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| Europe |
| The Butcher’s Bill of 1916: Europe’s Blood-Drenched Year of Horror |
| 2016-12-19 |
| One hundred years ago today, the bloodiest year yet in Europe’s long history was coming to its painful conclusion. On December 17, 1916, the guns fell silent around Verdun, a wrecked fortress-city in northeastern France, for the first time in 10 months. The catastrophe had commenced on February 21, when German forces launched what was supposed to be a limited offensive around Verdun. The Western Front had grown static by the end of 1914, when the quick, decisive victories that all Europe’s armies anticipated would occur failed to materialize. Unable to achieve breakthroughs, soldiers on all sides dug in to avoid shells and machine gun fire. Soon the opposing trenches ran from the Swiss frontier all the way to the English Channel. The big missed story for 1916 is the Brusilov offensive, Imperial Russia’s last great success on the battlefield. Named after Aleksei Brusilov, the tsar’s best general and the architect of the victory, it began on June 4—the “glorious fourth of June” in Russian telling. German help saved Austria-Hungary and its defeated army in Galicia in the summer of 1916, and soon Brusilov’s battlefield triumph devolved into the familiar pattern of offensives begetting counteroffensives, producing nothing but mountains of corpses. By the time the brutal slugfest petered out in late September, the Austrians had lost almost a million men, including more than 400,000 taken prisoner. Brusilov had nearly knocked Vienna out of the war, having taken considerable ground in east Galicia, but not quite. Moreover, Russia’s losses in the end were as great as Austria-Hungary’s, and morale at home began to suffer as hopes of winning the war gave way to horrific casualties. Brusilov’s victory would be Imperial Russia’s last. Less than five months after the offensive ended, Tsar Nicholas II was deposed, beginning that country’s decades-long nightmare of revolution, civil war and Communist mass repression that would make the bloodbath in Galicia seem small. France triumphed at Verdun, in a sense, but the cost of that victory dogged the country for decades to come. In 1917, the French army mutinied rather than endure another such victory. The Germans indeed did not pass at Verdun, but the bloodbath required to halt them left France shell-shocked. The less-than-stellar performance of the French military in spring 1940, when the Germans invaded again, this time successfully, can be attributed in no small part to the lingering effects of Verdun. The British, too, took from the Somme that they must never do it again. The horrific cost—above all the futile July 1 bloodbath—reverberates in Britain today. The 100th anniversary of the offensive’s start was commemorated this summer with sorrow and regret. It says something important that virtually all Britons have heard of the Somme but probably not one in a hundred knows anything about the Hundred Days of 1918, when Haig finally broke the back of the German army in the greatest victories in the long history of British arms, thereby winning the war. One hundred years ago, Europe was busy killing itself and its civilization. In truth, that self-confident continent never recovered from 1916, when all participants in the Great War became fully committed to final victory—or defeat—so great was the cost of that terrible year. Such unprecedented horror created the world we are still living in today, with lingering consequences great and small. |
| Posted by:Pappy |
| #2 The US was doing extremely well selling material to all sides. Joining the war nearly bankrupted us. |
| Posted by: Iblis 2016-12-19 11:18 |
| #1 Maybe if we had taken Jefferson's approach embargo all trade with the lot but offered the offices for negotiation would have been the better choice than getting dragged into the never ending morass so many of our ancestors came here to escape. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2016-12-19 07:39 |