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Empty shell cases
On 14 May 1915 the London Times newspaper ran a story. It claimed that the British army on the Western front was so short of shells that it was having to ration its artillery guns to firing just 4 a day. And it blamed the Liberal government.
The shortage of artillery shells was true. The Germans were making a quarter of a million a day. The British could manage just 22 000. But it wasn't the government's fault. The reason that there was so little industrial capacity to make shells in Britain was, of course, that the British army had never expected to need them. They hadn’t yet bothered to acquire the BIG GUNS to fire them.
A small caucus in the Liberal Cabinet, prodded by the Army general staff, had started the war with a very small army, expecting the conflict to last just a few months. The army had crossed the channel with none of the right weapons, let alone the tactics, to engage in a modern war.
At an Anglo-French conference at a Boulogne hotel on 9 June 1915, nearly a year into the war, a senior British commander, one Douglas Haig, finally admitted that it was not worth launching any more British attacks until they had 1 000 heavy guns. At that time, the British had fewer than 100. The Germans had 3 300. But British attacks would get precisely nowhere until they had the heavy guns to blast the German defences to pieces before they tried to attack them.
Episode 04 - They had the wrong guns
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The CANARY GIRLS! Filling shells with TNT turned the women munitions workers yellow. It penetrated their skin and hair, even their babies were born yellow. Fortunately the effects were generally temporary, although there were some fatalities
The women munitions workers were risking their health filling shells with the wrong fuses to destroy the deep German dugouts
Up to a third of the shells fired by the British were duds. They did not explode.
Lloyd George had opened government factories to fill shells with explosives. It was a dangerous job that made the workforce sick and Lloyd George famously persuaded women to do it. It’s a story we discuss in our series on the Suffragettes (and, of course, the story is very different from the one we have all been led to believe).
But in the rush to make and fill shells, quality control was abandoned. The metal casings of the shells were delivered to the government factories in such different sizes and shapes that many were useless and many more were impossible to aim correctly.
The shells that now poured off the production lines were so badly made that a third failed to go off and others exploded as they were being loaded. They also had the wrong fuses to destroy the deep German underground dugouts.
The women munitions workers were risking their health doing a dangerous job, which men refused to do. But much of what they were doing was a waste of time.
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They had the wrong guns, the wrong shells, the wrong fuses. All they had were MEN.
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'Gassed' by John Singer Sargent
Most of the gas hung around in no man’s land or blew back into the British trenches
In September 1915 the British attacked the Germans at Loos in France. This time the British artillery bombarded the Germans with a quarter of a million shells. But only 22 000 of the shells they fired were high explosive. The rest were shrapnel, developed for attacking cavalry in the years before Napoleon. They were useless against modern defences.
Douglas Haig, in command on the ground at Loos, hoped that this time, however, he could make up for the lack of artillery by using a new weapon. POISON GAS.
Miles back from the front line, Haig famously got one of his officers to light a cigarette on the morning planned for the attack. He watched the smoke for a minute and reckoned the wind, though gusty, was pretty much in the right direction to blow the gas toward the Germans. He sent the order to advance. Within minutes the wind dropped. Haig tried to cancel everything but it was of course too late. Most of the gas hung around in no man’s land or blew back into the British trenches. The attack was the usual fiasco. Another humiliating failure with an unimaginable number of casualties.
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'Mametz' by Frank Crozier
'Winter sports'
It was only in November 1915, when the winter weather closed in, that these futile, large-scale attacks ended. Not that the Generals wanted the men in the trenches to relax.
Sir John French, in command of the Western Front for the first 17 months of the war, instructed his commanders to order small-scale trench raids, which would, he explained, ‘relieve the monotony and improve the morale of our troops.’ Quickly, he imagined, perhaps remembering his days at prep school in Harrow, ‘A KEEN SPIRIT OF RIVALRY AND EMULATION’ would appear.
By the end of the year the British had lost 285 000 men and gained virtually nothing at all. Sir John French was sacked. What he didn’t know was that an old friend had secretly been pulling strings all along to take his job. You guessed – Douglas Haig.
Both Haig and his sister, after all, were friends of the king. Haig’s wife was a lady in waiting to the queen. And then, for all his bluster in the summer (before he was in charge) about needing 900 more big guns before any more attacks should be even contemplated, Haig enthusiastically continued the policy of throwing men’s lives away in suicidal trench raids. He called it ‘winter sports.’
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