The Great War (mod 1914)

The fall of Jerusalem (July 28th, 1916) and of Baghdad (September 18th, 1916) obliged Haig to achieve one of his own and that meant attacking again on the Somme. Thus, as he lacked the 'tank' to fight the climatic episode of the Somme campaign, if not of the entire war, the British supremo was forced to spent some time to plan carefully the next step in order to achieve something that he could call a success. Then the Royal Navy had to make his world even harder still.

After many months asking to the top brass to release the submarine fleet, Keyes and Churchill's pleas were finally heard and 36 submarines of the D- and E-Types (from the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th Submarine Flotillas) were massed in the Heligoland coast, waiting for any ship of the German navy out of her base. After some weeks of boring inactivity, on the night of August 13th, 1916, part of the Kaiserliche Marine went into deep waters without being noticed. In fact, Admiral Reinhard Scheer's ships manged to pass unnoticed and sail deep into the Channel without being spoted but until they were beyond the Isle of Wight. And, even then, the British surface forces failed to take notice of this, but not Keyes' men: 17 submarines deployed to ambush Scheer's fleet and, in the early hours of August 14th, their torpedos caused havoc among the German fleet.

The result is told easily: without losing any submarine, Keyes' fleet decimated the German force. Six battleships (one of them the modern flagship of the Kairserliche Marine, the rest being old-fashioned predreadnoughts), a battlecruiser and three heavy cruisers were sunk in a mtter of minutes, giving another black eye to the pride of the German navy and to the fury of the Kaiser.


However, to Keyes and Churchill's changrin, the press called it a defeat, as the British battleships failed to sortie against the German vessels.


Finally, Haig decided to resume the Somme battle. The sector selected was the Bazentin-Guillemont area. This time the offensive was to be deeply prepared and it was to be supported by several diversionary actions (which included a French attack against Maurepas and another one in Alsace-Lorraine, in order to fix the German reserves). Haig was highly doubtful that the Germans would bit the Alsace bait, but he went ahead with the plan. All in all, the attack went on September 15th.


To begin with the proper battle, we shall being by looking on the rightmost sector: the trench front covered by the Guards and 6th Divisions, that were to attack Guillemont. Problems began at once. When the infantry went go over the top, the creeping barrage nowhere to be seen. The corps commanders, Lt. Gen. Frederick Lambart, 10th Earl of Cavan, assumed that the preliminary bombardment would have done its job -a bombardment that could not be observed- and ordered the attack to go ahead. Then, Fortune smiled his men. As they lacked proper orders or a decent battleplan, they were awfully lucky. In a section of the frontline, a company attacked sooner than the rest of the whole division and, of course, it was swept away by concentrated machine gun fire from the Quadrilateral Redoubt. The CO of the 6th Division informed then of the disturbing fact that the artillery hadn't make its job. Cavan found himself in a hard situation, as his HQ was being visited there and then by no one else than King George V and the HRH the Prince of Wales (1). Of course, Cavan suspected that having his men slaughtered in front of the king and the future heir could be damaging to his career and cancelled the attack (2). "No one could ever say that the King was of no use" (Captain Edmund Blackadder, 1/6th Queen's Own McKamikaze Highlanders, 6yh Division -3-).

Anyway, the Guards Division did attack, due to some failure in the communications. As usual the German machine gunners wreaked havoc on the Guards. Units soon became intermingled but, by some miracle, some attackers emerged uinscathed through the hail of fire and manged to make some ground. How this happened is not all clear, but some accounts suggest that the Bavarian troops in this area were in the process of being relieved and so were somewhat disorganised. Or perhaps the ferocity of the Guards' attack just disorganised them. After some hours of fierce fighting, the Germans broke and ran back to their second line and the Guards consolidated their wons (2,000 yards on a 1,500 yards front, quite a feat in these circunstances). During this attack, Scottish Lieutenant Colonel John Vaughan Campbell of the 3rd Battalion Coldstream Guards, Guards Division, earned his VC for his part in the fighting.


The rest of the attack was surprisingly better. On the leftmost flank, the Canadians attacked the ruined village of Bazentin le Petit with the support of the particularly accurate barrage which helped to deal quickly with the forward German trenches. By the end of the day the village had been conquered with "acceptable losses" (Canadian Private John Chipman Kerr, 49th (Edmonton) Battalion, managed to won the VC when he captured 62 prisoners were taken and 250 yards of enemy trench captured singlehandly despite being injured in one hand). On the right of the Canadians, the 15th Division took all of its objetives, including the ruins of Bazentin le Grand. In the centre the attack against Longeval was a complete failure. Enfilading artillery fire from High Wood halted the advance before it reached the first German line. Some ground was wound on the right side of the village, but by this time casualties were high.

Thus, when the day was over, Haig was able to claim, at least, that he had managed to defeat the enemy, even if the Germans were entrenched in their second line and ready for another fight.


However, this sucess was soon to be lost amidst news coming from Australia and the Northern Sea...




(1) In fact, this visit did took place, but on August 10th 1916. Blame my dark sense of humor and my willingness to have good old David dancing around the globe.
(2) Well, Cavan was not such a bad general -he proved quite able in OTL WW1-, but in this particular phase of the Somme, his planification was absolutely disgraceful.
(3) The regiment features in a sketch during Episode 12 of Series 3 of Monty Python's Flying Circus. The regiment is introduced as Britain's first "Kamikaze Regiment".




@TheExecuter: As I promised. I'm a man of honour.

@trekaddict: Now, now, now... You'll have to wait til 1918, my boy...

@quaazi: In OTL, Jerusalem was captured on 9 December 1917 and the planning for Operation Türkenkreuz began in late 1916, so... I don't think so.

@Enewald: Interesting idea... but no.

@Nathan Madien: With this



I know, that's something we could hardly consider a fighter, but, looking at the Fokker E-III, it's hard to see it as that, too

@Zhuge Liang: Impossible. The enemy would be quite aware of his presence at once.

@trekaddict: And against any kind of rules.

Once the North Sea was declared by the British as a "military area" (November 3, 1914), the Royal Navy patrolled its watersand intercepted cargo vessels suspected of carrying cargo destined for Germany and most of the world's oceans were effectively sealed by the end of 1914. The British also forced neutrals to comply with the terms of the blockade (0). Neutral shipping thus had to enter British ports for inspection. Ships without contraband were allowed to go on towards Germany. Germany displayed no signs of inmediate collapse, so the British were compelled to rethink tactics. In March 1915 the Allies annouced revised rules prohibiting all import and export traffic (including neutrals) from using German ports, which clearly violated the Declaration of London of 1908. As we have seen in previous chapters, as Germany was without a surface fleet strong enough to challenge the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet, Berlin had only one response--unrestricted submarine warfare (see chapter twenty-three).

As we have seen this successful campaign was interrupted after the sinking of the RMS Lusitania and the RMS Arabic, which caused a diplomatic crisis with the United States. However, the Handelskrieg shifted to the Mediterranean Sea, where several dismantled UB- and UC-Boats were sent by railway to join the small Austro-Hungarian flotilla at Pola, and were highly successful in their operations against the Allied traffic. By late November 1915 they had sunk 58 ships and this success renewed military pressure for an unrestricted campaign, which was oppposed by Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg. A war council in early March 1916, however, agreed to launch a restricted campaign against Britain, to the dismay of the American public – once again, any ship travelling in the vicinity of the British Isles was now in serious risk of being sunk-, with unrestricted warfare to follow two weeks later if the British failed to relax their blockade. The limited campaign began on 15 March 1916, but the unrestricted campaign was brief, sinking some 250,000 tons of Allied shipping before the “Britannic incident”.

The HMS Britannic was the third and largest Olympic-class ocean liner of the White Star Line. She was the sister ship of RMS Olympic and RMS Titanic, and was intended to enter service as a transatlantic passenger liner. Launched just before the start of the Great War, she was enlisted as a hospital ship in 1915. She had been finished with the the loss of the SS Imperator (a passenger liner of the Hamburg Amerikanische Packetfahrt Actien Gesellschaft (HAPAG) that struck an iceberg -24 October, 1913- in one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history) and the subsequent inquiries in mind (Olympic and Titanic were refitted on their return to Belfast). The main changes included the introduction of a double hull along the engine and boiler rooms and raising the 15 watertight bulkheads up to 'B' Deck (1) and the addition of large crane-like davits, each capable of holding six lifeboats, and additional lifeboats.

During the Gallipoli campaign, Cunard's RMS Mauretania and RMS Aquitania were used as troop transports. As the campaign declined fast, the Britannic -along with the Aquitania- was used as hospital ships to support the landings and then the operations of the EEF. However, as the campaign of the Somme began to be implemented, the HMHS Britannic was reffited as transport ship and, along with her sister Titanic, chartered by the Canadian Government to transport troops from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Britain.

But, before she was employed in that role, the RMS Britannic made a last voyage commercial with the White Star Line. On February 10th she left New York, bound for Liverpool. The convoy system was in its infancy, and many vessels still traversed the Atlantic without strictly following Admiralty guidelines. Britannic was one such example. Carrying 2,452 passengers, she cruised at 22 knots, and thus presented a difficult target to any waiting U-boat. That day, the KMS Bremen, a blockade-breaking German merchant submarine, was making her maiden voyage to New York. She was one of seven submarines designed to carry cargo between the United States and Germany in 1916, through the naval blockade of the Entente. Two of those submarines had been converted into long-range cruiser U-boats (U-kreuzers) equipped with 150 mm guns and two stern torpedo tubes: the mentioned Bremen and the Deutschland (2).

On the morning of April 12th, a Spanish steamer sailing about 400 miles (640 km) south of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, sighted the Bremen and wired a warning to all the ships in the area. A few hours later, Britannic spotted a surfaced U-boat 500 m (1,600 ft) ahead and the lookouts alerted the bridge. At once the captain of the ship, Charles Bartlett, altered her course toward the submarine, which was lying just of the starboard bow. Amazingly, the Uboat crew did not seem to have spotted the huge ship until the liner opened fire with one of the auxiliary six inch guns fitted for her self defence. The guns could not depress suficiently to hit the submarine, which franctically attempted an emergency immersion and fired in a hurry two torpedos in, as some Frenchman would say, in "the general direction" of the Brittanic (3). Amazingly, one of the two torpedos did strike the ocean liner on the starboard side, but the damage to the Brittanic was minimal, although two crew and one passanger, Mrs Mary Hoy, from Chicago, were injured. The damage inflicted upon the ocean liner did not deter the Brittanic from ramming the Bremen, that was severely damaged. Unable to submerge due to the damages received, her commander, Kapitaenleutnant Karl Schwartzkopf, seeing the british liner turning his guns against his ship, had no option but to surrender.


In the United States, popular outrage greeted the news of the Britannic’s attack with the same indignation expressed after the Lusitania incident the previous year. The sanctity of free transit for passenger liners had been broken and President Woodrow Wilson was unusually incensed. However, he remained commited to his have the United States embroiled in the European struggle. However, Wilson was to find himself in a hard spot when, a few days later, the German auxiliary cruiser Prinz Eitel Friedrich captured the schooner William P. Frye (3,374 tons) and took to Germany her US crew as prisoners of war. Wilson, fearing the worst as it was an election year, then threatened to sever diplomatic relations with the German Empire unless submarine warfare was restricted. Berlin agreed to that, but it was already too late.

The most significant impact of the Britannic incident and the Frye’s sinking was that ended the Republican schism. In 1912 the Republican Party was torn asunder when former President Theodore Roosevelt, frustrated with Taft's policies, formed the Progressive Party. The split gave Wilson the presidency, damaged the relations between Roosevelt and the GOP and the chances of the Republican party to win the White House. Worse still, by 1916 the Progressive Party had all but collapsed, and only one Progressive remained in the House of Representatives. Thus, Republicans and Progressives had to make peace if they wanted to defeat Wilson.

Thus, the contacts between both parties to join ranks, already begun in January 1916, were accelerated by the actions of the German navy and made possible the selection of a joint Republican-Progressive candidate while trying to put aside the mutual mistrust. Seeing the benefits, the Republican Party decided to take profit of the burst of patriotic fury and Roosevelt suddenly became the perfect candidate to defeat Wilson. Thus, on June 1916, when the Republican and Progressive conventions met in Chicago, there were moves to agree upon a single candidate. Except for some minor disagreeement about the need of implanting an universal military service, which was unacceptable to the Republicans, after several meetings at the Chicago Club, it was agreed that Roosevelt was the only character with enough charisma to expel Wilson from the White House. Thus, Roosevelt became the Republican nominee for President, with Warren G. Harding as his running mate. Wilson’s slogan – ‘he kept us out of the war’ – was to turn against him.

With an almost evangelical fervour, Roosevelt made speech after speech, crusading from state to state in a Pullman train carriage, repeating over and over again to the masses that “the United States cannot be indifferent to the firestorm ravaging Europe, and especially not to what happens in the Atlantic Ocean and on its Western European shores”. Roosevelt met Democratic charges of warmongering head on – he made a number of eloquent defences of his time in office, contrasting his defence of American interests in South America, Morocco and the Pacific with Wilson’s muddled foreign policy. Furthermore, Roosevelt’s possession of the Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 made the accusations of warmongering to look rather absurd. Nevertheless, Roosevelt insisted that the United States must be prepared for all emergencies and it could not rely on Wilson, who had kept the United States out of the war at the cost of American prestige.


Thus, when the voters went to the polls on 7th November, a Roosevelt victory was expected, although few would have expected that the winning margin would be as much as 2.2 million votes (10,226,606 votes (53.7%) 340 electoral vs 7,999,221 votes (42.0%) 191 electoral). When even Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan declared results in favour of Roosevelt, the New York Times felt it safe to announce that ‘Theodore Roosevelt returns for an historic third term’. The Colonel was back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.



(0) Zepp Branningan would have done more than simply this, for sure.
(1) Actually, the measure only affected six of the 15 bulkheads.
(2) Well, these submarines were armed with 150 mm guns, not with torpedos tubes and the Deutschalnd class (aka U-151 class) was not ready to use until 1917, but butterflies are on a rampage these days, you know...
(3) Blame Monty Python for that joke.


@Milites: I would also love seeing a lot of Camels and SE5as over the trenches. Time will tell.

@Enewald: If you can call a victory having your fleet decimated... well.

@quaazi: The AI is always an unsolvable mistery to me.

@Nathan Madien: Or to rise the journalists by impaling them...

@c0d5579: Hey, the Kaiser can keep winning like this! I don't mind!

@Zhuge Liang: The Kaiser should be reacting like Hitler after the Battle of the Barent Sea fiasco.