The battles on the
Western Front in August, 1914 represent the culminating point of forty-three years of European military history the moment when the two major military powers (and a few
lesser ones too) tested out their plans, their weapons, their tactics and their ideas. This was La Grande Guerre at last, following decades of speculation and colonial experirsentation. It was a turning point as important as any in the history of warfare - and yet it is almost totally neglected by the wargamer. I would estimate that for every game played on August, 1914, there are several hundred played on the Sudan or the Zulu campaigns, and even a few dozen played on later
stages of the First World War (almost all, paradoxically, in the air).
Why do wargamers so obstinately stick to the petty skirmishes of Mahdist vs Recoat or Ball vs Red Baron? I think there are many reasons, which actually tell us quite a lot about the nature of wargaming as a hobby:
- A) Small actions and individual skirmishes are notoriously more amenable to play with toy soldiers than La Grande Guerre, since the latter seems so impersonal and abstract - even though it never is to the people actually involved!
B) Small actions are the stuff of romance and tales of derring-do. Kipling and the Biggles books, the film ZULU, and the Boy's Own Paper have left us with an inexhaustable fund of colourful exploits in small unit action which the rather shabby and inglorious events of August, 1914 (which were heavily censored at the time anyway) cannot even begin to hope to rival. There is a sense of shame about the 1914 Haup tschlacht which persists in the popular imagination, even though it was the real thing whereas all those sideshows were really military non-events.
C) Reference works and use "wargamer's guides" to August 1914 are practically nonexistent, yet they proliferate for the sideshows. Admittedly there are model figures available in plenty for August 1914, but somehow no one seems to use them for that.
D) Apparently the WWII perception is reversed for WWI, in that the "forgotten army" in 1914 is the main body of the main protagonist, whereas in 1944-45 it is precisely the Indian Army, fighting in Burma as a sideshow! Presumably the reason for being forgotten is the same in each case is that 'our side' failed to win a glorious and conclusive victory. In 1914 we won only after four years of horrible trench warfare. In 1945 we won only by using the atom bomb. Wargamers like their armies to be decisively victorious, apparently, without recourse to such terrible expedients. War must be neat and clean for the wargamer to be interested in it....
A) Cavalry Encounter:
A French Cuirassier brigade goes forward in the hilly and heave y-woo a Ardennes Forest to scout for the enemy. A German Uhlan regiment fleets them, skirmishes mounted at first, then falls back on its reserve line or cycle infantry and machine guns. French victory conditions are to defeat the cavalry and identify and outflank the infantry. German victory conditions are to lure the French into a devastating fire trap.
B) The Angels of Mons:
A Scottish regiment is dug into the industrial suburbs near Mores, using worker's houses and wooded gardens for cover. A German infantry brigade is tasked to attacked. Scottish victory conditions are to extract themselves with less than 15% casualties while inflicting heavy damage on the enemy. German victory conditions are to pin and overrun the Jocks, using heavy indirect artillery fire followed by well coordinated infiltration by small groups. Both sides have a major problem! Much will depend on the rules for tactical liaison and coordination, as well as the invisibility factor generated by the close country.
C. Offensive a 1'Ourtrance:
A French regiment with close-support 75mm field guns occupies a low crest overlooking a village and copse, with standing corn in the fields between. A Bavarian company with a section of machine guns has just occupied the village and copse (no time to dig in!) when the order comes for the French to turn them out. The French rust advance with fire and movement in dispersed squad columns, with infantry-artillery liaison, across a mile of open ground. If they take too long developing their attack, the Germans will be reinforced by two more conpanies. Victory goes to the side which holds the village and copse at the end. French must go forward without being pinned down at too many points: Germans must use the (rather unpromising) ground to best effect. Extra points to the French for every burst of the Marseillaise that they succeed in coordinating, at company level! Germans obviously win if they succeed in getting a sensible message through to their indirect-fire artillery.
D. The Empty Battlefield:
The terrain is generally open with cornfields and copses,
- German line is believed to run along one edge of the table, with moderate artillery support and certain specified infantry positions (not very strongly held).
- French have a regiment of reservist infantry in dead ground along the opposite edge of the table. In this game there is an active umpire who runs the Germans and the French high command with one player only, for the French regimental commander. No figures are required for the Germans, who are invisible.
The player is told he must attack, without artillery support, as best he may, using the fire and manoeuvre tactics outlined in scenario C above. His men, however, are not well led or very proficient. They suffer various adverse morale checks and more or less go to ground short of their target (depending on umpire die rolls). Confusion factors are built into the 'passage of lines' as one company tries to relieve another.
Meanwhile. the umpire keeps giving snippets of good or bad information to the player - eg 'four batteries of 75's have wandered into your area' or 'they've just been ordered out again'; 'the brigadier has arranged aa flank attack on the enemy' or 'it's just been called off because the men are having lunch' and so on.,. The umpire must keep up the confusion and make sure that there are massiAre numbers of the player's regiment shulkitng to the rear in animated panic. The essence of the game is to see how well the player copes with each new situation in turn. He must move his personal figure around the table top to the key point at each development - eg to get liaison with the 75's when the appear, to stop the skulkers turning into a routed rob, and to talk to the brigadier to get things moving again, Of Course WE know that the attack has no chance of success - but the player doesn't, and he must only gradually be made aware his victory conditions are all about damage limitation rather than about 'victory', This is war on the empty battlefield, after all, All the above scenarios are based on real events.
Organization-French;
French cavalry regiments were composed of 4 ''active' and 2 reservist squadrons. In a cavalry division there were three brigades each of two regiments and a MG section (2 guns), Division artillery R 8 guns! Division also has a cyclist group of 324 men,
Infantry regiments were three battalions (2 in reserve regiments) each of four companies and an MG section, A company has two platoons each of two sections, A Division has a cavalry squadron, 3 artillery groups (each of 12 guns), three infantry brigades each of two regiments, )1e-serve infantry brigades had three regiments of two battalions, plus a Chasseur a Pied battalion.
Organization-German:
Cavalry regiment has four squadrons. Cavalry division has three brigades each of two regiments and a four-gun battery, plus a divisional MG battery and 1-3 Jaeger battalions. Each Jaeger battalion had four infantry companies, 1 MG company (6 guns), and one cyclist company.
Infantry regiment has three battalions plus 7 MG's. The battalion has four companies each of three platoons. The infantry division has two brigades of two regiments each, plus a cavalry regiment and 72 guns (Or 36 guns for a reserve division) and a bridging train. Note that each German 'active' corps had an air squadron, whereas the French had only one squadron per army.
Organization-British:
Cavalry regiment has three squadrons and 2 MG's. The cavalry division has four brigades each of three regiments and six field guns.
Infantry regiment has one battalion of four companies each of four platoons, plus two MG's. A division is three brigades each of four regiments, and 76 guns. There were four air squadrons with the BEF in August 1914, making it the most lavishly equipped formation in terms of aircraft per ground soldier (it had two infantry corps and the cavalry division).
Organization-Terrain:
Allow approximately 600 m front for a battalion in attack (in several echelons), 1500 m in defence (mostly 'up front'), or 4000 m of road space for a brigade on the march. All armies stressed dispersion and the use of cover, but there was a particular problem with French artillery, which relied heavily on direct fire or 'masked' fire (i.e. just hull-down behind a ridge with battery commanders/ observers on the crestline itself). This arrangement made the 75's conspicuous and vulnerable to counter-battery fire, whereas other armies had a high proportion of howitzers and relied particularly on truly indirect fire (i.e. from concealed positions a long way from a ridgeline, with observers communicating by telephone, air or distant signals). The French tried to fight from ridges with open glacis in front of them (see scenario 'C' above) whenever they had a choice - but the Germans could usually bring down fire in any terrain, provided they had established their communications between artillery and infantry.
Doctrine:
Much ink has been spilt on the question of tactical doctrines applied in August 1914, and with reason! The armies which fought then were trying out all sorts of theories and abstract logic that had been buzzing around the military press for the previous 43 years. There was a huge head of steam to release, and no one really knew whether the armoured kamikaze Bleriot monoplane sacrificing itself in the heart of a Zeppelin would prove to be the decisive weapon of the war or whether the old-fashioned bayonet would be. Certainly the machine gun was undervalued in most armies, except perhaps in the German Jaeger vanguard battlegroups that operated in close support of the cavalry. Combining a high level of both mobility and firepower, these spearheads were able to probe deep and put the French vanguards at a tactical disadvantage. They operated as aggressive all-arms teams which had some distinct similarities with the panzer divisions of a later age.
Also prefiguring the blitzkrieg was the German technique of marching hard to outflank and envelop the enemy. This had been spectacularly successful in 1870, and the whole French literature before 1914 betrayed a deep apprehension about it. Hence when the moment of battle finally arrived the French had a doctrinal formula to counter-act it (i.e. charging forward against the German centre to paralyse it and force the enveloping wings to withdraw), but in practice this was rarely applied. Contrary to popular belief the French were actually very reluctant to charge blindly forward, simply because they were almost always deeply worried about their flanks. They usually made limited advances with a small fraction of their forces, then discovered that the Germans were attempting an envelopment, and withdrew.
For example in one of the supposed 'mass attacks' in Lorraine, at Sarrebourg, the high command imagined that it was sending an entire army into the assault, whereas on the ground only one division was seriously engaged (including only two or three regimental assaults) before the whole army withdrew due to threats on its flank. We often read that a third of a million French casualties were suffered in these reckless early assaults, but in reality the figure cannot have been much higher than 20,000, or about one percent of the French forces in the field. It was only after several months of marching, counterrmarching and trench warfare that losses actually reached the 'third of a million' level which is wrongly attributed to reckless frontal attacks in August 1914.
- Correction [from MWAN 24]
I said that the French lost no more than about 20,000 casualties in their reckless frontal charges, and that it took several months for the butcher's bill to rise to the third of a million, often quoted. In fact, this is wrong, as I have discovered from reading Henry Contamine's La Revanche 1871-1914 (Berger-Levrault, Paris, 1957). The figures he gives are as follows;
Up to 29th August the French lost 260,000 casualties including 75,000-dead, about a half of which were in the first battles (20-22 August). To this must be added about 10,000 British casualties, an unspecified number of Belgians and some 15,000 unwounded French prisoners,
From 29th August to 10th September the total French losses were 35,000 dead, 90,000 wounded and around 100,000 prisoners, The German loss is estimated at about 20% less than the French, which makes it More than a quarter of a million.
We are discussing at least fifteen different battles in this period, however, which gives an average of 34,000 casualties per battle (including 'march losses' and the surrender of isolated garrisons in between the fighting), This is certainly heavy when compared with a total of 24,000 casualties in 'America's bloodiest day' at Antietam, although less heavy when compared with 60,000 British hit on the first day of the Somme. The average Division lost a quarter of its strength before 29th August, but none lost as much as a half its strength. A few regiments lost 90%, but it was more normal for them to lose about a quarter.
These losses represent about 10% of all the losses suffered by France in WWI, which obviously rakes the scale of slaughter a very great deal more than I had originally supposed. However I would still point out that the majority of these losses were suffered by troops on the defensive rather than in the assault, even in the strategically most offensive operations we find relatively few regiments making attacks, and relatively many standing still to fight exclusively by fire. In the first battles of the six armies, 20-22 August, I would estimate that perhaps 50,000 of the 130,000 casualties were suffered in attacks, with the rest in defence.
Back to Original Article
The troops of both sides were shocked and bewildered by the new breed of high explosive shelling which they suffered, and this was particularly true of the French because they could not often identify the enemy's gun positions to knock them out. But on both sides the front line infantry often found they had to go to ground under shell fire, and lost the ability to 'read the battle' or maintain liaison with friendly formations.
"The empty battlefield" was a reality, and it became very difficult to maintain a tactical plan, even though actual casualties were often much lower than was believed at the time (or later). Time and again small groups of shell-shocked stragglers would make their way to the rear claiming to be the '-sole survivors' of their regiment, only to find hundreds of other 'sole survivors' of their regiment eventually join them. We must rewember that both sides were new to combat and had received no effective battle-innoculation. They simply could not achieve in practice what was asked of them by their sophisticated and quite 'modern' tactical manuals. Some units with especially resourceful and energetic officers could sometimes make it work, but more often the tactics degenerated to a quite rudimentary level. Where the units were especially badly supplied with officers and NCOs -- as in the French reserve formations -- there was a tendency to panic almost as soon as the first shot was received.
The excitment and fear of the unknown was a powerful factor working against tactics which might have been successful if the troops had been seasoned and experienced.
In theory both sides wanted to form a solid mass of armies to fight a single decisive battle 'with all forces united', but in practice the armies became spread out over a huge frontage - from Lille in Northwest France to Mulhouse on the Swiss frontier. There were many fairly small battles, of short duration. The biggest involved only three or four army corps fighting for three days. Because neither side succeeded in uniting its forces, there was no big decisive confrontation but plenty of partial engagements, pulled punches and manoeuvres. In Lorraine the line finally came to rest around Nancy, while in the North the French skirmished and retreated as far as the Marne before making a stand as the exhausted Germans pulled back to the Aisne.
The month long campaign was remembered by its participants for its endless marching on dusty roads in the blazing heat among streams of pitiable refugees. The battles were few and far between - almost 'sideshows', in fact. Maybe for that reason the wargarrer may find something to interest him in them after all!
(Editor's Note: World War I figures are available from the following manufacturers: Minifigs; Ahketon, USA, RD 1, Box 125, Philadelphia, NY, 13673; Die Kaiserzeit, 82 Atlantic, Keyport, N.J. 07735. I hope I haven't missed anyone, but if I have, please let me know so I can list them. The Airfix troops (20mm) can also be used very effectively for this period. Also, Peter Laing -- 15mm figures.)
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© Copyright 1986 Hal Thinglum
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