Jack Sheldon - The German Army at Ypres - 1914

With love to my daughter Alison and my son-in-law Jim
as a new and exciting chapter of their lives opens.

By the same author:

The German Army on the Somme 19141916
The German Army at Passchendaele
The German Army on Vimy Ridge 19141917
The German Army at Cambrai
The Germans at Beaumont Hamel
The Germans at Thiepval

With Nigel Cave:

The Battle for Vimy Ridge 1917
Le Cateau

First Published in Great Britain in 2010 by
Pen & Sword Military
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
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Copyright Jack Sheldon 2010

ISBN: 978 1 84884 113 0
ePub ISBN: 9781844681563
PRC ISBN: 9781844681570

The right of Jack Sheldon to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.

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Foreword

First-hand German accounts of the fighting on the Western Front in the First World War are dramatically (an adverb of particular force in this context) different from those written by British participants. Very often conveyed in the historic present tense, their sentences are short and direct, devoid of the convoluted and passive constructions so beloved of more academic German prose of the same vintage. Using pathos, they cast the dead as heroes, putting direct speech into their mouths and not infrequently closing their observations with an exclamation mark for added and rhetorical effect.

For British readers these German accounts can seem over the top: rarely have they been taken seriously by those few Anglophone historians anxious to explore the other side of the hill. They have been given equally short shrift by their German counterparts. The products of the 1920s and 30s, they are seen as tainted by fascism and encrusted with the stab in the back legend so fervently promoted by German militarists. But the consequence of such superciliousness has been to rob us of an enormously rich and extensive primary source. The German army produced a vast body of regimental histories after the First World War, the best of them incorporating first-hand accounts and most of them written by participants in the actions they described. True, some of them took their tone from the more hyperbolic volumes of the series, Schlachten des Weltkrieges, or battles of the world war, of which Ypern 1914, written by Werner Beumelberg, is as Jack Sheldon points out in this book one of the more egregious examples. Sponsored by the Reichsarchiv, the body responsible for the German official history, Schlachten des Weltkrieges was designed to appeal to a more popular market, but some of the series undoubtedly rose above the expectations of the genre just as did some of the regimental histories.

These points matter because in 1945 the Royal Air Force destroyed the bulk of the Prussian military archives, leaving subsequent historians much more reliant on the published materials of the inter-war period than would otherwise have been the case. To dismiss the accounts so wonderfully exploited (and fluently translated) by Jack Sheldon in The German Army at Ypres 1914 is wilfully to deepen our ignorance and lack of understanding of an institution central to modern military history. Moreover, the German Sixth Army one of two Bavarian armies mobilised in 1914 took a major part in the fighting at Ypres. Unlike those of Prussia, the Bavarian archives were not destroyed in the Second World War, and so Jack Sheldon has been able to work in some unpublished material of particular force: look at the revealing memorandum printed in chapter 6 and issued on 30 October 1914 by Krafft von Dellmensingen, the Sixth Armys chief of staff and himself no mean historian of the war.

The German Army at Ypres 1914 is a tactical narrative of German operations at the regimental and battalion level. That was the significance of 1st Ypres: it was the moment when the generals of 1914 confronted the end of manoeuvre, when corps-level movements and aspirations to higher strategic control were confounded by the tactical constraints of positional warfare. Flanders had long been one of the richest areas of Europe agriculturally, commercially and (increasingly) industrially. It had enabled the armies of the French revolution to march on their stomachs, and the Germans followed Napoleonic precepts in the autumn of 1914. They scratched Belgiums fertile soil for winter root crops, turnips, beet and mangel wurzels, in order to compensate for the collapse of supply. The German cavalry played an effective part in the opening stages of the battle (contrary to the reputation accorded them in British accounts) but found their movements hampered by hedged and fenced fields, by railway lines and urbanisation. Such a landscape was particularly well adapted for defence, and all the allied armies Belgian, French and British proved themselves in their exploitation of the opportunities it presented. But the consequences were horrific: it can be argued that proportionately the casualty levels at 1st Ypres outstripped those of the Somme and Passchendaele, and with them the old armies of 1914 ceased to exist.

Many of the accounts used by Jack Sheldon refer to the effectiveness of sniper fire: German soldiers removed the tell-tale spikes from their Pickelhaube helmets, and officers put their swords to one side and picked up rifles to make themselves less conspicuous. But the big killer was field artillery, particularly the French 75 mm gun firing shrapnel over open sights at ranges of less than 1,000 yards. German reserve artillery could not compete: deficient in training, it too often fired short and it was under-equipped. According to Jack Sheldon, one officer, lacking telephone line to speak to his guns let alone to other formations, had to use a whistle to give fire control orders, and another had to collocate his guns with the infantry so that he could communicate.

The first battle of Ypres became the stuff of legend in post-war Germany. The fighting at Langemark, characterised as a Kindermord, a slaughter of the innocents, was portrayed as a heroic and self-sacrificial action by German student volunteers, advancing into battle with patriotic songs on their lips. Plenty of the accounts cited by Jack Sheldon testify to the role of music in sustaining German morale, and General Berthold von Deimling announced that musicians who played during attacks would be awarded the Iron Cross. But the armies of 1914 were old not just because they were the last representatives of a disappearing order but also because they used reservists to bring their units up to strength not so much adolescents fresh from school as middle-aged fathers whose military service lay several years in the past but who were now recalled to the colours.