Winston Churchill wrote a book about the eastern
front in the First World War. He dedicated it to the Tsarist army and titled it
‘The Unknown War’. His book is a brilliant piece of narrative, bringing out the
drama of this front to the full. Bur
events on the front are still ‘unknown’, for this part of the First World War
received much less coverage in English or French than even the Balkan and
Mesopotamian fronts. It did receive coverage in German, but very often these works
present a purely German view of the Russo-German war, and the bias has been
transferred to well known English works, such as those of Liddell Hart.
Churchill’s own book was based on a very narrow range of sources, most of them
German, even though his ‘feel’ for the
subject allowed him to make much more of these sources than a lesser writer would
have done. There has been little in western languages since then, although
Soviet and émigré writers produced a substantial number of studies of the front
that might have permitted more authoritative western-language presentation of the
battles of this front. There is no official Soviet history of the army’s
performance in the First World War; and until there is, much that happened must
remain clear. None the less, it is possible arrive at a basic narrative of
events, and to make some effort at explaining them, especially when comparison can
be made of the various Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian sources.
My first aim, in writing this book, has therefore been are relatively straight-forward
one: to fill the gap in the military history of the First World War. It has
often been said that Germany could have won the war, if she had pursued the full-scale
offense against Russian in 1915, as Lundendorff wanted, instead of the partial
schemes that Falkenhayn preferred. But I do not believe that Lundendorff’s bold
schemes for eliminating Russia in 1915 would have worked; indeed, the effects
of various episodes in Ludendorff’s personal Drang nacht Osten- Tannenberg, the winter Battle in Masuria,
Kovno-seem to me to have been over-rated. On the contrary, it was Falkenhayn’s
policy of limit, attrition that probably offered the Germans a better way
forward, if he had been allowed to stick to it. Lundendorff would merely have led
them into yet more square miles of marsh and steppe, for it was not at all as
easy to overthrow the Russian army as Ludendoff maintained. Deaths, for instance, formed a higher percentage of German casualties
in the east than in the west until the end of 1916; and until the turn of
1916-17, the Russian army had even captured a greater number of German
prisoners (and of course a very much greater number of prisoners altogether in
the view of the Austro-Hungarian army’s weakness) than the British and French
combined. The idea that Germany had limitless possibilities in the east was a
legend, however powerful its influence on Nazi thinking there after.
At the same time, there was an equally powerful legend on the allies’ side:
that Russia, had she received the proper help from her western allies, could
have contributed decisively to the overthrown of the German Empire quite early
in the war. Lloyd George wrote forcefully in maintenance of this view: ‘ half
the shells and one-fifth the guns . . . wasted’ in the great western offenses
could, he alleged, have contributed decisively to Russia’s performance. I am
not so sure. In 1915, the Russian army certainly suffered material shortages,
but the allies could hardly make them up, because they had material shortages
themselves; and in any case, to assume that guns and shells would have made any
greater difference to the east than they did to the west was to mistake the
importance of mere quantity. My study of the engagements of 1915 showed that
shell-shortage was very often used an excuse for blundering and disorganization
that were much more important, in causing Russia’s defeats in that year, than
the mere shortage of material. In any case, by 1916, the Russian’s own output
of war-goods had reached generally satisfactory dimensions. On 1st
January 1917, Russian superiority on the eastern front was in some ways
comparable with the western superiority
eighteen months later in France. It would have take much more than the dispatch
of guns and shell to the eastern front to cause the defeat of Germany there.
This was a discovery that came as a surprise to me, since I hd always assumed,
following Golovin and others, that the Russian army had lost battles because of
crippling material shortages; and I had gone on, as other writers have done, to
assume that this was an inevitable consequence of the economic backwardness of
the Tsarist State. But when I consulted the figures for Russia’s output of
war-goods, I soon found that the shortages had been exaggerated, and sometimes
invented after the event.
It is not really accurate to say, for instance, that the Russian army was not ready for war, and that it plunged in before it was ready, in order to save the French. At the time, the commanders asserted they were ready even four days before the army crossed the German border. But what they understood as readiness, was of course woefully at odds with war-time reality, they had no idea what to expect. But ‘unreadiness’ was discovered in subsequent battles, and was at bottom a hard-luck story. In 1914-1915, lack of war-goods was not a comment on Russia’s economic backwardness, but rather the slowness with which her regime reacted to the needs of war. The politicians and the generals used shell-shortage as a ‘political football against the government and the war ministry, and their tales of shell-shortage were therefore treated with skepticism; the artillerymen wrote off the infantrymen as stupid and alarmist; and, when the government decided to do anything, it turned too foreign producers who failed to deliver on time.
Once the government made up its quarrel with the industrialists, the country
proved able to produce war-goods in fair quantity. By 1916, it could produce
aircraft, guns, gasmasks, hand grenades, wireless sets and the rest- if not in
immense quantities, as in the Second World
War, at least in quantities sufficient to win the war in the east if other things had been equal,
By September 1916, for instance, Russia could produce 4,500,000 shells per month
.This compares with German output of seven million, Austro-Hungarian one
million, and since the bulk of this production went elsewhere- to the western
or Italian fronts, there was not much truth in the assertion that Russia lost
the war because of crippling material weaknesses.
It was the country’s inability to make use of it economic weight that began to interest
me, rather than the backwardness of which many writers had spoken. I began to
examine the army’s structure, and again discovered some surprises. The army, as
it grew before 1914, split, roughly between the patrician wing, of which the
Grand Duke Nicholas, Inspector General of the Cavalry, and commander-in chief
in wartime, was the head, and a praetorian one, dominated by the war minister
Sukhomlinov. I had always read accounts that made out Sukhomlinov to be a
bungling, corrupt; he was detested by ‘liberal’ Russia on both counts, and was
imprisoned after the March Revolution. But, much to my surprise, the evidence
as I saw it showed that Sukhomlinov, and not his enemies, was the real reformer.
His enemies ,though eventually coming to power in the war-years, were much less
‘technocratic’ in their approach than they claimed to be. The resisted
essential reforms before 1914, and their old-fashioned attitudes did much to
reduce the army’s effectiveness in the war- years. No system of tactics emerged
to combat the shell- shortage of 1915; and the disasters of that year also owed
much to the commanders’ wholly mistaken belief in fortresses. Moreover, the
division of the army between patricians and praetorians even effected strategy,
for it added a dimension to the usual
rivalries and battles of competence that prevented the emergence of coherent
plans, with corresponding movement of reserves. The structure of the army, as
shown in tactics, conscription, transport organization, relationship of infantry to artillery, and the
rest, all of which I have tried to investigate, displayed the country’s great weak point was not, properly speaking, economic,
but more administrative. I have tried to account for this, as far as evidence
allows, at least in the armed forces’ case.
This book proved difficult to conclude. The fighting stopped in January 1917, except
for a few episodes; yet it was in 1917 that all the problems I had seen came to
a head. To narrate the year 1917 would have made this book intolerably long,
and I should have gone far beyond my strategic brief. What particularly interested
me was why the country, the war-economy
of which was successful as never before, should have gone through vast social
change even though, with the German army at the gates, there was ostensibly every
argument for retaining an unbroken front at home, at least for the duration. My
last chapter is an effort to explain this.
I have seen the First World War, not as the vast run-down of most accounts, but
as a crisis of growth: a modernization crisis in thin disguise. It was much
more successful than is generally allowed. It failed, I think, against the
bottle-neck of peasant agriculture. Inflation had accompanied the country’s economic
growth in the First World War; and it was inflation that, in the end, caused
Russia’s food-suppliers to withhold their
produce at a critical time. A book that began with the battle fields thus ends
with a discussion of war-economy, inflation, revolution in the towns and countryside.
This was the pattern of the First World War itself, and I have tried to record
its course in eastern Europe as bets I can.
Jesus College, Cambridge
4th October 1974
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