The German Army Handbook of 1918

287 Pages·2008·30.64 MB·English

by  James Beach

The German Army Handbook of
1918
David Nash
The German Army Handbook of 1918

This edition published in 2008 by Frontline Books, an imprint of Pen and Sword
Books Ltd, 47 Church Street, Barnsley, S. Yorkshire, S70 2AS

www.frontline-books.com
New Introduction © Pen & Sword Books Limited, 2008
This edition © Pen & Sword Books Limited, 2008
9781783469666

The German Army Handbook of 1918 was originally issued by The General Staff
as Handbook of the German Army in War, April, 1918. It was republished in
1977 by Arms and Armour Press as German Army Handbook, April 1918.

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in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil
claims for damages.

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INTRODUCTION
... Shoulder cords (officers’).—‘Field shoulder cords’ will be worn
by officers on the jacket (Bluse) and greatcoat; for officers below the
rank of General they will have a uniform width of 1¾ inches without
any stiffening; they consist of a cloth strap of various colours,
corresponding to those of the shoulder straps of the rank and file (in
the infantry and Jäger the colours correspond to those of the edging
of the shoulder straps of the rank and file). This strap forms a
foundation for the cords and badges, which are ‘dull’ and of a size
corresponding to the present size for captains.
In April 1918 the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France was reeling
from the blows delivered by the German army in their Lys offensive. The
outlook seemed gloomy, the Germans were threatening to break through to the
Channel ports, and Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the Commander-in-Chief,
felt it necessary to issue his famous ‘backs to the wall’ order imploring his army
to an even greater defensive effort. By coincidence in the same month the
General Staff in London reissued this intelligence handbook on the German
army. The modern observer might ask why, at this moment of titanic struggle,
such things as ‘shoulder cords (officers’)’ of the German army might be worthy
of official record? The simple answer is that a British intelligence officer in the
path of the German offensive, seeking to identify the units to which prisoners
belonged, would need to understand the German army’s uniform distinctions;
particularly if the prisoners would not volunteer such information orally or
sought to deceive him. When taken out of context the extract quoted above
seems rather absurd, but it is upon such apparently trivial things that an
intelligence system often depends. Taking a step back, it is important to realise
that this handbook, in spite of its sometimes unusual detailing, is one expression
of an almost intangible phenomenon: British intelligence’s perception of their
enemy. We now have the benefit of hindsight, derived from comparing accounts
from both sides of the conflict. The modern reader can find out a great deal
about the reality of the situation on both sides of the Western Front and the
danger is that this leads to unrealistic critiques of contemporary decisions. For
the actual participants their perception of the enemy was incomplete, sometimes
misleading, and constantly changing. Snippets of information would be accrued
from multiple sources and it was the unenviable task of the intelligence staffs to
collate and analyse them in order to generate an intelligence picture which would
then inform operational decision-making.
This handbook was one of the tools available to the intelligence staff in their
work. It was not the only one and it was perhaps not the most important,
however it can perhaps be seen as one of the cornerstones of the intelligence
library of documents available to them. It distilled all the underlying intelligence
data concerning the German army. In modern parlance it was a compendium of
‘basic intelligence’ over which more up-to-date ‘current intelligence’ could be
overlaid. For example, an intelligence officer might receive reports suggesting a
re-organisation of certain German units. The handbook would provide the datum
against which he could judge the significance of this change. The handbook also
provided a number of useful aide memoires. At the simplest level, Appendix B
would assist in the interpretation of captured German maps. Perhaps more
importantly, Chapter 1 provided the intelligence officer with an exhaustive
explanation of German manpower policy since 1914. Therefore when the
intelligence officer came to interrogate prisoners or examine their pay-books, he
would have a point of reference for such significant factors as the call-up dates
of new classes of conscripts, the re-deployment of older men, or the duration of
training for new soldiers. At the BEF level this would allow strategic judgements
as to the German manpower situation, but for lower-level intelligence officers it
would contribute to their assessment of the character of the German units
opposite them in the frontline. The handbook could also assist in the induction of
new intelligence personnel. Its layout made it an ideal textbook for the
Intelligence School in Harrow where officers of the Intelligence Corps were
trained. Alternatively the staff officer assigned to intelligence from other duties
could use it as a primer.
For the modern reader the handbook has many potential uses. Its most obvious
utility is as a source on the German army in the First World War. Thanks to the
unwelcome attention of RAF Bomber Command in 1945, the archival sources on
the German Imperial army are not all that they could be. Although other sources
do exist in English, such as the recently-translated version of Herman Cron’s
1937 work Imperial German Army, 1914–18: Organisation, Structure, Orders of
Battle (2002), the sheer detail contained in this handbook makes it useful to a
variety of historians studying the Kaiser’s army. As well as being written in
English, it also has the advantage of being compiled contemporaneously rather
than retrospectively. As David Nash pointed out in his introduction to the 1977
reprint of the handbook, it does contain some factual errors regarding the
German army but on balance this is outweighed by the quality and quantity of
the material presented. The range of material presented is vast: from lists of
recruiting districts to the average age of divisional and corps commander; from a
detailed explanation of how the army expanded after August 1914 to technical
performance data for various weapons; and from the colours that carrier pigeons
were dyed for easy recognition to the average speed of transport trains.
Regarding the last point, the handbook suggests that in the early part of the war
‘trains started for a destination, getting through as best they could, passing from
station to station as the line became clear’. This stands in contrast to the usual
stereotypes of Teutonic efficiency in running railways.
Organisational Context
The other benefit of this handbook is what it tells us about British intelligence.
Intelligence documents reveal the interests of their creators. Their emphasis and
their omissions say something about the intelligence system that created them.
The establishment of the modern British intelligence community is usually dated
to 1909 when the establishment of a ‘Secret Service Bureau’ under Captain
Vernon Kell and Commander Mansfield Cumming led to the development of the
Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service, known colloquially as MI5
and MI6. However the military intelligence component of the intelligence
community has a much longer pedigree. Both the Royal Navy and the British
army evolved intelligence staffs in the second half of the Nineteenth Century and
by 1914 these were well rooted in the military hierarchies. In August 1914 the
intelligence staff of the War Office deployed to France and Belgium with the
General Headquarters (GHQ) of the BEF. The intelligence effort was led by
Colonel (later Major-General Sir) George Macdonogh. At the end of 1915, when
Haig took over command of the BEF, Macdonogh moved back to London to
galvanise the growing but still rather moribund intelligence staff at the War
Office. Macdonogh was replaced at GHQ by Brigadier-General John Charteris; a
controversial figure who, it has been alleged, misled his commander as to the
true state of the German army in 1916 and 1917. Charteris was removed from
his post in January 1918 and his place was taken by Brigadier-General Edgar
Cox, a former protege of Macdonogh’s. These changes of senior personnel
reflect two things. First, during the attritional battles of 1916 and 1917 there
were often tensions between the War Office and GHQ intelligence staffs. At the
heart of this was the perception of the German army, particularly whether or not
it was declining in the face of the Allied offensives. Second, was the fact that
until 1917 the analytical centre of gravity probably lay at GHQ rather than at the
War Office.
In 1914 the regular intelligence officers’ posts in London had been taken over
to a great extent by retired officers, known as ‘dug-outs’. After his return to the
War Office Macdonogh gradually improved the size and quality of his analytical
staff. He seems to have deliberately targeted the recruitment of academic
experts. For example the international historian (later Sir) Charles Webster was
languishing as a minor functionary in the Army Service Corps’ supply chain
when he was summoned to utilise his talents on the War Office intelligence staff.
At the time of the Handbook’s publication, the War Office sub-section
responsible for analysing the German army was MI3(c). This group of five
officers resided in Room 331 of the War Office (now known as the Old War
Office Building) along with their colleagues of MI3(b) who analysed Austria-
Hungary. MI3(c) included Captain Thomas Joyce, an anthropologist from the
British Museum, who had worked in this section since 1916. They were led by
Major Gilbert Shepherd, an intelligence staff officer who had been assigned
previously to GHQ in France. In the context of the earlier GHQ / War Office
rivalry, the ‘ownership’ of various intelligence publications was of some
importance. By 1918 the division of labour was that the War Office assumed
responsibility for documents related to the German army as a whole, while GHQ
published material related only to the Western Front. But although this handbook
was a War Office document, much of its information would have been derived
from GHQ’s intelligence products. This was not the only publication published
by MI3(c). They also compiled and updated the various orders-of-battle that
were vital reference books for frontline intelligence officers. These books were
known colloquially by the colour of their covers. Thus the publication German
Forces in the Field, which went through six editions between March 1915 and
April 1918, was known as the ‘Brown Book’.
The Handbook
Whereas the format for the German Forces in the Field had been developed by
Edgar Cox during his time as a junior intelligence analyst at GHQ in 1915, the
contours of the handbook were determined by its pre-war version. The
introduction to the 1912 edition explained that it was intended ‘for the use of
officers who desire to obtain a comprehensive view of the German army during
peace-time, or who may wish to follow its operations during manoeuvres or
other training’. Before 1914 the War Office issued and revised a number of these
handbooks covering almost all the armies of Europe. The handbook can
therefore be seen as quite a ‘traditional’ intelligence publication.
A comparison between the pre-war and 1918 versions of the handbook is
interesting. Although the earlier edition has nearly 350 pages, compared to the
almost 200 in 1918, the latter is printed in a much smaller font and so the
volume of information is considerably greater. Both adopt a similar structure.
They begin with a discussion of the manpower available to the German army
and the processes by which men were recruited and trained. Both then move on
to the German command and staff arrangements before examining the various
arms of service and concluding with communications, logistics and various
appendices. The most striking difference is the omission of any analysis of
tactics in the 1918 edition, whereas the pre-war version included a short section
on the ‘tactics of the three arms’. This gap is understandable. In comparison to
other intelligence products, the handbook was designed to have quite a long
shelf-life. Therefore any pronouncements on German tactics could be overtaken
by developments on the ground and could become dangerously misleading.
Second, the analysis of German operational behaviour fell within the remit of
GHQ rather than the War Office. To this end GHQ Intelligence would often
publish analyses of German tactics; sometimes as standalone documents, or as
part of their daily intelligence summaries.
In many ways this handbook stands as a testimony to the development of the
intelligence system over the previous four years. By 1918 the British army had
evolved a variety of intelligence collection techniques. On the frontline the
Germans would be observed round the clock by specially-trained observers
looking for indications of forthcoming operations. Periodically the infantry
would launch raids into the opposing trenches with the express purpose of
capturing prisoners for interrogation. The German trenches and rear areas would
be systematically photographed by British aircraft, with the pictures examined
and annotated by specialist draughtsmen looking for the infrastructural changes
that presaged enemy attacks. German wireless messages would be intercepted,
with the codes being attacked by teams of female soldier clerks. British
offensives would yield numerous prisoners but, perhaps more importantly, large
hauls of documents which would have to be translated before analysis. This
analysis might involve the examination of sacks full of letters, using Field Post
Office designations to ascertain the location of units, or it might be the collation
of hundreds of soldiers’ pay books to create a profile of new recruits. At the
same time technical experts would comb the battlefield for discarded weapons