This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ The Battle of the Ardennes 22 August 1914 House, Simon Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. 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The Battle of the Ardennes 22 August 1914 A Thesis by Simon J House 7 February 2012 Contents List of Contents 1 List of maps and sketches 2 List of Abbreviations 3 * * * Introduction 4 Part One: Operational Study Chapter One: Operational Overview 28 Chapter Two: Army Operations 73 Part Two: Lost Opportunities Chapter Three: Neufchâteau 118 Chapter Four: Maissin–Anloy 175 Chapter Five Other Battles 209 Part Three: Analysis Chapter Six: Doctrine 241 Chapter Seven: Training 287 Chapter Eight: Armaments, and Equipment 312 Conclusions 362 * * * Appendix One: Foreign Language Text 384 Appendix Two: Order of Battle 399 Appendix Three: Bibliography 408 1 List of Maps and Sketches 1 Maps Map 1: Rivers and Frontiers p.33 Map 2: Ruffey’s Plan p.50 Map 3: The German move south (21/22 August) p.57 Map 4: French 5 Colonial Brigade at Neufchateau p.128 Map 5: German 42 Brigade at Neufchateau p.132 2 Sketches A: Neufchateau Sketch 1 23 DI: situation at 13.30 p.133 Sketch 2 23 DI: situation at 14.00 p.134 Sketch 3 23 DI: situation at 16.00 p.137 Sketch 4 23 DI: situation at 19.00 p.140 Sketch 5 24 DI: orientation p.142 Sketch 6 24 DI: First Contact p.145 Sketch 7 24 DI: situation at 12.00 p.146 Sketch 8 24 DI: situation at 14.00 p.147 Sketch 9 24 DI: Friendly Fire incident p.152 Sketch 10 24 DI: The “assault” on Rossart p.153 B: Maissin–Anloy Sketch 11 Approach Marches p.179 Sketch 12 Battle dispositions p.185 C: Other Battles Sketch 13 The strong fixed flank guard at Bertrix p.212 Sketch 14 Battle dispositions at Bertrix p.214 2 List of Abbreviations France CA Corps d’armée Army corps CAC Corps d’armée coloniale Colonial army corps CC Corps de cavalerie Cavalry Corps DC Division de cavalerie Cavalry Division DI Division d’infanterie Infantry division DIC Division d’infanterie colonial Colonial Infantry Division DIR Division d’infanterie de reserve Reserve Infantry Division RI Régiment d’infanterie Infantry Regiment RAC Régiment d’artillerie de campagne Field Artillery Regiment Germany AK Armeekorps Army Corps RAK Reserve Armeekorps Reserve Army Corps HKK Höhe Kavallerie Kommando Independent Cavalry Command KK Kavallerie Korps Cavalry Corps ID Infanterie-division Infantry Division RID Reserve Infanterie-division Reserve infantry Division KD Kavallerie division Cavalry Division IR Infanterie-regiment Infantry Regiment RIR Reserve Infanterie-regiment Reserve Infantry Regiment FAR Feld-artillerie regiment Field Artillery Regiment 3 Introduction The purpose of this thesis is threefold: to present the first operational study of the August 1914 Ardennes campaign; to demonstrate that in two particular encounter battles the French had the opportunity to inflict a tactical, possibly operational defeat upon their opponents but in both cases failed to do so; and to explore the reasons for that French failure, by relating events on the battlefield to each side’s pre–war preparations. On 22 August 1914, on a battlefield one hundred kilometres wide, stretching from Luxembourg in the south–east to Dinant on the river Meuse in the north–west, two French and two German armies clashed in a series of encounters known collectively as the Battle of the Ardennes. The battle came about as a result of an offensive ordered by General Joffre under the overall strategic umbrella of the French Plan XVII, an offensive designed to counter the developing German threat to the French left flank. The outcome was a clear tactical defeat for the French, whose armies retreated first to their start–line and then, in accordance with the general strategic situation, deep into the hinterland of France. By 23 August, the day on which the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) met the German First Army at Mons, the focus of the war had already shifted to the west bank of the Meuse and the broad open Belgian plain. On 22 August, about twenty–seven thousand French soldiers were killed and many more men wounded and missing in action.1 Overall German casualties have never been published, but individual regimental histories and eye–witness accounts give sufficient evidence to suggest that they were similarly high in the combatant units. However, the French retreated, defeated; the Germans advanced, victorious. French 1 H. Contamine, La Victoire de la Marne (Eds. Gallimard. Paris, 1970), p.120 4 losses for so little gain and the unanticipated failure of their offensive strategy had to be explained: over time the myth of the ‘Cult of the Offensive’ arose. Overlaid with the ensuing four years of savage and unheard–of casualties on the Western Front, the legend of gallant but suicidal French attacks gained credence amongst many historians. In 1930 Liddell Hart wrote: ‘The troops attacked blindly with the bayonet and were mown down by machine guns’2; and in 2005 Doughty could still write: ‘Tragically for France, many casualties suffered in the attacks from August 14 to 23 were unnecessary and came from foolish bayonet charges against an entrenched enemy’.3 In fact the French Ardennes counter–offensive had had the strategic potential to change the course of the war, by cutting the lines of communication of the three powerful German right wing armies (Schwenkungsflügel)4 which were seeking to execute the ‘Schlieffen Plan’. Indeed the mission and role of the two German central armies in the Ardennes was to prevent just such a move. The French failure, following as it did their earlier defeats at Sarrebourg and Morhange on 20 August (which battles were the main French attack towards the German frontier in Alsace–Lorraine), surrendered the strategic initiative to the Germans and dictated the pattern of events leading to the Battle of the Marne, the ‘race to the sea’ and stalemate in the trenches. The first compelling reason for writing this thesis is that there has not yet been an operational study of the Battle of the Ardennes as a complete, unitary military campaign, in any language. Sewell Tyng’s excellent book The Campaign of the Marne devotes one chapter from forty–three to the French perspective of the offensive in the 2 B.H. Liddell Hart, first published as The Real War 1914-1918 in 1930, but this quotation taken from History of the First World War ( Cassell & Co Ltd., London, 1973), p.82 3 R.A. Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory (Harvard University Press, 2005), p.75 4 H.H. Herwig, The Marne, 1914 (Random House, New York, 2009), p.50: translated as ‘pivot wing’. 5 Ardennes;5 Terence Zuber’s The Battle of the Ardennes, 1914 only claims to be a tactical comparative study and even then focuses predominantly on German tactical performance in individual encounters, giving the French side much less attention.6 Apart from Tyng’s and Zuber’s works, the battle has so far either been hastily summarised in general histories of the Great War, in which it necessarily takes but a small part in a general survey of the Battles of the Frontiers, or it has been treated piecemeal with individual encounters being analysed in detail.