WW1 History: 1916, A Most Terrible Year

This year I am going to start reading in earnest, a chronological history of The Great War: World War One.-SF

BOOKS that focus on what happened in a particular year have become a publishing phenomenon. So Keith Jeffery, a British academic historian whose last work was a fascinating, if slightly plodding, official history of Britain’s secret intelligence service, MI6, must have thought it a clever idea to go for 1916, the midpoint of the first world war. Mr Jeffery’s purpose is to show that not only was it a year of tremendous events, but one in which the effects of the war spread across most of the world, often with consequences that can still be felt a century later.

By 1916, the war that some had believed would be over by Christmas 1914 had become an attritional slog on both the largely static Western Front and on the rather more fluctuating front in the East. To break the deadlock, the general staffs of all the main belligerents continued to work on new tactics, such as the creeping artillery barrage, and to seek new technologies, including the tank, which first saw action in September 1916. Contrary to a widely held view, the second half of the war was a period of unprecedented military innovation.

The idea that sheer offensive élan could overcome well-entrenched defences equipped with modern weaponry, in the form of accurate artillery and the machine- gun, had died during the appalling bloodletting of late 1914. In the four months before the war of movement in the West ground to a halt, France and Germany had between them suffered over 1.5m casualties—a loss rate that was not exceeded until manoeuvre returned to the battlefield in the final months of fighting. By 1916 most of the soldiers on both sides had not only lost faith in imminent victory, but had become fatalistically resigned to the war as permanent crucible for their generation which civilians and politicians at home could not begin to comprehend.

Read the Remainder at Economist