalry, motor vehicles (the Canadians had a contingent of armored trucks mounted with machineguns to use as a pursuit force).
One of the great operational breakthroughs of Allied doctrine was the development of "bite and hold" tactics. Instead of trying to make the ultimate breakthrough, rupturing the enemy lines and thrusting cavalry forces through to roll up his line and destroy his rear areas, troops focused on limited objectives, overwhelmed them, then occupied and rebuilt them as a base for the next attack. "Slow and steady wins the race" might be a way of describing this sort of action. Once the Allies adopted this sort of advance and stopped wasting men and material on huge operations that could never be fully executed, they started moving towards success.
And the battle for Vimy Ridge was, arguably, an excellent example of "bite and hold".
Next time: why this ridge?
Postscript: I'd be remiss if I failed to mention that, in addition to their tactical wargames, Too Fat Lardies has published a Great War kriegsspiel that directly addresses this sort of operational planning. It's called (in their typical hearty fashion), "Corps Blimey", and it's available in their 2008 Christmas Special. A quick description of it can be found in their blog, here, and they posted an AAR of a Corps Blimey playtest game to The Miniatures Page. As chance would have it, the playtest scenario was a British assault on Vimy Ridge.
For the most part, this image is utter nonsense. The number of casualties suffered by both sides in the Great War was horrific, but then the scale of the war is close to unimaginable for many modern readers and viewers unfamiliar with military history. Armies of millions lined a network of trenches and bunkers that ran from the Channel coast to the Alps. In the first day of battle of the Somme, when the British and French armies famously lost over 60,000 men killed and wounded, the initial attacks had consisted of 750,000 men. For a modern American perspective, the combined strength of the US Army and Marine Corps in 2011 did not reach 740,000, counting all commissioned and enlisted personnel everywhere in the world, not just those deployed to war zones, let alone actually those in combat roles (for example, US troop strength in Afghanistan has never reached 100,000).
So, about three percent of the British troops who went into battle on the first day of the Somme were killed, and six percent were wounded. Fewer than one in ten were causalities in what is widely seen as the most horrific trench battle of the war--far from the near-total slaughter generally depicted in popular images of the war.
Also omitted in most depictions of trench warfare are the tremendous amounts of preparation that went into such attacks. And of this, the battle of Vimy Ridge (mentioned yesterday) is a prime example. One of the reasons that Canadian troops succeeded so brilliantly in their attack can be seen in the months leading up to the offensive. Strategic and operational planning for the April attack began in November of the year before, and tactical planning began in January, leading to a final plan adopted formally in March. Officers studied previous engagements under similar conditions, developed new tactics, trained and rehearsed troops repeatedly in the months leading up to the assault. Officers and men learned the roles and responsibilities of their superiors and subordinates, so as to be able to take over for fallen comrades. Aircraft and patrols thoroughly explored the enemy defenses, and tens of thousands of maps were prepared and issued from the squad level and higher.
Often given short shrift in popular depictions of the war is the crucial role played by artillery. Guns had gone, during the course of the war, from weapons firing individually at targets visible to them within a few thousand yards to firing bombardments by map direction at targets often miles away. The detailed artillery plan for the Vimy attack coordinated the efforts of over a thousand field guns, mortars, and howitzers. Plans included preliminary bombardments directly on enemy defenses, a moving barrage aimed to protect the advancing troops and suppress any defenses they might face, and preparations for counterbattery fire against any German guns that might respond to the attack. (Techniques of direction- and distance-finding based on sound-ranging and flash-detection had become quite sophisticated.) Troops often did advance to the attack slowly, but when they did it was because they were trailing behind a screen of shell fire that both obscured them from enemy view, smashed bunkers and trench defenses, and tore up barbed-wire obstacles. Before the battle, engineers laid hundreds of miles of telephone wire so as to provide instant communication from observers at the operation's start line to the rear area where the artillery were located. In preparation for a new offensive, batteries would often be re-sited so that enemy guns that had previously been able to fire on them would shoot at the wrong coordinates. Multiple firing locations might even be prepared. And careful calculations would be made from all these locations to ensure that the guns were aimed precisely at the enemy defenses. And, if needed, miles of light rail would be laid to bring forward a steady stream of shells from depots deep in the army's rear area to the batteries' firing positions.
And there was more than high explosive to fear. By 1917, both sides had developed tactics for the use of chemical weapons. Some gas dissipated quickly; other forms were persistent. Some killed quickly, other types merely caused irritation or nausea. Different varieties and combinations served different purposes. Once an enemy's artillery positions or supply depots were located, those might be targeted for persistent gas attacks. If below-ground barracks were observed, heavy, long-lasting gas that would sink into them might be fired into the area. Firing on a position that one expected one's own troops to assault and capture, only gas that would dissolve or blow away quickly, so the defenders would be incapacitated but friendly forces arriving to take possession would not be harmed.
Another tool used by armies preparing for a defensive was the shovel. Not only would new firing positions for artillery be prepared, and new saps (trenches leading towards the enemy front line) be prepared, but where practical troops would engage in mining. Digging deep in the earth, sappers would create tunnels to bring friendly troops to the front line under cover--both protected from enemy artillery and invisible to enemy scouts and reconnaissance aircraft. And more tunnels would reach forward under no-mans-land to the enemy positions; chambers directly under the enemy's strongpoints were filled with high explosive which, when detonated, would destroy the strongpoint and open a gap in the foe's defenses.
So, tremendous amounts of preparation (planning, training, movement of troops, build-up of supplies) went on before an offensive was launched. Most troops knew where they were going and what they were expected to do. Enemy forces were often subjected to weeks of artillery bombardments and mining before an attack, destroying their strongpoints and weakening their morale. Enemy defenses received saturation shelling as an attack began, and troops were often preceded by a curtain of flame and destruction, making it well-nigh impossible to target them as they advanced.
So why did so many attacks fail? Why did the fighting continue year after year? In a word, resiliency. Defenders learned to build defenses stronger and in greater depth; instead of one line of foxholes, a fortified trenchline; instead of one trenchline, two, one behind the other; instead of linear fighting positions that, once penetrated, could be infiltrated laterally, belts of concrete pill boxes with adjacent fighting positions, which could support each other with fire. Instead of one gun position, half a dozen for each gun, all carefully sighted, so that enemy attacks would have to waster fire on unmanned positions.
And attackers still lacked one vital component: the ability to swiftly communicate between advanced forces and the main body. The initial stage of an attack had the full weight of supporting firepower (artillery, machineguns, aircraft) behind it. But an attacker who achieved his objective, capturing the enemy's frontline trenches, had no way to communicate with those assets. Two-way radios were too heavy to carry forward, even to mount on aircraft. Communication lines (telephone and telegraph) could be carried forward as troops advanced, but any shellfire into no mans land was likely to break those lines. Flag signals could be used, but only for limited messages and at the reach of line of sight.
So, far too often, attacks succeeded but follow-on forces could not be directed to the right area, higher headquarters could only learn which units had failed and which succeeded by men running back across the battlefield to report. And an area pulverized by the explosion of mines and weeks of artillery fire was not suitable for the rapid advance of cavalry, motor vehicles (the Canadians had a contingent of armored trucks mounted with machineguns to use as a pursuit force).
One of the great operational breakthroughs of Allied doctrine was the development of "bite and hold" tactics. Instead of trying to make the ultimate breakthrough, rupturing the enemy lines and thrusting cavalry forces through to roll up his line and destroy his rear areas, troops focused on limited objectives, overwhelmed them, then occupied and rebuilt them as a base for the next attack. "Slow and steady wins the race" might be a way of describing this sort of action. Once the Allies adopted this sort of advance and stopped wasting men and material on huge operations that could never be fully executed, they started moving towards success.
And the battle for Vimy Ridge was, arguably, an excellent example of "bite and hold".
Next time: why this ridge?
Postscript: I'd be remiss if I failed to mention that, in addition to their tactical wargames, Too Fat Lardies has published a Great War kriegsspiel that directly addresses this sort of operational planning. It's called (in their typical hearty fashion), "Corps Blimey", and it's available in their 2008 Christmas Special. A quick description of it can be found in their blog, here, and they posted an AAR of a Corps Blimey playtest game to The Miniatures Page. As chance would have it, the playtest scenario was a British assault on Vimy Ridge.
Thursday, April 9, 2015
Vimy Ridge Day
Today is Vimy Ridge Day.
Because the battle of Vimy Ridge, which began on April 9th, 1917, and lasted for four days, served not only as one of the successful portions of the Allied Arras Offensive of that year, but as a historic milestone for the nation and people of Canada. The four divisions of the Canadian Corps, fighting together in one battle for the first time, methodically planned, prepared, and executed an operation that seized its objectives swiftly and efficiently. In doing so, they forced the German Army to give up ground it had held since the first year of the war and demonstrated that the Allies could push back the formerly immovable German defensive line through a slow and careful series of attacks.
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Wikipedia has well written articles on the battle of Vimy Ridge and the Canadian National Memorial.
Blogger Stanley Martens has found three rather good maps of the Vimy Ridge operations.
For more on Canada in the Great War, I recommend the Canadian War Museum's website, the Canadian Great War Project, the official history of the Canadian Army in the First World War, and the Great War site sponsored by the National Post.
There are two wargames that I've been able to identify that portray the battle for Vimy Ridge.
Vimy Ridge (first published in 2000 and still available from Pacific Rim Publishing; republished in 2001 by, but apparently no longer available from, Microgame Design Group) appears to be a moderate-complexity game with fairly good ratings on boardgamegeek.com.
Vimy Ridge: Arras Diversion (published 2013 by Decision Games) appears to be a low-to-moderate complexity game, also with mildly favourable ratings (but fewer).
Also worth visiting are
Veterans Affairs Canada's page on First World War remembrance
Library and Archives Canada's page on military history
the Canadian Military Histories Digitization Project
Canadian Military History, a journal published by the Military, Strategic, and Disarmament Studies studies center of Wilfrid Laurier University
the Canadian government's military history gateway
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