With the German advance into Belgium on August 4, the shooting war began in earnest on the western front, and the opening of the war is commonly dated from this day despite the shelling of Belgrade in Serbia the week before. The Belgians, under the leadership of King Albert I, decided to fight, relying on numerous con- crete fortresses with heavy guns, placed on the outskirts of major cities, with dis- persed units of light troops around the country. The spirited defense by Belgium came as a surprise not only to the Germans but also to world opinion, which expected that the Belgians would simply surrender as hopelessly outmanned and outgunned. Hoping for British and French reinforcements and relying on the fortresses, the Belgian decision may have seemed rational. As it turned out, the German army brought up heavy guns with greater range than the cannon in the Belgian fortresses, and simply fired on the targets for a period of weeks, gradu- ally reducing them to rubble and killing the defenders. German artillery brought down the 11 Belgian forts near Liège through extended bombardment; German guns pounded the last forts at Loncin into silence on August 17. The first air raid in history occurred in these first attacks on Belgium, when bombs were dropped from zeppelins on the city of Liège, with a few civilian casualties.
Horrified by the outbreak of the war, and aware how ethnic loyalties divided the American people, President Wilson announced on August 4 that the United States would remain neutral. Two weeks later, on August 19, Wilson urged the American people to be neutral in thought as well as in deed. However, Wilson would find it difficult to maintain neutrality not only because of the affinity of different recent immigrants and their descendants to one or another European power, but also because, traditionally, neutral states asserted and defended their rights to commercial trade with belligerent nations. Although the United States advocated that stand in 1914, as events unfolded in 1915 and 1916, the issue of maritime trade with Europe would embroil Americans in one crisis after another.
When the Belgians refused to yield passage to the German troops, the British Expeditionary Force (B.E.F.) began landing at Le Havre and Boulogne, and put some forces inland at Rouen. Meanwhile, the Germans repulsed the expected French invasion of Lorraine, with heavy French losses. In the west, the Belgians retreated to Antwerp, and, by August 20, the Germans had occupied Brussels. Gradually, the German forces advanced, defeating the French at Charlerois and the British at the Battle of Mons, in Belgium, the first major clash between German and British troops. Since the military did not allow newspaper cor- respondents anywhere near the front, newspapers in Britain carried no news of the defeat of the B.E.F. at Mons. Similarly, however, the German public did not learn that the Schlieffen Plan had failed and that the grand strategy soon resulted in near stalemate.
The Germans took Namur in Belgium, using the same long-range artillery previously employed at Liège. By the end of August, the British and French desperately tried to stop the German advance, with a British force at Le Cateau and the French surrendering the fortress at Longwy. The Germans moved on to take Amiens and crossed the River Oise on the path to Paris. By August 31, they arrived within 15 to 30 miles of the outskirts of Paris, near Chantilly.
On the eastern front, Russian forces moved into East Prussia and advanced through Poland into Germany. However, at a major battle at Tannenberg, the Germans turned back the Russian advance. The Russians occupied Lvov in the Ukraine, and the battles on the eastern front seesawed over the next months. In October and November, the Germans advanced through Poland to Warsaw, but retreated from a massive Russian counterattack westward to Cracow.
With the Germans within shelling range of Paris, the French government moved to Bordeaux on September 3. On September 4, Britain, Russia, and France signed the Triple Entente, the agreement each made not to sign a sepa- rate treaty with the Central Powers. One of the first massive and long battles, the Battle of the Marne, lasting the week of September 5 to 12, 1914, began to give the shape of things to come, yielding only a small French advance with great losses. The first battles near Verdun began in September, and the Germans took the French fortress of St. Mihiel. The Germans retained a salient, or advanced position, into French territory at St. Mihiel well into 1918.
In September and October 1914, the Germans defeated the British and Belgian defenders of Antwerp and turned south, advancing along the Channel into Flanders, slowly pushing down through Ghent, Lille, Bruges, and Ostend. The British and French finally held the German advance at the First Battle of Ypres, which lasted more than three weeks: October 30 to November 24, 1914.
Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers, and Britain declared war on that empire. Britain brought in Egypt as an ally to protect the Suez Canal. The British moved up from Kuwait into Iraq. The Austrians tempo- rarily invaded Serbia, taking Belgrade in early December but evacuating it after intense Serbian counterattacks two weeks later. On the all-important western
As the stalemate set in, both sides developed more elaborate emplacements, like this German defensive line. (National Archives)
front, the French and British attempted to push back the German advances but made no important gains.
By the end of the year, Germany had lost 675,000 soldiers, and the French had lost about 850,000. The British had lost more than half of the original Brit- ish Expeditionary Force.
In 1915, there would be a series of long, bloody engagements on the western front. These so-called battles, named for the nearest village, fort, river, or city, were actually long-drawn-out and fruitless attempts to assault well- defended positions. More men were sometimes killed in one of these battles than in entire past or future wars. Major engagements, some lasting more than a month, cost thousands of casualties. The major western front battles in 1915 included Soissons (January–February), St. Mihiel (March–April), Ypres (April–May), Artois (May–June and September–October), and Champagne- Argonne (September–November). Although casualties in these engagements ran as high as 300,000 troops, one side or the other achieved only very minor gains or none at all.
THE WAR
IN
THE AIR
From the perspective of later history, the introduction of aircraft in World War I has been the subject of great interest, romantic exaggeration, and fascination with the airplanes themselves and with the pilot-aces who flew them. But, in reality, the war in the air represented only a minuscule aspect of the whole war in terms of the total number of men involved or the total damage to land forces. At first the armies employed light aircraft along with tethered observation balloons for artillery spotting and observation. Some of the first air-to-air engagements con- sisted of one side’s spotter aircraft firing a rifle at the other side’s tethered balloon.
One use for aircraft was aerial spotting and surveillance photography, which remained important throughout the war. (National Archives)
Soon, however, the aircraft mounted machine guns instead of rifles, and one- or two-man crews engaged in hundreds of spectacular dogfights. Some of the pilots, who displayed a real killer instinct or hatred of the enemy, accounted for many deaths. In the last months of the war in 1918, air forces of the British, French, and Germans began supporting ground troops in both offense and defense, playing more of a role as commanders gradually recognized the value of integrating the air arm into their battle plans.
The most famous of the aces, Manfred von Richthofen, accounted for 80 enemy planes shot down. He maintained a set of trophies at his quarters. He sent investigators to examine enemy planes that had crashed behind German lines. They would try to establish the identity of the downed pilots from papers found on the corpses. They would cut from the wreckage pieces of canvas, often with the serial number of the plane, which Richthofen then mounted on the wall of his room.
Mick Mannick, a hero of the British Royal Flying Corps, shot down 73 Ger- man aircraft. Mannick and Richthofen both died in action. Other aces included the American, Eddie Rickenbacker (who lived to the ripe old age of 83), and the Canadian, Billy Bishop, who became a national hero in his own country. The American pilot Frank Luke developed a specialty of bringing down enemy observation balloons.
In 1918, as the Germans, French, and British introduced larger aircraft, the future of warfare could be dimly perceived; bombing raids involving hundreds of aircraft supported ground action and dropped hundreds of tons of bombs on industrial targets. In the period 1914–15, however, only a few officers recognized the potential of the airplane, and, as with the submarine, effective employment had to evolve gradually.
American pilot Frank Luke developed a special talent for shooting down German observation balloons. Here he poses with one he knocked out over Allied-held territory. (National Archives)