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John KeeganThe First World War
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “The War Beyond the Western Front”
Chapter 7, “The War Beyond the Western Front,” turns to the various battles on the imperial periphery of the European powers, which made it a truly world war. Germany had managed to establish a handful of colonies in Africa, in the Pacific Ocean, and along the Chinese coastline. These became targets of Britain, France, and Japan immediately upon outbreak of the war. Germany’s Asian holdings fell relatively quickly, but a difficult climate and fierce German resistance made for a long and costly campaign in what is now Cameroon. After an abortive uprising by South African Boers who refused to fight for a British army they had fought just over a decade before, the German position in South-West Africa (including what is now Botswana) collapsed. All that remained was German East Africa, now Tanzania, which doggedly hung on until the end of the war. There had been a prewar understanding that the powers would exclude one another’s colonies from military operations, but local white settlers were eager for combat and the Great Powers quickly forgot their earlier promises under the pressures of war. After their early successes, British and South African forces would spend years chasing the army of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, who became legendary for his ability to ambush and evade his vastly superior enemy for the entire remainder of the war.
Meanwhile, German cruisers stationed near their colonial possessions were technologically superior to the British ships protecting their convoys. They harassed British and French shipping all over the world, but eventually, the British were able to break the codes these ships used to maintain contact with home and sank several German ships before one contingent suffered a shocking defeat off the coast of Chile. The British ordered battle cruisers to pursue the Germans, who foolishly sought to follow up their victory by attacking the British-controlled Falkland Islands, where the entire squadron was destroyed. From that point forward the German surface fleet posed no threat to Allied shipping and would pose no naval threat at all until the appearance of the U-boat in late 1915.
In the Black Sea, the German Mediterranean squadron suddenly appeared, which hoisted the Turkish flag outside of Constantinople (now Istanbul). Soon afterward, these “Turkish” ships attacked Russian ports on the Black Sea, and the Ottoman Empire was formally at war with Russia, Britain, and France. Turkey’s entry opened up an entirely new theater of war in the Middle East. The sultan’s call for Europe’s Muslim subjects to rise up went mostly unheeded, but the empire still held enough territory to present a major strategic problem for the Allies. Turkish forces attacked the British-controlled Suez Canal but were pushed back, leaving that sector relatively quiet for the remainder of the war, but Turkish movements into the Caucasus caused great alarm for the Russians given their tenuous hold over its largely Muslim population. Yet the sultan too had subject nationalities eager to throw off Turkish rule, and whatever the attitudes of the Caucasian people, their territory was an extremely forbidding site of an invasion.
By early 1915, the Turkish force was utterly destroyed by the Russians; it was weakened by cold weather and limited supplies. The participation of some Armenian forces on the Russian side encouraged the Ottoman government’s decision to kill roughly 700,000 Armenians over the course of the war, an event that would help coin the term “genocide.” These early defeats proved the Ottomans had not reversed their long decline, but they retained enough of a warlike reputation, and power in key strategic positions, to grant themselves importance beyond their actual capabilities. Turkish entry into the war prompted the Allies to seek Italy’s switching sides, with a promise of land in the Eastern Mediterranean. The British navy moved into the Dardanelles, which connects the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, to support Italian operations and to secure a southern supply route for Russia.
Italy’s declaration of war, initially against Austria, required an offensive through mountainous territory with the vast majority of troops untrained for such rigors. Their attack on the Isonzo River proved to be the first of 12, and the Italian front would prove largely stable for the Central Powers, especially after a smashing victory against Russia at Gorlice-Tarnow in the spring of 1915 eased the pressure on Austria’s east. Rather than the encirclement maneuver typically viewed as the key to decisive victory, Falkenhayn at Gorlice-Tarnow cut with remarkable speed through the Russian formations and sowed such confusion that their entire Polish front collapsed, although the kaiser refused Ludendorff’s demand for further action to force the capitulation of the Russian army. They were aware of how Russia could always trade space to regain the tactical advantage, and they still had enormous manpower reserves from which to draw. Russia still needed time to recover and was hoping for a Turkish defeat to ease up its southern flank.
After the French decided against sending troops from the Western Front to the Dardanelles to relieve Russia, Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, convinced the government that the Dardanelles represented a strategic flank, compensating for the lack of a tactical flank on the Western Front. Admiral John “Jacky” Fisher ultimately conceded to Churchill’s plans, giving him one new super-Dreadnought and a potential landing force including troops from Austria and New Zealand (ANZAC). Churchill hoped to subdue Turkish defenses by naval bombardment, but Turkish emplacements and mines proved a formidable obstacle, inflicting severe damage on several battleships. The Allies decided to land forces who could take out the Turkish batteries and clear the way for minesweepers, but the plan went forward without proper logistics and a poor sense of what the troops would actually face upon landing.
Furthermore, the lack of suitable landing spots made it likely that Turkish forces would be ready to meet them head-on. ANZAC forces were chosen for the beach landing, well-trained soldiers with a fierce fighting spirit. Upon landing, they scrambled to escape the vulnerable beaches and reach high ground, while another landing at Cape Helles by British forces immediately encountered enemy fire. Forces under Mustapha Kemal, later the leader of post-Ottoman Turkey, delivered a counterattack, although Allied forces were able to cling to their positions for the next several months. Fourteen Allied divisions were eventually spread across the beaches to no strategic effect. By early January 1916, the withdrawal was complete, and was entered into the legend of military history. The Gallipoli campaign was also supposed to relieve Serbia, but it had the opposite effect, convincing nearby Bulgaria to support the Central Powers, and it prepared for war against Serbia with the promise of territorial gain. With help from both Austrians and Germans, the British and French struggled to establish a base of operations in neutral Greece. They were slow to arrive, however, and the attacks on Serbia drove their army and king into exile in Montenegro.
After fierce debate among the Allies, they decided to retain a force at the port of Salonika, which irritated Greece without putting meaningful pressure on enemy forces. Instead, the soldiers stationed there became highly vulnerable to infectious diseases. With the end of 1915, the Allies scored victories in the colonial theaters, and Turkey’s win at Gallipoli did nothing to alleviate its strategic vulnerabilities in and around the Persian Gulf. The advantage lay with the Central Powers in both the East and West although Russia was not yet out of the fight, and they would have to inflict a more decisive defeat upon the British and French to relieve a painful blockade cutting them off from all maritime sources of strength. The following year would prompt both sides to try and break the stalemate.
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Year of Battles”
Chapter 8, “The Year of Battles,” covers the pivotal engagements of 1916, beginning with the naval Battle of Jutland. Admirals went much further than generals in appreciating the tactical and strategic ramifications of new technologies, and the launching of the British Dreadnought prompted every major navy in the world to follow suit. These massive battleships were fearsome weapons of war, their one drawback being difficulty in radio communication, which actually made it more efficient to use the same kind of flag signaling navies had used for centuries. Another mistake was the belief that cruisers provide reconnaissance and then escape damage while awaiting reinforcements, but their speed provided little protection against modern battleships. The first, and only, clash of main fleets took place at Jutland on May 31 and June 1, 1916. At the outset of the war, Germany planned to use its High Seas Fleet as part of a “risk strategy” of wearing down the advantages of the Royal Navy bit by bit across a series of engagements until they were vulnerable to a direct challenge. But after suffering losses in early engagements beyond what they could sustain, the fleet spent 18 months near their harbors, with no purpose other than to keep a chunk of the British fleet there to observe them.
By the spring of 1916, German Admiral Scheer decided to venture out and take on the British fleet in what he imagined would be a surprise move. Unbeknownst to him, the British long ago broke German naval codes, although a bureaucratic snag hindered the announcement of their movements to the British fleet under Admiral John Jellicoe. Jutland would go down as one of the most closely studied and hotly debated naval battles in history, but Keegan finds the sequence to be fairly simple. British battle cruisers ran into the German scouting group, with the Germans getting the best of the initial exchange. German pursuit brought them in contact with the main line of British battleships, who pummeled them until Scheer ordered a retreat. The German fleet then turned around again, encountering the British fleet at an angle highly favorable to the latter. The German battleships withdrew under cover from ships armed with torpedoes, and the British fleet held back and the main German fleet returned home. Although the British lost more sailors killed and ships sunk, the overall number of German ships rendered inactive was higher, and they would never again make a major attempt to break out.
By 1916 war production for the Allies was growing massively, especially in terms of manpower and number of artillery shells. British volunteers flooded the allied ranks. While the French and British debated what to do with their immense resources, Falkenhayn decided that among the Allies, France was the one most vulnerable to breaking, and so the Germans would focus their events on the old fortress city of Verdun, a target of immense symbolic value that was surrounded on three sides. Verdun was a quiet sector since the early days of the war, and Falkenhayn’s plan was to put enough pressure on it to draw a steady stream of French reinforcements, until they either gave up the crucial position or suffered grievous losses over time. On February 21, the German bombardment opened, followed by an infantry assault that nearly captured all of Verdun, but forces under Philippe Pétain decided to mount a defense at all costs, playing into Falkenhayn’s intended strategy. The subsequent fighting was relentlessly back-and-forth on the ground, but the French managed to withstand the worst of German artillery and hang on to their key forts. The German plan to wear out the French army resulted in their own army suffering comparable losses, but they also could not mount an offensive to drive the French from Verdun without taking unsustainable losses, especially among units who already spent considerable time in the theater. Even so, an ill-fated French attack allowed the Germans to counter and capture the prized fort of Vaux, a high position from which the Germans unleashed a new form of poison gas. Their attempt to seize the last fort failed, however, and after frightful losses on both sides, the Germans lapsed into a defensive position, until a renewed French offensive months later retook much of their lost ground.
At the end of 1915, command of the British Expeditionary Force went from John French to Douglas Haig, who stood out in a generation of tough-minded senior officers for his apparent indifference to the fate of his men. Haig planned a major British offensive for their position on the Somme, where there was little activity since 1914, giving the Germans time to develop a deep network of defenses. The British had 20 divisions at hand, but many were inexperienced volunteers. Haig’s plan was to launch a massive bombardment that would cut barbed wire and stun the enemy, so that his own soldiers could simply march across no-man’s-land and occupy the enemy trenches. Such expectations proved wildly optimistic, as shells were not designed to cut wire, and artillery had to strike a perfect balance of striking targets in front of soldiers without hitting the soldiers themselves. The end result, as was often the case in World War I, was that soldiers marched across open fields, facing terrible enemy fire with only their uniforms and the occasional mound of dirt to protect them. On July 1, less than a third of the attacking divisions even made it to the German front line, leading to an appalling 60,000 British casualties (including 20,000 dead) in a single day, the worst day in all of British military history. The Germans prepared a defense in depth that permitted the taking of the front line, followed by a swift counterattack. The front lines moved only marginally over the course of July. The British were able to regain momentum with the first use of a tank in battle, which panicked the German defenders, but these prototypes were not technically sound enough to sustain an offensive. The battle ended in November 1916 with modest gains, and it stands today as one of the darkest episodes in British history.
The other great offensive of 1916 was the so-called Brusilov Offensives, encouraged by a substantial transferal of Austrian forces to the Italian front. Germany instituted an extractive occupation in Poland, which the Russians were eager to dislodge. Bringing a massive advantage in men and artillery, the Russians failed to coordinate their assets, and more men simply led to more casualties. General Alexei Brusilov called for another offensive across hundreds of miles of front, which upon its launch in July met with some early successes, particularly against Austrian forces in the south. The mass of forces quickly outstripped their meager logistics, but it still represented the most significant Russian victory to date, and led to Falkenhayn’s replacement by Hindenburg.
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
In an operational sense, the First World War outside of Europe was a relatively minor affair. There were few major engagements, none of which would have a major impact on the overall course of the war. In popular culture depictions like The African Queen (1951), the war can provide a backdrop for an entertaining adventure story, rather than a hellish reckoning with a world tearing itself apart. However, the political significance of the wider war would become apparent in the following years. For example, Japan’s role during this conflict was a small one, picking off a handful of German-occupied territories on the Chinese coastline. When the Allies demanded that they return these territories to China, on the basis that the postwar world would be one of self-determining nations rather than multinational empires, the Japanese wondered why such provisions did not apply to Dutch-occupied Indonesia, French-occupied Indochina (now Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam), and British-occupied Singapore. At the Treaty of Versailles, the Japanese even proposed a provision in the League of Nations covenant assuring equality among all races, which was rejected. They would absorb the bitter lesson that empires were taken rather than granted, and in the next war sought their own Asian empire that would equal that of the Europeans.
It is common to identify nationalism as a cause of the war, and the spread of the war into colonial territories helped lay the seeds for the nationalism of subjected peoples. Soldiers from India, Senegal, Indochina, and many other places filled the ranks of their colonizers’ armies, constituting a majority of forces in some places outside the major fronts. In Pankaj Mishra’s 2020 book Bland Fanatics, he discusses how:
relatively little is known about how the war accelerated political struggles across Asia and Africa; how Arab and Turkish nationalists, and Indian and Vietnamese anti-colonial activists, found new opportunities in it; or how, while destroying old empires in Europe, the war turned Japan into a menacing imperialist power in Asia (Mishra, Pankaj. Bland Fanatics. 2020, p. 51).
The combatants were mainly European, but the scale and consequence of the war was truly global.
In Europe, the battles of 1916 test the question of whether the terrible costs of the Western Front battles were a structural necessity or an act of utter folly. According to Keegan, Verdun was, for the French, more important as a symbol than as an actual defensible position. He notes that had they lost control of Verdun:
the results might have been beneficial to the French conduct of the war, for it was indeed a death trap, while the broken and wooded terrain to its rear at a cost of life much lower were to suffer in and around the sacrificial city in the months to come (281).
Haig’s plan at the Somme was questionable on its own merits, as it made assumptions about the capability of artillery that the conduct of the war had refuted many times over. Given the inexperience of his largely volunteer army, Haig seems to have drawn up a technological solution so as to spare his soldiers from having to engage in elaborate fire-and-movement maneuvers beyond their training. Since the technology was plainly not up to the task, the result instead was a massacre, “moving forward upright and in straight lines” into a hailstorm of enemy fire (291). As Keegan points out, there was no way for soldiers to avoid suffering heavy casualties against an entrenched enemy defender. Only a successful offensive had hope of ending the war. Haig's lack of adaptability over a campaign of many months strikes Keegan as particularly galling, something which also reinforces the theme of incompetence that runs throughout the book. A lack of good options does not justify the worst option.
