189 If at first you don't succeed, fail, fail and fail again

One of the men included in Asquith’s government in coalition with the Conservatives was the former Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour. He took over as First Lord of the Admiralty, the post Churchill was forced to vacate as a condition of the coalition forming.

But Balfour had already been a member of Asquith’s War Council, the only Conservative on it. One of the major concerns of the Council was to find a way to break the stalemate of trench warfare on the Western Front. So many approaches were explored: the use of tanks, or of aircraft, or flamethrowers, or of gas. At sea, Britain imposed a blockade on trade to Germany, and Germany had a first campaign of submarine warfare against trade to Britain. The Germans interrupted it in the face of US objections, rather more strident against Germany’s subs than against Britain’s blockade – the US did well out of trade with Britain and was, in any case, rather more sympathetic to the Allies than to the Central Powers.

None of the new weapons or tactics broke the stalemate. So, demonstrating a massive lack of imagination, or of capacity to learn from past mistakes, the high commands in 1916 tried mass offensives by infantry again. The only great change was the use of artillery which, with the machine gun, caused for more casualties than any other weapon in the First World War. The offensives, by the Germans at Verdun and by the Anglo-French on the Somme, again failed as all others had, gaining next to no territory and causing huge losses – over a million, across both sides, on the Somme.

So 1916 ended with a lot more carnage but no progress towards peace.

Illustration: Sir Douglas Haig, the man who was sure he could command the BEF better than anyone else, and presided over unbearable losses for very little gain. By Bassano Ltd, vintage print, 16 January 1917
National Portrait Gallery x15159

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.