Dan Snow's History Hit - The Western Front

Episode Date: May 17, 2021

The Western Front in the First World War is a story of aristocratic generals sending ordinary men over the top to their deaths in futile frontal attacks against entrenched positions. Or is it? In this episode, Dan interviews the brilliant historian Nick Lloyd, author of The Western Front who tells a much more nuanced account of the Western Front. They talk about the myths and legends of these campaigns, the great leaps forward in technology between 1914-1918; and how the men in command, and those on the front line, desperately tried to grapple with the complexities of this unprecedently brutal war. 

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Every so often a book comes along. A book lands on the old desk, the old in-tray, and it feels like this will become a kind of canonical text. It feels like it will be a benchmark against which other books are judged. It feels like it is the best summary we have available of a particularly large and important part of history. And I'm going to say, Nick Lloyd's book about the Western Front is a book like that. The best-selling military historian Nick Lloyd has just published his magisterial account of fighting on the Western Front of the First World War, from the summer of 1914 to the autumn-fall of 1918.

It's so fascinating because, of course, the Western Front, almost like no other series of campaigns in history, is more mired in myth, legend, folk tales. Is this a story of aristocratic generals sending young working-class men in futile attacks against entrenched positions, the bloodiest fighting in history? Or is there a more interesting nuanced story to tell here? Well, I'm glad to have Nick Lloyd on the podcast to talk about it. It is a subject of enduring fascination because there is truth to all the myth. There is truth in part to all of these myths and legends, but there's also a much more interesting, much wider and important story to tell about this war. My ancestors, many of your ancestors, were caught up in this terrible fighting

on the Western Front. I've been lucky enough to meet survivors of it. Veterans now sadly passed away. It's a subject that I will never tire of talking about. It was great to have Nick Lloyd on and hear all about it. If you want to listen to Nick Lloyd on the podcast previously, we have talked about the Battle of Passchendaele, the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917. If you want to watch my tour along the Western Front, some of the sites that I enjoy where you can still get closest to those men and women that were caught up in that industrial slaughter, please watch my documentary on History Hit TV. It's a digital history channel. It's like Netflix for history. It's a streaming service just for history fans. We've got new material going up every single week.

And you just go to historyhit.tv. You can listen to Nick Lloyd's back episodes and you can also go and watch some of these documentaries. In the meantime, everyone, I hope you enjoy this conversation about the Western Front so much as I did. Nick, good to have you back on the podcast. Thanks very much. Great to be here. I can't believe it was 2017 we talked about Passchendaele.

One of the battles that has come to define the Western Front in people's memories. But now you've done the whole thing. Yeah, I haven't done the whole thing, but I've done the whole Western Front. Yeah, though I just think it's a natural move for a historian. You do kind of campaign stuff where you do an element of a war and then you want to branch out and do the whole thing. So it was a sort of natural move for me. I just felt it was necessary and needed at this point. It's difficult on this podcast because these people listening to this are history fans who will understand that old myth of lions led by donkeys has significant problems with it. But

let's quickly address that because that's one of the lots of things that people are talking about with your book. How are you thinking at the end of this about command, first of all, about generals? Why do you think we have developed such a profound critique of the generals of the First World War? And how is that connected with their performance on the Western Front? And how do you think they did perform? Yeah, I mean, I think the myth of the lions and donkeys is a cultural cliche, and it's not going anywhere. It's still sort of shorthand. You can use it as a shorthand means for all kinds of things. So, you know, if you want to talk about stupidity and futility, you can use this as a cliche, and everyone immediately understands what you're talking

about. And I think it was perhaps natural that we would seek to blame individuals and see it all as a matter of stupidity because the war was so terrible and so shocking and so unlike anything we'd ever seen before. has gone now since the First World War. So I think now we're in a stage where we're actually able to begin to start to look at it dispassionately. And we had generations of scholarship now, we've had opening of the archives, we've got more and more research on all these different aspects of the war now that are less studied than other aspects. And so after 100 years, we come to a point where we can begin to actually look at the subject in more detail and without the kind of emotion heavy approach that we've had in previous generations. So I just think it's a necessary evolution of thinking about the war. And what I try and do in the book is just actually look at it in a more of a dispassionate way. I don't want to smash people over the heads with it and say that there's no truth in the lions and donkeys myth. I think

there's elements of it, but we have to see it in a more dispassionate, rational way, I suppose. I always think it lets previous wars and commanders off the hook in a way. I mean, you look at the Valkyrn campaign in 1809 or the incredibly ill-fated expeditions to the Caribbean, Spanish America that took place in the 18th century that I'm very familiar with. They were cesspits of incompetence and poor planning. And yet it's funny that the First Lord Generals have become a kind of lightning rod for all of our criticisms of people who send men into battle, perhaps not prepared for the challenge they're going to face. Yeah, it does. And I think one of the things with the book is just trying to

appreciate the scale of the challenge of what's going on, how difficult command is on the Western Front, which numerous people have discussed prior to me. And what I try and do is you look at particularly the French and their struggles and what they are trying to do. And I want people as they go through to actually think, what would I have done? Would I have done any better? How would I have approached this? There are examples of not very good commanders. There's examples of commanders who are kind of okay. And there are examples of commanders who are really, really good. So you'd have that in any war today. And it's only war that essentially sorts it all out and separates the wheat from the chaff. And by the end of the war, you get very, very good commanders. And I'm pretty sure this is the truth for every war. By the end of it, or by the final stages of it, the people who can't

get results, who don't know what they're doing, have been cast aside. And you see that very clearly on the Western Front, where you get a new generation of commanders. So appreciating the difficulties and the challenges of command is crucial. And just seeing how it evolves, because one of the problems, I think, with, like I've done in the past, you do a single campaign study. It's only a snapshot really. It's a snapshot of a much bigger story. And what you tend to see and what you see over the course of the book is that the French will do some good things and then the Germans will respond. The French will break through one line and then the Germans will build another line. And then the French will do some really good things with counter-battery fire and the Germans will change the way they do bombardment.

So you get this constant tactical evolution, which means you have to make two steps forward in order to make one step forward. And you do something good and you can't reinforce it or you can't exploit it. And it's so frustrating. So I hope people, if they read the book, just go through and actually think, what would I have done? Would I have done something better? And I think that question is a live question. And it's something that's really important that people have a look at and see the things that were tried. Who rises, who falls, who gets promoted, who gets sacked for good reasons, for bad reasons, whatever. You see this whole movement of personnel. see this whole movement of personnel. And I think that gives it a more of a sort of a human quality because these people were humans. They weren't robots. And one of the problems you get in the First World War is that you look at the photos of these generals and they just look like cardboard cutouts. And they're not. They're individuals and they are trying to deal with the situation. It's very, very difficult. A lot of them make many mistakes, as I'm sure we all would, because they

don't know what they're doing and they don't know what the future looks like. But some of them get it early on and they get what they can and can't do, and that marks them out for greatness. Some of them make mistakes. One of them is my great-grandpa, General Snow, who, as you know, got moved on eventually. And some of them make terrible errors and enjoy great success. People like Rawlinsill, I mean, you can have both. It was a hell of a four years for some of them. Let's get into the weeds here. Military observers had known that future warfare was going to be like this.

You look at the Richmond campaign in the 1860s as General Grant approached the Confederate capital and it was a savage, attritional, underground, trench-bound kind of warfare. Why? Why do we get the Western Front? Tell everyone at home. When Napoleonic armies ran

around Europe and then went back to winter quarters in the winter, why do we suddenly develop two great fortified lines that stretch from the Alps to the sea? Well, that's a great question. I mean, you have incidences of trench warfare in earlier wars. You get it in the Russo-Japanese War, American Civil War. You get elements of fortified positional warfare, I suppose, as it would have been called. But it's a combination of the Western Front. So you get big armies, you get lots of men, 1.6 million in 1914, and you get 1.2 million Frenchmen. So you get a huge number of people in actually quite a constricted space. You get the ability

to maintain them and keep them supplied. And you get enormous amounts of weaponry and means that you have to go to ground. You can't not go to ground. You need protection from the fire swept zone because rifles and machine guns can fire so much further now. So you can actually have the open battlefield like you had back in the early 19th century, where you could sort of see your opponent on the other side of the hill and you couldn't really hit them. But obviously in the First World War, you can. So it's the intensity of the war, it's the numbers, it's the sheer amount of troops, and it's the weaponry. You can't really manoeuvre, so you haven't got a weapon system or an ability to move and outflank. So you get all of that and it just sort of mushes together into what will become the deadlock of 1915 to 1918.

So Nick, Brown Best Musket, 100 years before 1915, you mentioned there. Battle of Waterloo, Brown Best Musket, killing range, 100 metres? I'm not even sure it goes that far. Yeah, exactly. So what is the effective lethal range of a British Army rifle in the First World War? Well, it's about 600 yards. I mean, you can go, it's about 600 yards. I mean, you can go up to 2,500 yards. And of course, in the right hands, you can get 15 aimed shots a minute. Vickers machine guns, 2,000 yards. And of course, that's not looking at artillery.

The amount of firepower is just so much greater than you have in previous wars. And you got barbed wire, a new invention. For the first time, you can create a beaten zone of high explosives, of supersonic splinters of steel, which you cannot pass through as a human being made of flesh. You can deny that area to human passage. Yeah, and this is a dilemma. And they know that wars are going to be lethal. They know that wars are going to be horrible. There's an assumption that wars can't continue for very long, so that wars have to have this massive clash of arms, which they do. But I think everyone sort of underestimates just how strong and powerful modern industrial states are, and the ability to maintain troops for months on end and to keep

going. And nobody's done this before. So you have that sense of when you get to 1950, nobody has any idea how you get out of this situation. Is it the Battle of Neuve-Chapelle or Luz where they fire in the space of half an hour the entire output of British armament industries during the Boer War? Yeah, it's Neuve-Chapelle, yeah. But you can't criticise the army.

I mean, the army in that example is performing very very well it's just the problem is the environment is just a totally different law and how radical the western front is takes people time to work out what they need to do and getting the amount of firepower you need everyone underestimates what you're going to need and it's only by 1916 and 1917 that you understand and you approach it in more of a scientific way. A certain amount of trench front will need X amount of shells to destroy or to neutralise for a certain period of time. And so you can then calculate it. And it's very mathematical and precise. But early in the war, you just can't do that. You're firing what you have.

You're trying to mass infantry to smash through, which is an understandable thing because you've got infantry. You don't have the firepower. So you mass what you've got and you try and smash them through. It's only after really the end of 1915 that a number of senior commanders, particularly in the French side, are realising that we just can't do this. This is just not going to work. You mentioned the power of the state there, which is really interesting because logistics are as important as anything else. Previous states just weren't able to keep one million lads living in a field, fed, watered, clothed with medicine all winter. I mean, this is a revolutionary departure, right? Previous armies had to go home in the winter. There was nothing to eat.

Yeah. I mean, you see this very clearly on the Western front where the troops are able to be supplied and kept with uniforms and boots and food. They're able to keep in relatively good health given the conditions that they're in. And I think for other armies in the First World War, you don't get that. The Serbs can't produce uniforms. They can't produce the shells. They don't have the ammunition. The Austro-Hungarians go through huge shortages. But looking at the Western front, if you like the more advanced states, they can keep them going there indefinitely, really. As the war goes on, the manpower becomes more of a crucial issue, and they have to increasingly replace manpower with technology. We've still followed in that trajectory ever since, really. What strikes me about the First World War is actually that its reputation is one of kind of hidebound conservatism. In fact, it's a cauldron of innovation. It's dizzying how fast

things change and how much warfare changes in those three or four years. Yeah, it is. And, you know, if you just go through this, it's remarkable. And I think it's unprecedented in warfare. You start in 1914 and everything's relatively familiar. You have horse-drawn artillery, cavalry, lightly armoured infantry. And that's it, really. If you look by 1918, you've got the whole development of air power, which is bombing, strafing, control of the air, reconnaissance, even dropping things from the air, like dropping water or ammunition or use of air mobility as well. Artillery, the massive expansion of firepower. But it's not just the amount of guns or the caliber of the guns, it's the shells,

it's producing the shells and producing the things like the fuses. So you get the 106 fuse, which is much more sensitive and much more accurate and much more effective at destroying wire. A whole technological revolution that goes on to produce this and to make it effective. A whole technological revolution that goes on to produce this and to make it effective. Machine guns, rifles, rifle grenades, steel helmets, gas, gas masks, sophisticated signals intelligence, tanks. The list just goes on. And the fact that you go from zero to within 18 months having to deploy about 40 tanks on the Western Front, you're looking at the British, it's just remarkable.

The French are developing their tanks. You've got the whole production of air power. So it's mind-boggling how fast this goes, how quickly technology is invented, developed, integrated, and then actually made into an effective weapon. So by 1918, it's a fully 3D battlefield in every aspect. And it's not like 1914. So I think if you compare the ends of the war, you see a shift that I would argue is probably unparalleled in modern history. Yeah, that four years, that's less than the time between the Battle of Talavera in the Peninsula War and the Battle of Waterloo with Wellington in command. And the technological change there was limited to say the least. I mean, maybe a couple of rockets present at the Waterloo campaign. You may have

read my great-grandpa's journal. He was injured in 14, came back in 15 to command a division outside Ypres. And he was like a tourist. He was like, oh, there's no one around during the day. And there's airships. They look good. His letters and his diary are remarkable. And he was meant to be in charge. And it was like he was walking through a new landscape. It was one he didn't recognise. He's a subaltern. He'd been galloping across the veld of Southern Africa as a kind of swashbuckling young lieutenant. And here he is in this kind of moonscape where he comments like, you don't see anyone during the day. And that was a kind of radical change from even a few months before. Yeah. And I think that would shock you. If you go to war in 14 and you're in a war of movement,

it's familiar-ish, I suppose. Obviously, the mass is different from South Africa. And then if you get injured and you come back in 16, it's a totally different army. So the army's bigger, the British army's much bigger. It's full of people who you'd never meet normally. You wouldn't see them in the army. And you've got this huge mass of stuff going on.

So even in the 1st of July, 1916, as we know, the big disaster of the British army in the war. But you look at the diaries and the accounts of people leading up to it, everyone's just really impressed at how much stuff they've got and how much effort is being put into this. So there's a great pride there. Of course, the British haven't really worked out how to fight properly yet. But the application and the fact that they are here in strength now is remarkable. But you do get this with people that get to a certain point in the war and then leave it. And then they come back and they can't recognise it because there's so much going on. And I'm thinking a little heart, of course, the great British military theorist who

gets injured on the Somme. And of course, he's invalided back home. So he never sees 1917 or 1918. For him, the war is the psalm. And I think that goes on to influence his very critical views of high command, because you don't see the whole thing. So if you were to see what 1916 was like and then come back in 1918, it's very different. You're listening to Down Snow's History. We're talking about the Western Front with military historian Nick Lloyd. More after this.

Romans, gods, Spartans, the wars of Alexander the Great's successors in incredible, entirely necessary detail. The Ancients podcast, it's kind of like Dan's show, except it's just ancient history. We've got the leading experts. We've got the big topics from We've got the big topics, from ancient Vietnam to the fall of Rome. Subscribe to The Ancients on History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's

Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week What does writing this book tell us about the nature of command? I mean, there's that great expression someone, the French general said, if Napoleon was here, he'd know what to do. There was genius in the war, but it was hidden.

It's in incremental improvements to silent registration of artillery, or as you say, getting a usable tank onto the battlefield within 18 months. Where are the moments of genius, do you think, on the Western front? There's that great exchange with David Lloyd George, where he's telling a bunch of generals, it's funny, there's no great generals in this war, is there? And I think one of them responds, yeah, there's no great politicians either. And I think there's a puzzlement there. It's like, well, where's the Napoleon? Where's the general? And they're all swallowed by it. They're all engulfed by the enormity of the war. But I do think there are moments of genius. And I

do take through several generals that I think get it. And I think Philip Pétain is one of them, where certainly early in the war, he correctly appreciates what needs to be done on the Western Front and what can be done on the Western Front and what can be done on the Western Front. And that crucial recognition of the importance of attrition and the importance of not breaking through step-by-step advances is a crucial insight into the reality of what you can and can't do in that trench deadlock. And other commanders resisted this. They didn't want that to be true. They wanted to be able to break through and restore normality and manoeuvre. But actually recognising that at the moment that's not possible, I think, is a crucial insight. And others follow that. Rawlinson has the same insight, but he's not

able to really act on it at the Somme because of Haig. And I think later on, there are other examples of great insights in terms of what commanders are able to do. And I think you see that again in 1918, where there's various commanders who understand how to get results on the battlefield, Curry, Monash, some of the Dominion commanders as well. And I think the crucial difference is, as you go through the war, is that those commanders who are eager to learn and to see what the Western Front's like, okay, what do I need to do? I need to speak to all the right people, all the experts, the artillery guys and the logistics guys and the infantry, and I need to work out what we can do. And there are those other commanders who insist that whatever is out there on the Western Front must conform to my

understanding of war, my classical pre-war understanding. Someone like Higgs, for example, who goes to the Western Front on the assumption that I kind of know everything. I know about war. And therefore, what is that? They must conform to what I know. And you get other people that go, this is entirely new. I'm coming in with no preconceptions. What do we need to do? And I think certainly there are commanders that know what can be achieved on the Western Front. And there are those commanders who don't. And I think that's a crucial distinction that I think you can see in the book. And there are commanders that are good for a certain period of the war, and then they sort of lose it. And then there are commanders who are great at other periods of the war. So it depends as well on that. But I think what you see in the war with the commander, the importance of

bringing in experts and understanding you need all the combined efforts of everyone to produce effect. And it's not just about individual genius so much. It's a scientific war and it's combining everything. And of course, you have the whole coalition aspect as well, where the Allies get there in 1918 with the appointment of Ferdinand Foch. And it's being able to work in a coalition effectively. That's also a crucial insight that they can't do it on their own. And they need to have new structures for command that they wouldn't have had in previous wars.

We're talking about commandos, and your book is a brilliant portrait of command, but also it's NCOs, isn't it? It's junior officers and NCOs all the way up through the command structure. It really strikes me from your previous book on Passchendaele, reading about the Battle of Amiens. You just need, down to platoon level, every level, you need people that just know how to do this on the Western Front, how to fire, manoeuvre, get through, bypass strong points. And you can't will that army into being, can you? No, no, you can't. And it takes time and effort and you need to work out what you need to do. So it's all right training people, but the war they're going to be fighting is very different to what you're training for.

So the adaptability and the innovation is crucial. And having people that can think clearly, encouraging a culture of questioning, which is, again, it's not always easy to do, particularly in that situation. And there's laments as the war goes on that the quality of the soldiers isn't good enough and the quality of the officers isn't good enough. And I think later on, they realized that perhaps they have been too eager to throw infantry into situations where human flesh is just not going to make the difference. You need that combination of technology and firepower to give your people the best chance of getting through. And you see this by 1917, most people

have recognized that infantry can only go about 1200 yards. That's it. That's as far as you're going to go. And then you need to either dig in or you get new troops in, but you're not going to get battalions that's going to go three miles in that trench deadlock. Changes in 1918 slightly, but in that real trench deadlock, you can't go that far because it's just so exhausting and tiring and taxing on battalions. I was about to say, as a proud Canadian, I was about to say, I'm glad you put that little reference to 1918 and the AMIA, the big Canadian advance at AMIA, the record advance that I learned with my mother's milk. 1918 is like full circle where everything changes and you get the restoration of manoeuvre, the Germans come out. So there's none of those big defences again. So you get a

much more mobile battle. But still, the memory of the First World War is still in that middle period, 1915, 1917. That's the First World War for many people. That's the essence of the war. But obviously, 1918 dispels a lot of those myths. It's a very different kind of war.

I do sometimes get nervous that those of us that are in the know, do we sometimes, did you find this when you're writing about, are we in danger of throwing out the baby in the bathwater? Are we, oh, you know, yeah, learning curve. And actually hundreds of thousands of people were killed and wounded in utterly pointless attacks by all sides in the Western Front. I learned recently, which I didn't know much about, the pre-Christmas 1914 assaults by the British army that were just the definition of futile. And do you feel as a historian that sometimes is it too easy to forget the kind of tragedy

of those moments? Oh, it is. Yeah, absolutely. And you get by 1915, the French army, the French politicians are getting nervous because they're getting people coming back from the front talking about these little attacks or these attacks which have to go into sort of right headlines and just produce carnage. And they're talking about, well, the generals say it's all about gaining the moral high ground. And I think there's a line in the book where one of the French deputies talks about they're just all dead. They're just all dead in front of the German line and they're carrying on. And you do get this sense of anger and futility about it. And I think, you know, that's part of the story of the book is that these generals are all overwhelmed with it. And a lot of them make a lot of these mistakes. And I think by 16, they're realizing that in many ways, their most valuable of caution, and he wants to save his men as much as possible. And I think that's why he becomes the national hero that he does. And you get other

British commanders as well, who have that sense of, we have to shield our men from the storm as much as possible. And there are other commanders who don't really share that, who believe actually we need to put everything in now and smash the enemy as much as we can or we can just continue to take these losses by 1916 you really can't that's why you have to produce tanks and all these other things so it's a tragedy it's a complete tragedy and everyone makes mistakes everyone makes huge errors i think not necessarily everyone but there are huge errors all over certainly in the early phases of the war. But I think once commanders realise that this is not going to work, you do see changes. So I think the second half of

the war is quite different. And also the generals were not insulated from their mistakes. I mean, Castelnau, French general, lost a son, at least one son in an attack he directed. I mean, you know, these generals and indeed the politicians were losing relatives, friends, often. Yeah, absolutely. Castelnau actually loses three sons in the war. He's asked in the war, he says, what are you going to do after the war? And he says, I shall weep for my children. It's just utterly heartbreaking. You can't imagine the horror of that. Foch is the same. Foch loses his only son. Ludendorff loses, I think, two step-sons. The list goes on. Allenby loses his only son. So the tragedy and horror is transmitted to the generals. There's no question about that. I think some would say it's a price worth paying. We have to pay the blood cost and all these kind of things, but they're not insulated from it. That's a crucial insight, I think, that people have to understand if we're going to judge them. And we can judge them and we can talk about, we might have favourite generals or infamous generals, and I think that debate will go on. But I think it has to move on from the idea that these people are all

criminally incompetent, because I just don't think that sits up. The scale of the challenge is terrifying, really. And nobody knows the scale of the challenge in 1914. They have no idea what they're going to need to do to win. And they have a short-term mindset. They have to win quickly because they can't really imagine this horror going on. It's only later on they realise that actually this is going to go on and therefore we need to have a strategy that takes that into account

and allows us to survive rather than sort of petering out in the summer. You've studied it all your life. Having written this huge book now about the whole of the Western Front, did it change any of your thinking? I've done a fair bit on the Western Front, so I was pretty aware of it. I was very eager and interested to look at the French side of things, which I hadn't covered previously. So writing the French story of the Western Front, I found fascinating and I found really interesting to see how their developments and what they're working out are some cases paralleled or maybe the British get there slightly later and just to see how the

French do things. So I found that the most interesting because I think what you see in the book is the early stages of the book. It's French and Germans and that's the war. And then as you go forward, the British gradually increase in importance and strength, almost to a parity by 1917. And then the Americans come in. So for me, the French aspect was the most interesting to do. And I think for readers who might be familiar with the Somme or Passchendaele, they won't be familiar, most people won't be familiar with the French battles. So that was really interesting from my perspective and something I was really interested to write there and see how it linked in with the British.

Thank you very much, Nick, for coming back on the podcast. The book is called? The Western Front, History of the First World War. Where do you go next, buddy? Another front. Eastern Front. So yeah, we're going to do Eastern Front. So I'm writing at the moment.

It's Austria, Hungary andary and Russia and Serbia and Romania and Bulgaria and Italy. So it's the Eastern Front and the Balkans. It's a war that, again, most of us have absolutely no understanding of, myself included. So it's a fascinating story. And in many ways, it's the heart of the war, but it's a very, very different war. So yeah, we'll see how this one comes out but it's a natural sequel, I suppose, to the Western Front. Can't wait to talk to you about that. Good luck with it, Nick.

See you soon. Thanks so much. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.

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