The Great War: 100 Years Ago

World War One represents a model of warfare that was uniquely European.  This was not because of its world wide nature, its ferocity, or its use of technology, but because each side of the war took up familiar roles.

With the end of dynastic and religious wars in the 17th century Europe entered a phase where national armies and navies ruled military considerations.  Part of the goal of these considerations was the idea that nations should expand the realm of control of a nation state.  For many countires this means colonialism.  Colonial countries tend to have small brushfire wars spread across the globe as various powers compete over the resources controlled in the colonial areas.  Such wars are proxy wars at most, which different power interests bleeding the capacity of a colonial power to benefit from its colonial possesions, and in the 20th century resulted in the wide spread decolonization of the globe by the western powers and its recolonization by communist powers.

The European conflict though was a unique battle that started with one nation deciding it had claims not on colonial possesions, but on the actual territory and soveriegnity of its neighbors.  In response a coalition of defending nations will arise with a policy of containment hoping to preserve peace until the agressor nation runs out of steam.  When the agressor nation tires of the containment there is usually a war, and the agressor is usually dismantled and reborn as a more moderate state.  Except for the Franco-Prussian war and the Russo-Turkish war, major wars of the 19th and 20th century in Europe all followed this routine.

Agressor: France War Fought: Napoleanic

Agressor: Russia War Fought: Crimea

Agressor: Germany War Fought: Great War

Agressor: Germany War Fought World War Two

Agressor: USSR War Fought Cold War

The cold war represents the only time that an effort at containment was successful short of all-out war.  This model, much to the legitmate worry of many European governments, is repeating itself as the current Russian nation becomes imperalist and expansionist.  

U-18, a U-17 type submarine, captained by Kptlt. von Hennig, is sunk by the trawler Dorothy Gray while trying to penetrate Scapa Flow.  This would be one of only two attempts on the main British Naval base by submarine during the Great War.  Despute the vulnerability of the base (in 8 October 1939 U-47 would sink the anchored Royal Oak in that harbor) commerce raiding soon ended attempts by German submarines to attack the anchorage.

Most naval historians rightfully consider the Dreadnought to be the battleship that broke the mold.  It was so important for ship design that all later battleships would be classified based on if they incorporated the dreadnought's innovations.  Every battleship before became a pre-dreadnought, while everyone after became a dreadnought.

What many people do not know is that before there was the Dreadnought there was a standard setting pre-Dreadnought that many considered the penultimate heavy ship design.

In 1893 the British navy started the Spencer Programme, an ambitious shipbuilding program designed to leave Great Britian stronger than any two of its adversaries.  The programme was Codified as the Naval Defense act of of 1889, and the two adversaries that Britian had to face was Russia, Great Britians enemy from the Crimean campaign, and France, its longest term military threat.  To meet that threat the Royal Navy laid down first the Majestic class, whose nine ships would make it the largest class of Battleships ever designed.  This would lead to a massive heavy ship building programs.

All together 29 ships were commisioned from Majestic - 9 ships  Canopus - 6 ships, Formidable - 8 ships, Duncan - 6 ships were designed by Sir William White, and all were largely similar in layout and capability.  The super class would be copied by every navy in the world who added battleships to their inventories.

By the Great War of course the pre-dreadnoughts were outclasses and in many ways a waste of displacement and staffing power.  Even with the nature of the emergency, Great Britian quickly demobilized as many of them as they felt they could.  Heavy guns, torpedoes, mines, and 21 knot powerplants all drove them to the breaking yards early.

Kitchener's Army was an innovative method to rapidly expand the British army in the first days of the Great War.  When completed it would provide 30 divisions to the 60 division British Expenditionary Force and would prove to be an essential element in keeping the German army from defeating the allies in the first three years of the war.

The original planning for wartime expansion in the British army had two phases.  The first was an immediate expansion of existing divisions by the addition of reservists.  These soldiers, recently trained in regular service and familiar with their regiments, took little effort to integrate into their parent battalions.  

The second component of army expansion was the Territorial Army (TA), the brain child of Richard Haldane.  Formed in 1908, it assembled the nearly 150 administrative and operational volunteer force battalions that were geographically formed and placed them under lord lieutenants, or commands of noble rank from the regions the battalions were drawn from.  The territorial army though was a political creation and not a military one.  Officers of the TA were chosen for their social rank and not their military training - meaning that battalions could become ineffective for years under the lead of incompetent officers without any effective way of correcting the situation.  A further difficulty was that the TA had two classes of volunteers, general volunteers and local volunteers, with the later category prevented from service outside of Great Britian.  Thus even a qualified unit with good training would see itself ripped apart if deployed overseas.  

Kitchener, a war hero with great public standing and little regard for the political convulsions that had seen the Army divided into two circles during the Boer War (and whose division resulted in French and later Haig, two officers of only medicore ability, take command of the main striking force of the Empire) decided that the whole Territorial Army was a wasted effort.  Instead, he wanted a "new" army to be formed along a best practices model, with all soldiers in the army volunteers who agreed to overseas service.  This would possibly short circuit the crony system of appointment that was becoming common under General French, and would at the same time bring entire division sized organization into battle trained from the outset to work together.  

Kitchener was so popular in fact that the plan succeded far beyond the capability of British to quickly arm the new soldiers.  Kitchener's Army was formed into groups, called K1 to K6, each of which held a pool of 6 divisions (the 4th would be disbanded to provide soldiers to the broken 1st to 6th divisions in late 1914, so the K4 and K5 drafts had the same divisions assigned).  This organization provided the 9th to the 26th divisions, and the 30th to the 41st divisions usually officered by soldiers promoted from the trenches in France.

The flaws in Kitchener's army were the flaws of the entire British Army.  They lacked equipment in the first twelve months of the war, with formed units showing up in France with cannon that lacked sighting equipment, batteries with no artillery shells in store, soldiers carrying older rifles and wearing ad hoc uniforms, often purchases for themselves in tailor shops, and without telegraphy equipment.  Many solkdiers fired their first shots when they arrived at the front, and the doctrine of bayonet advance was impressed on these new divisions even as it was being abandoned by the French and Germans.

Although a hollow gesture by 1914, on 11 November, 2014 Sultan Mehmed V declared jihad on the western powers, allowing (by Caliphat standards) any individual dying in the Great War who fought for the German Central Powers to recieve preference in heaven.  The main result of the declaration was a footnote of history: this was the last declaration made by a citting caliph in the history of the Muslim Caliphate.  

By 1914 the Muslim Caliphate, dominated by the Ottoman Turks since the 1450s, was no longer seen by the majority of Muslims as the international protector of Islam.  Violent disputes within the Caliphate between Shi'a and Sunni followers, mass destruction of the cultural heritage of many minorities, and racial disparities between the ruling Turkish elite and the people of Arab, Persian, and other descent had turned the Caliphate into an an international joke, a feeling shared by many of its citizens.