WAR MEMOIRS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22020, 1 August 1933, Page 8

WAR MEMOIRS

BY MR LLOYD GEORGE

THE RUSSIAN FAILURE

USELESS SLAUGHTER

THE RUSSIAN COLLAPSE Whilst, during the summer of 1915, the Russian armies were being shattered and pounded by the overwhelming artillery of Germany, and were unable to put up any defence'owing to the lack of rifles and ammunition, the French were hoarding their shells as if they were golden francs, and were pointing with pride to ' the enormous accumulation of reserve dumps behind the lines. I recollect a munition conference in Paris where Frfench generpls flourished their statistics of accumulated millions with all the pride 1 of possession and of achievement What about Britain? When Britain began to manufacture in earnest, and turned out her hundreds of sans, great and small, and her hundreds of thousands of shells of all calibres, the British generals treated the production as if we were preparing either for some great race or contest where it was essential that the British equipment should be equal to, and'--better than, that which had been provided for any competitor in the field. The military leaders in both countries never "seemed to have grasped what ought fto have been their dominant thought—that they were engaged with Russia in a common enterprise, where it was vital to the attainment of a common end that they should pool their resources, and each , of them be put in the,best position to contribute his share to the speedy accomplishment of that aim. TEAM SPIRIT ABSENT The team spirit was conspicuously absent during the first years of the war. 'Each player ;was .thinking too much of his own scoring, and too little of victory for his side. The recognition by the French generals of the towering fact that Russia had an overwhelming superiority in men never had any effective practical outcome, except a constantly expressed demand that Russia should send a ~ large contingent of these men to France to aid the French army in its defence of French territory, and save French manhood from an undue share of sacrifice which such defence involved. Quantities of. guns, rifles and ammunition were sent from Britain and France to Russia before her final collapse, but they were despatched reluctantly. They were quite inadequate to the need, and when they reached the hard-pressed armies of Russia they came too late to

avert the final catastrophe. The answer (Of the French and British ; generals to every suggestion for. the remunitionment of Russia was that they had nothing to spare in 1914-1915 or 1916, and that when they gave anything away to Russia it was out of their own dire need. That was a answer if fatuous and wasteful efforts j to crash through the formidable German entrenchment were the best strategy for either of those years. 'Allied generalship on the Western Front never gave any weight to the fact that up to'the third quarter of 1916 the .'Germans had a definite superiority in heavy guns in the West as well as the East. I am not sure that they even realised it. They could see their own guns.' They could not visualise those of the enemy. DISPARITY IN ARTILLERY And yet their own Intelligence Officers supplied them with abundant evidence of the Allied inferiority in artillery. In 1916 I was shown a French memorandum which gave the comparative strength of the German and French artillery in the greatest battle of the war—the Battle of Verdun—three months after the battle had commenced, when both sides had brought- lip every gun they could spare in the west. The memorandum demonstrated that the Germans not" only possessed a total numerical superiority of guns on the Verdun front, but that they had approximately 740 heavy and very heavy guns against the French 224—0 r more than three times their equipment of these powerful weapons. And yet at' this time they were engaged in massing all , the artillery they could spare for their i 'campaign in the east against Russia! The western generals will point to these figures as a proof that they could not send a single gun or shell away from their front to help at any other. What it does demonstrate is the folly of attempting >With inferior artillery to attack a highly trained army skilfully entrenched and armed with superior weapons. Anyone who has seen the German entrenchments will realise how formidable an enterprise it was to capture them. The fortresses of Beaumont Hammel, Pozieres, and Thiepyal will serve as specimens. They were excavated deep down under the surface; These dug-out fortresses were strengthened by iron girders and concrete, so that no shell could hope to penetrate their wellprotected depth. GUNS AND DEFENCES To shell them was like bombarding the Catacombs. On the other hand, the German task in attacking the French lines was equally hopeless. The Allies had considerable numerical superiority on the Western Front. They also could entrench, and they had a sufficient <> equipment of guns, machine-guns, rifles, and grenades to repel every effort to break through. That was the lesson of Verdun. On the Russian front there was not the same need for heavy artillery as on . the West. Neither Austrians nor Germans could dig such a tremendous line of triplex entrenchments along so vast a front. It was more of a war of movement. There the eoixante-quinze would have come by its own, provided there was plenty of ammunition. The itlil- <. lions blazed away in stubborn and stupid offensives in the West would have been saved. Had there been enough heavy artillery to effect a break in the Austrian lines, the lighter and more mobile guns would have done the rest. And a few hundred

XIII, This is in part the story of the failure of the " steam roller " to help the cause of the Allies. For a time it was represented that Russia would not only hold the Germans but would inflict irreparable losses on them. Instead of which, Mr Lloyd George describes the debacle. In the article for to-morrow the grim tale is continued, with some added disasters. ,

machine-guns with adequate ammunition would have completely held up the German advance. 1 [Already in February, 1915, Mr Lloyd George had become alarmed about the Russian situation, and had his views in writing before Mr Asquith.] SAVING RUSSIA" ' To anyone who had the advantage of perusing the despatches from our able military representative on the Eastern Front, or any reliable history of the 1915 campaign, it must be evident that the overwhelming defeats sustained by the Russian armies were not due to any inferiority in numbers (the Russians outnumbered the Germans along the whole line) or to any lack of courage, endurance, or discipline on the part, of Russian soldiers—their undaunted valour under dismaying conditions must always remain a marvel. Neither were these disasters attributable to lack of skill on the part of the Russian. generals in the field. By common. consent their conduct of the retreat was, at least, competent. The enveloping tactics of the German marshals were thwarted at every turn, and the Russian armies escaped without any wholesale loss of equipment. This was' due to a combination of skilful generalship on the part of,the leaders and fine fighting qualities in the men they led. Let us give the Grand Duke Nicholas and his generals the credit of having achieved this feat. But why was so gallant an army, so competently led, driven like a herd of cattle across the plains of Poland and the marshes of Galicia? The answer is to be found in the extracts from the reports of impartial British officers, who witnessed this agony of gallant men who had been deprived by official stupidity of the means of defending themselves and the country for which they were prepared to die. PRAISE FOR RUSSIA They were, not vanquished bv better troops—they never had . a chance of measuring their quality as fighting men againsf the soldiers who were arrayed against them. They saw millions of German sheila hurtling through the airin their direction and bursting into destructive fury among them; they heard the deadly rattle of the machine guns carried forward by the advancing Germans, but they rarely ever saw the foe that pelted them at a safe distance with bullet and shell. Thejr defences , were shattered by the monster guns of Germany.

The survivors of this bombardment were left among the debris without a shelter to protect them from such a rain of fire and brimstone as has not fallen on mankind since the days of Gomorrah. Had they advanced, machine guns would have mown them down. Orderly retreat was their only 'chance of saving themselves and their country 1 ! Even in retreat hundreds of thousands were destroyed in the open by the terrible blizzard of shrapnel and high explosive. Had the Russian ■>' artil?' - been doubled, especially in the medium and heavy calibres, and had there been an abundant supply of shell; had the Russian posts been defended by an adequate quota of machine guns, the German troops would have encountered the same resistance oh the eastern front as they i sperienced whenever they attacked in the west. They could not have afforded the cumulative losses inflicted upon them in a series of attacks. On the Austrian front, where the quality of the enemy troops, was distinctly inferior for a variety of reasons—reasons which do not in the least reflect on Austrian valour —the impetuous onslaught of the* Russians, following a sufficient preliminary attack, would not only have successfully broken the Austrian lines, but that success would have been exploited and pushed perhaps «to the gates of Vienna. COMPARISONS AND DISASTERS The Austrian armies were a different proposition from the German. The Russians/won comparatively easy victories against the Austrians, and they, were only unable to take advantage of them owing to lack of ammunition. A wellequipped Russian . army could have crossed the Carpathians, penetrated through the Hungarian and Austrian plains up to their Slavonic kinsmen in Croatia, and then imperilled the capital of the Empire. It'may be said that the Germans would then have come to the rescue of their 'chief ally. Of course they would. They would have been bound to do so for their own preservation. But they could not have afforded Austria effective assistance without dangerously weakening their own Western front. They could not have withdrawn any part of their troops from the Polish front, as that would have placed in jeopardy the roads that led to the heart of Prussia. The battles of Loos, Artois, and Champagne, if they had been fought at all, would have been fought under conditions twice as favourable to the French and British armies as those which turned them into a futile massacre of myriads of brave young men. As it was, these gallant fellows were sacrificed on the altar of misguided and antiquated theories which had already been discredited by repeated exposure. The sacrifice was in vain. It did not liberate France,- and it failed to save Russia. The excuse they put forward after their failure for fighting these profligate battles was that hard-pressed Russia demanded these attacks in order to prevent the Germans from increasing their forces on the Eastern Front. The Germans never arrested their victorious march for a. single hour because, hundreds of miles to the West, the French and British generals were making elaborate preparations to send their infantry to be shot down by German machineguns in fruitless efforts to break through German defences. These generals were sure of "victory this time. Previous experience ought to have taught them to know better. The best help we could have given Russia would have been to send her artillery a portion of the ammunition we wasted in France and Flanders in piling up casualties among our own troops.