The First World War was ferocious in its first years. But
the combination of sustained and enormous losses of the enormous battles of
1916 and the strains on the home fronts brought the "deeper forces"
to emerge, in the words of historian René Albrecht-Carrier. The number of
enormous battles—and casualties—across the military theaters in the year 1916
staggers the imagination: Verdun, the Somme, Jutland, the Brusilov Offensive, the
Siege of Kut, and five of the Isonzo front battles, as well as other actions.
The death toll was barely fathomable. General Aleksei Brusilov's offensive
alone, ended with a death toll (not
casualty toll) of over a million men (when deaths from both sides are
combined). These Brusilov deaths occurred over a period of just under four
months.
But 1916 had its own logic, really. Stalemate was the
hallmark of the Western Front and some other fronts, but in all theaters, a
kind of larger stalemate had held sway already by 1915. On all fronts, 1915 was
a period of intensive experimentation for breaking the deadlock: poison gas;
undermining and explosion of enemy trenches; flamethrowers; proliferation of
machine guns, trench mortars, and more. Above all, the dramatic rise in
artillery shelling to prepare for breakthrough dominated the thinking of high
commands. But breakthrough to "the green fields beyond" remained
illusive nearly everywhere in 1915.
In the case of the Western Front, Allied representatives met
at Chantilly, France, in early December 1915 to coordinate offensives for the coming
year, all agreeing to attack on a large scale as soon as possible. The Germans
got there first, however, and delivered a massive blow at Verdun. This
disruption delayed the Allied attacks somewhat, but the British and French were
able to launch the Somme Offensive on July 1, 1916.
The well-known human result on the Somme was slaughter.
More on that in weeks to come. But it was
also slaughter in these other terrible conflicts.
But the changes resulting from this transition enormously
increased armaments and material production went far beyond the battlefield.
Indeed, in this Higgsian crisis related to war emergency and war production,
almost all belligerents made fundamental changes in the size and extent of
state intervention into their societies, in particular in economies. Since the
labor force available for making all the artillery shells had been reduced by
war recruitment and conscription, governments drew whole new ranges of the population
into munitions plants. Young women in England whose livers were compromised by
assembling toxic artillery shells were blithely called "Canary
Girls." Some munitions plants exploded because of espionage, others
because of accidents on the part of the young, inexperienced, and tired
munitions workers.
Men like David Lloyd George in Britain and Albert Thomas in
France came to fore as ministers of munitions who could break the old
limitations on government transfers of private wealth through taxes, inflation,
confiscation, etc. in order to produce the shells now thought to be needed in
the war. The 1916 Hindenburg Program in Germany did the same but went much
further in eroding individual rights and creating the total war system.
Although the war became even more ferocious before the end,
1916 stands as the year that finally broke the old world.
